Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:29:41.773Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mobilizing the past: creuseurs, precarity and the colonizing structure in the Congo Copperbelt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2017

Timothy Makori
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Copperbelt of Congo was once the bastion of industrial development and no individual embodied its modernity as fully as the salaried industrial miner. Today, with the near collapse of the state-run mining company, Gécamines, and the liberalization of the mining industry starting in 2002, the majority of miners are no longer trained and salaried industrial workers but rather children and youth eking out a precarious living as artisanal miners or creuseurs. In Congo, artisanal mining is paradoxical, for, although it indexes a future of unskilled, untrained, flexible work in rural and peri-urban enclaves, its organization of labour and rudimentary techniques of copper extraction allude to and borrow from the colonial and precolonial past. Creuseurs mobilize the past as a strategic response to the threat of dispossession of ‘their’ land by the state and foreign investors, and they do so by laying claim to an anterior ‘sovereign’ – the ancestors – whose existence predates colonialism. This paradoxical emplacement of artisanal mining, its entanglement in time, invites interrogation of some of the ways in which scholars have understood precarity not only as a politically induced condition resulting from neoliberalism but also as an outcome of the enduring nature of the colonizing structure in Africa.

Résumé

La Copperbelt du Congo fut autrefois le bastion du développement industriel et nul n'incarnait autant sa modernité que le mineur industriel salarié. Aujourd'hui, avec le quasi-effondrement de la société minière d’État Gécamines et la libéralisation de l'industrie minière entamée en 2002, la majorité des mineurs ne sont plus des travailleurs industriels formés et salariés, mais des enfants et des jeunes gagnant tout juste de quoi vivre en travaillant comme creuseurs. Au Congo, l'exploitation minière artisanale est paradoxale en ce qu'elle augure un futur de travail sans qualification, sans formation et flexible dans des enclaves rurales et périurbaines, tandis que l'organisation du travail et les techniques rudimentaires d'extraction du cuivre évoquent et empruntent au passé colonial et précolonial. Les creuseurs mobilisent le passé comme réponse stratégique à la menace de dépossession de « leur » terres par l’État et les investisseurs étrangers, et ils le font en revendiquant un « souverain » antérieur (les ancêtres) dont l'existence précède le colonialisme. L'emplacement paradoxal de l'exploitation minière artisanale et son intrication dans le temps nous invitent à nous interroger sur certaines manières dont les chercheurs ont interprété la précarité non seulement comme une condition politiquement induite résultant du néolibéralisme, mais également comme une conséquence de la nature persistante de la structure colonisante en Afrique.

Type
Mining gold and copper
Information
Africa , Volume 87 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 780 - 805
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barchiesi, F. and Bellucci, S. (2014) ‘Special issue: African labor histories’, International Labor and Working-Class History 86: 4–14.Google Scholar
Bashwira, M.-R., Cuvelier, J., Hilhorst, D. and van der Haar, G. (2014) ‘Not only a man's world: women's involvement in artisanal mining in Eastern DRC’, Resources Policy 40 (June): 109–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellucci, S. and Freund, B. (2017) ‘Introduction. Work across Africa: labour exploitation and mobility in Southern, Eastern and Western Africa’, Africa 87 (1): 27–35.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (2006) Precarious Life: the powers of mourning and violence. London and New York NY: Verso.Google Scholar
Callaghy, T. and Ravenhill, J. (1993) Hemmed In: responses to Africa's economic decline. New York NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Carstens, J. and Hilson, G. (2009) ‘Mining, grievance and conflict in rural Tanzania’, International Development Planning Review 31 (3): 301–26.Google Scholar
Cline, W. B. (1937) Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa. Menasha WI: George Banta Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L. (2006) ‘Reflections on youth: from the past to the postcolony’ in Downey, G. and Fisher, M. S. (eds), Frontiers of Capital: ethnographic reflections on the new economy. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, E. and Pratten, D. (2015) Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cooper, F. (2017) ‘From enslavement to precarity? The labor question in African history’ in Adebanwi, W. (ed.), Beyond the Margins: the political economy of everyday life in Africa. Martlesham, UK: James Currey.Google Scholar
