in March 2011. Still, the Bwana Mkubwa community participates in projects such as malaria prevention, school facility upgrades, sewage and potable water system improvements, as well as wildlife conservation. History Early years The copper ore workings at Bwana Mkubwa are ancient. There is historical evidence of the mining operations conducted as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries and also in subsequent centuries in Bwana Mkubwa and other Copperbelt areas such as Kansanshi and Kipushi, which aroused the interest of mining explorers from Europe. Opened in 1902, Bwana Mkubwa is the oldest mine in the Copperbelt region of Zambia. It was discovered by the Rhodesia Copper company. The Bwana Mkubwa Copper Mining Company, registered in London, formed in 1910. In 1916, the Susman brothers offered their Nkana copper claims to Bwana Mkubwa but the offer was rejected. Following the end of World War I, in 1918 the Bwana Mkubwa Copper Mining Company embarked on a massive programme of investigating the possibility of extracting copper from low grade ores using a flotation process. For this purpose, they engaged Mineral Separation Agency, a London-based firm, a specialized agency in this field with many patents to their credit on the subject. What ensued was installation of a new processing technique known as "Perkins Process" for handling low grade copper (4.25% copper) with capacity to handle 1000 tons of ore per day; the estimated copper reserve was 3.7 million tons. The work started from 1922. However, the extraction process, other techniques adopted for assessment of copper percentage from the ore using substituted samples of malachite (which did not exist in investigated locations) proved disastrous to the company which suffered losses in the initial years of processing. Eventually this resulted in closure of the mines in April 1931. The company was sold to "The Rhodesian Congo Border Concession Ltd.", and which came under the control of Rhokhana Corporation. It investigated better sites in the Copperbelt from 1952 onwards which resulted in the Bwana Mkubwa getting into prominence as a copper mining area. 20th century Bwana Mkubwa was recapitalized in 1922 on the strength of a series of experiments made on the ore by Minerals Separation Ltd, In the late 1920s Ernest Oppenheimer prevented the Americans from dominating the Northern Rhodesian mining industry. In the 1950s people casualties were taken to Bwana Mkubwa for medical treatment. The copper processing plant was built in 1998, at a