COPPER IN RHODESIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 813, 6 November 1929, Page 15

COPPER IN RHODESIA

NEW TOWNS SPRING UP ON VELD ENORMOUS WEALTH Halt’ a dozen wide-awake energetic and rapidly growing cities have, during tire 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 been sudden and surprising, says the South African correspondent of a United States exchange. Copper has produced this great change on the African veld. When the Great War ended, Northern Rhodesia was considered an obscure and slow-moving colony, with fewer than 1,000 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 Ndolo, N’kana, Bwana Mkuba, Broken Hill, 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 £IOO during 1909. Today this mineral area could not be bought for £5,000,000. Power Stations Built 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 tbe 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). Great Trek i 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 pccupied 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 £1,000,000,000.