Public-private contractualisation also applies to the spaces and times of mineral flows. Bonded warehouses are a case in point. Created by state administrations in the Copperbelt since the time of colonisation, these technologies allow companies to settle and store goods on tax-free state-demarcated parts of the territory. They are zoning technologies: state admin-istrations delineate a portion of their land where common fiscal law does not apply. Goods entering a bonded warehouse are motionless but are still considered as being in transit, which allows the company owning the goods to avoid paying import duties or other taxes. Bonded warehouses are akin to a no-interest credit on import duties by the public administration to private companies:
A customs bond is an oath that is signed after duties are assessed but before they are paid; it is a promise to fork over duties when the goods are reclaimed from storage, in three days or three years … if the goods are transferred out of the facility and out of the [country]
… then their owners avoid tariffs altogether.58
In a 2018 article, Dara Orenstein runs through the history of bonded warehouses: inspired by the functioning of a free port such as Hamburg or Hong Kong, bonded warehouses are an invention of nineteenth-century US capitalism. It is unclear how they were transplanted to Southern Africa.
The first mention of bonded warehouses in the Copperbelt is made in the annual report of 1931 published by the British Colonial Office in Northern Rhodesia. It notes the existence of five bonded warehouses on Northern Rhodesian territory, described as ‘major public works’ under-taken in the colony.59 They were situated in Ndola, Mokambo, Livingstone, Fort Jameson (now Chipata) – four major border cities that the office described as ‘free warehousing ports’60 – and Broken Hill (now Kabwe), a
58 Orenstein, ‘Warehouses on Wheels’, p. 650.
59 Colonial Office, ‘Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Northern Rhodesia, 1931’ (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), p. 87.
60 Ibid., p. 27.
mining town in central Zambia located on the line-of-rail. The locations of these five bonded warehouse show the will of Northern Rhodesia’s British colonial government to encourage not only mining but also the movement of goods on its territory, as bonded warehouses are ‘site[s] of circulation, not of production’:61 Livingstone was the point of entry/exit for goods coming from or going to South Africa on the North–South corridor. Fort Jameson, situated close to the Nyasaland (now Malawi) border, was used as a gateway for commercial traffic going east on an alternative route towards the ports of Nacala and Beira in Northern Mozambique. As for Ndola and Mokambo, they were directly looking at the Congo as the two towns sit on the border splitting the Copperbelt in two. They were strategically set on the trajectory of the roads mentioned in the first part of this chapter:
Material and immaterial infrastructures appear to be complementary. Those bonded warehouses were most likely used to store goods to be exported, such as copper, obviously, but also maize and tobacco: Here we see that the infrastructures created for copper can be used for the trade of other goods. The storage of such goods allowed investors to wait for the best time to sell their products according to international market prices. They thus contributed to and exacerbated the commercial specialisation of Northern Rhodesian territory and its polarisation around borders and the line-of-rail.
Bonded warehouses were still in use during the nationalisation period and were aimed at supporting private investments in Zambia. The 1986 Invest-ment Act, for instance, included several incentives for investors such as the
‘access to any existing free trade zones’ and additional tax breaks for inves-tors.62 Nowadays, the vast majority of logistics, mining and trading compa-nies in the Copperbelt use bonded warehouses. Bolloré Logistics, Trafigura and Reload Logistics are among the major companies moving Copper-belt minerals across space, and all their storage installations are equipped with bonded warehouse technology. Their proliferation in the Zambian Copperbelt is worth emphasising. Businessmen and -women involved in cross-border economic activities and trade in the Copperbelt always refer to Zambia as a much safer place for people and goods than the DRC.
Thus, bonded warehouses contribute to the image and the functioning of Zambia as a ‘structured platform’63 for traders and companies wanting to
61 Orenstein, ‘Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Produc-tion’, p. 51.
62 Saasa, Zambia’s Policies towards Foreign Investment, p. 35.
63 Interview, Congolese trader involved in cross-border trade in the Copperbelt, Kitwe, 2016.
benefit from the riches of the DRC without being based in the country.
For instance, Bolloré Logistics has built a 70,000 square metrewarehouse in Chingola, including an 18,000 square metre bonded warehouse ‘dedicated to the transhipment of copper, cobalt coming from the Katanga region in the DRC, as well as chemicals … brought to Chingola through the southern and eastern corridors’64 for the services of a single mining company in the DRC. The installation of this facility is justified by the insecurity in the Congo: close enough to the border but outside the DRC, the Bolloré warehouse constitutes a free-of-charge ‘buffer stock’65 for the mine in case of border closure or political instability.
