Introduction
By all accounts, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is emerging as an increasingly important rural livelihood in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, even if work practices have been disrupted due to Covid-19 (Perks and Schneck Reference Perks and Schneck2021). Migration is often part and parcel of this widespread economic activity. This article examines how the cultural politics of migration in artisanal gold mining in Tonkolili District in central Sierra Leone offers a productive lens onto the gendered authority and power relations that structure mining livelihoods.
In the latter half of the 2010s, there was so much internal migration from other parts of Sierra Leone that these Tonkolili gold sites were linguistically heterogeneous, with Krio sometimes acting as a lingua franca in these predominantly Temne-speaking areas. To access a mining livelihood, women and men migrants entered into varying social relations of (inter)dependency that defined the gendered organization of labour as well as a larger politics of belonging – relations that often marked their migrant status.
In the final section of the article, I briefly turn to the gold-mining zones of Manica District in central Mozambique, not by way of comparison but as a way to point to some important differences in the control over access exerted by authorities. Although a similar ‘internal migration’ process occurred in the gold-mining zones of Manica District, in many of the sites most of the men and women whose livelihoods were dependent on artisanal gold mining during the same time period came across the international border from adjacent Zimbabwe as undocumented migrants. Most of the Zimbabweans were linguistically able to interact easily with the lingua franca of XiManica in the mining zones, as they either spoke it or spoke ChiShona, which is very similar. Yet the international migrant status of these men and women was not overtly marked in these artisanal mining zones.
I suggest that, by analysing how migrant status plays a role in shaping social relations in the artisanal mining sites, one gains an insight into the particular gendered cultural politics at play, including the authority relationships and the differential weight of territorialized ‘belonging’. However, migration has not been a consistent topic in the burgeoning scholarly and policy analyses of ASM in sub-Saharan Africa (but see Bashwira and Cuvelier Reference Bashwira and Cuvelier2019; Bashwira and van der Haar Reference Bashwira and van der Haar2020; Bryceson etal. Reference Bryceson, Jønsson and Shand2021; Maclin etal. Reference Maclin, Kelly and Perks2017). When it is mentioned, as I show below, migration is typically hinged on either side of the commonly bifurcated analytical portrayals of this extractive activity: as either an exemplar of the putative unruliness of the sector or to demonstrate its vital economic importance for so many people.
Instead of seeing migration as symptomatic of one of these larger policy perspectives, I draw inspiration from Donald Moore’s pathbreaking work examining rural economic activities through a ‘crucible of power’ (Reference Moore1999; Reference Moore2005) to show how mobility is more closely calibrated to the particular gendered authority and power relations at play in terms of accessing and practising this livelihood in Tonkolili District. Focusing specifically on how different gendered pathways of admission to the mining sites and organization of labour were managed in different ways, I show how migrant status was a central feature of the organization of labour in the Sierra Leonean gold-mining zones, particularly in terms of informing a territorialized ‘mode of belonging’ (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2008). In contrast, the (international) mobility of men and women typically did not play such a key role in the Manica research sites. I argue that migrant status is marked by authority and power relations in artisanal gold mining when those controlling access to mining livelihoods, including access to residency in mining communities, are able to emphasize contingent forms of belonging by migrants compared with those defined as ‘locals’. Critical to these differential forms of valuation is the particular organization of productive and distributive labour.
As in all production work, the organization of labour is crucially important in artisanal gold mining (Verbrugge and Besmanos Reference Verbrugge and Besmanos2016; Rutherford Reference Rutherford2020). Like access itself to the artisanal mining sites, labour relations may require working through relations of (inter)dependence. As I will show, men and women seeking these labour opportunities, economically precarious and physically dangerous as they may be, often need to enter into or call upon particular relations of dependence or interdependence – be they kin, family or patronage. Such relationships are much more than simply geared towards production. They also entail distributive labour, which is ‘about accessing or making claims on the resources of others’ (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015: 94).
Examining the interactions of mobility and the organization of labour through a gendered lens sharpens this further by following long-established feminist political economy analyses of the gendered organization of labour that is most evident in the various forms of women’s work and the compensation they receive – or do not receive – as shaped through relations of dependence within households, communities and workplaces (e.g. Mohanty Reference Mohanty, Alexander and Mohanty1997; Benya Reference Benya2015). In the few studies on women’s and men’s gendered motivations to move for artisanal mining in sub-Saharan Africa, the emphasis has been on explicating motivations for moving to the mines, emphasizing migrants’ strategic agency in navigating insecurity and resettlement (see, e.g., Bashwira and van der Haar Reference Bashwira and van der Haar2020). My analysis here adds to the literature by addressing a related gap: the gendered authority relations that shape the cultural politics of migration and the gendered organization of labour into which women and men move.
