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9:30-10:00
Hannah Tubman
Conflations of Remediation and Extraction:
(Re)Valuations of Waste in Kabwe, Zambia
10:00-10:30
Maaike Rozema
An Environmental History of Tsumeb, Namibia: Considerations on Conducting a Multi-Species Research in an African Mining Town
10:30-11:00
Discussion
11:00-11:30
Coffee break
Chair - Maaike Rozema
11:30-12:00
Luke Blomsma
South Africa’s Holy War: Religion and Boer Forces During the Siege of the Diamond Mining Town of Kimberley, 1899-1900
12:00-12:30
Jan-Jan Joubert
The evolving relationship between Afrikaners and gold mining in South Africa during and after apartheid
12:30-13:00
Discussion
13:00-14:00
Lunch
Chair - Jan-Jan Joubert
14:00-14:30
Christiana Banja
Mining Childhood: The Impact of Blood Diamonds on Early Childhood Education in Kono District
14:30-15:00
Lorenzo D’Angelo
Unhealthy landscapes: Mining and environmental transformations in Sierra Leone
15:00-15:30
Discussion
15:30-16:00
Coffee break
Chair - Christiana Banja
16:00-16:30
Artemis Mantheakis
Mimi ni Baba na Mimi ni Mama: A Feminist Political Economy of (In)formal Artisanal Limestone Aggregate Mining Supply Chains in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
16:30-17:00
Bas Rensen
Manufactured drought? An environmental history of water scarcity in Kajiado District, Kenya Colony, between 1912 and 1939
17:00-17:30
Discussion
17:30-18:00
Rita Kesselring and Jan- Bart Gewald
Book launch: Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia's Northwestern Province: An Ethnography of Inequality and Interdependence
18:30-19:00
Walk to restaurant ‘Verboden Toegang’
19:00-22:00
Dinner
8:30-9:00
Coffee
Chair - Luke Blomsma
9:00-9:30
Gerrit Dusseldorp
The prequel: a deep-time perspective on land-use of the diamond fields in the Northern Cape
9:30-10:00
Jan-Bart Gewald
“A Want Supplied at De Beer’s Diggings!”: Unpacking part of the front-page of “The Diamond News and Vaal Advertiser” of Saturday, July 1, 1871
10:00-10:30
Discussion
10:30-11:00
Coffee break
Chair - Elijah Doro
11:00-11:30
Jack Boulton
Tinkering with Uranium in Swakopmund, Namibia
11:30-12:00
Wesley Mwatwara
Gang violence and artisanal gold mining along Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke
12:00-12:30
Discussion
12:30-13:30
Lunch
Chair - Artemis Mantheakis
13:30-14:00
Elijah Doro
A Silenced Chernobyl’? The Cam and Motor Mine Arsenic Fallout in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900s to the Present
14:00-14:30
Walker Swindell
Towards a multi-species environmental history of Kabwe, Zambia c.1890s-2020
14:30-15:00
Discussion
15:00-15:30
Coffee break
Chair - Lorenzo D’Angelo
15:30-16:00
Sam Matthews Boehmer
Green Extractivism?: Placing African Green Hydrogen in Historical Context
16:00-16:30
Eric Cezne
The making of H2-scapes in the Global South: Political geography perspectives on an emergent field of research
16:30-17:00
Jackson Tamunosaki Jack
‘Oily Lifeworlds’: Entanglements with Oil Extraction in the Niger Delta
17:00-17:30
Discussion
17:30-18:00
Closing Discussion
‘Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia's Northwestern Province: An Ethnography of Inequality and Interdependence’
By Rita Kesselring
Rita Kesselring provides a compelling ethnographic account of the wildly uneven, deeply interconnected development trajectories of Solwezi, a copper mining town in Zambia, and Zug, an urban hub for metal trading firms in Switzerland. In so doing, she provides a valuable open access case study of the asymmetrical interdependencies that global capitalism creates between towns and cities in the Global North and Global South.
