African miners on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia went on strike against a proposed increase in the native tax, which effectively forced them to work longer. The colonial police opened fire on protestors, killing six. This event marked the beginning of organized labor resistance against the Anglo-American mining companies that would eventually fuel the Zambian independence movement.

The 1935 Copperbelt strike is foundational to the 'mine' poetry of central Africa, particularly in the works of Zambian and Zimbabwean poets. The mine compound became the crucible of modern urban identity, a setting for poems about alienation, colonial violence, and emerging nationalism. The writer Dambudzo Marechera wrote of the 'cancer of the mine dumps,' and the strike's imagery is invoked in protest verse collected in anthologies like 'The New African Poetry,' where the 'smoke' of the smelters is a flag of both colonial oppression and the promise of post-colonial resource nationalism.