Introduction

The Copperbelt has long been associated with distinctive cultural production, particularly in the fields of music, dance and (in Haut-Katanga) visual arts. Migrants brought to its towns their artistic practices which, as they interacted with different African cultures and European influences, enabled them to create new syncretic forms. Musicians incorporated the Western guitar and visual artists took up the paintbrush and the canvas. European analysts emphasised the social functions of culture, connecting urbanites to the society they had left behind and teaching them how to live in town. From the start, however, Copperbelt culture was collected and curated in distinctive ways that shaped its form and content. In Haut-Katanga, ateliers and European collectors of ‘primitivist’ art trained local painters and sculptors to produce works for the gallery and the market: this partly enabled artistic works that became some of Africa’s most renowned cultural outputs. Mine companies provided spaces and opportunities for theatrical, dance and musical performance, with UMHK in particular employing hundreds of performers to entertain and educate its workers. Social anthropologists such as Clyde Mitchell used cultural activities such as the Kalela dance to assess the urban mentality of Copperbelt residents. Copperbelt musicians, however, resisted the insistent classification by ethnomusicologists into ‘authentic’ and ‘urban’ styles and constantly developed innovative forms that both utilised and commented on the connection between local and global cultures.

Academic and cultural commentators sought, as a corollary of the wider modernist binaries that shaped Copperbelt knowledge production, to distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art. Painting was classified as either the product of trained academicians influenced by and produced for European observers or popular painting of village scenes for the local audience; theatre likewise meant either performances of Shakespeare or Molière or the spectaculars and comedies put on by company-sponsored troupes to entertain and educate workers. This hierarchical division was, however, reversed when it came to music: early collectors reified ‘authentic’ rural music and bemoaned the influence of European culture in Copperbelt towns. The independent nation-states of Zambia and Zaire sought to create and manage idealised national cultures, with profound and unforeseen consequences for the artists and musicians of the region.

There was, however, no clear division between art and commerce for many of those involved: a canvas painting sold to a collector might bring the same financial reward as a wall painting to promote a new nightclub. Similarly, in the music scene, distinctions between expressing ‘tribal’ or ‘national’ identity, pleasing an audience and being paid for one’s work, were commonly blurred. Mine company patronage influenced not only cultural opportunities but also outputs. Artistic influences flowed across the Copperbelt border in ways shaped by shared cultural understandings but also by the differential opportunities provided for and constraints created by collectors, colonial and post-colonial states, mine companies and local art markets, undermining any easy categorisation into ethnic, regional or national forms, or the distinction of form from function.

These diverse cultural outputs helped Copperbelt residents to articulate and reach shared understandings of society, morality and human behaviour in a rapidly changing world. They can theoretically be read by historians as contemporaneous commentaries or popular knowledge production, enabling comparison of the similarities and contrasts both between new Copperbelt cultures and between these and older African societies. However, our access to these outputs is heavily mediated by the cultural curation to which they have been subject. Put simply, we only have access to a tiny sliver of what was sung, danced, painted and performed by Copperbelt residents, a sliver that has been preserved for specific reasons by various elite producers of knowledge – collectors, ethnomusicologists, museums, mine companies, states, recording companies, publishers and so on. These actors, albeit engaged with artists and musicians themselves (they were sometimes the same individuals), collected and disseminated Copperbelt cultures for diverse purposes. One theme, however, dominates their otherwise diverse thinking: the nature and extent of changes to (supposedly authentic, essentially rural) African cultures as a result of their encounters with (supposedly modern, essentially urban) Western culture. While earlier collectors believed it was possible to discover forms of authentic African art untouched by Westernisation, it is evident that what can be studied today are the cultural outputs produced as the result of engagements between artists and curators, musicians and collectors.

This chapter cannot provide anything approaching a comprehensive cultural history of the Copperbelt: the brief analysis here both draws on and engages with the extensive research into the region’s art and music (and, to a lesser extent, theatre) from the 1950s to the 1990s, without discussing artistic form and style in any technical way.Footnote ¹ It rather charts, with the use of diverse archival material and interviews with Copperbelt artists and musicians, a narrow path through some of its most prominent artistic movements, their curation and characterisation by cultural knowledge producers, while focussing on the ongoing debate between artists, collectors and wider society about the nature of the relationship between authenticity and hybridity, high and popular art, the ‘African’ and the ‘modern’, that in Copperbelt society was the dominant topic of cultural conversation.

Company Culture, Worker Entertainment

The migrant residents of Copperbelt mine towns produced cultural outputs for artistic and entertainment purposes that commented on and helped make sense of their new environment. They drew on cultural forms from their own societies, as well as those they found in these new communities and elsewhere. Dance bands were created in the 1930s and 1940s that – as across southern Africa’s urban and mining centres – performed localised versions of commercial Western music.Footnote ² In 1941, Luanshya’s Roan City African Dancing Club held a Saturday night dance at the Native Welfare Hall Mine Compound to raise funds for British towns devastated by Luftwaffe bombing raids.Footnote ³ Touring dance bands visited Copperbelt towns: in August 1951 the Bulawayo Sweet Rhythm Band visited Elisabethville and sought to play at Northern Rhodesian mine venues.Footnote ⁴

As part of its efforts to create stable urban workplaces and communities, UMHK pioneered the provision and sponsorship of cultural venues and activities. These took an unmistakably paternalistic form, as the company tried to adjust workers and their families to new urban ‘realities’, but equally allowed significant space for Africans to express their own ideas. In comparison, the Northern Rhodesian mines – consistent with their belated and grudging embrace of urbanisation – did much less to actively shape the cultural attitudes and output of Copperbelt societies. Nonetheless, by the late 1950s they too provided a range of cultural and leisure activities for mineworkers and their families.