Through detailed storytelling, Kesselring explores the lives and routines of state officials, residents, mine managers, and mine employees in Solwezi. From there, she follows Solwezi’s copper as it makes its way through shipping, financing, and trading.
Highlighting the key actors in this value chain, Kesselring reveals not only the central role
Switzerland plays in Southern Africa's mining industry, but also the central role that Southern Africa plays in Switzerland’s status as a leading service commodity trading hub— thanks primarily to the constant flow of wealth from Zambia to Switzerland.
What emerges from this detailed portrait of inequitable interdependencies is a new way forward. It is only through joint solidarity action between such vastly different but inherently connected places, Kesselring argues, that the world can arrive at more equitable North-South economic relationships.
Lorenzo D'Angelo - Sapienza University of Rome
‘Unhealthy landscapes: Mining and environmental transformations in Sierra Leone’
In Sierra Leone, large-scale extractive activities (e.g., iron, diamond, rutile mining) have played a crucial role in fragmenting landscapes, affecting not only rivers, hills, forests, and plantations, but also sacred sites and ancient human settlements. As a result, human and non-human health has been severely affected, especially in those areas where intensive mining has turned landscapes into “sacrifice zones”. How can we recover the wholeness of these environmental transformations and avoid the (re)production of fragmented and discontinuous spatial and temporal knowledge?
This paper addresses these questions by examining the ways in which resource extraction has affected public health in Sierra Leone since colonial times. It focuses on two distinct diseases: 1) the so-called “Yengema diseases” (1950s) and 2) the Ebola epidemic that more recently hit the country (2014-2016). Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on Sierra Leone’s mining industry, this paper aims to develop a connective (and comparative) perspective that ideally links different extractive and non-extractive contexts within and beyond Sierra Leone.
To this end, it proposes an approach based on an anti-essentialist relational ontology that draws on Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the thread to rethink Sierra Leone’s fragmented landscapes in holistic terms, that is, as spatio-temporal stratifications of rhizomatic encounters.
Christiana Banja – Leiden University
‘Mining Childhood: The Impact of Blood Diamonds on Early Childhood Education in Kono District. Abstract’
Kono District in Sierra Leone has a long history of diamond mining, but during the civil war (1991– 2002), these diamonds became a major cause of violence. The trade in “blood diamonds” fuelled conflict, and many children were forced to work in mines instead of going to school. This essay looks at how blood diamond mining affected early childhood education in Kono, showing how child labor, displacement, poverty, and the destruction of schools made it difficult for young children to learn.
During the war, children were taken from their families and made to work in dangerous mining conditions. Instead of being in school, they spent their childhood digging for diamonds, which harmed their health and slowed their mental development. Many families had to flee their homes because of the war, which led to the closure of schools and left children without a place to learn. At the same time, fighting destroyed many school buildings, and the government struggled to rebuild them. Even after the war, the impact of blood diamonds did not disappear. Many families in Kono are still poor and see mining as a better option than education. Because of this, some children continue to work in mines instead of going to school. Although international organizations and local efforts have helped rebuild some schools, there are still many challenges. Schools lack enough teachers, materials, and funding to give children a good education.
This essay argues that the effects of blood diamond mining are still making life hard for children in Kono. To fix this, more effort is needed to rebuild schools, stop child labor, and make sure every child gets an education. Without these changes, the cycle of poverty and mining will continue for future generations.
Jack Boulton - Université Libre de Bruxelles
‘Tinkering with Uranium in Swakopmund, Namibia.’
Despite an ongoing downturn in the price of uranium, its mining in Namibia is both well-organised and well-handled in terms of its environmental impact, with the objective being to make ‘Namibian Uranium’ a global brand and a world leader. Yet, this industry belies the cosmic origins of uranium as an element formed in the heat of a supernova some 3.5 billion years before the formation of Earth. As such, it invokes remarkably long timeframes – much more than the lifespan of any mine – both into the past and into the future. In that regard, human beings become just a tiny fragment of uranium’s history: and uranium has always been very good at setting the terms of its own engagement.
