At the height of their productivity in the mid-1950s, the mines of the North Rhodesian Copperbelt were by no means small beer, either to a financially straitened post-war Britain, or to the ambitiously nationalist settler communities of the two Rhodesias, North and South. Demand for copper had increased after the war, and production in the Copperbelt rose sharply after 1953, the year that the Central African Federation, composed of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, was inaugurated. The mines had been a useful bargaining chip as the settler blocs pressed for greater autonomy. After their aims were partially achieved in 1953, tax revenues from the Copperbelt effectively financed the Federation (Butler, 2007, 209-16).

The country itself was relatively sparsely populated, and the low population density had always made the stability of the labour force an issue for the mining companies. During the 1920s and 1930s, the early years of the mining industry’s development, the labour force had been migratory, with the largest proportion of workers hailing from the northern provinces and Barotseland (Berger, 1974, 15). However, the very long distances that most workers had to travel always militated against regular returns to their homes, and though it was unpalatable to the Government, busy towns had quickly grown up around the mines. ‘By the later 1930s,’ writes Butler, ‘it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction that Copperbelt workers were essentially rural tribesmen, temporarily working away from their homes’ (Butler, op.cit., 50).

The companies were relatively sanguine about this, since it helped to stabilise the workforce, but to a Government recently wedded to the concept of ‘indirect rule’ in Africa, the spectre that such nascent urban worlds presented was of a ‘detribalised’ African. This newly urban, industrialised African population would, it was thought, be divorced from the ‘traditional’ rulers, laws, and morals that were supposed to be the instrument of colonial order.

‘Detribalisation’ was a concept that also loomed large for the Church in Central Africa, and a 1932 Commission of Enquiry by the Department of Social and Industrial Research of the International Missionary Council resulted in the publication in 1933 of Modern Industry and the African (Merle Davis ed., 1933). Despite the breathtaking condescension of the book’s general attitude toward Africans and African societies (they are variously described as backward, slow, ‘blundering’, helpless, primitive, etc.), its final recommendations are, as Cooper points out, rather more realistic and serious in outlook than anything being considered at the time by the Government (Cooper, op.cit., 53-4; Merle Davis, 376-93). Despite the prejudices about African life that the Commission held, it had understood that the processes of industrial urbanisation were not about to go into reverse. The basic thrust of the Commission’s findings was that rural communities should be strengthened and developed so that they might cope better with this new world, and that the infrastructure and institutions of city life should be established in the mining towns.

The missions saw their job as preparing ‘the Bantu’ to make the transition between a crumbling past and a bewildering future – it was a time of ‘tutelage and transition’, in which the missions would be on hand to help confused Africans ‘span the gulf between savagery and civilisation’ (ibid., 10). Recommendation 43 of Modern Industry was that the Protestant missions be united in this project (ibid., 385). In 1935 a ‘United Mission to the Copperbelt’ (UMCB) was set up, drawing in numerous missionary groups (including the London Missionary Society, which had a prominent role) to take forward the programme outlined by the Merle Davis Commission (Sundkler and Steed, 2000, 791; Ragsdale, 1986,  128-30).