In each mine camp in the 1940s, UMHK began constructing large recreation halls. These provided space for both entertainment – film shows, dancing and concerts – and instruction. The company sponsored and directly employed musicians who performed at such venues and at open-air events and parades, such as its annual ‘Mangeurs de Cuivre’ festival. Large shows known as ‘Spectacles Populaires’ combined ‘traditional’, religious and contemporary music, ‘tribal’ dances and comedy sketches, providing opportunities for young performers, some of whom became household names.Footnote ⁵ The company used these shows to disseminate moral messages concerning work discipline and familial values that complemented the socialisation lessons provided in Mwana Shaba (see Chapter 5).Footnote ⁶ ‘Mufwankolo’, aka Odilon Kyembe Kaswili, gave his name to a semi-improvised theatrical sketch format that poked gentle fun at authority, commented on urban society and offered life lessons.Footnote ⁷ One performance involved Mufwankolo instructing his wife to cook milonge (smoked fish) then, having failed to leave money for her to buy it, being angered at her failure to provide dinner.Footnote ⁸ Adolphe Kisimba, who went on to perform with the Mufwankolo group, started at Elisabethville’s Cercle Saint Benoît (see Chapter 4), directing an adapted form of ‘tribal’ dance and sketches based on close observation of everyday life as it played out in the city’s streets, buses and law courts.Footnote ⁹

Catholic schooling was a foundational influence on Haut-Katanga’s distinct performance culture: Guene finds that many performers received their early musical education in choirs, for example at St Boniface College in Elisabethville’s CEC.Footnote ¹⁰ Joseph Kiwele’s Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Cuivre, established in 1947, became internationally renowned: Kiwele, a member of Elisabethville’s CEC council (Chapter 4), went on to perform for Belgian royalty and compose classical works, notably his ‘Katangese Mass’ and the Katangese national anthem.Footnote ¹¹ Masengu Katiti, another choir member, established the Jecoke dance group (its name is an acronym for the ‘jeunes comiques de Kenya’, the Elisabethville CEC township) with Edouard Masengo. The alternative routes taken by Kiwele and Katiti show both the interrelationship between high and popular culture in the trajectories of performers but equally the vital hierarchical distinction between them in artistic categorisation. Practitioners trained in classical and choral music and inculcated into late colonial European theatre circles clearly viewed these as superior to the popular culture of the townships. European theatre was scripted in French or English and classical music (such as Kiwele’s work) was written down, whereas African urban theatre or music was partly improvised, performed in African languages and, while informed by Western music such as jazz, equally drew on the story-telling oral ‘traditions’ associated with rural communities.Footnote ¹²

Creativity and innovation were arguably easier in areas such as Kenya and Katuba than in the closely supervised company townships: mineworkers and other urban residents flocked at the weekend to the CEC areas for unsupervised fun. Jecoke performances, however, became a mainstay of UMHK Spectacles; like Mufwankolo plays, they conveyed social teaching focussed on, for example, abstention from alcohol and the need to provide money to wives to avoid conflict.Footnote ¹³ Its surviving performers, however, trace its origins to Northern Rhodesia and/or Bemba migrants who brought their dance styles to the Katangese towns that were then adopted and adapted.Footnote ¹⁴ Eliot Mujinga, a former Jecoke performer, recalls:

As Northern Rhodesian provision of social activities expanded, venues were constructed (funded by the sale of low-cost alcohol) that could be used for entertainment. In keeping with their lower developmental ambitions for their workers, AAC and RST focussed less on cultural enlightenment than on keeping township residents busy. These companies did not establish permanent cultural troupes and greater effort went into the organisation of sports to watch and play.Footnote ¹⁶ Theatre was, until independence, largely restricted to European audiences and performers and African cultural expression was not, as in Haut-Katanga, patronised by white residents. By the 1950s, however, Northern Rhodesian radio was broadcasting short plays, for example those of Edwin Mlongoti, which provided vignettes of urban life and educational messages. Powdermaker found that Luanshya residents were listening to programmes about town life and about the village, about customs and modern life and the interplay between them: ‘the radio took the listener from one to the other, without giving him any sense of disparity’.Footnote ¹⁷

Mine companies had long encouraged displays of the ‘tribal’ dancing that migrants had brought with them, as a link to their home area. By the 1950s these activities were organised and competitive: dance associations were established and public areas set aside for groups to perform for the wider community. In Luanshya in April 1956, plans were drawn up for ‘an arena for tribal dancing in the African Township’ that would cost £1,550.Footnote ¹⁸ Performing a ‘tribal’ dance to a multi-cultural urban community necessarily involved a contextual change to the performance and the form of these dances evolved in significant ways. This was recognised by J. Clyde Mitchell and his research assistant Sykes Ndilila in their landmark study The Kalela Dance.Footnote ¹⁹ Clyde Mitchell characterised the dance, associated with Bemba communities but now performed in Western clothing and sung in the simplified Copperbelt version of Bemba by mostly Bisa residents, as a ‘paradox’: ‘The dance is clearly a tribal dance in which tribal differences are emphasized but the language and the idiom of the songs and the dress of the dancers are drawn from an urban existence which tends to submerge tribal differences.’Footnote ²⁰

Mitchell explained this paradox by charting the dance’s origin story from Bemba ‘mbeni’ through the influence of military recruitment and parades and the adoption of the name ‘kalela’, a dance of pride. The wearing of ‘European’ dress turned the dance into a pantomime of the white community and a protest against African exclusion from urban elites. However, by 1951 (when this research was conducted), senior African workers themselves aspired, as we have seen, to upward mobility, partly by dressing and behaving culturally like Europeans. Clyde Mitchell shows that African workers’ class and ethnic relationships were situationally specific and that the form ‘tribal’ identities took was altered by urban experience and relations with European society:

This explanation may seem obvious to a contemporary reader familiar with notions of inter-sectionality but, in a context where racial, ethnic and class identities were both essentialised and understood via either/or binaries (rural/urban, traditional/modern, tribe/class), the relational and contextually specific Kalela dance provided a significant and influential insight, revealing the capacity of cultural performance to explain social change.

Art and Modernity in Late Colonial Haut-Katanga

The collection of material culture and its classification as ‘art’ or ‘artefacts’ was central to knowledge production processes that were themselves central to European colonialism. Belgium was particularly concerned with exhibiting African objects in the metropole: characterising such objects as ‘primitive’ and juxtaposing them, explicitly or implicitly, to Western art, helped justify a supposedly civilising mission. Belgian society engaged directly (if always problematically) with Congolese culture and the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) was one of Belgium’s most visited museums. Sarah van Beurden argues that, by the 1950s, continued Belgian colonialism was publicly justified by guardianship of supposedly ‘endangered’ culture: African traditions facing extermination because of Westernisation were preserved with ethnographic zeal and ‘scientific’ methods.Footnote ²² As Van Beurden puts it: ‘Colonial modernity was both the threat from which collectors sought to safeguard these “authentic” cultures and the source of their authority to rescue and properly value the objects that represented this cultural authenticity’.Footnote ²³ Such intervention was necessary because modernising elite Africans could not be relied on to preserve their own culture.

