manager
of the Messina (Transvaal) Development Company—to which enterprise
copper mining in the northern Transvaal is due— reported in 1920
somewhat unenthusiastically on the Bwana M'Kubwa Mine, which had been
worked intermittently before and during World War I. In a cable in
March 1920 he summed up: 'With ample equipment and highly technical
skilled management and reduced capital I consider mine offers moderate
assured return with large attractive but highly speculative future
profits.' Raymond Brooks, himself an American mining engineer of high
repute, writing of the situation in 1925, when Rhodesian Congo Border
Concession was opening up the N'Changa prospect, explains that Thorold
F. Field, an eminent American mining expert who did in the end appreciate the possibilities of the Roan Antelope situation,
like
four or five other well-known American engineers who had visited the
country [in 1925], did not visualize the possibilities of the
copper-bearing formations then being investigated at Nchanga. . . . One
of these engineers stood with mc on the edge of a trench and remarked
that we would not find a copper-mine there because no deposits of
commercial importance had ever been developed anywhere in a similar
formation. Three other very well-known copper men from the United
States visited Nchanga for a day, and left with the same impression. In
fact, their entire conversation when looking at our work was about the
dangers and likelihood of being bitten by tsetse flies and contracting
sleeping sickness. . . .6
Nevertheless, American capital, as well as American enterprise, did contribute
to the building up of the Copperbelt, not only through the channel of
the Anglo American Corporation organization, but through a second
source—through what subsequently developed into the Rhodesian Selection
Trust, the driving force behind which was Mr. (subsequently Sir) A.
Chester Beatty, also an American mining expert who later became a
naturalized British citizen.
The
fact that, in the event, the development of the Copperbelt was to be in
the hands of two groups adds, of course, to the human interest of the
story, since such a division implied the possibility of conflicts of
personalities, just as on the technical and financial sides it raised
6 Raymond Brooks: 'How the Northern Rhodesian coppers were found', Northern Rhodesia Journal, No.
1 (June 1950). It was not only in expert circles that there was
scepticism: 'I remember a day', wrote Raymond Brookes, 'in the second
year of operations when I, as manager, called on the Governor of
Northern Rhodesia ... to ask his aid by furnishing Natives to help cut
motor roads in certain portions of the concessions to make
transportation less difficult. His reply was: "Mr. Brooks, I will base
no part of our programme for the development of Northern Rhodesia on
the doubtful possibility of finding mineral deposits of importance" ': he. eit.