Ethnographic research was carried out for periods of three to five weeks a year in both Sierra Leone and Mozambique from 2015 to 2018. Research was carried out in two gold-mining villages in Tonkolili District, after receiving approval from their respective village chiefs. In Mozambique, research was carried out in multiple artisanal gold-mining sites in Manica District. Most days were spent in the mining zones, interviewing and carrying out participant observation with different women and men involved in artisanal gold mining (e.g. digging, panning, owning mining shafts, sponsoring diggers) or in work connected to mining (gold buying, selling food and beverages, etc.). Dozens of semi-structured interviews were also carried out with men and women involved in artisanal gold mining in these sites, and over twenty interviews were conducted with state and traditional authorities and members of non-governmental organizations in both countries.
In the next section, I sketch some of the dominant themes in the literature concerning ASM, and in some of the limited studies that focus on migration and ASM, as I put forward the conceptual lens that stresses how particular gendered cultural politics can make mobility matter in the crucible of power that shapes access and labour in artisanal mining zones. I then analyse the dominant arrangements of production in artisanal gold mining in Tonkolili and, more succinctly, in Manica, showing how migration played different roles in the gendered politics of belonging in both areas, before briefly concluding the article.
Artisanal mining in the scholarly and policy spotlight
What has been known as ASM since the 1990s includes a wide range of technological, material and social practices. Since then, ASM has increasingly become an important source of income across the continent, with a growing and extensive scholarly and policy literature emerging. Much legislation and discourse surrounding this topic is shaped by colonial legacies (D’Avignon Reference D’Avignon2018), including contrasts with ‘large-scale’ or ‘industrial’ mining that render ‘artisanal’ as inferior and lacking – contrasts that tend to draw on a longstanding ‘racial vernacular’ that discriminates against Africans (Pierre Reference Pierre2020: 94).
For many policymakers, donors and some scholars, ASM is typically viewed in terms of ‘numerous negatives’ (Hilson and Gatsinzi Reference Hilson and Gatsinzi2014: 4), helping to generate a cartography of concern and a requirement for wider action to regulate such places (Huggins etal. Reference Huggins, Buss and Rutherford2017). ASM sites have often been characterized by policymakers and some researchers as spaces of illegality and criminality, ignoring how laws and regulations premised on industrial mining make it very difficult, if not impossible, for artisanal miners to become ‘legal’ (Hilson and Gatsinzi Reference Hilson and Gatsinzi2014). ASM’s ‘illegality’ is also constructed through moralizing narratives that talk of it being a putative conduit for gambling, prostitution and alcoholism and reorienting youth towards vice and money, violence and lawlessness.
While negative perceptions of ASM persist, governments, donors and even some large-scale mining companies are increasingly looking for ways to provide some legal recognition of ASM through forms of regulation that are framed in terms of ‘improving’ the sector. While the portrayal of ASM in policy prescriptions treats this form of mining as a defined category, lending it the patina of homogeneity, research on different gold ASM sites highlights the heterogeneous forms of site organization and the ways in which ASM is intermingled with global capital relations and new forms of territorialization (Lahiri-Dutt Reference Lahiri-Dutt2018; Smith Reference Smith2021). National or regional institutional interventions into artisanal mining need to be examined, I suggest, following Moore (Reference Moore2005), in terms of their entanglements with more localized power relations and ‘wider socio-economic inequalities’ that are reflected in and produced through ASM (Fisher Reference Fisher2007: 755; see also Geenen Reference Geenen2016; Rutherford and Buss Reference Rutherford and Buss2019). Gender, ethnicity, class, age and marriage, among other factors, all shape access to and strategies around ASM-related activities (Buss Reference Buss2018; Hilson etal. Reference Hilson, Hilson and Siwale2018; Buss etal. Reference Buss, Rutherford and Stewart2019). Mobility can also shape relations of dependence and authority; yet mobility tends to be discussed in the ASM literature and in policy discourses in terms of the prevailing two narratives concerning criminalization or development.
Among policymakers promoting the ‘numerous negatives’ portrayal of ASM, replicating the stereotypes of the ‘racial vernacular’ (Pierre Reference Pierre2020), some express a concern that ‘outsiders’ are disrupting what are viewed as ‘local’ norms, environments and economies. In these contexts, ‘outsider’ and ‘local’ may or may not align with state borders. Such portrayals play up the trope of menace, of migrants as potentially dangerous young male outsiders who are unregulated by any authority. In my research, government and civil society officials in capital cities have often raised concerns about migrant miners threatening locals and local livelihoods. In 2014, for example, a few social justice NGO representatives in Freetown told me about migrant male miners abusing girls living in adjacent communities and often leaving many as single mothers. Senior mining ministry representatives in Maputo in 2016 expressed similar sentiments to a colleague,Footnote 1 as they repeatedly explained in interviews the need to regulate the ASM sector in Mozambique to address various problems, including of ‘foreigners with capital’ who come to the country, distort prices and control the ore-buying market. Government management is needed, these officials explained, to strengthen control of the sector through mining passes and licences, to impose organization on what they characterized as ASM’s ‘disorganization’, and to extract tax revenue for the government.
