Final paper for me at the conference is our very own Matteo Grilli (postdoc @UFSweb) on the Basutoland Congress Party and its international networks. #ASAUK18#ASAUK2018
Grilli: The BCP was heavily influenced by the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore. Pan-Africanism became the ideological foundation of the party. #ASAUK18#ASAUK2018
Grilli: Ntsu Mokhehle (BCP leader) sent party members to Israel and Yugoslavia to learn about communal work and ownership that could be adapted to traditional forms of labour organisation in Lesotho. #ASAUK18#ASAUK2018
Grilli: Mokhehle's international networks ultimately allowed the BCP to survive in exile after the party was ousted from power and banned in Lesotho in 1970. #ASAUK18#ASAUK2018
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Professional news: my contract at Leiden ends this month so I'm leaving academia. I'm good at my job. I publish a lot (3 books, 21 articles/chapters), got great teaching evaluations and supervised 4 PhDs since finishing my own in 2016. It's not enough though.
I have to accept that I will never get a permanent academic job, and have also realised I no longer want one. Working conditions at universities are deteriorating. At Leiden, I took on the work of two colleagues who had burnouts. Unsurprisingly, I found their jobs stressful!
People often say encouraging things about my work and prospects for employment. The reality of the academic job market is that my profile has been enough to get me only one one job interview this year, despite many applications.
Post-war migration in Britain usually means immigration to Britain. The important contribution of this book is to show that this occured alongside mass emigration from Britain, and how this changes our understanding of migration and migration policy.
This collective experience of emigration is absent in popular memory. As I note in the review, ‘Migration’ means the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948, not the Carnarvon Castle departing Southampton for Cape Town at the same time.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Mufulira Mine Disaster, #Zambia's worst ever mining disaster. On 25 September 1970, 89 miners on the night shift were entombed when vast quantities of mud and water leaked from a surface tailings dam and inundated the mine. #mininghistory
Mufulira was the world’s largest underground copper mine, but it took only 15 minutes for the entire eastern section to flood. Survivors recalled a noise like thunder, a shockwave of air through the tunnels, then the lights going out before the wet mud rushed through the tunnels.
Pictures from the aftermath give an indication of the terrible force of the mud rush that surged through the underground workings.
This photo I came across from the @TWArchives got me thinking about the global division of labour, specifically who could do what kinds of jobs in different places at the same time. The photo shows dockworkers in Sunderland manually unloading chromite from a ship in 1949.
What caught my eye is that the caption labels it "East African chromite," which is probably incorrect. The chromite was almost certainly mined in Zimbabwe, in open pits in Shurugwi (then Selukwe) and then shipped to Britain via Beira.
Chromite was manually extracted and then loaded onto trains to Beira. Here, the work was done by African men and it was absolutely unthinkable for whites to shovel chromite, and regarded as dangerous to racial prestige. This was not appropriate work for white men.
Yesterday I spent a happy afternoon in the @ASCLibrary looking through two boxes of material on #Zambia recently donated by Frans Verstraelen. This was a mixture of books, reports, leaflets, and periodicals from the University of Zambia, some of which are now very hard to find.
The focus of much of the books and pamphlets is on Christianity, Christian churches and humanism (the guiding ideology of the country after independence). Several things by and about Kenneth Kaunda as well
As an aside, Henry Meebelo (who was a historian and theoretician of the United National Independence Party) is seriously overdue an intellectual biography.
Thanks to @blewis2103 I have a copy of a 1972 film on the history of Kansanshi, #Zambia, featuring an interview with with 95 year-old Chief Kapijimpanga (pictured) and footage of pre-industrial smelting techniques as recalled and reconstructed by elderly locals. #mininghistory
Chief Kapijimpanga worked with the prospecting party that established a mine at Kansanshi in the 1900s and the film includes footage of the remains of that mine in the early 1970s. I think has now been obliterated by the new open pit.
If anyone would like a copy, then let me know and I will share it.