Curators at RMCA emphasised the artistic value of Congolese works, mainly wooden sculpture, classifying them by geographic/ethnic area. An ethnographic mindset that classified African material culture into distinct ethnic groups – for example ‘Kuba art’ – was central to collecting across the colonised continent: this approach could equally be seen in Northern Rhodesia’s flagship Livingstone Museum.Footnote ²⁴ Belgian investment in cultural imperialism, however, raised the profile of Congolese art to particularly prominent attention on the inter-war global stage. Elisabethville in the 1950s was meanwhile home to a thriving public arts scene, with regular exhibitions that attracted Western and – increasingly – African attendance. The construction of a bold new modernist home for the Leopold II (later Lubumbashi) Museum was funded by UMHK, though its collection was primarily pre-historical and archaeological.Footnote ²⁵ Couttenier finds that the museum was visited by tens, even hundreds of thousands of ‘native’ visitors in the 1950s, but little is known about their engagement with its collections. For its curator Burkhart Waldecker, the museum provided urbanised Africans, ‘[s]eparated from their villages by the imperatives of industrial life and modern economy’, with a link to their ‘authentic’ culture, typically organised along ethnic lines.Footnote ²⁶ Waldecker shared the hegemonic view that African cultural artefacts should be studied not for aesthetic reasons but for their social purpose; understanding their function was key to interpretation.Footnote ²⁷ An evident tension existed between such a functionalist approach and a global art market that valued African masks and sculpture as decontextualised works of aesthetic beauty.

Meanwhile, Belgian settlers organised the Amis de l’Art Indigène (AAI) that sought to ‘preserve’ Congolese art from Western influence and encouraged artists to engage with their ‘authentic’ culture.Footnote ²⁸ Belgian instructors, building on interest generated by the global primitivist movement, established workshops to train students with potential for African self-expression in Western art techniques. In 1951, the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Lubumbashi (aka ‘The Hangar’) was established by Pierre Romain-Desfossés. Desfossés sought to curate a new African art movement in which Congolese trainees, while learning Western canvas painting techniques, would produce art that was ‘naïve’, authentic and reflected supposedly distinct ‘tribal’ perspectives on the natural world.Footnote ²⁹ François Amisi, one of the first artists to study there, recalls learning a distinctive approach to Katangese art rooted in individual creativity, which he contrasts to the more internationalised context within which art from Léopoldville was produced.Footnote ³⁰ Fabian’s interviewees explained that their engagement with such institutions was motivated less by learning from European experts than in identifying a market for ‘authentic, African’ art.Footnote ³¹

The growing commercialisation of African art, coupled with imminent decolonisation, created an urgency among curators to identify and preserve the ‘authentic’ that was supposedly at risk of being lost in the Western-oriented modernisation of the continent. Such a position can be detected in Mwana Shaba’s issue of July 1960, published at the moment of independence. In an article titled ‘Congolese Art’, F. X. Goddard sought to situate the new country’s artistic heritage in decorated functional objects such as pottery and stools:

Haut-Katanga’s network of cultural patronage, provided by both Belgian curators and UMHK, had encouraged a wave of distinctive artistic production that was matched in few other parts of the continent, and certainly not the Zambian Copperbelt where there was an absence of any comparable art scene. As will be seen, the curation and classification of Copperbelt culture would provide an important if problematic foundation for subsequent attempts to define a national identity.

Hugh Tracey’s International Library of African Music

In 1951 Hugh Tracey appealed to Northern Rhodesian and Katangese mine companies to fund his new ‘International Library of African Music’ (ILAM):

Based on these assumptions, ILAM, funded by mine companies across southern Africa to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds, manufactured and dispatched recordings of ‘traditional’ music to be played over loudspeakers in Copperbelt mine townships. Company officials, however, had conflicting views about their value. Some senior managers thought ‘traditional’ music could counter subversive political messages in modern songs.Footnote ³⁴ Compound managers were less convinced: ‘They point out that good music is being broadcast from Lusaka every day but this does not prevent the circulation of political hymns of hate and they doubt whether any activities on the part of the mine could counter that activity’.Footnote ³⁵ The rural recordings of ILAM were, they reported, not as popular as contemporary ‘jive’ music.Footnote ³⁶

Tracey is a prominent and controversial figure in African ethnomusicology, whose work has been analysed both for its understanding of African musical form and political context, particularly in South Africa.Footnote ³⁷ Pauline Coetzee explores Tracey’s ambiguous relationship with colonial authorities and ideas: he rejected characterisations of African music as simple or ‘exotic’, insisting on its artistic value. Yet his writing often makes sweeping ahistorical characterisations regarding ‘Africans’ in general and specific ‘tribes’ in particular.Footnote ³⁸ In both private correspondence and public broadcasting, Tracey emphasised the creativity of African musicians, whose ability to meet their societies’ cultural needs was being undermined by the industrial production and promotion of Western music.Footnote ³⁹ In this respect Tracey can be usefully likened to Alan Lomax, a seminal figure in the collection of (African-) American ‘folk’ music, who sought to capture a similarly authentic culture in danger of being swept away by capitalist commercialisation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like Waldecker and other visual art curators, Tracey understood African ‘arts’ in terms of their social functionality: ‘for music to be effective it must bear a direct relationship to the mentality of the people, their intrinsic spiritual values, their traditional art symbols, their age groups, their environment and the way in which they prefer to cope with that environment’.Footnote ⁴¹

Indeed, when Tracey addressed the British Royal Africa Society in 1954, his theme was the social role of music. In this address he voiced his opposition to the teaching of Western classical music in African schools and the proliferation of radio stations, which will ‘open up the floodgates of foreign dance music and destroy that sense of continuity which is so vital an element in true progress, and in maintaining a sense of well-being in the swiftly changing circumstances of Africa today’.Footnote ⁴² It was incumbent on Western authorities to ensure this fragile continuity:

Tracey praised the popular visits to Copperbelt towns by rural ‘Ng’om[b]a’ musicians. Generally, however, he contrasted the negative situation in Northern Rhodesia to that in Haut-Katanga:

