Rosalind Morris poses the kind of question in the introduction to Unstable Ground that is so brilliant that you wish you had thought of it: ‘What has gold done to people and what has it made them do?’ (23). This is a succinct way of summarising questions that arise from the many and enormous consequences of the discovery of the world’s largest gold deposit on South Africa’s Witwatersrand in the 1880s. As one man who worked there during the boom explained, the population became ‘gold-minded’ (63), a term Morris uses to show how gold possesses people, moving them to self-sacrifice, take extraordinary risks and commit terrible violence.
Indeed, the book opens with a moment of tragedy and violence as Morris describes witnessing the aftermath of the death of an informal miner, known as a zama zama, in an accident at an old ostensibly closed gold mine. It’s a fitting opening as the violence and the injustices of the industry’s past and present feature heavily in the book. These include the familiar themes of disasters, disease, migration and strikes but also disputes around the demarcation of municipal boundaries, amnesty applications by pro-apartheid paramilitaries and the proliferation of funeral service providers.
Unstable Ground is the product of 25 years of fieldwork and reflection centred on the West Rand and organised into three long sections. It has a loose chronological approach moving from the early history of gold mining, to the heyday of industrial mining and then the contemporary near-collapse of the industry, and deliberately has no conclusion as Morris argues one is not possible. This structure leaps forwards and backwards in time and is punctuated by long literary digressions. The result is unsatisfactory answers to the question brilliantly posed.
The text does not tolerate casual readers. The opening chapters references the ideas of Derrida, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Muriel Rukeyser, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Fanon’s reading of Freud and later Nietzsche, Goethe, Adorno, W.H. Auden, Njabulo Ndebele and Homer’s Odyssey. In one section, after a brisk discussion of Dante’s Inferno, the narrative moves to Paris and Morris argues ‘the underground mines of South Africa are usefully understood by analogy with the Arcades’, (27) an unfinished project of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. At times it feels like erudition for its own sake.
This erudition comes at a cost. The decision by Morris to discuss, at length, dozens of European thinkers and writers but only a few African scholars gives the troubling impression that we can only understand what happened in South Africa with continual reference to European thinkers. Morris claims her ‘method of writing’ was inspired by ‘mineworkers’ love of wit and verbal dexterity’ (16) but I wonder how many of the region’s mineworkers would recognise themselves in the text. In this sense, the book’s conceptual framework obscures the lives of its subjects and leaves the reader unclear about how they see themselves. It is only in chapter 11 on protests and labour activism that we really encounter the ideas and perspectives of the book’s subjects in their own terms. These are obscured in other parts of the book. Morris even names one of her key informants ‘Virgil-Umholi’, after the Roman poet who appeared as Dante’s guide to the underworld, which is not, I suspect, how he would see or understand himself.
European thinkers are the continual reference point used to analyse and explain South Africa’s gold mines. Thus, to give examples from one section, a crisis in the monetary system brings to mind Goethe’s Faust (266), a sex workers’ hopes are explained through the formulations of Kant (275), the link between gold mining and sex work understood using the work of philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux (283), and the denial of wage increases for miners is explained using Louis Althusser’s mediation on Blaise Pascal (307). Once you begin noticing this, it’s hard to stop, though in Morris’ defence she does take the work of Sol Plaatje and other South African writers seriously.
As the above suggests, the text is difficult to read. Take Chapter 6 on the history of protests against segregation. Here, Morris discusses the pass system, the laws steadily extending and tightening its application, the women-led protests against it in Bloemfontein and provides an illuminating analysis of the poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho. The chapter then abruptly shifts to modern-day zama zamas and the gangsters who exploit them, concluding ‘It is in this sense that the Chamber-made world is a cave in the manner given that Platonic figure by Luce Irigaray, where sexuated people and not merely the men dissimulated as gender-neutral hoi anthrōpoi, are chained’ (168). Readers who think I have selected a particularly opaque passage for dramatic effect can consult the book for themselves.
The gold orebody in the Witwatersrand is famously low-grade. Morris quotes a description given by the Chamber of Mines imagining the underground strata as ‘a fat, 1,200-page dictionary lying at an angle. The gold-bearing reef would be thinner than a single page’ (60). Unstable Ground is 637 pages, and I do not think the same ratio applies, but there is a sense that fascinating insights are buried within a mass of text and the reader must work to unearth them. The travails in Pretoria of the last black mine claim-owner (130), defiant claims to dignity and masculinity by survivors of the underground flood at West Driefontein (198) and how the use of the mining language Fanakalo with its impoverished vocabulary sparked a massive strike at Western Deep Levels (304) are illuminating vignettes on what gold did to people. Buried deep and difficult to extract, there is nonetheless a lot to learn from this book.
