Africa has played a prominent role in the history of nuclear materials. The uranium that destroyed Hiroshima came from Belgian Congo and during the Cold War much of the uranium fuelling America's nuclear weapons was mined in Africa. Gabrielle Hecht provides the first study of African uranium miners and of the path of yellowcake from its colonial origins to the present. One challenge of such a study is the secrecy of mining in Africa; uranium mining may be the most secretive of all. Hecht visited mines in Gabon, Madagascar, South Africa, and Namibia, where she conducted numerous interviews and trawled through the limited official archives. She also sought, in the most inventive of ways, to fill gaps in the documentary trail. Her research is exemplary. Being Nuclear is notable for its breadth. It covers the labour process, occupational and environmental injury, the Cold War, the creation of nuclear markets, the role of national and international agencies, liberation movements, the non-proliferation treaties, and postcolonial politics.
Hecht uses the concept of nuclearity to make sense of this potentially scattered history. Nuclearity identifies how workplaces, materials, and forms of knowledge become designated as ‘nuclear’. It is, in Hecht's words, a technopolitical category which is unstable in time and place and emerges from the play of political, economic, and cultural forces. In each site, those forces ensure that nuclearity has a different valency. The British and French nuclear stories are tied up with the loss of empire, and hence with prestige as well as profits. France mined uranium in Madagascar where the first major deposits were discovered after the war. Other mines followed in Niger and Gabon where there was no state monitoring and waste was dumped into open pits and rivers. By contrast, uranium mining in South Africa fell under state control. South African uranium was a by-product of gold mining, which meant that mine workers were unaware of the health risks they faced.
South Africa's nuclear energy and weapons programmes were made more complex by South Africa's occupation of Namibia. The history of the Rossing mine in Namibia, operated by Rio Tinto Zinc from 1966, typifies the ambiguities of nuclear products. That mine was caught up in the West's covert support of the apartheid regime and its history is one of the most disturbing parts of Being Nuclear. In Namibia, opposition to Rossing as a colonial symbol served SWAPO well during the liberation struggle. With independence in 1990, the new nationalist government quickly reversed its policies in reaching an accommodation with Rio Tinto.
The apartheid regime in Pretoria was determined to gain a seat on the International Atomic Energy Agency board and thereby legitimise its nuclear ambitions. In striking contrast, Madagascar miners never became nuclear workers in the sense that their work gave them no special claim for rights against the state nor were the mines part of the nation's claims against France as the retreating colonial power. Thus in technopolitical terms, South Africa was a visible nuclear player, Madagascar was not.
There are two limitations to Being Nuclear. The first is the breadth of the material, which moves from the late colonial period through the labour conditions on mines in four very different countries and, in the process, explores the creation and maintenance of nuclear markets. Hecht makes few concessions to her readers and the text is crammed with too much detail. There is also a problem of definitional boundaries. Which forms of knowledge and political processes, if any, are unique to nuclear weapons and which belong only to nuclear energy production? Having read Being Nuclear, I cannot answer that question.
The story Hecht tells is both old and new. The deplorable labour practices in the uranium mines will be familiar to anyone who has read the histories of gold or asbestos mining. However nuclear weapons remain a global threat and the story is ongoing. A new uranium mine opened in Malawi in 2009 and there are plans for mines in a number of other countries to meet China's energy needs. Hecht has written the first history of nuclear Africa which, given the importance of the subject and the obstacles she faced, is a major achievement.
