The lufwanyama emerald series, part three: the gazette
in 1976, a line was drawn around the kafubu schist belt.
not a physical line. a legal one. the lufwanyama emerald restricted area was formally designated under zambian mining law. the boundaries were set. the licensing framework was established. from that point forward, emerald mining in that zone required a licence from the state.
the intentions behind the designation were real and reasonable. the zambian government had confirmed, through geological survey, that the kafubu area contained one of the most significant emerald-bearing formations on earth. the resource required management. unregulated extraction would suppress prices, destroy the deposit, and ensure that the wealth generated by zambian emeralds left zambia without returning.
these are not bad reasons to draw a line. they are, in fact, good reasons.
but a line drawn around a resource is also a line drawn around the people already living and working on that resource. and that is where the history becomes more complicated than the gazette notice itself allows for.
before 1976, the communities of the lufwanyama area had been living alongside the emerald belt for generations. artisanal miners — many of them local — had been working the schist informally, recovering green stones with hand tools and selling them through whatever channels were accessible. they were not operating illegally. the law that would define their operations as illegal did not yet exist.
the gazette created that law. and in creating it, changed the legal status of people whose relationship to the ground had not changed at all.
this is not unique to zambia. it is the pattern of mineral governance across the african continent, repeated in different decades with different resources in different jurisdictions. the discovery of the resource precedes the law. the law arrives and draws a boundary. the boundary creates insiders and outsiders from people who were simply, previously, there.
what i want to hold in this post — and what i think the lufwanyama history requires us to hold — is the difference between the legitimacy of the intention and the adequacy of the implementation.
the zambian state was right to want to manage its emerald resource. the question the history raises is whether the framework created in 1976 was built in a way that included the communities it covered — or simply drew a line around them and called it governance.
fifty years later, that question is still not fully answered.
the emerald series continues. next — the arrival of industrial mining and what it changed. 💚
