Development Shadows: The Afterlife of Collapsed Development Projects in the Zambian Copperbelt

Abstract

Communities that were once the target of postcolonial development schemes still contend with the legacies of these interventions, long after such projects have been abandoned. This article looks at the afterlife of Israeli-led agricultural cooperatives that were initiated in the Zambian Copperbelt during the 1960s. Although these schemes collapsed in the decade following their establishment, local communities are still coping with the history of their rise and fall. In the Kafubu Block and Kafulafuta, the physical, social, and economic landscapes resonate with the successes and failures of this modernist planning. The schemes continue to provide a fundamental and contentious point of reference in both individual and community lives. A long-term perspective on the communities’ continued engagement with the legacies of the abandoned schemes deepens our understanding of development's complex “afterlife,” and demonstrates how the past retains its relevance by taking on different meanings over time.

Telling ruins: the afterlives of an early post-independence development intervention in Lake Victoria, Tanzania

“…One of the countries that provided significant foreign aid in the spirit of Nyerere's vision was Israel. That country's historic Labour Party, with its long history of experimentation with rural collectivist communities (notably the kibbutz movement), found natural allies in the leadership of socialist-leaning leaders such as Kaunda in Zambia and Nyerere in Tanganyika/Tanzania (for example, see Schler & Gez 2018). Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, Israel was strongly invested in Africa, notably through construction projects and the introduction of agricultural technologies, but also through social organisations such as cooperatives and youth movements (Bar-Yosef 2013; Yacobi 2016).…”

On the Tracks of Ujamaa: Vestiges and Memories in a Former Socialist Village in Southern Tanzania

“…5 These remains are the results of various development interventions across time and from a range of actors. Such interventions, which their architects sometimes consider successes, also led to failures that often generated key, though unforeseen, transformations (Ferguson 1990;Li 2005;Schler and Gez 2018;Gez, Fouéré and Bulugu 2022). To study the tangible vestiges of European colonialism in former colonised societies, many recent scholarly works borrow the concept of "ruination" from Ann Laura Stoler (Stoler 2013).…”