ABSTRACT
The Republic of Zambia is a landlocked country of some 290,586 square miles, a little larger than Texas, in central southern Africa. The first large copper mine in Zambia, Roan Antelope, came into production in 1931. The copper industry itself in 1964 employed about 50,000 workers, 8,000 of them expatriate; this was about 17 percent of total Zambian wage employment. The head offices of most large Zambian firms were not even in Zambia, but in either Salisbury or South Africa. The Zambian government tended to be critical of the copper companies for their apparent lack of interest in expansion plans in Zambia, and for the high proportion of their after-tax profits which they paid out to their foreign shareholders as dividends. In June 1969 a referendum was held to change the independence constitution, permitting the expropriation of mineral prospecting and exploitation rights granted in colonial times.