Cuvelier, J. (2011a) ‘Between hammer and anvil: the predicament of artisanal miners in Katanga’ in Ansoms, A. and Maryesse, S. (eds), Natural Resources and Local Livelihoods in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: a political economy perspective. New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cuvelier, J. (2011b) ‘Men, mines and masculinities: the lives and practices of artisanal miners in Lwambo, Katanga province, DR Congo’. PhD thesis, University of Leuven.Google Scholar
Cuvelier, J., Vlassenroot, K. and Olin, N. (2014) ‘Resources, conflict and governance: a critical review’, The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2): 340–50.Google Scholar
De Boeck, F. (1998) ‘Domesticating diamonds and dollars: identity, expenditure and sharing in southwestern Zaire (1984–1997)’, Development and Change 29 (4): 777–810.Google Scholar
de Hemptinne, M. (1926) ‘Les mangeurs de cuivre du Katanga’, Congo: Revue Générale de la Colonie Belge 1 (3): 374–403.Google Scholar
De Herdt, T. (2002) ‘Democracy and the money machine in Zaire’, Review of African Political Economy 29 (93–94): 445–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Meulder, B. (1996) De kampen van Kongo: arbeid, kapitaal en rasveredeling in de koloniale planning. Amsterdam and Antwerp: Meulenhoff and Kritak.Google Scholar
Depelchin, J. (2005) Silences in African History: between the syndromes of discovery and abolition. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers.Google Scholar
Dibwe, D. (2004) Le Travail, Hier et Aujourd'hui: mémoires de Lubumbashi. Paris: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Dibwe dia Mwembu, D. (2001) Bana Shaba abandonnés par leur père: structures de l'autorité et histoire sociale de la famille ouvrière au Katanga, 1910–1997. Paris: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Diop, Cheikh A. (1988) Precolonial Black Africa. Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press.Google Scholar
Dreschler, B. (2001) Small-scale Mining and Sustainable Development within the SADC Region. London: International Institute for Environment and Development and World Business Council for Sustainable Development.Google Scholar
Epstein, A. (1967) ‘Urbanization and social change in Africa’, Current Anthropology 8 (4): 275–95.Google Scholar
Epstein, A. (1981) Urbanization and Kinship: the domestic domain in the Copperbelt of Zambia 1950–1956. London and New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1973) ‘“Kazi”: conceptualizations of labor in a charismatic movement among Swahili-speaking workers’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 13 (50): 293–325.Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1990) History from Below: the vocabulary of Elizabethville by André Yav. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Farrington, C.. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Ferguson, J. (1999) Expectations of Modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Fetter, B. (1976) The Creation of Elisabethville, 1910–1940. Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Geenen, S. and Classens, K. (2013) ‘Disputed access to the gold sites in Luhwindja, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’, Journal of Modern African Studies 51 (1): 85–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geenen, S. and Hönke, J. (2014) ‘Land grabbing by mining companies: local connections and state reconfiguration in South Kivu’ in Ansoms, A. and Hilhorst, T. (eds), Losing Your Land: dispossession in the Great Lakes. Martlesham: James Currey.Google Scholar
Global Witness (2006) ‘Digging in corruption: fraud, abuse, and exploitation in Katanga's copper and cobalt mines’. London: Global Witness <http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/154/en/digging_in_corruption>, accessed 16 August 2010., accessed 16 August 2010.' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Global+Witness+(2006)+‘Digging+in+corruption:+fraud,+abuse,+and+exploitation+in+Katanga's+copper+and+cobalt+mines’.+London:+Global+Witness+,+accessed+16+August+2010.>Google Scholar
Gluckman, M. (1960) ‘Tribalism in modern British Central Africa’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 1 (1): 55–70.Google Scholar
Gondola, D. (1999) ‘Dream and drama: the search for elegance among Congolese youth’, African Studies Review 42 (1): 23–48.Google Scholar
Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hendriks, T. (2013) ‘Work in the rainforest: labour, race and desire in a Congolese logging camp’. PhD thesis, University of Leuven.Google Scholar
