The Rhodesia Copper Company dug trenches and shafts between 1902 and 1907, but the surface ore was oxide — expensive to refine — and when cheaper copper flooded in from neighboring Katanga, development stalled. Interest revived in the 1920s when prices climbed. Engineer Russell J. Parker arrived in September 1925 to inspect the old workings and noticed something his predecessors had missed: the ore improved with depth, and the mineralized shale bed widened at lower levels. By April 1926, Parker's drilling confirmed a belt of sulfide ore roughly 36.5 feet thick at 500 feet down, averaging 3.87% copper. Sulfides were far cheaper to process than oxides. The deposit that had seemed marginal suddenly looked like a mine worth building.

Construction between 1927 and 1931 was brutal. The swampy terrain bred malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and the death rate soared. European miners in South Africa heard about the blackwater fever; local Africans heard about something else. When a surveyor's assistant named Joseph Zgambo drowned in the Luanshya River in 1928, word spread that a dangerous snake spirit — the funkwe — lived in the water. Recruitment halted. An exorcism ceremony was held that year to drive the spirit out. Meanwhile, the mining company brought in a London-based expedition from the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases. The solution was drainage: culverts, straightened stream channels, filled holes, and a cleared zone around the housing. Deaths dropped from 61.1 per thousand per month in the 1929–1930 rainy season to 17.5 per thousand by 1931–1932. The funkwe, it turned out, had wings.

Production began in 1931 at the worst possible moment — a copper slump that shrank the Northern Rhodesian mine workforce from nearly 32,000 in 1930 to 6,677 by the end of 1932. When prices recovered, the tensions shifted from economics to justice. In May 1935, striking Bemba miners gathered outside the Roan Antelope offices, and police fired into the crowd, killing six and wounding twenty-two. A government commission blamed the violence on a tax increase that had been announced without explanation. Two years later, with the mine finally profitable, Roan Antelope paid an 80% dividend. That pattern — wealth flowing upward while workers organized for fairer wages — defined the mine's middle decades. The African Mineworkers' Trade Union, formed in 1949, won pay increases through a 21-day strike in 1952. By 1960, production peaked at 105,000 tonnes. By 1964, when Zambia gained independence, Luanshya had grown to 62,000 people, most of whose livelihoods depended on the copper beneath their feet.

Nationalized in 1970, absorbed into Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines in 1982, then privatized again in 1997 — Roan Antelope's ownership changes read like a case study in post-colonial resource politics. An Indian-owned group went bankrupt in 2000. Heavy rains overwhelmed the Luanshya dam in 2001, flooding the underground workings and forcing an official closure. A Swiss-Israeli venture took over in 2002 but collapsed in 2008, laying off 2,500 workers. In 2009, China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group acquired the mine and reopened it the following year, but global competition and a proposed steep mineral tax increase in 2015 cost Zambia more than 10,000 mining jobs across the Copperbelt. Through it all, Luanshya has endured — a city whose very name traces back to Russell Parker's claims, staked on the land between a dead antelope and a vein of copper.