This paper explores uranium via the monstrous: that which is leaky and contagious, perhaps otherworldly, perhaps dangerous if not successfully controlled. Indeed, the current epoch, as well as Anthropocene, has been described as the Age of Lovecraft: an unsettling, disturbing period inhabited as much by cosmic horrors and other weird beings as it is by the Earthbound. The presentation therefore asks two questions: firstly, is uranium a monster? Secondly: if not, what are we so afraid of?
Luke Blomsma - Leiden University
‘South Africa’s Holy War: Religion and Boer Forces During the Siege of the Diamond Mining Town of Kimberley, 1899-1900’
This research paper utilizes primary source material, such as unpublished diaries of Boer soldiers, to examine the role of religion on the Boer forces during the Siege of Kimberley and the Battle of Magersfontein in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902).
The strong influence of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) and its ministers significantly shaped the strategy and conduct of the Boer commandos during the war. Literature highlights instances of NGK ministers preaching in the trenches and the Boer forces’ strict observance of the Sabbath on Sundays, during which fighting was avoided and artillery remained silent. Even when confronted with the largest army mustered by the British Empire between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, the Boers largely adhered to their religious ideals of warfare.
Ministers and Boer leadership transformed the war into a conflict that exhibited the characteristics of a biblical holy war. In a speech to the troops, Paul Kruger declared that any Afrikaner who died in this war would be guaranteed a place in heaven. NGK ministers preached that South Africa was God’s promised land, drawing comparisons to the biblical Israel described in the Old Testament. This also underscores the contemporary significance of this research as religious violence is still a significant issue in today’s world.
Eric Cezne - Leiden University
‘The making of H2-scapes in the Global South: Political geography perspectives on an emergent field of research’
Clean hydrogen is touted as a cornerstone of the global energy transition. It can help to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors, ship renewable power over great distances, and boost energy security. Clean hydrogen's appeal is increasingly felt in the Global South, where countries seek to benefit from production, export, and consumption opportunities, new infrastructures, and technological innovations. These geographies are, however, in the process of taking shape, and their associated power configurations, spatialities, and socio-ecological consequences are yet to be more thoroughly understood and examined. Drawing on political geography perspectives, this article proposes the concept of “hydrogen landscape” – or, in short, H2-scape – to theorize and explore hydrogen transitions as space-making processes imbued with power relations, institutional orders, and social meanings. In this endeavor, it outlines a conceptual framework for understanding the making of H2-scapes and offers three concrete directions for advancing empirical research on hydrogen transitions in the Global South: (1) H2-scapes as resource frontiers; (2) H2-scapes as port-centered arrangements; and (3) H2-scapes as failure. As hydrogen booms in finances, projects, and visibility, the article illuminates conceptual tools and perspectives to think about and facilitate further research on the emergent political geographies of hydrogen transitions, particularly in more uneven, unequal, and vulnerable Global South landscapes.
Elijah Doro - Leiden University
‘‘A Silenced Chernobyl’? The Cam and Motor Mine Arsenic Fallout in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900s to the Present.’
The Cam and Motor gold mine was the richest and biggest gold mine in colonial Zimbabwe. The mine extracted sulphide ore bodies from deep level mining and employed oxidation and roasting technologies to retrieve the gold from the iron pyrites. The roasting process produced tens of thousands of tons of toxic arsenic trioxide as waste, and this was dispersed across the surrounding landscapes, residential areas and farmlands in a massive fallout across more than half a century. The threat posed by this fallout of poisonous pollution to human bodies and multispecies lives received tepid attention within colonial scientific and medical discourses as well as postcolonial modes of waste governance. This paper engages with the case study of Cam and Motor mine to interrogate extractive sites in colonial Africa as ‘silenced Chernobyl’ whose indelible toxic writ was ingrained in human bodies and natural ecosystems but has been ignored, forgotten or silenced through narrative violence. The paper propounds the need to revisit silenced colonial toxiscapes (toxic landscapes) and track their legacies in processes of ruination to extrapolate how historical mining landscapes in Africa are situated in the socio-environmental and extractive politics of the present.
