The Copperbelt was not ancient. In 1935 it was barely a decade old as an industrial region. The Roan Antelope and Nkana mines had only started commercial production in 1931. But the copper lying beneath this stretch of what is now Zambia had been known for a very long time, and Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company had been the driving force in extending British influence north of the Limpopo to claim it. Rhodes acquired mineral rights from local chiefs through treaties whose legitimacy would not bear much scrutiny. Boundaries with Portuguese Angola and Mozambique were fixed by the 1891 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty signed in Lisbon, and the border with the Congo Free State by an 1894 agreement. In 1924 the British Empire took direct administration from the BSAC. By 1930 the mines employed nearly 32,000 people.

The specific grievance that lit the fuse was a hut tax - a colonial instrument introduced by the BSAC in 1901 in North-Eastern Rhodesia and rolled out in North-Western Rhodesia between 1904 and 1913. The tax was enormous. In some cases it represented six months of wages. It was not designed to fund services. It was designed to force rural Africans into the cash economy - to create what the colonial administrators themselves called debt bondage, generating a steady stream of labor for mines that might otherwise have struggled to attract it. Any unrest the tax caused was suppressed by the British South Africa Police. The African miners also had three more immediate grievances. They were paid less than European miners for the same work. They were legally barred from working in sections of the mines reserved for Europeans, no matter their skill level. And they faced routine workplace harassment and violence.

The Great Depression reached the Copperbelt through the collapse of European copper prices. In February 1931 the Mkubwa mine shut down. The Chamishi, Nchanga, and Mulfira mines followed over the next few months. Construction at Roan Antelope and Nkana was just wrapping up. The result was mass unemployment: from 31,941 mine workers in 1930 down to 6,677 by the end of 1932. Many of the African men who lost their jobs had nowhere to go - their rural villages were stretched thin and could not absorb them. They stayed in the compounds, jobless and hungry. A quarter of the European population left the region between 1931 and 1932. The Africans could not leave.

The strike began at Nkana on 27 May 1935 and collapsed the following day for lack of coordination. Then it ignited at Roan Antelope, where some of the tribal leaders within the compound joined the strikers and gave the action coherence. On 29 May a large crowd gathered outside a compound that held police, officials, clerks, and elders. Protesters began throwing stones and shouting slogans. Witnesses described the police as panicked. They fired into the crowd. Six men fell dead. Seventeen others lay wounded on the ground. The strike ended that day. A commission headed by an official named Russell was appointed by the British to investigate. It concluded that industrialization and 'de-tribalization' were the core problems - a diagnosis that put the fault on the workers for having become workers, rather than on the conditions that had killed six of them.

The strike did not win higher wages. It did not abolish the tax. It did not secure access to the mines reserved for Europeans. By those measures it failed. By another measure it succeeded completely. It was the first organized industrial action in Northern Rhodesia. Historians point to it now as the first overt collective action against colonial rule in the territory - a moment that African townsmen across the region noticed, and talked about, and built on. Out of its aftermath came trade unionism, and out of trade unionism came African nationalist politics, and out of African nationalist politics came, eventually, an independent Zambia in 1964. There were more strikes, more deaths. In 1940, another wave of miners' strikes killed 17 workers and injured 65. The colonial administration's immediate response to 1935 was to prop up missionaries and mining companies as partners in producing a 'disciplined workforce,' and to quietly implement social-service schemes for the rural relatives of urban workers, out of fear that the next copper-price crash would do what the 1935 strike had not. But the direction of history had turned. The six men killed at Roan Antelope did not see that. Zambia did.