Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the unpaid domestic labour of African mineworkers' wives in the Katangan Copperbelt was essential to establishing and displaying social hierarchies between different ranks of mineworkers, and between mineworkers and other urban inhabitants.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how the unpaid domestic labour of African mineworkers' wives in the Katangan Copperbelt was essential to establishing and displaying social hierarchies between different ranks of mineworkers, and between mineworkers and other urban inhabitants. While missions and some colonial officials across Africa sought to produce young women who were educated in domestic arts and child-rearing to serve as suitable "modern" wives for urban wage laborers, Katanga provides a different and perhaps unique case. The policies of the mine company Union Minière ensured that women married to its workers were encouraged- and could afford- to concentrate on creating the perfect "modern" home. Women's production of what Europeans read as a clean, ordered home, with well-dressed and well-cared for children, influenced their husbands' prospects of promotion. The use of 'modern' electric ovens and western-style furniture created distinctions between mining camps and neighbouring cités, understood by mineworkers and their families as displaying their own advancement.

Secondly, this paper examines how, from the 1980s, economic decline, inflation, and delays in - or the absence of - mineworkers' paycheques made women's economic contributions newly essential to mineworkers' households. Most women contributed through entrepreneurial and trading activity. The success of these activities often depended, in part, on their husband's jobs, which provided money for investment in their businesses, and access to networks of potential customers and investors. Women's contributions, in turn, allowed their husbands to maintain identities as "workers" even as their jobs ceased to reliably provide sustenance for their families or even themselves.