During the 1930's, especially in the early depression years, welfare associations of African intellectuals, for the most part Government clerks or mission employees, were formed in Northern Rhodesia. Originally conceived as guilds of conscious elites, what many Europeans of the period distastefully referred to as ”detribalized natives“, these associations quickly became, or were considered to have become, organs of wider significance. Many persons who later rose to prominence in politics and the trade union movement acquired their first organizational experience in these short-lived, rather underestimated protest bodies. As the name suggests, there were many resemblances to nineteenth-century British workmens' associations; certainly in the line of rail towns stretching from the Falls to Ndola, the Duke of Wellington's convictions were resurrected by Government a century later in another land. When Government directed its basilisk gaze at these associations in 1933, they quickly succumbed. Still, one is justified in studying them, if only because they serve to increase the number of Africans in African history.
