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Hippo Mine -
Mystery No. 1 Solved
By Simon Zukas
Ilse Mwanza in her article in the September
Lowdown
whetted our appetite to know more about the first copper mine in
Zambia.
The mine was once owned by Anglo American, but they considered the
ore body too small for them to operate and it then fell into the
hands of “small miners”.
The last such small miner was Laddy (Ladislav) Kropacek, who, as a
student, had escaped from Communist Czechoslovakia and then
qualified in the UK as a metallurgist.
Laddy came to work as a metallurgist at Broken Hill (Kabwe) mine in
the 60’s and unlike the small miners that the Rhodesias were full of
had never been bitten by the bug…But the small miner then working
Hippo mine found Laddy useful and near enough to Hippo to offer him
a few shares in Hippo mine.
The then-owner worked the mine with his Zimbabwean foreman, Edmund,
and labourers from Angola and did the many jobs that self-employed
small miners do, including machining work on a lathe. The mine
relied heavily on borrowings from Banks and paid them back by sales
of copper ore to Nkana Mine
Laddy was married to a Welsh woman, Muriel, and they took regular
holidays to Wales. On returning from one such holiday, the
Kropacek’s were surprised to find a delegation of several
well-dressed men to welcome them at the Lusaka Airport. It turned
out that these had no other purpose but to insist that Laddy resign
from Kabwe Mine and go to live at Hippo and ensure that enough ore
is produced and transported to Nkana Mine so that the Bank is paid
back the money it had lent to Hippo.
‘Why pick on me, I am only a minor shareholder?’ Well, there had
been an accident.
While working on the lathe the “small miner” (whose name I can’t
recall) had his spleen torn by a piece of metal and died after
being driven to Hospital in Kabwe.
Laddy took his turn as a small miner and went to live with Muriel on
the mine, only to find that what was left underground were only the
“pillars”, the main ore body had already been mined out at the 100
foot level. To remove the pillars would cause major subsidence and
be unsafe for working underground. Cutting an inclined slot and
ramp was a possibility. Mining the pillars was tempting, because,
like the rest of the Hippo ore body, they consisted of Azurite with
a copper content of 13% as against the Copperbelt ore bodies with
less than 5%. Azurite could be delivered direct to the Nkana smelter
without beneficiation and processing costs saved.
While Laddy was working out how to get the pillars, there was an
upsurge in the world price of copper, so Laddy transported to Nkana
the ore stockpile that had accumulated over many years on the
surface and was able to pay off the mine’s debts and close the
mine to go and live in retirement in Wales. |
October
2005