X Marks the Spot: Continuities of Colonial Spatial Exploitation in Luanshya, Zambia

Abstract

This essay illustrates how a golf course serves as a site for continuities of colonial spatial exploitation in Luanshya, Zambia. It draws on the narratives of alleged abuse of public office by a Zambian member of parliament as reported in media publications between 2012 and 2016 to locate exploitation as part of ongoing waves of dispossession that have been occurring from the founding of Luanshya city in the 1920s, which have persisted in varying formations. The paper demonstrates that capitalist extraction often happens at a large scale and also by individual political elites enabled by state neglect. I show that we can trace recent extractivism in the Global South by looking at fields of activity like sport in what are often small, neglected cities. This piece invites geographical scholarship practices to take a speculative approach in attending to wayward responses of refusal of the exploitative actions of political elites against the local public.