Jigsaws, Holograms, and Labor History

This chapter compares vampire stories on the two central African copperbelts, that in the Belgian Congo, where mining was controlled by one company, Union Minière d’Haute Katanga (UMHK), and that on the Northern Rhodesian side of the border, where mining companies—the Anglo-American Corporation and the Rhodesian Selection Trust—competed for labor and profits during the 1930s. Although African laborers, artisans, and hangers-on crisscrossed this border well into the 1940s, working men told different stories of abduction and extraction in both places. The banyama who sought their victims around Northern Rhodesia’s copper mines took men’s blood, but they also captured men’s wills. Banyama stories from the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt produced some terrifying descriptions of how men became workers:

This story was going around when I arrived at Luanshya in 1935.…The Banyama…snatch live men and sell their bodies to people who need them.…Another story is that the European has a special license from the Government, and he employs natives armed with charms to do his work in secret. These secret agents are never known and they go about at night. Having picked their victim they lure him to a secret spot where they hit him on the head with a “mupila.” A “mupila” is said to have a rubber tube full of medicine which steals the man’s mind and he even forgets his name and can be taken anywhere.^[1]

In colonial Katanga, batumbula captured Africans with the same methods found in banyama and wazimamoto stories elsewhere, but ate their flesh and did not take their blood. Africans were hired by white men to capture other Africans and give them an injection that made them “dumb.” Finally, victims became fat, white or pinkish, and hairy like pigs. Sometimes a special diet transformed the victims into cows. White men then ate them on special occasions like Christmas and New Year.^[2] Sometimes these white men worked for Americans. The revolts of the early 1940s—Luluabourg and Katanga—were fueled by rumors of white cannibalism.^[3] A Belgian priest, Dom Grégoire Coussement, was said to be a batumbula in Elisabethville. After he was transferred to Kasenga, on the Luapula, in 1943, he was said to kidnap Africans on both sides of the river, imprison them in the belfry of the mission church, and drive them to Elisabethville, where they were killed and eaten.^[4]

The next section shows how laborers from Northern Rhodesia worked in Katanga’s mining industry well into the 1930s. This raises the question, why, if the men telling the stories were the same, are these stories so different on the two copperbelts? Finding out is not easy. The source materials for both copperbelts have little in common. Even before the 1935 strike on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, officials and missionaries had been concerned about the impact of migrant labor on African society. As we have seen in chapters 6 and 7, officials worried about the moral fiber of migrants—already compromised in their eyes by how they imagined matrilineality—and the vulnerability and privation of women left alone to farm. The Depression had shocked these officials even more, showing them the grim realities of rural poverty as nothing had before: when the world price of copper dropped by almost half, and all but two of Northern Rhodesia’s mines closed, many African laborers did not return home. By 1933, the International Missionary Council’s Department of Social and Industrial Research, founded in 1930, published the results of its research on Northern Rhodesia’s mines, Modern Industry and the African, which offered a wealth of evidence with which to reconstruct the lives of copperbelt workers, and how they managed urban life. Of the African workforce at Nkana Mine, 10 to 15 percent had Barclays Bank accounts, for example, and a large number of miners at Roan Antelope Mine ordered blankets and other goods by mail rather than patronize local shopkeepers.^[5]

The 1935 strike generated another set of concerns. Typical of the labor protests of the 1930s, African miners had actively and collectively left work, apparently to protest a tax increase, and in the subsequent panic the police shot and killed six Africans and wounded many more at Roan Antelope Mine. Although Africans soon returned to work without incident, officials launched a commission of inquiry that served to inscribe the strike with a level of leadership and organization that their findings disputed. The commission also produced page after page of miners’ and managers’ testimony about work, remuneration, and relations underground and in the compound.^[6] More than dockworkers’ strikes elsewhere in Africa, the 1935 Copperbelt strike had a profound impact on British imperialism: the anthropology of urbanization was born, as were studies of the conditions of mine labor and urban life. Indeed, the banyama story quoted above comes from a government-run newspaper sold—without much success—on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt in the wake of industrial strife. Its editor sought to make it the vehicle by which educated Africans could offer information to their less educated fellows.^[7] This particular tension of the reporting of a story by those attempting to prove it wrong informs many of the banyama stories in this chapter. P. K. Kanosa, the author of the quotation above, cautioned that Africans “who have some sort of education” had an obligation to “kill this story,” but noted that as long as “ignorant natives continue to arrive on the Copperbelt there will always be people to believe stories like this.” ^[8]

No such sources, let alone uses of storytelling, exist for UMHK in the 1930s. The details of consumption and pleasure that percolate in and out of the Northern Rhodesian material are absent, as far as I can tell, from the Congolese material. Missionaries in Katanga, as we shall see, did not see themselves as opponents of state labor policies. Visitors who had just come from South Africa, such as Margery Perham, were usually impressed by the differences between the two countries. The Belgian government in exile conducted no large-scale investigation of Congolese labor protests of the early 1940s; it was assumed that Belgium’s status as an occupied country encouraged African extremism. Northern Rhodesia and the Congo do not have equivalent data; the material presented here cannot, in and of itself, yield a reliable historical comparison: data on African banking on the Rhodesian Copperbelt cannot usefully be compared with travelers’ anecdotes about the Congo.

So I ask readers to bear with me and think of this chapter as two kinds of histories at once—the history of the puzzle, in which each and every piece clarifies and completes the picture, and the history of the hologram, in which the image is constructed from the light shed on a fragment. This is a history-writing strategy, a way to get at two different kinds of knowledge at once. The material on consumption and savings on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt allows for a detailed examination of how workers regarded their wages and all they contained. There are no comparable data for the Belgian Congo. But there is a level and commonality of description from the Congo that is unlike anything for Northern Rhodesia—descriptions that are so similar that, seen in the same light, they make a hologram, a single image that becomes vivid and three-dimensional when seen through a single, consistent illumination. African miners were not alone in describing the physical transformation that accompanied their sojourns in Katanga. Margery Perham used the metaphor of castration to describe the hospitalized Congolese mineworkers she visited in February 1930. Listening to them “rasping out” responses to a nun, she reflected: “There is something almost ludicrous about it. Ten, five years ago (now, if they had the chance) these men were indulging in tribal warfare, perhaps in torture and cannibalism; now they look as docile and as lifeless as bullocks in a fat-stock show.” ^[9] The barely fictionalized autobiography of a willful Belgian nun in Elisabethville in the late 1930s includes the powerful image of a hospital orderly, sent to sleep off a binge on local brew, eaten by ants: “. . . on the dirt floor was a man-shaped mound of white ants that had eaten Banza clean to the skeleton. Not even a tuft of hair was left on the skull.” ^[10]

Let me argue that the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt is the jigsaw. Between missionaries’ studies, testimonies about the 1935 strike, a generation of anthropologists and another generation of labor historians, the data about the Copperbelt in 1930–45 provide a number of “pieces” with which I can reconstruct a picture. The Congolese side is the hologram—whether I recreate an image from Dame Margery, African miners, or former nuns, the image is always the same: Africans are being eaten alive, their shapes transformed, and emasculated. Each of these images is blurred and incomplete. Taken together they do not add up to the kind of picture one gets from diverse pieces; they add up to something somewhat different, made three-dimensional by the way it is looked at.