In Zambia today, the opening of a bonded warehouse is subject to the procurement of an annual ‘customs area licence’. Customs officials keep the keys to the bonded space and are entitled to inspect those ware-houses anytime to ensure that no goods are leaving them (otherwise, taxes would have to be paid), although unannounced inspections are uncommon.
Bonded warehouses are, therefore, delineated spaces where private owner-ship and public rules combine, and where public and private logics meet and intertwine. However, the bond no longer requires geographical fixity, as the bonded warehouse technology has been expanded to goods in motion.
This is what Dara Orenstein calls ‘warehouses on wheels’: thanks to a unique seal numbered by customs administrations, bundles of copper cathodes can travel, in transit, for several days without paying any duty, as they did not officially or administratively cross the border and enter Zambia. The border itself is moving along with the seal: ‘the customs border [is] not so much a riparian line comprised of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates as a process enacted in a sequence of spatially circumscribed transactions’.66 The contract between customs administrations and the company managing the movement of copper cathodes allows partners to negotiate when and where the goods will effectively cross the border – if they ever do – and taxes will be due.
This functioning has been further expanded in the form of temporary import/export procedures. They allow a mining company, for example, to import a machine without paying any duty on the basis of a promise that it will be sent back to its country of origin before the end of the
64 Bolloré Logistics, ‘Transport et Logistique en Zambie: Focus marché’, www.bollore-logistics.com/fr/Pages/FOCUS/Zambia.aspx (accessed 12 March 2020); author’s trans-lation from French.
65 Interviews, Bolloré warehouse’s managers, Chingola, 2016 and 2017.
66 Orenstein, ‘Warehouses on Wheels’, p. 654.
365-day period fixed by administrations. This happens frequently between the two sides of the Zambia–Congo border, as the same mining compa-nies (Glencore, First Quantum Minerals) and logistics compacompa-nies (Bolloré Logistics, Reload, CML) are settled in both countries. Thanks to temporary exports and imports, they can share costly mining equipment between their own subsidiaries. Temporary exports and imports can be extended beyond 365 days with a simple request from a reputable clearing agent, which can pave the way for longer and longer exonerations.67
By pretending goods did not enter its territory, thanks to the contracts’
administrative technology, the state is depriving itself of the right to tax these movements. Consequently, these types of contracts open profit opportuni-ties to mining and logistics companies that they would not have been able to access without public intervention and rule. It entails close cooperation between customs administrations, which enable, certify and control these zones, and private companies managing copper and cobalt circulations in the Copperbelt. Zones are now presented as the liberal tool par excellence as they represent a way of attracting private investment through loosened fiscal constraints. They are the direct heirs of their colonial counterparts: they mark the deepening of the private accumulation logics developed around the flows of minerals allowed by the state’s administrations. Bonded ware-houses represent a key infrastructure technology for ‘efficient’ (i.e. profitable) commercial traffic and are central to the Copperbelt’s mineral flow regime.
Today, they meet the state’s objectives of industrial development and take the form of another liberal zoning technology that has been implemented in the region: special economic zones.
The ‘infrastructure-isation’68 of the Copperbelt started during coloni-sation, which means the complete organisation of the territory around infrastructures allowing mineral exploitation and exporting is not limited to physical infrastructures. ‘Soft’ infrastructures were also created and took the form of administrative technologies given the state’s importance in their creation and management. Their goal was to coordinate the priorities of the private sector, which was dominant in the first decades of colonisa-tion, with the actions of the state, which created rules to ensure private accumulation. Among those soft infrastructures, contractualisation played
67 Hélène Blaszkiewicz, ‘La formalisation inachevée des circulations commerciales afric-aines par les infrastructures de papier: Cas de l’industrie logistique zambienne’, Politique africaine 151 (2018), pp. 133–54.
68 Hélène Blaszkiewicz, ‘La mise en politique des circulations commerciales transfron-talières en Zambie: infrastructures et moment néolibéral’, Géocarrefour 91, 3 (2017).
an important role as it allowed monopolies to form and strengthen. In the same way, bonded warehouses as a public technology gave mining and logistics companies control over the rhythms of their movements. Those two administrative technologies work on the question of resolving, through the contractual organisation between actors, all aspects that could constitute obstacles to the fluidity and regularity of traffic – from the organisation of relations with partners and competitors to space and time. This section has also shown the historicity of these two administrative technologies. It underlined the long-term influence of private logics in the organisation of the territory of trade and how public administrations have enabled a certain level of accumulation around flows of minerals.
