‘Satanbic Stop Stealing Our Money’: Zambia Mine Workers’ Struggles against Finance

Abstract

This article explores how Zambian mine workers used the courts and a protest campaign to resist predatory lending by Stanbic Bank. Given that debt repayment was done directly from their salaries, these workers were not necessarily advocating debt refusal or default. Neither did they expect the courts to rule in their favour. Rather, they sought to resist the bank’s arbitrary changes to the terms of the loan by naming and shaming the bank, highlighting the precariousness of their employment and taking advantage of the ruling party’s desperation for miners’ votes in order to advance their claims on the state. The article shows how debt resistance and citizenship claims upon the state can be combined by indebted workers in their struggles against finance capital. It draws on 36 months of ethnographic research conducted among miners and their families in Mufulira and Kitwe on the Zambian Copperbelt between 2016 and 2021.