Tracey drew the same comparison in his South African radio broadcasts, in which he presented a popular ethnography of African ‘tribal’ music in the context of foreign influence and ethnic mixing:

In Northern Rhodesian mining towns, there was

Tracey’s methodology has been questioned, by Coetzee in particular. His wide-ranging collection tours involved only brief stays in each place and, as suggested above, he depended on colonial or company officials and their African interlocutors for access to and knowledge about local musicians. Record cards for each song, containing fieldnotes taken by his wife Peggy Tracey, provide revealing but inconsistent information on the musicians involved (sometimes named but sometimes not, for example ‘Luchazi men and women’), the place of recording and lyrical subject matter. Lyrical topics encompassed, among other things, the nature of Copperbelt society, the societal impact of rural–urban migration, gender relations and political conflict, for example:

• This mine song is about men who leave home and stay a long time in the Copper Belt.Footnote ⁴⁷

• She had a child in the Luanshya hospital and was buried there, never to go home again in her village.Footnote ⁴⁸

• Matinda was too lazy to cook for her husband – that was no good. Women who run about and do not devote themselves to their house-work will die childless.Footnote ⁴⁹

• This song is sung when external signs of mourning are taken off. It is an example of an old social custom now being featured in song on a European instrument.Footnote ⁵⁰

• These hymns are typical of those which are now being compiled by separatist congregations. Most of the [Western] melodies have been absorbed, digested and handed on in the oral folk tradition, so that it is now nearly impossible to trace their parentage.Footnote ⁵¹

• This song contains an account of the troubles between the Trades Union and the Mine Company.Footnote ⁵²

• A poor boy says: ‘I have no father, no mother. I am very poor. I have nothing to eat, what shall I do today’.Footnote ⁵³

Each recording was classified by Tracey’s personal and, Coetzee notes, inconsistently applied system:

• A – of genuinely African origin

• U – of urban, industrial, or non-folk origin

• F – of patently foreign origin

• M – of special musical value

• m – of normal musical value.Footnote ⁵⁴

Coetzee also shows that, despite his views, many of Tracey’s Copperbelt recordings were evidently marked by ‘Western’ and/or commercial influences.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even in rural areas he recorded songs that discussed the impact of urban migrancy on marital relations: one Luchazi lyric warned: ‘If you do not send me clothes from wherever you are on the mines, I will refuse to write to you. So don’t you forget’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In one broadcast Tracey empathetically analysed the changes in musical form and lyrical content of the Kalela dance, suggesting it features ‘interesting modern developments of … the tribal tradition’.Footnote ⁵⁷

This engagement can equally be seen in his recordings of and relationship with individual musicians, which bears comparison with Lomax’s championing of Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly.Footnote ⁵⁸ Jean Bosco Mwenda migrated from Bunkeya to Jadotville/Likasi when his father began working in the mine. Already a relatively senior African employee in UMHK’s housing department and a successful local musician, Mwenda was ‘discovered’ by Tracey in 1951, who recorded his seminal song ‘Masanga’.Footnote ⁵⁹ He became a truly global artist, appearing, for example, at the Newport jazz festival in 1969 at the invitation of Pete Seeger and maintaining an international profile into the 1980s. Tracey likewise recorded Stephen ‘Tsotsi’ Kasumali in Kitwe in 1957, an Aushi singer and guitarist who performed in many languages. Kasumali, Tracey wrote, sings ‘popular songs of his own composition which give him plenty of scope to introduce local gossip between verses. He is assisted by 2 or 3 friends who share his bohemian life wandering from compound to compound along the Copperbelt’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Kasumali’s song ‘Ematambo Waifwe Bantu’ expresses typical Copperbelt themes, counterposing a ‘loafer’ to the honest worker he exploits by bringing prostitutes to his home, and stressing the importance of family ties and children who will support you in old age.Footnote ⁶¹ One of Tracey’s collaborators, Alick Nkhata, would go on to become a leading figure in Zambia’s post-independence national musical culture (see below).

While Tracey bemoaned the effects of ‘Westernisation’, it was precisely those artists who blended European, African and American musical forms, instruments and lyrics who came over time to embody a quintessential Copperbelt urban style.Footnote ⁶² The tapping of a glass bottle for rhythmic accompaniment, viewed by Tracey as a novel influence reflecting Westernised consumption, over time became associated with an ‘authentic’ regional sound, along with the innovative picking of acoustic guitar strings, guitars that would soon be replaced by electric ones. Through a period of economic, political and social change, innovative musicians commented on the dynamic relationship between past and present, rural and urban identities and evolving notions of tradition and modernity in creative ways far removed from the preservationist concerns of Western collectors.

The Cross-Border Copperbelt’s Music Scene at Independence

European observers of late colonial Copperbelt music almost universally interpreted its specific manifestations as reflecting the rupture between a disappearing rural past and a powerful but disruptive urban future. Jack Dahn, in the mining magazine Horizon in 1960, characteristically praised Zambian ‘traditional’ music with wistful nostalgia for the passing of a pastoral idyll:

In reality, Copperbelt mine towns were a dynamic melting pot of both innovative and derivative musical expression, with influences flowing across their shared border and from southern Africa, the United States, Europe and Latin America. Just as Northern Rhodesian migrants influenced Katangese Jecoke, there was in the early 1960s a fertile exchange between musicians playing in mine clubs and private bars in both countries. Guitarist Victor Kasoma, whose father worked in both Zambian and Congolese mines, recalls:

Thompson Sichula performed in and promoted bands playing both Copperbelt and Western pop music: ‘[the] Copperbelt had a mixture because we had people who came from different provinces and no one would say that this music belongs to which and who’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Koloko, however, argues that, as young Zambian Copperbelt musicians embraced Western pop styles and played in venues frequented by Europeans and wealthier Africans, Congolese musicians found favour with the patrons of township bars.Footnote ⁶⁶