Intervenors working in aid or development, and sometimes in research circles, who also advocate for reform and strengthened regulation, generally take a less overtly moral view of migration into and among ASM sites, or at least refrain from associating it with threats and insecurity. Rather, for some of these observers, migration is taken as evidence of the economic importance of ASM, if not the solidifying of a professional identity. For example, Maclin etal. (Reference Maclin, Kelly and Perks2017) argue that their survey data of almost 1,000 men and women show the main motivations for migration were ‘economic push’ factors, as most of their respondents sought better livelihoods: ‘People are moving to the mines not because they are attractive, but because they have no other options’ (ibid.: 120).
In their analysis, Jønsson and Bryceson (Reference Jønsson, Bryceson, Bryceson, Fisher, Jønsson and Mwaipopo2014: 25) seek to fill a void they see between ASM literature and the ‘burgeoning field of migration studies’ by examining the ‘livelihood and mobility decision-making’ patterns of Tanzanian artisanal gold miners. They argue that miners who migrate from one gold site to another do so as they embrace a type of professional identification, forging a social network among other men and embracing risk as they seek out new opportunities (Jønsson and Bryceson Reference Jønsson, Bryceson, Bryceson, Fisher, Jønsson and Mwaipopo2014; see also Bashwira and Cuvelier Reference Bashwira and Cuvelier2019; Bryceson and Geenen Reference Bryceson and Geenen2016; Bryceson etal. Reference Bryceson, Jønsson and Shand2021).
In other words, the understanding of migration is often overdetermined by the larger narrative of which it is a part: ASM as a menace or ASM as an important livelihood. Mobility thus becomes symptomatic of larger negative forces or a function of individual decisions seeking to improve economic returns. In both scenarios,Footnote 2 mobility is dis-emplaced from the actual social and power relations of the mining zones. I suggest that the lens of labour, combined with gender, helps illuminate those relations, as mobile labour is valorized at times by these gendered authority relations.
The work involved in artisanal mining often entails negotiating access to sites, tools, the labour power of others, and so on. Both men and women often gain access through new or pre-existing dependency or interdependency relations. While some tasks, such as panning (the reprocessing of already processed ore-bearing soil or the processing of soil that may contain ore), can be done alone, excavation, transportation and processing require making arrangements with others, often across unequal social and power relations, or being called upon by others to do that work. This can be done through affinal or kin ties or through various forms of patronage ties or interdependency relations. The latter are not inherently static: some who begin work as dependants can become patrons if they are able to find minerals or can borrow money from someone else and parlay that wealth into assets of some sort to attract others. As other scholars have shown, there is often fluidity in economic tasks and in some pathways to accumulation in artisanal mining, for both men and women (e.g. Bryceson etal. Reference Bryceson, Jønsson and Verbrugge2013; Reference Bryceson, Jønsson and Verbrugge2014). Nevertheless, all of these dependency relations may be predicated on overarching authority relations that generate a ‘mode of belonging’ or ‘routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become “incorporated” in particular places’ (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2008: 79) – and these authority relations can also shape access to the mining sites.
In the artisanal mining zones I researched, ‘belonging’ did not always matter in terms of shaping access. Control over labour involved in the artisanal mining in these sites was not always firmly territorialized, which Nancy Peluso (Reference Peluso2005: 2) defines as ‘spatialized zones within which certain practices are permitted based on the explicit or implicit allocation of rights, controls, and authority’. Where it did matter, for example in the artisanal gold-mining sites in Tonkolili District, the mobility of men and women could reinforce the authority relations informing more explicit modes of incorporation. The dynamics around mobility in the Manica research sites, while more complex than can be explored here, point to different factors, beyond territorializing practices, where mobility is not necessarily a constitutive element in the power and authority relations in the ASM sites.
The incorporation of mining labour in Sierra Leone
In this section, I explore the gendered forms of incorporation in the gold-mining zones in the two mining areas studied in Tonkolili District, how they shaped labour and the relations of (inter)dependency, and the role of mobility in this nexus. Tonkolili District, in the middle of Sierra Leone, has been a significant gold-mining area in the country (Maconachie and Hilson Reference Maconachie and Hilson2011). With reduced artisanal mining opportunities in the diamond areas, there have been more men migrating to the gold areas from the diamond fields this century (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2020: 782).
Sierra Leone: the marking of ‘strangers’
In Tonkolili, migrants help accentuate pre-existing authority relations found in artisanal gold-mining sites. To put it schematically, a pit or shaft ownerFootnote 3 (the term used to identify the person who is responsible for organizing the excavation) nominally required the approval of a hereditary landowner (a senior male of the patrilineage with ancestral claims to the land who still resided in the village) in order to carry out mining; this approval might have entailed payment or at least a token of respect. If the pit/shaft owner was a migrant, they also needed approval from the village chief. Pit owners either sponsored diggers or, at times, they excavated, typically with at least one other digger. Diggers provided the labour for extraction as well as transportation and the processing of the gold. Diggers were organized into teams of about two to twelve people, almost always men. Diggers also helped with transporting the gold out of the pit and washing the ‘gravel’ (the gold-bearing ore in these alluvial gold deposits).
