Read here about a forthcoming special issue of the journal Extractive Industries and Society on extractive communities that is co-edited by project PI Miles Larmer and Vito Laterza, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.
Social and Political Mobilisation in Extractive Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa
Miles Larmer
In September 2016, Vito Laterza of the University of Oslo and I co-organised a panel on ‘Social and Political Mobilisation in Extractive Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa’ at the African Studies Association (UK) conference held at the University of Cambridge. The aim of the panel, and a special section of the journal Extractive Industries and Society that Vito and I are currently preparing on the same theme, is to reconsider the nature of social and political change from the perspective of extractive communities – rather than more institutional approaches focused on mine companies, nation-states or trade unions. The aim was to create a broader comparative analysis that enables understanding of societies experiencing and engaged in mineral production, both industrial and artisanal, today and in the past, an aim complementary to that of the ‘Comparing the Copperbelt’ project. Seven diverse and fascinating papers were presented by an inter-disciplinary panel of researchers investigating many aspects of artisanal and industrial extractive contexts in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Mine communities have traditionally often been reduced to their (usually male) workers, who have often been idealised as an African ‘working-class’, or dismissed for their failure to play a structurally ascribed role of such a class. Extractive communities are, we think, better understood as encompassing the families of mineworkers (many of whom have been active in the economies of mine communities, as farmers or marketeers); those resident in communities linked – by economics, politics or environment – to the effects of mine company activity writ large; and ‘rural’ areas linked – by migration, remittances and ideas – to areas of mineral production. Viewed in this way, the history and contemporary analysis of extractive communities can be approached in ways that reflect their actual experience rather than imposed political or intellectual frameworks, albeit with an appreciation that, in line with this project, that these have historically influenced each other.
While all such actors may be usefully considered members of extractive communities, they should not be assumed to have naturally shared interests. In practice, industrial mineworkers with employment contracts may benefit from the exclusion of artisanal miners who seek control of some of the same resources, but both may equally be members of the same family networks, or even the same individuals whose circumstances have changed: indeed, as Benjamin Rubbers has demonstrated, in Haut Katanga some retrenched mineworkers have turned to informal mining as a survival mechanism.
Rubbers’ paper analysed the changing role of labour unions. It reminds us that the role of any such organisation cannot be assumed and must be empirically researched. Labour union research, so commonly conducted within the organisational confines of the workplace and nation-state, in fact necessitates research that operates across established frameworks and frontiers: in their papers, Duncan Money and Michela Mossetto Carini in different ways locate their migrant workers in trans-national locales. For Money, white mineworkers drawn to the colonial Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt brought with them the militant, racialized politics of mines in Australia, the US and the United Kingdom. For Carini, the national origins, identity and familial responsibilities of Mozambican migrant mineworkers to South Africa are vital to comprehending their distinctive political and organisational approach.
As in our Copperbelt project, researchers explored the changing relationship between mine capital, nation-states and communities. Historically, many industrial mining companies treated mine territory as essentially sovereign territory and adopted state-like practices, both Weberian and welfare-ist. Today’s mine companies assert a more neo-liberal approach, seeking to refute any role in delivering services which are sometimes demanded by states and communities, but are commonly forced to engage with often opposed local interests, including ‘traditional’ authorities: Patience Mususa (see recent blog post) explained the complex navigating of new mine companies between these different interests in Zambia’s North-West Province, where local divisions between chiefs, the state and communities shed light on the micro-politics of this ‘new Copperbelt’. Maha Rafi Atal, meanwhile, analysed the Lonmin ‘state’ in South Africa’s Platinum Belt and its assertion of a particular form of corporate governance in the Marikana mine area.
Extractive communities have of course always been a nexus of social and political mobilisation and conflict: this has sometimes found expression as a coherent popular and/or class-based opposition to the terms of extraction and exploitation of mine companies, but such conflicts have also involved nation-states, local political leaders, non-governmental organisations and social movements. They have equally oriented around social divisions within extractive communities: between mineworkers and other community residents, between ‘autochthons’ and ‘migrant’ workers, and along gender, generational and other lines. Akin Iwilade focuses on generational divisions in the Niger Delta in a context where the achievement of respectability, so often undermined by the extraction of wealth with no noticeable benefit to local communities, is pursued by youth social networks in ways that ultimately incentivise violence as a path to social adulthood. Rather more positive findings were reported by Roy Maconachie, whose work on post-conflict Sierra Leone demonstrates that youth activism, in response to grievances arising from the limited opportunities arising from artisanal diamond mining, is opening up new opportunities for public engagement in policy-making in an economy still dominated by the perilous extractive-based path to development.
Gavin Hilson, a leading scholar of mining and development and the editor of Extractive Industries and Society journal, provided a powerful commentary on the panel in his role as discussant. He argued for a fully inter-disciplinary approach to the challenges of managing the ‘paradox of plenty’ created by extractives in African societies, bringing together academics – social scientists, historians and geologists – with policy-makers. We hope that the special section, to be published by the end of 2017, will demonstrate the added value of such an inter-disciplinary focus on the study of extractive communities both in Africa and elsewhere.