It was a typical Tuesday night in Pigale, the pub owned by the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia, the nation’s largest mining union. The bar is located next to the bus stop used to ferry miners from the center of town to their various workplaces, making it a key location for industrial politics, rumor mongering and catching up with friends for an after work drink. Benson, from the Chinese operated Chambishi Copper Smelter, arrived at the table where I was drinking with three Mopani Copper Mines employees (a subsidiary of the Swiss Glencore Group). He apologized for his late arrival, which he blamed on Chinese management’s lack of empathy. Two of the other men had previously worked for Chinese sub-contractors and everyone at the table compared stories about Chinese management practices. I listened excitedly as these tales built upon common tropes about employment with Chinese mines, including low wages, exploitative practices and a disconnect between employees and management. As these stories continued however, they became more and more outrageous, culminating in the (seemingly genuinely believed) tale of a Chinese manager who, after putting his arm around an African worker to comfort him (after the death of a family member) was deported back to China and executed at the airport.
The difference between Western and Chinese investments and aid programs in Africa is an increasingly popular topic of both academic and journalistic inquiry (see the cartoon above). How to place the seemingly sinophobic rumors of Zambian copper miners (and also small traders, unemployed youths and ambitious rural elites) into this literature is something I have been struggling with since my PhD fieldwork in Malawi. Luise White’s excellent Speaking with Vampires offers several insights into using gossip, rumor and allegory to interpret tensions caused by colonization. In the same way rumors of blood sucking reflected the colonial relationship between Kenya and England and individual relationships between westerners and Kenyans, I have been tempted to read Zambian’s stories about Chinese management being killed for forming personal connections with miners as an allegory for atrocious working and the lack of social interactions between Chinese supervisors and their employees.
While I still see some value in this approach, I am unsure as to how to compare it to Zambian’s depiction of other foreign investors and managers. Zambians’ complaints about white South African managers are legion, however these complaints are inevitably over a specific mistreatment, without the allegoric nature of their depictions of the Chinese. A white South African manager’s conduct will be indicted after they smoke in a public area, or (much more commonly) swear at a Zambian, and complaints about them will lead to general discussions about this form of behavior. Similarly, Zambian workers frequently assure me of the superiority of white-non South African management (both for contractors and mines), leaving me to wonder if this is a form of positive Occidentalism, a courtesy to myself or a reflection of actual superior working conditions. In an attempt to find out if it is the latter, I’ve been surveying the wages and working conditions of contracted workers under various sub-contracting relations. Its early days, but it seems that wages and conditions under Chinese sub-contractors are no worse than under other nationalities (and better than under Zambian management).
Not only are these narratives interesting in and of themselves, Zambian’s understandings of and discussions about the Chinese (obviously) affect how they engage with Chinese companies and what Chinese companies and development agencies are capable of doing and by extension their competitiveness vis-à-vis western corporations. I made this point in more detail when recently reviewing Ching Kwan Lee’s excellent new ethnography (available in January’s issue of African Studies Quarterly). Zambian’s views on the Chinese are not solely critical. The recently opened China Mall in Kitwe and Ndola present a positive spin on the Chinese’s supposed thriftiness and ingenuity. However, there is clearly understandings of a ‘Chinese character’ that frequently affects Zambian politics and investment that are at least in part built in comparison to the west.
When Benson told me that he wished his company was owned by Westerners, I explained to him that my survey indicated that there was little difference in payment between the two and asked him what he meant. He explained that westerners, (specifically myself) were always drinking with Zambians and talking to them. It appears that he used the sociality of myself and a few local NGO workers to frame his understanding of the difference between Chinese and Western investment, in a manner that has enabled a focus on the poor behaviors of Chinese management in Zambia’s media and politics (to the benefit of western companies). I have written previously about how Malawian’s expectations of western style development and western developers impedes Chinese development agency and practices (here http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jid.3313/full ). It is possible that expectations about a broader western identity, intimately tied to the non-mining westerners Zambians interact with, significantly affect Zambian understandings of the difference between Chinese and Western investment