It is at this intersection of access to and control over labour that migration sharpens the edges of power and authority relations operating within the Tonkolili artisanal gold-mining zones. In contrast to Fenda Akiwumi’s (Reference Akiwumi2014: 776) astute analysis of diamond-mining communities, where ‘strangers’ coming for artisanal mining overturned the usual hierarchy privileging local landowners, the migrant labour of men and women in the gold sites I examined helped reinforce, not challenge, some of the pre-existing local relations of authority that shaped access to mining livelihoods. Almost all of the male migrants and most of the women entered into a mesh of dependency relations through which they directly or indirectly exchanged their labour in turn for the ability to make a claim for other resources, in addition to any pay or share of (possible) gold for their work. Their productive labour was part and parcel of a form of distributive labour. But these dependency relations tended to be quite gendered.
Supporters
A number of the predominantly young men working as diggers in gold mining were not from the community adjacent to the mining zone. Many of these migrant males drew on a common, gendered social practice of entering into a dependency relation with a more economically or politically powerful man. The prevailing ethos was that ‘everyone is “for” or “behind” someone else and no one can claim to be “for” her/himself’ (Richards Reference Richards1996: 145 cited in D’Angelo Reference D’Angelo2014: 288). For example, young and poor men become dependants of relatively richer men as a way to make do and possibly as a way to become a ‘big man’ themselves. As ethnographic research in Sierra Leone has long shown, big men draw on dependency ties and other strategies to increase their ‘wealth in people’ and ‘wealth in knowledge’ to further their authority and economic gains (e.g. Richards Reference Richards1996; Shaw Reference Shaw, Karp and Masolo2000; Ferme Reference Ferme2001; Hoffman Reference Hoffman2011). Migrant men coming to the artisanal gold zones often sought out or were already configured by such dependency ties with ‘supporters’. Supporters are men (or, more rarely, women) who sponsor a team of diggers by providing daily food (or money in lieu of food), tools, a machine for pumping water, and often minimal health expenses and other forms of patronage (such as providing credit, helping out if there is a funeral, etc.). In turn, supporters receive 50 per cent of the gold excavated by the team of diggers, who also must sell their own individual shares to the supporter at a price lowerFootnote 4 than the going market rate in the village.
Many of these miners travelled to the mining areas from nearby villages or other provinces in Sierra Leone. Although many migrated on their own after hearing about gold being mined at a particular village, some were actively recruited by older male relatives or by people they did not know from the village. For example, a young man originally from Tonkolili District recounted in 2017 that he had been diamond mining for four years in Kono, about 150 kilometres away. ‘I never made a profit in Kono so I came here to try gold.’ He added that this work emerged because his good friend from another village in the area was contacted by his relative, a supporter at the mining village in need of diggers, so the two of them moved from Kono back to Tonkolili.
Other supporters from the mining village looking for workers sometimes recruited complete strangers from other villages. As a supporter commented in 2017:
I support seven men. To find diggers I can go to villages and pay transport for them to come here or I encounter them on the road and offer them a job. It is common for diggers to stay with me for a year or so. I give them rice and medical and shelter – either in my house or they build temporary shelters by the pits. I share the gold found fifty–fifty. I buy [the workers’ share of gold] at 35,000 [leones per carat] and sell at around 42,000.Footnote 5
Such dependency ties among men are not immutable or uncontested.Footnote 6 During times of extensive gold-mining activity, it was not uncommon for supporters who had a poor reputation in terms of providing sufficient food, tools or other forms of support to have trouble finding diggers. In such cases, these supporters inevitably would travel to other villages – and/or try drawing on family networks in other parts of the country – to recruit other young men. Moreover, some young men in the gold-mining areas saw these dependency ties as a way to advance and become big men themselves, identifying these ties as ‘holding another man’s knees’. This pathway to possible economic advancement was almost exclusively masculine (Ibrahim etal. Reference Ibrahim, Rutherford and Buss2020: 170).
Not all migrant men come to the gold-mining areas to dig. Some come with the resources, and often the experience, to be a supporter. But even these relatively wealthy men were marked as migrants. In 2016, one supporter who also recruited young men from nearby villages noted that he himself is a stranger at this mining village: ‘I have spent the last year here. I initially approached the chief and asked permission to be a supporter here. The chief told me, “It is not a problem.” The chief gave me this land to work on – for the chief is the landowner here.’ Landowners, who are not always chiefs, are important figures in marking the distinction between locals and strangers.
Strangers versus locals
A key distinction operating in the Tonkolili villages is between locals and strangers, a longstanding attribute of rural socio-political dynamics in the region (see, e.g., Chauveau and Colin Reference Chauveau and Colin2011; Lentz Reference Lentz2013). ‘Strangers’ are ‘residents who have no ancestral kinship rights to land or claims to indigeneity in a place’ and therefore are in ‘an inherently subordinate and insecure position in traditional land space’ (Akiwumi Reference Akiwumi2014: 774; see also Dorjahn and Fyfe Reference Dorjahn and Fyfe1962). Men who are defined as locals because they have an ancestral right to membership in a specific community have, among other localized advantages, the ability to access land more easily for farming or building a house and to have a say in local political processes. This distinction also played out in various ways in the artisanal mining areas. Although many local men dug in teams and some sought out supporters, particularly if they did not have many resources, others asserted that it was mainly locals who were self-supporting when digging while it was mainly strangers who needed a supporter. As one man in his thirties noted in 2017:
We locals are self-supporting – we do not have a supporter. It is migrants who come here who need to get supporters, not the locals. When you are self-supporting no one will compel you to work for [a] certain number of hours a day. So we locals come together with family members to self-support. And if some days we have no money we can go to bed hungry, while migrants are more pliable to work hard under a supporter because they need food and can’t go to bed hungry. Thus, the supporter needs to feed them.