Herbert, E. (1984) Red Gold of Africa: copper in precolonial history and culture. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Herbert, E. W. (1993) Iron, Gender, and Power: rituals of transformation in African societies. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Higginson, J. (1989) A Working Class in the Making: Belgian colonial labor policy, private enterprise, and the African mineworker 1907–1951. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Hilson, G. and McQuilken, J. (2014) ‘Four decades of support for artisanal and small-scale mining in sub-Saharan Africa: a critical review’, Extractive Industries and Society 1 (1): 104–18.Google Scholar
Hilson, G. and Yakovleva, N. (2007) ‘Strained relations: a critical analysis of the mining conflict in Prestea, Ghana’, Political Geography 26 (1): 98–119.Google Scholar
Hochschild, A. (2005) King Leopold's Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Hoogvelt, A. (1997) ‘Debate: the African crisis. Introduction’, New Political Economy 2 (2): 317–18.Google Scholar
Hunt, N. R. (1997) ‘“Le bébé en brousse”: European women, African birth spacing, and colonial intervention in breast feeding in the Belgian Congo’ in Cooper, F. and Stoler, A. L. (eds), Tensions of Empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, N. R. (2016) A Nervous State: violence, remedies, and reverie in colonial Congo. Durham NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inikori, J. E. and Engerman, S. (1992) The Atlantic Slave Trade: effects on economies, societies and peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Jewsiewicki, B. (1983) ‘Rural society and the Belgian colonial economy’, History of Central Africa 2: 95–125.Google Scholar
Jewsiewicki, B. (2010) The Beautiful Time: photography by Sammy Balonji. New York NY: Museum for African Art Press.Google Scholar
Kirsch, S. (1996) ‘Anthropologists and global alliances’, Anthropology Today 12 (4): 14–16.Google Scholar
Kirsch, S. (2014) Mining Capitalism: the relationship between corporations and their critics. Oakland CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Likaka, O. (1997) Rural Society and Cotton in Colonial Zaire. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, P. E. (1989) ‘The impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa: a review of the literature’, Journal of African History 30 (3): 365–94.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, P. E. (2012) Transformations in Slavery: a history of slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
MacGaffey, W. (1977) ‘Economic and social dimensions of Kongo slavery (Zaire)’ in Miers, S. and Kopytoff, I. (eds), Slavery in Africa: historical and anthropological perspectives. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Maclean, R. (2017) ‘DRC: vast business network of president who won't step down revealed’, Guardian, 20 July <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/20/drc-vast-business-network-of-president-who-wont-step-down-revealed>, accessed 21 July 2017., accessed 21 July 2017.' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Maclean,+R.+(2017)+‘DRC:+vast+business+network+of+president+who+won't+step+down+revealed’,+Guardian,+20+July+,+accessed+21+July+2017.>Google Scholar
Macola, G. (2002) The Kingdom of Kazembe: history and politics in north-eastern Zambia and Katanga to 1950. Münster: LIT Verlag.Google Scholar
Magubane, B. (1971) ‘A critical look at indices used to study social change in colonial Africa’, Current Anthropology 12: 419–45.Google Scholar
Makori, T. (2013) ‘Abjects retraités, jeunesse piégée: récits du déclin et d'une temporalité multiple parmi les générations de la “Copperbelt” congolaise’, Politique Africaine 131 (3): 51–73.Google Scholar
Marnham, P. (2013) ‘Tracing the Congolese mine that fuelled Hiroshima’, Telegraph, 4 November <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10416945/Tracing-the-Congolese-mine-that-fuelled-Hiroshima.html>, accessed 21 July 2017.,+accessed+21+July+2017.>Google Scholar
Marx, K. (1992 [1887]) Capital. Volume 1. London: Penguin Classics.Google Scholar
Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mbembe, A. and Roitman, J. (1995) ‘Figures of the subject in times of crisis’, Public Culture 7 (2): 323–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miers, S. and Klein, M. A. (1999) Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Miers, S. and Kopytoff, I. (1977) Slavery in Africa: historical and anthropological perspectives. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Miller, J. (1988) Way of Death: merchant capitalism and the Angolan slave trade 1730–1830. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J. C. (1957) ‘Aspects of African marriage on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia’, Rhodes-Livingston Journal 22: 1–30.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J. C. (1961) ‘Social change and the stability of African marriage in Northern Rhodesia’ in Southall, A. (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mudimbe, V. (1988) The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Mususa, P. (2010) ‘“Getting by”: life on the Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines’, Social Dynamics 36 (2): 380–94.Google Scholar
