ON AFRICAN VELDT

Northern Advocate, 15 November 1929, Page 5

ON AFRICAN VELDT

CITIES SPRINGING UP.

GREAT MINING BOOM

Half a dozen wide-awake, energetic, and rapidly-growing cities have, during the last two or three years, sprung out of the inner African jungles. They may still be classed as small, none possessing more than a few thousand inhabitants, yet their development has beep sudden and surprising, says a writer in the San Francisco “Chronicle.”

Copper has produced this great change on the African veldt, When the Great War ended, Northern Rhodesia was considered an, obscure and slow-moving colony, with fewer than 1006 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. Today the settlements •of Ndcio, N’kana, Bwana Mkuba, Broken Hill, 1 Kasempa, and Roan Antelope aspire to be future metropolises. Their streets are crowded with motor cars, 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 before the present-railroads were built, was offered a few thousand acres near the N’kana copper mine for 500 dollars (£100) during 1909. Today this mineral area could not be bought for 25,000,000 dollars (£5,000,000). Broken Hill (called after the mining town in 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, feverinfested 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 present 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.

Sir Edmund 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 chiefly 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 Ratanga fields and those on the British side of the border, ore reserves are estimated to ■be worth 5,000,000,000 dollars 1 (£1,000,000).