Fresh fighting is once again drawing international attention to the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In covering escalating clashes between the Congolese army and the M23 rebel forces, popular media and policy commentators invariably mention the region’s mineral wealth and the role of Congolese ‘digital minerals’, such as coltan, in powering mobile phones and similar devices. We should care about what happens in the Congo, such reports often imply, because we all carry a piece of it around in our pockets. And, more pointedly, the conditions under which these materials are mined and fought over are horrific, approximating a novel scramble for resources based on coerced labour in Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’.
In The Eyes of the World, James Smith offers an essential corrective to such narratives by unearthing the perspectives of artisanal miners and traders themselves, the individuals and communities who extract and move digital minerals from the DRC’s subsoil into global circuits of production. Smith’s principal argument is that, viewed through his interlocutors’ eyes, artisanal mining in the region is ‘a kind of conflict-ridden collaboration’ (p. 32) that – in the aftermath of war and amidst massive displacement and dispossession – has emerged as a hugely important site of opportunity and community. Fundamental to the operation of the sector and to local understandings of its dynamics is the notion of movement. Miners’ mobility and the circulation of wealth mean that ‘many hands can touch money’ (p. 45), establishing conditions not for resource-based war but for peace.
Outside actors, however, either fail or refuse to see artisanal mining in such a light. Instead, the titular ‘eyes of the world’ (i.e. the attention of an ‘international community’ comprising conservationists, ‘anti-slavery’ crusaders, humanitarian NGOs and corporate extractors) see miners as victims and/or criminals harvesting ‘blood minerals’. In response, these observers and outside actors elevate transparency-focused, bag-and-tag certification schemes or industrial extraction as preferred alternatives. Congolese involved in the trade regard these efforts as a unified project aimed at enclosing deposits and/or ‘cleansing’ minerals of their origins (of having been wrought by Congolese hands from Congolese earth), and they resist them. Miners circumvent attempts by companies and regulators to exclude them from sites, or to purge their ‘dirty’ minerals from the supply chain. They decry the tags of transparency initiatives as ‘handcuffs’ (craca) that marginalize and immobilize. Meanwhile, they valorize their own labour (in holes, in dirt, under challenging conditions) as acts of self-sacrifice, as requiring collaboration and skill, and as producing (the conditions for) post-conflict reconciliation and economic improvement that benefit society writ large.
This is, in short, a masterful and most necessary book. Smith’s writing is simultaneously beautiful and cogent. The ethnographic material is often humorous, frequently incensing, sometimes heartbreaking, and always compelling. Through rich and evocative description, Smith transports the reader, as if by wormhole, to particularly productive scenes, then details and interrogates settings, characters, dialogue and underlying dynamics in ways that entertain, illustrate and illuminate. He excavates miners’ worlds – situated histories, territorial struggles, labour arrangements, wartime trauma, economic projects, cosmologies, spiritual negotiations and more – to great effect. He not only gives voice to the labourers who produce the stuff upon which the contemporary world runs, but also emphasizes the political implications of miners’ projects of movement and self-organization as having collectivist, arguably even anti-capitalist, orientations.
I could go on at (much) greater length in praise of Smith’s book, but I do have several questions to pose for the sake of discussion and elaboration.
While Smith’s theorization of movement is enormously effective for framing the contemporary circumstances, what remains less clear is the longer history and origins of such ideas and practices; how they relate to Congolese conceptualizations of lifecycles and the future; and whether Smith sees this ‘theory from the south’ as offering a framework for understanding the dynamics of late capitalism and resistance to it in rural Africa more broadly, across both space and time. Has movement as an ethos long characterized Eastern Congolese visions of the good life? And/or how contingent is it to the (post)colonial moment and the mining sector? How does movement relate to notions of ‘the frontier’ in African studies (e.g. the work of Kopytoff and others), and to kinship, expansion and intergenerational growth? Beyond evasion of colonial authorities, what did movement entail for Eastern Congolese under Leopold II and the Belgians? In a context where residents have endured forced relocation (by colonial overseers) and displacement (during war), is there not also a negative valence attached to mobility, and some sense of nostalgia for being settled? Do Smith’s interlocutors (favourably) anticipate ongoing mobility (as miners, or as something else)? Or do they aspire to more sedentary agrarian (or urban) ideals or futures, to being rooted once again (along with their ancestors) in particular patches of earth? How do these imaginings of the future fuel, limit or otherwise shape the political potentialities of artisanal miners’ resistance, collectivism and autonomy? Smith tells us through the words of his interlocutors that ‘there’s nothing like the love that … diggers had for one another’ (p. 214), and he repeatedly emphasizes the centrality of collaboration, reciprocity and trust. At the same time, we learn very little about actual affective interpersonal relationships between miners. How do miners cultivate and maintain relationships with one another amidst movement? How are ties established, what form(s) do they take, how do they transform, and what do they do?
Such queries notwithstanding, The Eyes of the World is a magisterial contribution to contemporary scholarship on labour, extraction and the socio-political worlds of artisanal mining. It comprises a powerful interrogation of late capitalism and competing configurations of work and value ‘on the margins’ (though really at the core), one that centres the perspectives of Congolese mining laborers to reveal how they use their hands to dig and to build, together, amidst exploitation and ruination.
