Whites in twentieth-century Southern Africa are regarded as being among the most resolute defenders of colonial and white minority rule. Across the region, colonial governments fought vicious, protracted and unsuccessful conflicts against African nationalist movements, and the intransigent attitude of governments towards these movements was largely supported by whites. This support is often contrasted with the actions of the small number of whites who joined liberation movements.

Yet there was another unexpected and puzzling white reaction to African nationalism: indifference. Why did white mineworkers on the Zambian Copperbelt not seriously resist decolonization?

The center of Zambia’s economy was—and is—the copper industry. Until the mid-1970s, several thousand white workers were employed on the mines and in 1963, the year before independence, these mines employed some 7,800 whites, 17 percent of the total workforce. Some of these were managers or mining professionals like engineers—anyone in a position of authority was white. But most were employed doing the kind of jobs common to mining anywhere in the world: driving winding engines hauling men and material up the shafts, operating pumps, repairing machinery and driving locomotives.

These whites were among the highest paid workers in the world and, what’s more, avoided most of the hard manual work normally associated with mining, like drilling and blasting. Instead, this work was done by African mineworkers and almost all whites also supervised African workers as part of their job.

Such a privileged position, however, did not mean that they intended to stay on the Copperbelt. In some ways, these whites were the opposite of settlers. They were a highly mobile workforce accustomed to moving frequently between mining and industrial sites across and beyond the British Empire, in search of work or better pay. In 1963, almost half the white workforce had been on the mines less than three years.