We tend to associate mining with big technology, big capital and planetary globalization: a hydraulic shovel produced in the USA might be operated by a French engineer in a Malian mine listed on the London Stock Exchange. Robyn d’Avignon’s A Ritual Geology masterfully shifts the scale, zooming in on the women panning for gold with sieves in Kédougou and the men working the placer deposits with handpicks in Sabodala. Yet the book’s most powerful intervention is to show that these two scales – of transnational mining capital and of artisanal mining in savanna West Africa – are intricately connected and interdependent: colonial French geologists targeted known outcrops identified by Senegalese orpailleurs, while contemporary orpailleurs benefit from technology transfer and Chinese mining equipment. D’Avignon underlines the role of West African mineworkers as a pivotal source of geological data, labour and techniques crucial to the success of the capitalist endeavour to profit from the subsoil. Through a convincing combination of ethnographic and historical approaches, d’Avignon shows ‘how corporate mining is shaped by histories of wealth and sacred engagements with the earth that predate and evolve alongside it’ (p. 200).
The book explores the complex regional language of subterranean rights, through which capitalist gold mining is enlisted ‘in webs of responsibility and exchange’ (p. 164). This takes the shape of what d’Avignon terms a ritual geology, ‘the set of material and ritual practices, prohibitions, and ideological engagements with the earth and its spirited inhabitants shared widely across a geological formation’ (p. 61). By recounting the centuries-old stories of Bida and Nininkala, d’Avignon shows how spirit snakes promised wealth in gold in exchange for human sacrifices. Human–spirit pacts, in this sense, ‘cemented the claims of people to natural resources’ (p. 74), materializing the ongoing struggle over mineralized land. Such a focus shows that gold can simultaneously be a globally circulating commodity and ‘a ritually fraught object attached to occult forces, territorial spirits, and mobile spirit snakes’ (p. 62).
Path-breaking in its methodology, this detailed ethnography brings out local specificity – in terms of the cosmology and epistemology of eastern Senegal – but the book simultaneously situates this place-based and embodied knowledge in a broader regional context of connectivity. Regional parallels are created by shared patterns of French colonialism and postcolonial legacies of Françafrique, but they also have deeper roots in the trans-Sahara gold trade. A researcher without d’Avignon’s decade-long intimate engagement with eastern Senegal would not have been able to uncover the nuances of the region’s ritual geology. Yet the book goes beyond local specificity, to show how French colonialism generated a framework in which artisanal mining – orpaillage – became legally separated from industrial mining. A Ritual Geology shows that this separation was motivated primarily by the wish of the colonial and postcolonial governments to profit from mining by minimizing the interference of skilful artisanal miners.
Towards the end of the book, d’Avignon invites other researchers to take geological structures as an entry point into African history. Scholars of resource extraction, such as Kathryn Yusoff, Timothy Mitchell and Timothy LeCain, have long advocated taking materiality seriously. Yet in an Africanist setting, d’Avignon urges us to specifically pay attention to how resources are inscribed into human and human–spirit relationships. The book ‘invites us to consider how other African societies, in different time periods and regions, have constructed knowledge about the subsoil and defended claims to its resources’ (p. 202). How can this be applied to localities with century-long histories of large-scale industrial mining, such as the Zambian Copperbelt, which are shaped heavily by migrant labour in a context where kilometres-deep mine shafts have obliterated environments? How much precolonial ritual knowledge remained in these localities? The Copperbelt has a long and rich history of copper-mining knowledge, dating back to the first millennium CE. Yet artisanal mining all but disappeared with the rise of the copper-mining industry in the twentieth century. Only recently have artisanal miners (jerabos) been regaining prominence by recovering copper traces from mine dumps. Yet these two histories are rarely connected. Jerabo claims to mineral wealth are very much framed in a post-industrial manner, without reference to precolonial legacies. Questioning to what extent ritual geology plays a role in contexts such as those on the Zambian Copperbelt seems very worthwhile.
A final issue to consider, particularly in our current time of the Anthropocene, which appears to be addicted to extraction, is what ‘our rightful share of the earth’s subterranean granaries’ ought to be (p. 206)? Would the answer to this question change if we seriously considered locally specific ritual geologies?
Funding
Research for this article was funded by the European Union (ERC, AFREXTRACT, project number 101039920). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