‘This happens,’ he added, ‘because migrants come here with a target such as “I need to mine for a certain number of months” or “I need to reach a certain amount of money.” Thus, they are desperate to get a supporter to meet their targets.’ Taking a breath and picking up his shovel to go back into the shaft, he observed: ‘Locals just don’t have such a timetable. Also, migrants can’t come to dig on their own but must dig under a local.’
In turn, the ‘subordinate and insecure position in traditional land space’ of ‘strangers’ (Akiwumi Reference Akiwumi2014: 774) was emphasized by a number of the migrants as well. One pit owner who came from a different district observed in 2018 that the landowner and chief always came by asking for ‘gifts’ and there was nothing he could do as ‘I am not from here. I can tolerate this constant asking for money or I can leave. I have no standing to push back, unlike those men from this area.’ He added that initially the chief was supportive of him but since he began ‘getting good gold’ at his pit he suspected that the chief or other locals wanted to push him away and take over his area.
Hence, mobility means that male miners need to enter into relations of dependency to get access to the mining areas. In the villages studied, diggers or supporters generally did not earn much from their gold mining. Diggers who had a supporter, however, were able to get some food and shelter and, at times, borrow money via distributive labour. But such relations of support can be fickle and one’s position as a migrant can be precarious.
While migrants were a key source of controllable labour for pit or shaft owners who were supporters, they also helped demonstrate the power of the local chief as the key source of territorializing authority in the villages.
Local chiefs
Strangers did not need to dig under a local’s direct control, but everyone emphasized that strangers needed to adhere to the localized mode of belonging, even when intending to work in the mining zone for only a short time.
One woman in 2018 likened the way in which migrants become integrated into a mining village to what she called a ‘certification system’:
If you as a stranger come here, you work with a local: a stranger gold buyer works with a local gold buyer; a stranger digger with a local digger; a stranger supporter with a local supporter; a stranger woman doing panning works initially with a local woman panning. You need to have a local to lean on before coming to the mine site. Strangers can be integrated – anyone can integrate.
While she noted the common practice of newcomers to at least initially work with a local person, the ‘certification’ comes from the local village chief. He (all chiefs in the area were men) decided whether or not to allow someone to stay in his area and the mine. As a range of scholars have shown, chiefs have had territorialized control in rural Sierra Leone thanks to colonial and postcolonial histories and politics (e.g. Fanthorpe Reference Fanthorpe2006; Ferme Reference Ferme2001; Richards Reference Richards1996). To mine, one needs the chief’s approval. In 2017 one man explained the process when he observed how the mining village had expanded rapidly due to gold mining: ‘A stranger declares her- or himself to the chief who will arrange a local person to be responsible [for the stranger]. If you know someone and you arrive, your friend or relative needs to introduce you to the chief.’
Although miners said that chiefs never prohibit anyone from staying to mine, if the chief were upset with the miner for any type of infraction he would expel them from the village and the mine. One of the chiefs in my study area also collected a weekly tax from miners, which he called a ‘token of appreciation’ to him for allowing them to mine in his village. In short, the chief was the key authority in the territorialized mode of belonging under which these artisanal gold mines operated.
For those who want to integrate more into the mining village, there are routes for doing so. One route is for the migrant man to marry a local woman; many said that it was then common for the woman’s family to stand up for the migrant in any issues arising in the community, as they assume his success will help them (see also Kachena and Spiegel Reference Kachena and Spiegel2018: 1027).
Many women also become involved in artisanal mining through marriage. Migrant men’s incorporation into economic activities in the mines highlights the importance of supporters, as they can organize labour to extract gold, and of the chiefs, who shape the contours of belonging through which migrants typically need to seek permission to work, even if only temporarily. In turn, migrant women’s incorporation puts into greater relief the importance of affinal and kin relationships for mobilizing labour.
Women as ‘family workers’ or ‘hustlers’
Mining labour was largely organized along gender lines. In addition to excavation being male-dominated, there were many other gendered tasks in the artisanal gold-mining sites, with women often predominating in panning or assisting in the transportation or processing of the mineral. They often earned less than men (Ibrahim etal. Reference Ibrahim, Rutherford and Buss2020; Maconachie and Hilson Reference Maconachie and Hilson2011; see also Buss etal. Reference Buss, Rutherford and Stewart2019). Women and girls also travelled around the mining sites selling cooked food or drinks.
