Malls in Zambia: racialised retail expansion and South African foreign investors in Zambia

Abstract

What does this new era of retailing mean for Zambians and the region more generally? In this article we try to show that, while South African capital's expansion is a powerful, regional manoeuvre that dispossesses as it accumulates; it is by no means rolling over the torpid remnants of a post-independence battlefield. Class contestations shape and reshape the South African economic expansion in retail. Local entrepreneurs, investors, workers and farmers resist the imperial impetus in South Africa's post-apartheid regional expansion. Workers, farmers, local entrepreneurs and even local investors, in the form of minority share-holders, have contested the South African-led retail expansion. Regional and continental contestations around retail and other expansions abound, ranging from Nigerian local farmers who want to burn down Shoprite stores, to Egyptian retailers who eschew a company that will not play Arabic prayers during Friday prayer time, to the Shoprite workers who claimed equal status with their South African counterparts.