David Racanelli’s musicological analysis of Copperbelt guitar musicians, following Ferguson, distinguishes Kasumali’s ‘localist’ style from the Four Pals, influenced by South African kwela jazz, and the still more cosmopolitan Jean-Bosco Mwenda. Yet he emphasises that Copperbelt ‘guitar accommodated musical localism with strong rural connections as well as intra-African and international cosmopolitan features’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In practice most musicians played a range of musical styles, either by choice or because of audience demands. Nonetheless, African consumers learned to distinguish between modern and authentic musical labels. White’s analysis of Kinshasa’s music scene documents the local division between ‘la musique moderne’, played on Western instruments and performed in commercial settings in Lingala or French, and ‘folklore’, performed on adapted ‘traditional’ instruments and sung at social gatherings. In practice, the development of ‘tradi-moderne’ and ‘urban-traditional’ sub-genres indicates the extent to which all urban music was essentially syncretic, but also the enduring hegemony of such typologies.Footnote ⁶⁸

Copperbelt culture was also marshalled by anti-colonial nationalists: the secessionist state’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Kibwe was chairman of Adolph Kisimba’s Jecoke group, whose Honorary President was Katangese president Moïse Tshombe.Footnote ⁶⁹ Keith Kabwe’s Dark Knight band performed songs critical of British rule and played at political meetings in the run-up to Zambian independence and Thompson Sichula performed with Alick Nkhata in initiatives to promote and support UNIP in its role in government. The politicisation of artistic expression would increase after independence as African leaders sought to use music and other art forms to disseminate new national identities.

National Cultures and Their Copperbelt Discontents

Congo and Zambia’s status as emergent modern nations was marked by visits to the Copperbelt by global superstars, notably Louis Armstrong (1960), James Brown (1970) and Duke Ellington (1973).Footnote ⁷⁰ Many Zambian musicians responded to these influences by performing Western music and adopting names resembling pop bands such as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.Footnote ⁷¹ As Koloko recalls, listening to Western music was seen by young cosmopolitan Copperbelt residents as a marker of sophistication, but fierce debates ensued between its fans and advocates of local music.Footnote ⁷² Such debates also played out at an official level, as post-colonial political leaders mobilised culture to give legitimacy to their new nation-states.

In the early 1970s, President Mobutu, in line with his policy of authenticité (Chapter 6), attacked foreign cultural influence as a legacy of colonialism and invested state resources to promote ‘national’ Zairian culture. ‘Traditional’ art provided, van Beurden suggests, a ‘natural resource’ comparable with revenue from extractive minerals in providing a vital ‘usable past’ for Mobutu’s nationalist project.Footnote ⁷³ Van Beurden shows that central to the intellectual framework of authenticité was the reification of a mythic rural tradition that drew closely upon colonial notions of ‘primitive modernism’, valuing artistic works for their function in supposedly distinct pre-colonial African societies.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nonetheless, cultural authenticité, as with its intellectual equivalent, initially provided some Congolese artists with a meaningful opportunity for creative expression and access to state sponsorship and patronage. It, however, had the effect of centralising cultural capital (in all senses of the term) in Kinshasa, excluding many Katangese artists and forcing some to migrate there for training and funding.Footnote ⁷⁵ As one aspect of this policy, Mobutu demanded restitution for and the return of artworks from the Tervuren RMCA, to be housed in a new national museum in Kinshasa.Footnote ⁷⁶ This project marginalised the existing Lubumbashi museum, which was incorporated into a single Institute of National Museums of Zaire (IMNZ) in an organisational structure resembling the University of Zaire (Chapter 6).Footnote ⁷⁷ Thefts of valuable works from the museum in the early 1970s, and the likely smuggling of these across the border into Zambia, only reinforced centralised control from Kinshasa.Footnote ⁷⁸

Katangese musicians equally experienced a cultural ‘Zairianisation’, as Mobutu sought to repress the earlier mobilisation of cultural history by the secessionist state. Zairian cultural policy led to the dominance of a single musical form – Congolese rumba – that, despite its own syncretic origins in African and Latin musical forms (and notwithstanding the leading role played in its development by Katangese musicians like Mwenda), came to be associated with Kinshasa, the Lingala language and world-famous performers such as Franco (Luambo Makiadi)’s OK Jazz band, whose stardom rested partly on praise songs for and patronage by Mobutu.Footnote ⁷⁹ David Beni identifies this as the ‘moment that Kinshasa music gained momentum and began to assert itself in Katanga and everywhere else’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The resultant flood of Kinois Lingala rumba recordings – characterised by interviewees variously as ‘imperialist’ and an ‘invasion’ – marginalised musical production in Haut-Katanga, where there was no recording studio.Footnote ⁸¹

Music was equally central to the promotion of a specific national understanding of Zambian culture, in which a leading role was played by Alick Nkhata. In the early 1950s, Powdermaker noted the popularity of Nkhata’s songs about town life, performed on the radio and combining ‘traditional music’ with the guitar.Footnote ⁸² Thinking resembling that of Tracey can be detected in Nkhata’s speech to Lusaka’s Listeners Club in 1952:

Nkhata remained a prominent Copperbelt performer into the 1960s, producing songs praising the late colonial UNIP-led government.Footnote ⁸⁴ He reworked ‘traditional’ songs as educational parables: ‘Icupo’ pokes fun at a rural woman, newly married to a town husband, who struggles to understand modern goods such as powdered milk. ‘Abanakashi ba Mwunjanji’ criticises urban women for adopting immoral activities such as beer drinking and prostitution, idealising and essentialising the ‘traditional’ African woman.Footnote ⁸⁵ Having worked for the colonial Central African Broadcasting Services as well as Voice of America, in 1966 Nkhata became the first Director General of the Zambia Broadcasting Corporation, an organisation closely controlled by the government.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nkhata’s Big Gold Six Band performed songs with lyrics praising Kaunda and his government’s achievements such as ‘more primary schools, more secondary schools (UNIP, Yes!) … new hospitals throughout the country (UNIP, Yes!)’. Later songs had titles such as ‘Four Year Plan’ and dealt with the threat posed by UDI-era Rhodesia; ‘Copper Ebuboni’ highlighted mining’s centrality to the national economy.Footnote ⁸⁷

In the early 1970s, the (renamed) Zambian Broadcasting System (ZBS) opened its own studio in Kitwe; a 1971 song recorded there by Kasama Bantu Actors, ‘Mwa Ombe ni Kaunda’, praised Kaunda for liberating Zambia.Footnote ⁸⁸ Other recordings warned about witchcraft and the need for self-help – archetypal UNIP messages and evidence of how political priorities shaped musical production in a context where the state controlled broadcasting, private recording studios were virtually non-existent and vinyl records and equipment was expensive. By this time, however, the expansion of welfare services in Zambia’s mine townships gave more young residents, like their Katangese counterparts a decade earlier, access to instruments and instruction and opportunities to perform in venues such as Mufulira’s Chawama Hall.Footnote ⁸⁹