Newell, S. (2013) ‘Brands as masks: public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (1): 138–54.Google Scholar
Pact (2010) ‘PROMINES study: artisanal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo’. Washington DC and Kinshasa: Pact Inc.Google Scholar
Parpart, J. L. (1983) Labor and Capital on the African Copperbelt. Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Petit, P. and Mutambwa, G. M. (2005) ‘“La crise”: lexicon and ethos of the second economy in Lubumbashi’, Africa 75 (4): 467–87.Google Scholar
Powdermaker, H. (1962) Coppertown: changing Africa. New York NY: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of power and eurocentrism in Latin America’, International Sociology 15 (2): 215–32.Google Scholar
Reefe, T. Q. (1981) The Rainbow and the Kings: a history of the Luba empire to 1891. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Reyntjens, F. (2009) The Great African War: Congo and regional geopolitics, 1996–2006. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, A. F. (2012) A Dance of Assassins: performing early colonial hegemony in Congo. Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Rubbers, B. (2009) Faire fortune en Afrique: anthropologie des derniers colons du Katanga. Paris: Karthala.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubbers, B. (2010) ‘Claiming workers’ rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the case of the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines ’, Review of African Political Economy 37 (125): 329–44.Google Scholar
Rubbers, B. (2013) Le paternalisme en question: les anciens ouvriers de la Gécamines face à la libéralisation du secteur minier katangais (RD Congo). Tervuren and Paris: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale and L’Harmattan.Google Scholar
Scott, D. (1999) Refashioning Futures: criticism after postcoloniality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Síocháin, S. O. and O'Sullivan, M. (2003) The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo report and 1903 diary. Dublin: University College Dublin Press.Google Scholar
Smith, J. (2015) ‘“May it never end”: price wars, networks and temporality in the “3Ts” mining trade of the Eastern DR Congo’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 1–34.Google Scholar
Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: the new dangerous class. London and New York NY: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Trefon, T. (2004) Reinventing Order in the Congo: how people respond to state failure in Kinshasa. London and New York NY: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Trefon, T. (2016) Congo's Environmental Paradox: potential and predation in a land of plenty. London and New York NY: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Tsurukawa, N., Prakash, S. and Manhart, A. (2011) Social Impacts of Artisanal Cobalt Mining in Katanga, Democratic Republic of Congo. Freiburg: Öko-Institut e.V., Institute for Applied Ecology.Google Scholar
Vansina, J. (1966) Kingdoms of the Savanna. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Vansina, J. (1978) The Children of Woot: a history of the Kuba peoples. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Werbner, R. P. (2002) ‘Postcolonial subjectivities: the personal, the political and the moral’ in Werbner, R. P. (ed.), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London and New York NY: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Werthmann, K. (2009) ‘Working in a boom-town: female perspectives on gold-mining in Burkina Faso’, Resources Policy 34 (1): 18–23.Google Scholar
White, L. (2000) Speaking with Vampires: rumor and history in colonial Africa. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Willis, J. R. (1985) Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa. Volume 2: The servile estate. London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Wilson, G. (1945) The Analysis of Social Change Based on Observations in Central Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
World Bank (2008) ‘Democratic Republic of Congo: growth with governance in the mining sector’. Report 43402-ZR. Washington DC: World Bank.Google Scholar