Conclusion
As a mining hub, the Copperbelt has long been analysed as a copper and cobalt producing region – the centre of African urbanisation, unionisation and the wage-earning economy. As this chapter demonstrates, it is also important to consider the Copperbelt through the prism of the historical links it has forged to the global economy by exporting minerals and through the infrastructures enabling their circulation. This chapter has traced the long history of material and immaterial infrastructures supporting the movement of copper (and, more recently, cobalt). I showed that the technologies governing commercial traffic today date back to the era of colonisation:
the territory’s polarisation along the line-of-rail and the Zambian Copper-belt cities stems from the design and layout of major export routes drawn during the first decades of the twentieth century. In the same way, the deep cooperation between public and private actors embodied in various contrac-tualisation practices originated in charted companies and the monopolies they had on the territory. These material and immaterial infrastructures enable fast and efficient commercial traffic, prevent undesirable stoppage and maintain the link between the local Copperbelt and the global economy.
This chapter also examined the inertia of mineral-related infrastructures.
Throughout successive political regimes, the territorial polarisation that emerged during colonisation stayed the same. Infrastructures form a kind of dead weight; they constrain the territory’s organisation and the development projects that can be carried out. The Copperbelt territory was organised in the interest of copper exploitation and exporting, but infrastructures cannot
adapt to the booms and busts of copper prices:69 if economic diversification is based on context-specific economic policies, infrastructure diversification can hardly be achieved in a short amount of time. Infrastructures do not change according to political temporalities; only the roles assigned to them can change, and have shifted rapidly: the mineral-related infrastructures that were required to allow the development of the colonial metropolis were then justified as a means to achieve national development and sovereignty after independence. Today, the same infrastructures are legitimised as they represent international connectivity and a vital link to the global markets.70 The promotion of mining circulations through infrastructure development contributes to the uneven repartition of the advantages linked to fast and efficient movements: from the beginning, the mineral trade has benefitted from this ‘arterial’71 organisation of space. Other types of trade organised according to different rhythms, geographies and sociabilities are deemed illegitimate to use the restricted and saturated infrastructure network and, thus, suffer from more friction and delays.
The emphasis on global mineral flows explains the global position of the Copperbelt despite its landlocked position inside the continent. The territory of the Copperbelt, especially of the Zambian Copperbelt, has developed over more than a century to become a crossroads for regional commercial traffic. A form of capitalism has emerged around the infrastruc-tures designed for the exploitation of mineral wealth, be they Congolese, Zimbabwean, South African or Zambian. It has existed for more than a century and has been maintained even when the economy was nationalised.
In this form of capitalism, private and public actors have acted jointly to enable the accumulation of capital. This can explain the success of today’s neoliberalisation policies: they only form an additional layer – the latest – of reinvestment in the logics of polarisation and commodification of the Copperbelt territory, organised for the benefit of entities located on the international stage. As in other parts of Africa, the neoliberal organisation of territory in the Copperbelt re-utilises and capitalises on the legacies of
69 Alastair Fraser and Miles Larmer, Zambia, Mining and Neoliberalism: Boom and Bust on the Globalized Copperbelt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
70 Tom Goodfellow, ‘African Capitalisms, Infrastructure and Urban Real Estate’, 17 August 2018: http://roape.net/2018/08/17/african-capitalisms-infrastructure-and-urban-real-estate (accessed 4 November 2019).
71 Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, The American Historical Review 995 (1994), pp. 1516–45.
colonialism.72 Material and immaterial infrastructures are interesting media to highlight this continuity as they represent ‘the mundane assembly of global circulation’73 on the field and in history. They show the permanence of private logics in the global connections linking the two sides of the Copperbelt with the global economy. Therefore, public-private collabora-tions and the infrastructures they built can be understood as the ‘carriers’
bringing colonial hegemonic transactions into the neoliberal present.74
72 Louis Awanyo and Emmanuel Morgan Attua, ‘A Paradox of Three Decades of Neoliberal Economic Reforms in Ghana: A Tale of Economic Growth and Uneven Regional Development’, African Geographical Review 37, 3 (2016), pp. 173–91.
73 Ouma and Stenmanns, ‘The New Zones of Circulation’, p. 98.
74 Jean-François Bayart, ‘The Meandering of Colonial Hegemony in French-speaking West Africa’, Politique africaine 105, 1 (2007), pp. 201–40.