BIG READ: Growing up in Africa’s most toxic town

It’s true that the older you get, the more clearly you remember the past, whereas last week seems a blur.

I remember vividly the time I spent in Kabwe, the mining town called Broken Hill in what, until Zambian independence in 1964, was the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia. Over the past few years I have been researching Kabwe to write a book about a town that is remarkable in so many ways.

After lead and zinc were discovered in 1902, European miners flocked to the area, christening the place Broken Hill after the Australian mining town of the same name. It later became known as the birthplace of Zambian politics.

Two years into independence, Broken Hill became Kabwe, reverting to its original name, according to University of Zambia historian Mwelwa Musambachime. The local people had known it as “Kabwe-ka-Mukuba”, which means “ore smelting”, and valued it as a place for mining copper, which they prized as currency and for decoration. But when large lead mineral deposits were discovered, it changed the future of the area.

My father went there first in about 1953 to work as the postmaster, but seeing the Rhodesia Broken Hill mine on the town outskirts, he became infatuated with mining. Unskilled for the industry, he joined the hundreds of men in similar circumstances who did shift work and went to work underground.

He would come home every day in soot-stained overalls, swinging his lunch box. The men he socialised with, who brought their families to visit, were mainly Scots and English expatriates. They would sit under the trees in our backyard with their beers and whiskies, the women with gin and tonics, and watch the hot African sun go down.  

In about 1955 my father got sick, and had to go back to his hometown, Durban, to undergo treatment for lead poisoning. The treatment was successful — though his health was never the same afterwards. He had persistent stomach problems and in his 50s he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. In 1956 the family returned to Broken Hill. I was born in 1957.

My first memory of Broken Hill is of my father bent over, working in his vegetable patch in the back garden. Spinach, beans, spring onions had all been planted in neat rows and marked with a seed packet on a stick. I was toddling around and he was humming a song. He had an aviary with birds such as long-tailed paradise whydahs and carmine bee-eaters, and also a section dense with banana and guava trees. The cool heart of one of the banana trees was my secret sanctuary, a refuge from my two older brothers.

A few years older than me, they had a life separate from mine. David had a pellet gun and he and Leonard, younger by a year, were allowed to go into the bush on their bikes every afternoon. They kept various reptiles in cages, and once David came back from the bush with a dead cobra coiled around his crossbar. The neighbour alerted the local newspaper, who came to take a picture. Later, when he was in his 60s, David told me he had felt enormous regret about shooting that beautiful snake.

Leonard was less bloodthirsty. He kept a collection of frogs in a half-drum of water and my mother used to tell a story about how she had come outside one day to find him gently stroking a mature puffadder that was sunning itself in the rockery.

I spent the afternoons playing on the veranda, which was enclosed in gauze to keep the insects out. Or going somewhere with Angus, the housekeeper I adored, on his big black bicycle. My father had attached a special carrier to the back and Angus would put me into it and take me to Patel’s shop for sweets, or to the clinic for my shots.

Many years later, when I was researching our time in Zambia, David, the keeper of the family history, told me that Angus’s surname was Phiri, and he had a wife called Fatness, who lived in the “compound” or township. Angus and John, the gardener, lived on the property and were Bemba, like many of the people in that area. My brothers would often join the neighbouring male servants as they cooked their nshima and gravy over an open fire in the evenings, but this wasn’t something a little girl was invited to.

One day, around my sixth birthday, I heard my father say John was “political”. I didn’t know what political meant but unbeknown to me, Northern Rhodesia was in the midst of its struggle for independence from British rule. It lasted until 1963, the eve of independence and also the year we left to go and live in SA.

It is well known that SA’s biggest resistance movement, the ANC, had its headquarters in Lusaka, but its members came to Broken Hill to hold rallies. David told me he and my mother would sometimes go and sit at the railway line, which was near our house, to join the others who had come to listen.

But there is a more important meeting place, a natural arena called the Mulungushi Rock of Authority. Speakers from local resistance movements such as the Northern Rhodesia African Congress and the Zambian African National Congress, and later Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (Unip), came to address their constituents at Mulungushi Rock during the years when Northern Rhodesia, then in a federation with Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), was engaged in its struggle.

The town has been reduced to a dust bowl, its life sucked out.

It was also here, in Kabwe’s Hindu Hall, that Kaunda delivered his “Kabwe Declaration: A nation of equals” to his Unip supporters in 1977.

The town had a much older famous resident: Kabwe Man or Broken Hill Man, is a 300,000-year-old fossil that a Swiss miner found in 1921. It was the first historically significant human fossil found in Africa, according to Josh Davis writing in Science News.