In June 1975 in his ‘Watershed’ speech – a landmark moment in UNIP’s radicalisation – president Kaunda ordered ZBS to play 90 per cent Zambian music and challenged musicians to express their national identity

As discussed in Chapter 6, Zambian identity was itself ambiguous: while UNIP extolled supposedly ‘national’ values such as self-reliance rooted in a romanticised rural productivity, its anti-tribalist ethos meant that overtly ethnic cultural manifestations such as ‘traditional’ ceremonies were relegated to ‘heritage’ status, leaving space for urban musicians to assert their ideas of a Zambian sound. Kaunda’s declaration stimulated demand for recorded music and the Copperbelt provided the lion’s share of new supply, recorded at NCCM’s Malachite Studio in Chingola, but also at Ndola’s new Teal Studio, affiliated with South Africa’s Gallo Records. A key role was played by Zimbabwean promoter Edward Khuzwayo’s Zambian Music Parlour.Footnote ⁹¹ The local pressing of vinyl records transformed the fortunes of bands such as W.I.T.C.H. (aka ‘We Intend to Cause Havoc’) that had previously travelled to Nairobi for this purpose. Teal also provided loans, enabling musicians to buy instruments on credit.Footnote ⁹² Much of the ‘ZamRock’ music recorded during this boom period combined, as its name suggests, local guitar styles – themselves the result of the influences and interactions described above – with Western rock and African American soul and funk. ‘Jagari’ Chanda of W.I.T.C.H. explains it thus: ‘Zamrock, you’re playing rock and roll in Zambian style, trying to play rock music but with the feel of African music. The melody could be African … that’s a simple African call and response’.Footnote ⁹³ Koloko makes the following distinction:

In practice, however, ZamRock was far from the national(ist) music Kaunda envisaged. Musicians combined Western rock and funk and Jamaican reggae with Zambian musical forms that hardly demonstrated a national culture resistant to ‘conquest’. Band names – W.I.T.C.H., The Black Jesus and so on – and their members’ lifestyles and appearance (for example, dreadlocks) offended UNIP’s conservative views on young people’s public appearance and dress.Footnote ⁹⁵ While some songs promoted patriotic messages, criticised the smoking of marijuana and praised agricultural self-sufficiency, others focussed on sexual attraction and behaviour.Footnote ⁹⁶ In the 1980s, the Gaula Band courted controversy with their song ‘Kwacha Yapena’, blaming the falling value of the currency for social problems – it and another Gaula Band song criticising corrupt politicians were banned from the radio.Footnote ⁹⁷

By this time ZamRock had been displaced by the popularity of Kalindula: this was an overtly localist musical genre whose advocates reacted against both ZamRock’s globalism and the growing popularity of Western disco records. Kalindula took its name and original form from a rural music/dance style from Luapula associated with mourning, but this was now combined with various musical influences. New Kalindula bands used the handmade instruments common in rural areas alongside electric guitars, played rapidly for dancing.Footnote ⁹⁸ Kalindula songs touching on social mores and appropriate behaviour were likewise adapted to comment on social and political change.Footnote ⁹⁹ Koloko highlights the work of Spokes Chola, a blind Bemba ‘ngomba’ musician resident in Chingola whose songs praised opposition leader Simon Kapwepwe and bemoaned the 1970 Mufulira mine disaster. Dickson Mponda, a former mineworker, sang in ‘BaShimaini’ of the industry’s dangerous conditions and the poverty faced by mineworkers in retirement. Rocky Kapya’s ‘Chipayeni’ commented on shortages of food and essential commodities.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Despite its ostensibly localist orientation, Kalindula was also influenced by Congolese rumba, particularly by the growing number of Congolese/Zairian musicians living and working in Zambia. Congolese rumba bands, including Orchestra Super Mazembe, played in Zambian Copperbelt nightclubs while Zambians recorded their own rumba tracks: for example, Max Mwansa’s Black Power Band bemoaned the overweening power of local UNIP officials in ‘Imisango ya ba Chairman’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

‘Karindula’ (as it was known) was equally popular in Haut-Katanga, commonly played on a locally made ‘bandio’ guitar.Footnote ¹⁰² Interviewees stress both cross-border commonalities and exchanges in explaining Karindula’s development:

The combined effect of the rumba revolution and the economic downturn led many Katangese musicians to pursue commercial opportunities in Kenya and Tanzania, but also across the border in the thriving Zambian Copperbelt music industry.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Here their supposedly ‘authentic’ sound found a ready audience among poorer township residents who preferred it to more Westernised Zambian musical styles. Interviewees such as Chrispin Chani recall performances by Congolese musicians in Mufulira’s beerhalls.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Many Zambian artists and musicians attest to both the flow and influence of Congolese migrants into their respective industries, though not all were identified as ‘foreigners’:

Congolese musicians were seen as more serious and business-oriented, something that helped explain their success and the marginalisation of their Zambian counterparts.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In Katanga, Gécamines remained a vital source of cultural patronage but was now under the direction of the Mobutuist state. Company festivals such as the Mangeurs du Cuivre were supplemented in the 1980s by ‘animations politiques’, events displaying popular loyalty to MPR authority, increasingly watched by Katangese urbanites on new televisions.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These involved parades featuring majorettes and Gécamines-sponsored bands, such as Sukisa from Likasi and Coulé-Coulé from Kolwezi.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Workers started the day with songs and dances in praise of Mobutu and the MPR.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Gécamines theatre continued to provide instruction on the right and wrong ways of family life: Fabien Kabeya’s theatre group sensitised workers on social issues directed by the company’s ‘bureau de la coordination des actions sociales’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Meanwhile, Mufwankolo had made the transition first to radio and then, in the 1970s, to television: Fabian describes his broadcasts as ‘the talk of the town’ in Lubumbashi.Footnote ¹¹² In the context of the cultural demands of Mobutu-era authenticité, Mufwankolo’s supposed continuity with pre-colonial storytelling traditions enabled his comedic plays to offer an implicit critique of the distribution of wealth and power that resonated with audiences, which was not, however, perceived as a threat by the authorities.Footnote ¹¹³

In Zambia’s mine townships meanwhile, ‘tribal’ dances thrived long after the late colonial context (see above) in which they had begun. An area in each township was still set aside for the dances of specific ‘tribes’ every Sunday, which provided, interviewees stressed, a way for each community to understand each other’s culture.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In Kitwe these events were sponsored by the mine company, which provided cash prizes for the best performances.Footnote ¹¹⁵ An equally popular source of cultural knowledge was ‘Kabusha’, a radio programme that discussed social problems and how they were addressed in ‘traditional’ society. Henry Longwane was one of many interviewees who recalled it fondly:

This interest in rural ‘tribal’ culture in the Zambian Copperbelt provided knowledge of ethnic diversity and thereby reinforced its residents’ sense of urban cosmopolitanism.

