Mining is a hazardous occupation and the very real dangers of accident and death faced by miners have constituted a central part of the literature on mining regions around the world. Mining in sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial period has generally been assumed to have been particularly dangerous. This assumption, however, has never been subjected to serious scrutiny for the Central African Copperbelt beyond general descriptions of the harsh working environments.
This paper will examine available death and accident statistics for underground and open pit mines on the Copperbelt to establish trends in how dangerous mining was for those who worked in the industry during the period of private ownership. Statistical sources will be interrogated to understand how they were created and how they compare to safety statistics in the mining industry elsewhere, including in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Britain.
The early years of industrial mining produced a staggering death toll as many thousands of miners were killed by disease, particularly in Union Minière’s first operations. Provisionally though, it appears that once the incidence of disease declined, available accident and death statistics suggest that the Copperbelt mines were considerably safer than other mining regions in Africa, and perhaps even than the mining industry in parts of the developed world. It is striking, for instance, that there has been only one major disaster in the region’s history: the Mufulira Mine Disaster in 1970. This is in stark contrast to the grim record in South Africa, the only other mining industry of comparable size on the continent in this period.