Women as ‘family workers’ best illustrates how migrant women become incorporated into gold-mining activities. Some women working in gold mining are ‘locals’, almost all of whom began working for their parents as young girls, panning for gold or helping with the transportation or processing tasks, giving to their parents any gold they found. This practice changed only once they married (typically as a teenager), at which point they either sold the gold themselves or gave it to their husbands to sell.
The majority of women working in the mines were migrants but of two distinct types: women who came to the gold-mining village because of marriage; and those who came to work specifically in the gold-mining village. While the former included some who came with their husbands to work in the mines, others moved to the village for marriage and then began working afterwards. There is a noted preference for marriage partners to come from different, though geographically close, villages, with typically young women moving to their husband’s village.Footnote 7 These women said that it took time for them to feel incorporated into the daily life and hierarchies of their new home.
As a wife, a woman often became incorporated into her husband’s work. If her husband was mining his own pit or in a team of men working without a supporter, the woman could be called to cook meals for them and assist in ore transportation and washing, in addition to the domestic chores for which she would be primarily responsible. Some of this work would be for no compensation or she would be compensated in the same way as others who were called upon to do the work: either a bit of money for helping to process the gold (‘washing’) or, if she was helping to transport the ore, with a head-pan full of ore-laden soil (which she would wash on her own in the hopes of getting some gold). While this payment often did not lead to much money, the job of transporting ore from open pits to the top was sought after by many women. Most women said that getting such work required having a husband or brother or male friend among the diggers or as the supporter (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2020). While married women’s work in the mining areas often provided much-needed access to income for the household, particularly if their husbands were mining and currently not processing the gold (and thus had no ore to sell to get money), this possible conjugal interdependency for household income (see, e.g., Bryceson etal. Reference Bryceson, Jønsson and Verbrugge2013; Reference Bryceson, Jønsson and Verbrugge2014) did not negate the fact that husbands often asserted authority over what work their wives did in the mines and at home (Ibrahim etal. Reference Ibrahim, Rutherford and Buss2020).
Other women arrived explicitly for work in gold mining. They were almost always without a husband, or at least without one who could or would support them materially. These included widows, divorcees, abandoned wives and those whose husbands were incapacitated or who had given preference to another wife. For instance, one divorced woman declared in 2016 that she came ‘to hustle for money’. She rented a room in a house in the small mining town. ‘Like the other women,’ she said, ‘I came with plans to raise money for school fees and to get capital to start my own [small-scale trading] business. But, like most, I have been unable to achieve my plans as the gold is too small [limited] here.’
Another example of women ‘hustling’ for money comes from two women in their twenties. In 2017, they said that they were friends who came from a nearby chiefdom where they had been farming and trading until their capital ran out. When they arrived looking for work, a relative of one of the women who lived in the village took them to see the chief and he offered them work washing gravel at his mine, where he had hired a backhoeFootnote 8 to excavate a large area over a period of several days. They hoped that the money they earned would eventually provide sufficient capital for them to return to a petty trading career.
This arrangement was an innovation in the organization of labour, minimizing some of the gendered distributive labour aspects of the dependency relations as the supporter was no longer required to provide shelter and food to those men working under him. The machine replaced the group of diggers and the transportation work. The few pit owners and supporters who rented excavators complained about the high rental cost, but they also expressed satisfaction with no longer being required to ‘look after’ their male workers.
It is here that gendered dependencies are clearer. These supporters saw excavators as a way to relieve them of their responsibilities towards male diggers. When using a backhoe, supplemented by women’s washing labour, the supporters did not have any obligation to provide the women with shelter, food or medical help, or to loan money. Here, as migrants, these women were willing to work for a daily payment with the supporter having no other obligation towards them. Whereas women would be able to draw on kin or affinal ties to access certain temporary jobs, such as transportation or washing, they were mainly viewed by the pit owners as supplementary labour, not as people to whom they had obligations. Rather, women had obligations to help male relatives and husbands who had a claim over their labour.
My analysis of the cultural politics shaping migrants’ access to artisanal gold-mining livelihoods makes clear the authority relations informing gendered forms of territorialized belonging and (inter)dependency in the Tonkolili areas researched. But such a valuation of migrant status was not common in Manica District, Mozambique, even though a sizeable number of men and women working in this economic activity came from neighbouring Zimbabwe.
Mozambique: the unmarked non-citizen miners
This brief section examining how the presence of international migrants in the Manica gold ASM zones is not as marked as that of internal migrants in Tonkolili District illustrates how migrant status is not always entangled with power and authority relations in mining areas.
Why is the international migration of Zimbabwean men and women to artisanal gold mine sites less important in constituting quotidian authority relations in the mining zones of Manica District, Mozambique, than it is in the Tonkolili example? I suggest two reasons. First, the particular history of this border zone with Zimbabwe has been defined by a dynamic that emphasizes both the fluidity and the instrumentalization of international and internal borders (Tornimbeni Reference Tornimbeni2005: 314). Second, I argue that the configuration of authority and power relations operating in most of the artisanal gold-mining areas studied do not highlight the origins of those working in them, unlike in Tonkolili.
