2. The Rule of Rent: The State, Employers and the Becoming Urban Dweller in Northern Rhodesia Acting Across a Societal Field of Force, c. 1948–1962

Abstract

could be wise to have appointed Africansless so elected oneson advisory boards and committees. 4 This was a paternal gesture along the lines that to advise was to learn while to rule was to teach. Hence, it was not intended to incorporate Africans politically or as fully rights-bearing citizens into the country's emerging conviction "that modern life and improved living standards could be open to all, regardless of race or history of subjugation." 5 As a result, housing policies consciously withheld resources towards self-assertion or security of tenure. They made available accommodation in the form of social benefits and welfare tokens. Although today housing experiences are dominated by private renting, a free market philosophy, and the use of housing property to achieve financial gain, for the purpose of this paper, we have to engage with a completely different logic. State and employers who had no particular purview of investment or financially gainful speculation provided housing jointly and with a view of "stabilizing" labor. In this scenario, the payment of rent became a relation that tied up in a web of power the metropolitan colonial state, its Northern Rhodesia government, urban bureaucracies, small as well as internationally operating employers, and the becoming urban dwellersbe they European, African or otherwise, be they immigrants from the South or elsewhere, colonial staff, industrial workers, or anyone else. This paper aims to show how a considerable number of acting bodies and individuals became tied up in the politics of rent. It sets out to detail how and to which effect these actors perceived each other through the experiences of rent payment and collection, and how they tried to make the best out of a system that was complicated and fraught with power biases as well as loopholes. The paper will furthermore assess the changes of some of these constellations as they occurred between 1948, when the African Housing Ordinance was passed, and 1962, when (after a complicated general election) European dominance ended and, with the installation of the first "black government", the path for Zambia's independence was set. 6