Gerrit Dusseldorp - Leiden University
‘The prequel: a deep-time perspective on land-use of the diamond fields in the Northern Cape’
Diamond exploitation in the Northern Cape has fundamentally altered many aspects of the landscape. Yet the area has yielded evidence for human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years. I sketch the history of human use of the area and the persistent signatures that in places are still visible even today, and some that have been brought to light as the result of mining activities. I briefly review if and how these previous ways of land use and land tenure impact current societies.
Jan-Bart Gewald - Leiden University
‘“A Want Supplied at De Beer’s Diggings!”: Unpacking part of the front-page of “The Diamond News and Vaal Advertiser” of Saturday, July 1, 1871’
The “Diamond News and Vaal Advertiser" (DNVA) was one of the first newspapers to be published and printed on the South African diamond fields following the discovery of alluvial diamonds on the farm “De Kalk” (The Chalk) in 1866. The discovery initiated a diamond rush that saw thousands upon thousands of people descend upon the diamond fields. Within the space of a few months, teeming settlements with people from all over the globe came to be established along the confluence of the Vaal and Orange Rivers. Beginning in 1870 newspapers came to be published on the Diamond Fields, of which the DNVA was one.
The paper to be presented is methodological in nature and seeks to illustrate how we as historians unpack, see and gain insight into the past, as well as to demonstrate the international nature of the diamond rush in South Africa. The paper will take the top half of the front-page of the DNVA of July 1 1871 and seek to draw out the implications of its printed contents. That is, it will look at what has been printed and then explain what this means. In this manner I will show how the Diamond Fields of South Africa were intimately connected to the wider world far beyond southern Africa. In addition the paper will demonstrate the crucial implications of these wider connections without which the Diamond Fields could not have come about.
Jackson Tamunosaki Jack - University of Groningen
‘‘Oily Lifeworlds’: Entanglements with Oil Extraction in the Niger Delta’
As extractivism continues to produce environmental toxicity in the Global South, indigenous populations disproportionately impacted by pollution have responded in different ways, particularly in several resource endowed localities that play host to extractive activities in Africa. This study presenting an ethnographic account of the ‘oily lifeworlds’ in localities of crude oil extraction in the Niger Delta, foregrounds how people live with pollution through experiential knowledge associated with oil entanglements that reanimates/reimagine oil and gas pollution as source of utility. The Niger Delta, where decades of crude oil extraction have led to persistent hydrocarbon pollution affecting millions of inhabitants, provides a lens through which the diverse and unique ways indigenous people respond to pollution can be observed and understood. This paper deviates from widely recognized approaches of environmental protests and resistance which objectifies crude oil as a toxic pollutant responsible for the region’s environmental crisis.
Instead, it focuses on the rather uncommon and subtle entanglements with oil, which has enabled the people to live with oil pollution. Drawing from ethnographic analysis of the ‘oily lifeworlds’ in the Niger Delta, I argue that oil is embedded in everyday life and reanimated as a symbol of geocultural identity, as well as reimagined as a resource for economic, medicinal and spiritual utility for communities. Through accumulated experiential knowledge systems associated with decades of oil entanglements, residents of host communities have learned to co-exist with oil and the associated extractive activities as part of their everyday life. This approach of reimagining pollution as a source of utility foregrounds one of the unique and numerous ways in which indigenous people respond to pollution. Beyond this, it offers new insights into the intersection between extractivism and geo-cultural knowledge production in localities of resource extraction.
