A komboni is a type of informal housing compound or shanty town common to Zambia, particularly the capital city of Lusaka. It is characterized by a low income and a high population density. Kombonis typically began as housing for employees of a particular company, estate, or mine. An estimated 35% of Zambians live in urban areas, and kombonis exist in many of them. It is estimated that 80% of the population of Lusaka live and work in these areas.
History
Northern Zambia is part of the Copperbelt, which is a region of Africa known for copper mining. Beginning in the late 1880s, the region was largely dependent on copper mining. The increasing development of copper mining led to rapid urbanization and industrialization from the 1920s through the 1950s. Many new towns such as Ndola, Kitwe, Chingola, Luanshya, Mufulira, and Bancroft sprung up in the Copperbelt, each of them associated with a different copper mine or smelter and consisting of a planned "garden city" for their white residents and compounds housing male African workers, who came to work on the mines, usually for a period of six months, before returning home to their villages. The compounds were similar to army barracks, and the workers (who generally only spoke their own languages) corrupted the word "Compound" into "Komboni".
The mining towns were typically under the direct control of mining companies such as The Rhokana Corporation or Anglo-American, which provided social services and urban management. In many cases there were effectively "twin towns", one a mine town, such as Nkana, with the adjacent "civilian" town of Kitwe, lived in by people engaged in other occupations unrelated to the mines.
With Independence in 1964, the mines were nationalised and came under the control of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, ZCCM. The mines were subsequently re-privatized in 1997, beginning a series of changes to the structure and administration of those cities. Under ZCCM, houses were assigned to employees based on employee rank and family size. Higher-ranking employees were assigned housing in nicer neighborhoods, while lower ranking employees were assigned housing in the kombonis. After privatization of the mines, employees were offered the homes they were occupying at subsidized prices which were deducted from their severance packages. Privatization of the mines created an economic disruption, with the mines' new owners often employing reduced workforces. This caused a crisis, and now many neighborhoods are no longer as economically homogeneous as they once were.
Moving from the kombonis to the nicer areas of the towns (known as kumayadi) often entailed a change of lifestyle, such as avoiding cooking fish in the house because the fish makes the house smell like the komboni. The culture of kombonis is often seen as different or more traditional than life outside the kombonis, with more traditional gender roles.
Lusaka
Lusaka has been considered a poorly planned city, which grew slowly and in ways its planners failed to anticipate. It was founded in 1905 as a railway station named for a local leader, and did not officially become a town until 1913. In the 1930s it was named the capital of Northern Rhodesia and was redesigned with the intentions of making it a "Garden City for Africa". The intention was to have large open spaces, large building plots for European homes, and limited, much smaller housing plots for Africans. Like the other Zambian cities mentioned above, Lusaka consisted of "garden city" areas for white settlers and a village for the African employees of white settlers. However, planned African areas were insufficient for the number of Africans in the city, even when the city was first planned. Between the end of World War II and 2010, Lusaka grew from under 200,000 people to over 1.7 million as of the 2010 census, although there are estimates that the actual population is over 2 million. The vast majority of this increase in population happened in informal, unauthorized areas, on land that had been designated as belonging to white-owned commercial farms or industries. The white owners of these areas were permitted to house their employees on their compounds, or kombonis.
Because the compounds were on land belonging to white owners or businesses on which their employees were permitted to live, many of the kombonis are named after their colonial owners or the business they ran, leading to names like John Howard, Misisi (meaning The Mrs.), and Ng'ombe (meaning cows, because the area was used as a cow pasture).