The international border forged between British and Portuguese authorities in the late nineteenth century has been deployed in different ways by various state and designated traditional authorities and migrants for various purposes, including seeking better economic opportunities, escaping from authorities, or enhancing control over people or resources (e.g. Allina Reference Allina2012; Tornimbeni Reference Tornimbeni2005). On the Zimbabwean side of the border, research has shown how a variety of authority figures in localized scales of action incorporated migrants from Mozambique in diverse relations of (inter)dependency during the colonial and postcolonial periods (e.g. Hughes Reference Hughes1999; Moore Reference Moore2005).
Until the 2000s, most movements involved Mozambicans crossing into Zimbabwe. However, with the deepening politicized economic crisis in Zimbabwe since 2000, which has seen great numbers of Zimbabweans leave their country (e.g. Derman and Kaarhus Reference Derman and Kaarhus2013), more Zimbabweans have been entering central Mozambique. While white Zimbabwean farmers looking for agricultural opportunities after being displaced from their farms in Zimbabwe came as state-recognized migrants (Hammar Reference Hammar2010), many black Zimbabweans entered the country clandestinely. Local and national Mozambican authorities varied in their responses to them, with some migrants ‘informally tolerated by Mozambican authorities’ and even getting provisional or permanent identity cards (Tornimbeni Reference Tornimbeni, Palloni and Tornimbeni2015: 93).
Indeed, this is what Kachena and Spiegel (Reference Kachena and Spiegel2018) found facing Zimbabwean migrant artisanal gold miners operating in the Chimanimani transborder conservation area in south-western Manica Province, Mozambique. In this area, they found a form of territorialized authority at work, where in some cases customary leaders ‘framed cross-border migration as a threat that impinges on local rights to the gold fields, instigating notions of exclusion’ (ibid.: 1026). Such territorialized control recalls the colonial period when chiefs became agents of coercive labour practices (Allina Reference Allina2012). For most of my research sites forty or so kilometres to the north, however, such a territorialized politics of belonging was not playing out in relation to Zimbabwean artisanal gold miners.
Unlike the places where the government had successfully established state-sanctioned mining associations (see Dondeyne and Ndunguru Reference Dondeyne and Ndunguru2014; Rutherford and Chemane-Chilemba Reference Rutherford and Chemane-Chilemba2020), most artisanal gold-mining sites only fell under the authority of what people called the ‘landowner’ – the person who had usufruct rights over the land where the shaft or pit was locatedFootnote 9 – or, if there were no landowners, the chief; the latter was less common. The landowner’s exercise of authority focused mainly on getting his (or, less commonly, her) share – one-third of the gold found in the sites – and potentially enforcing the requirement that all shaft/pit owners sell the gold to him. Although a landowner would have discretion over who could be a shaft or pit owner on the land, the migratory status of the requester normally was not a factor in the decision, as both Mozambican landowners and miners and Zimbabwean miners stressed that Zimbabweans were not discriminated against or placed in a more vulnerable position for being Zimbabwean.
Indeed, many Zimbabwean men and women told me that they faced fewer inquiries about their citizenship in the gold-mining areas than in urban areas. ‘No one asks me for my ID here in the mining area,’ one Zimbabwean man observed. ‘But in Vila one has to be wary of the police.’ In the nearby town of Vila de Manica, Zimbabweans were more vulnerable to police demanding their documents or conducting ‘Portuguese testing’ (so-called because most Zimbabweans are unable to speak Portuguese, whereas the vast majority of Mozambicans can) and then demanding payments or possibly detaining and deporting the Zimbabwean (see also Kaarhus Reference Kaarhus, Pereira Khan, Meneses and Bertelsen2019). Zimbabweans who were able to speak a variant of ChiShona could often work in the gold-mining areas without concern. As a Harare man running a banca, a small store in an artisanal gold-mining area, observed: ‘If I could speak Portuguese, I would be operating a business in town. But without Portuguese, at least I can run my small business in this gold-mining area.’
More importantly for my argument, the landowner typically had no control over the labour of those mining on their land. In the multiple mining zones within twelve kilometres of Vila de Manica, many Zimbabwean men and women commuted there every day from their rental (or, for a few, purchased) accommodation in the town or in a nearby village. If they were mining in a site more difficult and/or expensive to access, they tended to rent temporary shelters in small business centres, unconnected to the landowner’s authority. Mozambican migrants did the same, while Mozambican locals would commute from their own rural or urban homes. The status of being a migrant, a foreigner or a local had no significant bearing on the usufruct landowner’s decision to allow someone to dig a shaft or on the shaft owner’s decision to allow diggers to excavate.
Traditional authorities played a very limited role, if any, in shaping the mining that occurred in their territories. Historically in the region the distinction between ‘original inhabitant’ and ‘newcomer’ has mattered in terms of local relations of ruling – even if, in practice, some newcomers became local rulers thanks to precolonial, colonial or postcolonial power dynamics (e.g. Mseba Reference Mseba2020). However, as Matthew Walker (Reference Walker2012) shows for the area to the south of Manica District, colonial and postcolonial policies (such as land dispossession and villagization) and the violent disruptions caused by sixteen years of civil war in the area (to 1992) all weakened claims of autochthony for land access. And, in terms of artisanal gold mining where I did my research, chiefs had no say.