Jan-Jan Joubert - Leiden University
‘The evolving relationship between Afrikaners and gold mining in South Africa during and after apartheid’
After defeat in the Anglo Boer (South African) War of 1899 to 1902, poverty drove thousands of Afrikaners to work in South African gold mines for the first time. The codification and legalisation of the gold mining colour bar from 1911, stiffened in 1925, gave the apartheid government and its immediate successors after 1948 the foundation to ensure job segregation and racial discrimination, in line with apartheid policies. This included exclusively sheltered employment for the predominantly Afrikaans white working class, which remained envious of the English and Jewish goldmine owners. The shrewd political move by mining tycoon Harry Oppenheimer to deal Afrikaner business a stake in gold mining from 1964, effectively insulated gold mining tycoons against further demonisation by Afrikanerdom, notably the government and newspapers, for 25 years. The next uptick in Afrikaner gold mining interest occurred after South African democratisation in 1994, as many gold mine owners left the country, with Afrikaners often filling the vacuum. Democratisation also ended racial job preservation, ushering in affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies. Likening BEE to the 1964 Oppenheimer deal has ignited much debate (scholarly and otherwise), while affirmative action has impoverished much of the Afrikaner working and underclass - often despite appearances. This paper will examine the ebb and flow of the relationship between Afrikaners and gold mining since 1910, including the social, economic and political commonalities and differences between the impacts of the South African gold mining colour bar and Black Economic Empowerment policies in South African gold mining.
Sam Matthews Boehmer - Cambridge University
‘Green Extractivism?: Placing African Green Hydrogen in Historical Context.’
The global push towards net zero has amplified optimism surrounding Africa's renewable energy potential, particularly in Southern Africa, where solar and wind resources are abundant. This study examines the implications of this optimism in the emerging green hydrogen sector, with a focus on Namibia's $10 billion Hyphen Project, Africa's largest green investment to date. While touted as a solution to decarbonisation and economic growth on the continent, historical analyses of resource exploitation in Africa—ranging from the "resource curse" to corporate-driven extractivism—raise concerns of neo-extractivism.
The literature on past African mineral exploitation highlights a recurring pattern: external profiteering with limited societal benefits. The concept of neo-extractivism underscores how states may perpetuate these trends by prioritising elite gains over equitable development. Parallel critiques of the renewable transition reveal dependence on foreign capital, inequitable energy distribution, and exploitative labour practices. Namibia's green hydrogen efforts, although innovative, exhibit vulnerabilities: exported benefits and limited local economic integration threaten to replicate historical inequities.
Using interdisciplinary methodologies, I will juxtapose historical and contemporary cases, questioning whether the green transition heralds equitable progress or merely cloaks traditional extractivism in environmental rhetoric. Sociotechnical imaginaries and economic frameworks illuminate how global agendas shape national policies. The findings contribute to debates on energy justice, colonial legacies, and sustainable development in Africa, proposing pathways to ensure inclusive benefits from renewable initiative.
Wesley Mwatwara – Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
‘Gang violence and artisanal gold mining along Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke’
Using case studies from Zimbabwe’s gold-rich Great Dyke geological formation, this study examines the anatomy of organized gang violence in artisanal gold mining communities and its impact on security and livelihoods. It argues that gang violence in artisanal gold mining should not be viewed as isolated incidences of gratuitous violence meted by drug-taking and machetewielding gangs. This study also seeks to understand the different ways in which artisanal miners negotiate access to gold-rush areas.
Artemis Mantheakis - Leiden University
‘Mimi ni Baba na Mimi ni Mama: A Feminist Political Economy of (In)formal Artisanal Limestone
Aggregate Mining Supply Chains in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’
This thesis argues that informal women’s labor in Dar es Salaam’s limestone and aggregate mining industry is both a critical yet unrecognized foundation of the supply chain and a site of structural exploitation within capitalist accumulation. Women perform the most labor-intensive and valueadding tasks, yet remain excluded from formal recognition, protections, and economic mobility. Their dual burden—balancing unpaid reproductive labor with precarious wage labor—serves as an invisible subsidy that sustains both the informal mining economy and the broader capitalist construction sector. Through a critical and feminist political economy lens, this study demonstrates that the persistence of informality is not merely a result of bureaucratic barriers but a structural mechanism of accumulation, wherein state policies, land dispossession, and corporate interests intersect to externalize costs onto women while extracting maximum surplus value from their labor. By centering women’s lived experiences and agency within the industry, this research critiques the structural conditions that sustain gendered informality and explores potential pathways for economic justice and transformation.