Popular Painting and Its Meanings in Haut-Katanga

Parallel to individual and state sponsorship of Katangese and later Zairian art workshops, a local Katangese market developed for what became known as ‘popular painting’, also referred to as ‘urban’, ‘naïve’ or ‘genre’ painting, first by Europeans and then among more ‘advanced’ African workers. The latter decorated their homes with such paintings, bought in local markets or on city streets, visually confirming their aspiration to or attainment of the respectable lifestyle of the modern household.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Popular painting was not valued by curators because it lacked the attributes of ‘high art’ and because – like Copperbelt music – it incorporated European motifs and imagery and was therefore seen as derivative and inauthentic. Many of our Katangese interviewees decorated their homes with such paintings, as well as with designs in embossed copper typical of the region. The most popular images were those associated with village life and ‘customary’ ways.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Marie Ngoy Mwamba fondly recalled pictures showing ‘the villages where there is a woman who has a load on her head and who cooks’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ François Musenge Dikumbi’s parents decorated their house with paintings of dances and hunting scenes that evoked the villages from which they had migrated.Footnote ¹²⁰ In contrast to the modernist primitivism taught in art schools, popular painting also portrayed recent and contemporary history including political events and leaders such as Lumumba. The visual collapsing of periodisation of, for example, political violence challenged the conventional division between the colonial and independent periods.Footnote ¹²¹ Such works were, unsurprisingly, excluded from official state patronage, not only for their lack of ‘authenticité’ but also for presenting in Katanga historical narratives from the perspective of the secessionist state.Footnote ¹²²

In the vast literature on the political economy of Zambia’s development and mining industry produced in the 1970s and 1980s, there is a notable neglect of cultural analysis. In contrast, in debates about Africanisation and authenticité at Lubumbashi’s university (Chapter 6), Katangese popular painting attracted significant academic attention, which can only be briefly summarised here. In rejecting the notion that African art must separate itself from external influences, Mudimbe asserted the richness of cultural expression that engaged with European political and cultural impacts in innovative ways, enabling artists to interpret and articulate their experiences to local communities.Footnote ¹²³ Jewsiewicki likewise insisted on the legitimacy of the incorporation of Western forms into the work of African artists, just as European artists had long done with ‘primitive’ African forms.Footnote ¹²⁴ Extensive conversations with genre painting artists informed ground-breaking analyses by Fabian and Szombati-Fabian, which interrogated conventional aesthetic valuations and helpfully problematised ‘folk’ artistry in Haut-Katanga’s urban industrial society.Footnote ¹²⁵ They sought to understand popular painting through the ‘relations of production’ that informed its creation and defined it as ‘a complex process in which a society articulates and communicates its consciousness of its origins, its past and its present predicament’.Footnote ¹²⁶ The fact that most popular paintings were ‘unsigned’ prompted reconsideration of the validity of attribution and, consistent with globally influential pop artists such as Andy Warhol, challenged the conceptual boundary between high and popular art, individual creativity and generic reproduction. Fabian’s collaboration with Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu provided a new visual history of Congo as well as an ethnographic analysis of how popular art recounted that history.Footnote ¹²⁷

Precisely because these analysts raised awareness of and gave intellectual legitimacy to this body of work, some popular painters came to be feted by international collectors. Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu became particularly famous for his paintings charting the history of Congo/Zaire in the second half of the twentieth century, produced in the tumultuous context of the late 1970s.Footnote ¹²⁸ Despite the efforts of Fabian and others to reject the assessment of Congolese art according to the criteria and discourse of individual creativity used by the global art market, it was that market that ultimately selected individual artists’ work for curating, exhibiting and sale. Popular painting’s global appeal then inspired future generations of Congolese artists, at a time when the internal market for popular painting was collapsing along with the Copperbelt’s wider political economy.Footnote ¹²⁹

There was in Zambia an absence of any equivalent visual art scene: while Lusaka-based collectors and galleries emerged in the post-independence period, they were still overshadowed by the two regional artistic centres of Salisbury/Harare and Lubumbashi and no distinct visual ‘Zambian Copperbelt’ style emerged. Many younger artists blame this on the lack of artistic schooling and patronage compared with Congo, but also draw on national stereotypes, comparing Congolese streetwise ‘hustlers’ with ‘docile’ Zambians.Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, many of the artists who in the 1980s and 1990s identified the potential for a popular art market in Zambia were Congolese migrants fleeing economic decline and conflict.Footnote ¹³¹ This stimulated the Zambian art scene in important ways. As Guene shows, Katangese migrant artists produced ‘art’ both for galleries and for tourist markets. They abandoned historically specific images with no resonance in Zambia and focussed on more universalist ones, particularly idealised rural utopias that appealed to the urban market for nostalgic imagery, as well as the ubiquitous ‘mami wata’ or ‘mamba mutu’, the mermaid. These images were then taken up by Zambian artists such as Matthew Mudenda.Footnote ¹³²

Cultures of Nostalgia and ‘Being Left Behind’

In the 1990s, the Kalindula music scene was devastated by the onset of the HIV/Aids pandemic, heralding the collapse of the last recognisably distinct Zambian Copperbelt music style.Footnote ¹³³ Political conflict in Katanga equally shaped the region’s artistic history: during the political violence of the early 1990s, Leon Verbeek bought thousands of popular paintings, preserving them for posterity and analysis.Footnote ¹³⁴ The economic collapse of urban mining societies across the Central African Copperbelt in the 1990s (see Chapter 8) destroyed the company sponsorship, purchasing power and coherent urban communities that had sustained and provided subject matter for the region’s distinct cultural expression. In both the Zambian and Katangese Copperbelts, the region’s ‘golden age’ became the focus of retrospective, nostalgic cultural activities, though in very different ways. ZamRock’s 1970s heyday has in recent years become the subject of Western attention, fuelling a partial revival. The band W.I.T.C.H., described by Wikipedia as having been ‘formed during Zambia’s golden post-independence days’, was re-formed with the collaboration of Dutch musicians.Footnote ¹³⁵ The group has toured the USA and Europe to widespread hipster acclaim and is the subject of a 2019 documentary by Italian filmmaker Gio Arlotta.Footnote ¹³⁶ A commercial music that once challenged notions of national authenticity is now a nostalgic emblem of a musical golden age. While this revival has brought belated acclaim to ‘Jagari’ Chanda and his fellow musicians, there is virtually no audience in Zambia for such bands.