In other words, the mobility of labour is not marked within the power and authority relations at play in the mining zones to the same extent as in Tonkolili District. The shaft owner also had limited authority over the (male) diggers. Often, the shaft owner was also a digger himself (or, again rarely, herself), and, as a rule, the shaft owner received one-third of the gold while the team of two or more diggers also received a third.
In contrast, government officials often marked the immigration status of artisanal miners. Periodically, provincial authorities have blamed ‘Zimbabwean’ artisanal miners for ‘destroying the environment’. For example, the provincial governor decried the environmental damage of ‘garimpeiros’, artisanal gold miners (Machirica Reference Machirica2015). At that point, dozens of Zimbabweans were deported. However, by the time I returned to the district in June 2016, these raids had ended and Zimbabweans and Mozambicans alike said that the authorities no longer bothered Zimbabweans working in the mines.
On the national scale, there are also occasional declarations against ‘foreigners’ in artisanal mining. An official from the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy in Maputo declared in an interview with my colleagueFootnote 10 that unlicensed foreign buyers were coming to buy minerals cheaply and not paying anything to the government; because of these ‘foreigners’, he underscored, ‘we [Mozambicans] are still poor because the people who find resources are not being paid real value’.
Although such hostility towards foreign miners could adversely affect migrant artisanal gold miners, for the most part it was not woven into the authority and (inter)dependency relations at work in the areas of my research. Gendered dependency relations mattered in the allocation and control of labour in the Manica District artisanal gold-mining areas I researched (Rutherford and Chemane-Chilemba Reference Rutherford and Chemane-Chilemba2020), but they were not constituted through the migrant status of the men or women working in the way they were in the Tonkolili site, pointing to heterogeneity in the constitution of authority relations. As a Zimbabwean male shaft owner who had been mining in Manica for five years observed: ‘Other than giving the landowner their share of my gold, there is no control over me. Local Mozambicans have welcomed us Zimbabweans.’
Conclusion
One can follow the two overarching narratives informing policy on ASM and view migration to artisanal mines either as a sign of growing economic opportunities or as a source of environmental, social or occupational harms. In contrast, I suggest that examining mobility through the particular gendered cultural politics in the ‘crucible of power’ that shapes access to artisanal gold mining is a more heuristically fruitful approach to understand how migration matters in particular social configurations of this economic livelihood. I argue that migrant men and women coming from other parts of Sierra Leone to mine gold in Tonkolili helped reinforce and mark some of the gendered power and authority relations shaping the organization of labour. Sierra Leonean men and women coming as ‘strangers’ to the Tonkolili gold-mining areas reinforced a range of authority and power relations (entangling the chief, supporters and households) that informed the organization of labour. The cultural politics informing a territorialized mode of belonging in this part of rural Sierra Leone strongly shapes access to mining as it hinges, in part, on the distinction between locals and strangers. This is visible in the mesh of gendered (inter)dependency relations into which male migrants and most of the women migrants entered and through which they (in)directly exchanged their labour for the ability to claim resources as well as any pay or share of (possible) gold for their work.
My analysis of the conditions of migration and the terms of settlement and working in the Sierra Leone mining zone shows the gendered contours of authority relations and the organization of labour. Male and female migrants enter into a series of social relations that valorize their dependency on others, be that other a sponsor, a chief or a husband. In the Tonkolili mining areas, migration reveals the operation of gendered authority relations and economic dynamics that can be reinforced and granted additional significance through the incorporation of migrant labour. As ‘strangers’, even if from a nearby district, migrants are more vulnerable and exploitable compared with ‘locals’, adding an important social dynamic to artisanal mining areas beyond the assumption that migration is a source of menace or a sign of economic development.
In contrast, as my brief discussion of ethnographic research in Manica District, Mozambique, shows, the Zimbabwean nationality of many migrant men and women working in artisanal gold mining was not commonly marked in the dependency relations that mobilized labour. Although there were occasional national- or provincial-scale declarations of concern over international migrants working in artisanal gold mining in Mozambique, in the actual social organization of the mining zones, the migrant status of the men and women working usually did not matter.
Rather than viewing migration through the lens of either of the two larger policy discourses concerning ASM – which view it as a menace or a pathway to economic development – I have suggested that migration can be tied to specific cultural politics informing the crucible of power that shapes the organization of labour, including any distributive labour involved in that organization’s relations of (inter)dependence. Being a migrant, even an international migrant, does not necessarily matter in terms of accessing artisanal gold mines or in terms of everyday livelihood practices; when it does, it says more about the crucible of power that shapes belonging than anything inherent in the migrant status.
Acknowledgements
I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support and my Canadian, Sierra Leonean and Mozambican colleagues for their insights and collaboration in this three-country project. In particular, I warmly thank Osman Fofanah for his excellent assistance in the research, Doris Buss for her generous and extremely helpful reading of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful criticisms and guidance.
Blair Rutherford is a Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa and Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Among other publications, he is the author of Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: the ground of politics (Indiana University Press, 2017).