Bas Rensen - European University Institute
‘Manufactured drought? An environmental history of water scarcity in Kajiado District, Kenya
Colony, between 1912 and 1939.’
Water shortages are recognised as important environmental dynamics in the history of colonial Kenya. They are usually presented and thought about as the lack of rain and conflated with droughts. This work lays out the anthropogenic causes of water scarcity as a mismatch between expectations and limits of supply and demand of water. Yet this is not a simple story of environmental decline and colonial violence: rather it takes seriously the agency of indigenous actors as they articulated technological and ontological changes set in motion by the colonial occupation. The project asks how colonial processes impacted the relation between people and water in Kajiado District in the former Masai Reserve in southern Kenya, and to what extent water scarcities changed social and political relations there.
Maaike Rozema – Leiden University
‘An Environmental History of Tsumeb, Namibia: Considerations on Conducting a Multi-Species
Research in an African Mining Town’
The histories of mineral extraction in southern Africa have traditionally been framed through a political-economic lens, emphasizing labour and capital. However, emerging anthropological approaches recognize the entanglement of human and non-human lives, challenging the ontological divide between nature and culture that has historically justified extractive industries. Through archival research, audiovisual analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, including walking methodologies and the collection of oral histories, my PhD project will explore how industrial mining has reshaped human and non-human relationships in Tsumeb, Namibia.
This paper specifically will be a literature review focusing on Tsumeb’s pre-colonial and early colonial histories. In doing so, I aim to identify key academic sources related to the local history of Tsumeb. Moreover, I aim to better understand people’s relationship to the land prior to colonisation, and the way this relationship has transformed through extravism.
Hannah Tubman - University of Edinburgh
‘Conflations of Remediation and Extraction: (Re)Valuations of Waste in Kabwe, Zambia’
Although the 1994 closure of the Broken Hill mine in Kabwe, Zambia represented a loss of employment for many, others saw opportunity in the vestiges of the mine. For industrial operators and small-scale miners, the mineral tailings and mine area are not only zones of waste but also zones of continued resource extraction. Exploring the tensions between profit and toxicity on a waste-based commodity frontier, this article describes how, amidst the toxic legacies of lead pollution, industrial and small-scale actors adopt the language of remediation to justify their interactions with discarded minerals. An analysis of these justifications explores how extractive actors employ multiple registers of value to make use of industrial vestiges. The conflation of extraction and remediation, I argue, reflects attempts to separate extraction from harm. More importantly, this slippage speaks to Kabwe residents’ overlapping concerns about a lead-free Kabwe and a revival of extractive industry.
Walker Swindell - Leiden University
‘Towards a multi-species environmental history of Kabwe, Zambia c.1890s-2020’
Scholarship on Zambian mining history has primarily focused on the Copperbelt region with the recent turn to environmental history seeing studies of mining centres highlighting the long-term legacies of industrial mining, particularly concerning pollution and its effects on communities. However, this human-centred scholarship has largely ignored the environmental history of the oldest Zambian industrial mining centre, Kabwe (Broken Hill). The lead and zinc mine there was for a time the source of the territory’s most valuable exports. My PhD will be the first environmental history of the town yet unlike those previous studies my research will adopt a more-than-human multi-species approach in order to understand the impact of the growth and decline of industrial mining on constitutive elements of Kabwe’s local biosphere: the physical landscape, animals and humans.
This paper will be a literature review which will serve as the base for my research agenda into the environmental history of Kabwe. I will begin by reviewing literature on Zambian mining history. Then I will review a series of environmental histories of mining centres from across southern
Africa and the world in order to identify insights that are applicable for my research. Furthermore, I will outline how more-than-human historical studies, focusing on animal history, can be applied to my own research as I seek to understand the impact of industrial mining on animals. I will conclude the paper by summarising the insights drawn from these works which will serve as a basis for my PhD’s research agenda.
