Subterranean Histories: Making `Artisanal' Miners on the West African Sahel.

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, in the context of rising gold prices and pro-market legal reforms, dozens of multi-national corporations have opened gold mines across the West African Sahel. Increasingly, corporate security forces enter into violent conflicts with so-called “artisanal” miners who extract gold with handpicks and dynamite. Social scientists and journalists have slotted conflicts between these two categories of miners into narratives of Africa’s neoliberal resource “curse” and problems of governance. By focusing on longer histories of extraction and empire, I reframe this “clash” as one node in a far-reaching debate over the rights of agrarian residents, the state, and private capital to the Sahel’s mineral resources. Since French conquest of this region in the 1890s, private prospectors and geologists have systematically appropriated the gold discoveries of West African miners while simultaneously degrading their extractive practices as primitive, criminal, and wasteful. While the criminalization of “informal” economic practices is a central feature of the power dynamics that constitute “development” in much of Africa, scholars have largely overlooked these dynamics in the extractive sector. Scholarship on mining focuses almost exclusively on the exploitation of land, labor, and ecologies. By contrast, I argue that the co-option of African mineral knowledge, and not only nature, is central to the reproduction of mining capitalism in West Africa, and likely elsewhere. This project also details how the racial geographies of imperialism became incorporated into post-colonial regulations of technological practice. Rooted in a deep historical account of gold mining in eastern Senegal, this dissertation is based on two years of field research in Senegal, Guinea, and France.