ON AFRICAN VELDT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 15 November 1929, Page 10

ON AFRICAN VELDT.

CITIES SPRINGING UP

GREAT MINING BOOM

Hall a-dozen wide-awake, energetic, and rapidlv-growing cities have, during the last two or three years, sprung out of the inner African jungles. They may be classed as small, none possessing more than a few' thousand inhabitants, yet their development has been sudden and surprising, says a writer in the San 'Francisco “Chronicle.” Copper has produced this great change on the African veldt. V hen the Great War ended, Northern Rhodesia was considered an obscure and slow-moving colony, with fewer than 1000 white settlers among 1,000,000 natives. The colony covers a region from the Victoria Falls and extends for 500 miles to the boundary of the Belgian Congo. To-day the settlements ol Ndolo, N’kana, Bwana Mkuba, Broken Hill, Kasempa, and Roan Antelope aspire to be future metropolises. Thenstreets are crowded with motorcars houses adapted to the tropic climate rise by hundreds, and land that five years ago contained nothing but lions, crocodiles, and hippos is sold at city prices. Mr. Zeedelberg, who ran a mail coach service through Rhodesia beiore the present railroads were built, was offered a few thousand acres near the N’kana copper mine for 500 dollars (£100) during 1909. To-day this mineral area could not be bought for 25,000,090 dollars (£5,000,000). RICH MINERAL FIELD'S.

Broken Hill (called after the mining town hi Australia) is the oldest of the new- communities. Excavations for zinc and other ores were made before the Great War, but, until lately, it remained a miserable, fever-in tested village. Several entire hills have been dug away since the place started on its industrial development. Great power stations were built on the Mulungushi and other rivers until recently only used by native chiefs for the purpose of drowning refractory subjects. American capitalists and engineers take a large share in opening the stupendously rich mineral fields. Lead, zinc, vanadium, coal, and other minerals besides copper, cover thousands of square miles and extraction plants on the most ambitious scale are being erected everywhere. Within a few years Northern Rhodesia expects to surpass its neighbour, the Congo, in the production of copper (at pi'esent this Belgian colony is the world’s second largest producer.) A trek, akin to that which occurred during the opening of the West in the United States, and like the one that previously took place in Africa when the Kimberley diamonds and Johannesburg gold .fields were discovered,, is now moving from South Africa into the far interior. Every train carries white immigrants from the Union and other parts of the world. WORK FOR. THE UNEMPLOYED.

Sir Ednmund Davis, a mine operator, intends to bring out a considerable number of unemployed British miners to work in this country. His efforts are much encouraged by the British authorities dealing with labour questions. These newcomers will not toil with pick and shovel as they would have done at Home in Durham or South Wales. The climate compels the use of native workers for the heaviest tasks while Europeans are chiefilv occupied as foremen, supervisors, and engineers. For the benefit of all these arrivals, hotels, shops, banks, garages, electric lighting installations, and other signs of a modern community are being erected, and already colonists discuss the foundation of additional settlements. In the Belgian Katanga, fields and those on the British side of the border, ore reserves are estimated to be worth 5,0.10,000,0.'K) dollars (£1,000,000,000..) ■