Haut-Katanga has remained a centre of the African art movement, the Lubumbashi Biennale continuing to attract global attention to its cultural events, organised by new artistic centres.Footnote ¹³⁷ These structures are, however, financially dependent on support from Belgium and the wider world; contemporary mine companies no longer sponsor cultural activities. Haut-Katanga’s artists have been at the forefront of commentary on the region’s decline and marginalisation and have produced powerful art in the shadow cast by the Copperbelt’s former prosperity. Sammy Baloji’s work explores the ‘beautiful time’ of urban Katanga’s golden age, squandered by corrupt leaders.Footnote ¹³⁸ His photo-montages bring the Copperbelt’s supposed past glories and contemporary ruins together, juxtaposing the region’s history and memory.Footnote ¹³⁹ In a different way, Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s 2014 novel Tram 83 collapses the region’s urban past and present in a picaresque portrayal of a nightclub in a secessionist state where casualised mineworkers rub shoulders with starving students, child soldiers and prostitutes and struggling writers seek the patronage of Western publishers. However, it opens with a quintessential Copperbelt origin story:

Katanga’s history is glimpsed in brief vignettes about its exploitative and extractive economy, as are the moral hazards typical of urban society; but here, unlike for Namusiya seventy years earlier, there is no hope of moral salvation, only the ever-present agonies of town life and the passing pleasures of sex, alcohol and – of course – music.

The production of academic knowledge about urban Katanga’s past has equally cohered around memories of its ‘golden age’. Dibwe dia Mwembu and Jewsiewicki’s ‘Mémoires de Lubumbashi’ is a landmark project that, as noted in the Introduction, intentionally collapses the conventional division of academic and popular history by treating Lubumbashi’s popular cultural outputs – theatre, painting and music – as not only the subject of their historical research, but as themselves legitimate forms of historical narration.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The project has brought together university historians, artists and community residents in exhibitions and events that seek to co-create the city’s distinct history. As well as recording hundreds of life histories of Lubumbashi residents, it has also created cultural ‘lieux de memoire’ in which Jecoke and Kalindula groups revived the old songs and dances, providing in so doing a new form of patronage for veteran performers and younger musicians seeking to engage with their communities’ cultural heritage.Footnote ¹⁴² A provocative parallel might be drawn between the preservationist tendencies of late colonial observers such as Waldecker and Tracey, who feared the loss of authentic culture in the face of unstoppable Westernisation, and those who today seek to preserve the fragile ‘folklore’ of the Copperbelt’s industrial heyday in the face of global neo-liberalism’s devastating impact on its economy and communities.

Conclusion

In providing a necessarily truncated history of cultural expression in the late colonial and post-colonial Copperbelt, this chapter has sought to demonstrate that understanding and curation of the region’s arts and music was shaped by a particular version of the ideas about modernity analysed more widely in this study. The training of Africans in conventionally Western artistic techniques and attempts to preserve ‘authentic’ and socially functional African culture were both marked by a distinction between high and popular art that was, however, applied differently to visual art and music.

State and company curation of Katangese urban culture had significant but also ambiguous effects on its development: late colonial art workshops, UMHK/Gécamines ‘spectacles’ and Zairian state patronage all shaped the ways that cultural expression was curated, funded and communicated to Copperbelt and wider publics. In comparison, while Zambian Copperbelt music was collected by the ILAM and later stimulated by Kaunda’s nationalist broadcasting policies, its visual art was neglected and little documented, something that is only now being rectified. The decades-long curatorial and intellectual knowledge produced about Katangese art has certainly stimulated artistic creativity and brought it to the attention of international art markets, but has also shaped it in significant ways beyond the control of either its artists or collectors.

Cross-border artistic innovation was shaped by the region’s shared societal and linguistic cultures, but also by changing migratory patterns shaped by labour policies, border controls, state patronage and/or interference in artistic expression, and economic fortunes. While some Copperbelt artists stress the region’s common cultural identity, rooted both in its distinct communities and history of multi-ethnic urbanisation, over time many have come to identify with or against ‘national’ cultural forms, such as Congolese rumba or ZamRock.

While there is overwhelming evidence that generations of innovative Copperbelt musicians consistently combined local, regional and global notation and instrumentation in creating syncretic musical forms, they themselves have consistently engaged in debates about musical origin and function that reflect aspects of the local vs global debate. This is both because their industry and the markets it serves have long been organised into such classificatory frameworks and because changing ideas about origin, identity and belonging have been a central subject of their songs. Similarly, popular painting, theatre and other manifestations of Copperbelt culture have taken as their primary subject the processes of social change associated with migration, urbanisation and the lifestyles, values and societal dynamics associated with town and village life as they have evolved since the 1950s.

Throughout this long period, Odilon Mufwankolo, pioneer of popular theatre in the 1950s, performed to Katangese audiences in person, on TV and (until 2006) on national radio. When Gécamines experienced near collapse in the early 2000s, his live performances sought to sensitise workers to the harsh realities of redundancy, but on one occasion a hostile audience in Kolwezi tried to physically attack his troupe for bringing such an unpopular message home to them.Footnote ¹⁴³ As we have seen, recent Katangese artworks have focussed on and been produced in relation to a context of decline and crisis, a context that has informed the region’s history for at least twenty-five years. The next chapter will focus on the social history of the Copperbelt’s decline, how it has been explained and periodised on both sides of the border and how the production of knowledge about this decline has shaped understanding of the region’s history.