“While initially it was named Homo rhodesiensis, it has since been classified as one of the best preserved fossils of another ancient human species called Homo heidelbergensis,” Davis says. Various other fossils were found and the Rhodesia Broken Hill Mine Company, which owned the mine, donated them to what was then the British Museum but is now the Natural History Museum, according to Davis.

David Livingstone passed through the area, resting for a while under a huge old fig tree in the centre. A memorial plaque marks the spot.

As a town, Kabwe, sitting at the gateway to Zambia’s lucrative Copperbelt, has always punched above its weight. This is not only due to its strategic minerals, but also its railhead. Certainly when I was a child, it was a bustling centre, the capital of Zambia’s Western Province. But, as I saw on a visit in 2018, the town has been reduced to a dust bowl, its life sucked out. This is not just due to successive uncaring governments and the inevitable march of modernity, but also because of the thing that gave the town its raison d’être — mining.

As we drove into the town on a sweltering February day, we passed a big Chinese agricultural concern, as well as the Elephant Hotel, an old favourite watering hole of my parents. I had hardly reached my guesthouse, the Luangwa Safari Lodge, near 18 Kochia Road, where we had lived, when the first heavy rains came down.

Over the next few days I walked around the neighbourhood, casting my mind back 50-odd years. By chance I met the new owner at No 18, a student who had inherited it from his grandmother, and went to see the classroom at Jasmine Primary, where I did the first year of the British education system, called “reception”. And to the club, where my parents went to dances. I was told I had missed Patel’s general store by a few years; the family had recently sold up.

But it was with a sense of loss and some anger that I learned in my research that Kabwe is the most toxic town in Africa, and ranked among the top 10 most polluted towns in the world. For decades, while its inhabitants have been going about their lives, doing their shopping, going to work, to school, the children playing in their backyards, poisonous minerals have been seeping into the soil and water.

The World Health Organization identifies lead as among the 10 chemicals of major public health concern. As a Google search will confirm, much research has been done and much written about the plight of the people of Kabwe, but not much to help them.

According to a study by Stephan Bose-O’Reilly and others, published in Environmental Research, “Kabwe has extensive lead-contaminated soil and children in Kabwe ingest and inhale high quantities of this toxic dust ... Over 95% of children living in the most affected townships had high blood lead levels (BLLs) > 10 µg/dL [the concentration of lead in a sample of whole blood equal to or greater than 10 micrograms of lead per decilitre of blood].”  About half the children had levels of more than 45 µg/dL, the study says. “The existing data clearly establishes the presence of a severe environmental health crisis in Kabwe which warrants immediate attention.”

In a letter to the Zambian government in 2021, the UN urged it to attend to Kabwe, saying a five-year project launched in 2016, and funded by the World Bank, to clean up lead-contaminated neighbourhoods and conduct testing, had not dealt with the source of the contamination in the mine waste dumps, or done a thorough enough cleanup.   

Human Rights Watch, together with five other organisations — Advocacy for Child Justice, Caritas Zambia, Children’s Environmental Health Foundation, Environment Africa Zambia and Terre des Hommes — last year urged the new Zambian government, under Hakainde Hichilema, to clean up the lead pollution.    

The main owner of Kabwe mine was Anglo American, which had a major stake in it from 1925 to 1974. Now Mbuyisa Moleele, a Johannesburg-based law firm specialising in human rights and environmental tort claims, and the UK firm Leigh Day have launched a class-action lawsuit against Anglo American SA, for causing multigenerational lead poisoning of people in the Kabwe district.

Writing on September 5 in Business Day, Amnesty International UK’s economic affairs programme director, Peter Frankental, said: “The suit is an important milestone in the battle to ensure corporate accountability, and justice for the communities negatively affected by mining activity.”

About 230,000 people live in Kabwe today, according to Zanele Mbuyisa, a director of Mbuyisa Moleele. In a video on the firm’s website, she says studies from the 1970s onwards show the same high levels of lead as now, and “nothing has changed”. Recent tests show that the lead concentration is about 150 times higher than the international standard of 400mg/kg, with children more at risk of lead poisoning because their brains and bodies are still developing. “There is no safe level of lead in the body,” she adds.

Quoted in the video, Prof Angela Matthee of the SA Medical Research Council says: “The younger you are the greater the risk. When a child is exposed in their early years, they can live their whole lives long with a damaged heart, with damaged kidneys. And it impacts on the brain, and that cognitive loss is often permanent.”

Looking back today at my years in Broken Hill/Kabwe, I am grateful for the good memories, and the work my father was able to do, carving for himself a new career that remained his passion until he retired many years later. But I can’t help feeling that the price we, and many others, have paid was too high.

Having spent the first six years of my life there, I can never be sure if my own health problems are related to the poisons that were secretly being emitted into the water and the soil. Mixing life with death.