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On a bright spring morning in Leiden, on the 20th of March, the African Studies Centre buzzed with energy as students, researchers, and guests gathered for the third edition of the African Research Master’s student workshop, this year titled Ruptures and Riches: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of African Mineral Resource Extraction. This year’s workshop marked a milestone, as the largest and most ambitious edition to date. Organized by students (such as myself), the workshop brought together sixteen speakers, ranging from undergraduate students to PhDs, postdoctoral researchers, and professors from a variety disciplines to give their perspective on the impact of mineral resource extraction in Africa.
Beyond its catchy alliteration, the title ‘Ruptures and Riches’ reflects a central tension in the history of resource extraction in Africa. Along with a group of fellow students, I participated in the research master’s course ‘Africa in Cross-Regional Perspectives: Through the Lens of Mineral Resource Extraction’, taught by Jan-Bart Gewald, project leader of Boom2Dust. Over several weeks, we delved into all kinds of stuff that is dug out of the ground: diamonds, gold, uranium, copper, coal, and more. Together, we examined what their extraction means in material, symbolic, and political terms, both historically and in the present.
Take diamonds, for example. On their own, they are unimpressive bits of compressed carbon, yet they have the power to dazzle. Over time, they have come to signify glamour, status and, thanks to some clever advertising, everlasting love. In places like Kimberley, South Africa (a Boom2Dust site), the promise of diamond wealth drew thousands, led to the rise of entire town, and made some individuals unimaginably rich. However, diamond fever also fed imperial ambitions, led to the dispossession of land, entrenched exploitative and racialized labour systems and transformed the entire landscape. And crucially, within the multispecies frame of the Boom2Dust project, we must remember the often cruel and exhausting exploitation of oxen, donkeys, and horses. The labour of beasts of burden underpinned historical extractive economies, yet their suffering has largely gone unrecorded. Today, the town of Kimberley is best known for its enormous pit, a gaping reminder of both the riches that were once extracted and the ruptures they left behind.
After some coffee, biscuits, and the usual registration bustle, we kicked off the day with two presentations on (former) mining towns in Southern Africa. The first was by Hannah Tubman from the University of Edinburgh, who shared her research on the now-closed Broken Hill zinc-lead mine in Kabwe, Zambia. I followed with a talk on my upcoming fieldwork in Tsumeb, a mining town in northern Namibia. Although my research is still in its very early stages, the pairing of our talks made immediate sense. Both Kabwe and Tsumeb are sites in the Boom2Dust Project, and both Kabwe and Tsumeb serve as important sites for exploring the long shadows cast by extractive industries in Southern Africa, places where people’s lives still remain deeply entangled with industrial pasts. Hannah’s findings resonate directly with the central tension of Ruptures and Riches, while many people in Kabwe hope for a lead-free future, they also view the revival of extractive industries as a potential path forward.
After a brief pause for coffee and contemplation, the workshop continued with two presentations from Leiden University, both set in South Africa. The first speaker, Luke Blomsma, presented his research on ‘South Africa’s Holy War,’ focusing on the siege of Kimberley in 1899-1900. Following Luke, Jan-Jan Joubert picked up where the siege of 1900 left off, presenting his research on the evolving relationship between Afrikaners and gold mining in South Africa during and after apartheid. Both presentations highlighted how mineral riches led to a concentration of power in specific places, where access to land and resources became central not only to wealth accumulation, but also to the emergence of conflict and the entrenchment of political, social, and racial inequalities.
In the afternoon, we mentally travelled away from southern Africa and landed in West Africa, and more specifically the country of Sierra Leone. This country often conjures up images of so-called ‘blood diamonds’, shaped by provocative NGO campaigns, a Kanye West song (2005), and a popular Hollywood film (2006) starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Yet beyond this Western representation of mining in the country, it is important to shift the lens and consider the knowledge from within. This block started with Research Master student Christiana Banja, who is herself Sierra Leonean, offering a deeply personal account of the connection between education and the promise of fast money from artisanal mining in the Kono district. Her presentation provided an emotional and firsthand perspective on what it’s like to grow up as a young girl in the Kono district. The second presentation was by Lorenzo D’Angelo from Sapienza University of Rome who shared his methodological considerations on doing fieldwork in Sierra Leone. His central question was more abstract than practical, but relevant nonetheless: how do we make sense of all the overlapping, messy consequences of mining without simplifying it into a single story of exploitation? He encouraged us to reflect by alluding to Wittgenstein’s metaphor of a thread, in which many different fibers interweave to form a coherent whole.
The final session of the day took us across the continent to East Africa. The pairing of these two presentations made sense not only in spatial terms, but also content-wise. Both drew on political ecology to emphasize how colonial and capitalist systems have produced environmental and economic inequalities. At the same time, they highlighted the friction between these overarching systems and the persistence of agency in the face of marginalisation. The session began with Artemis Mantheakis from Leiden University, who presented her fieldwork on women’s roles in the artisanal limestone and aggregate mining supply chains in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and the way that their informal labour is often undervalued. The second presentation, by Bas Rensen from the European University Institute, focused on the anthropogenic causes of water shortages in Kenya. Bas reminds us that history is not predetermined, and that harmful legacies of the colonial past are not fixed but instead that they can be challenged and reshaped.
Finally, we were especially honoured by the presence of Rita Kesselring from the University of St. Gallen, who chose this occasion to launch her new book, Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia's Northwestern Province: An Ethnography of Inequality and Interdependence. Rita’s ethnographic study explores the asymmetrical interdependencies between mining in Zambia and Switzerland, highlighting how global capitalism connects these regions and emphasizing the need for solidarity between such vastly different places to create more equitable North-South economic relationships.
That marked the end of the first day, and I think everyone was ready for a well-deserved dinner, gathering around a long table to embrace some good old Dutch gezelligheid with food and drinks.
On Friday, the day started early, with fresh minds ready to dive into the next round of discussions and presentations. Like on Thursday morning, we began Friday morning in South Africa, and specifically in the diamond fields of the Northern Cape. This time, archaeologist Gerrit Dusseldorp from Leiden University guided us through deep time, sketching the history of human interactions with the environment over 2.5 million years. With much enthusiasm, he showed us cave artworks from the region and explained what archaeology can teach us about environmental change. While the scale of human alterations to the environment has accelerated, Gerrit showed that our relationship with the land has always been transformative. This context of long-existing slow environmental manipulation set the stage for understanding the rapid, industrial-scale changes brought about by the diamond rush of Kimberley, a topic explored by our project leader Jan-Bart Gewald. He presented a paper illustrating how a historian can use a source, such as a newspaper, to unpack the patterns of the past by piecing the puzzle. By analyzing the top half of the front page of the Diamond News and Vaal Advertiser from July 1, 1871, he demonstrated how the Diamond Fields of South Africa were deeply connected to the wider world, arguing that these global links were crucial for the emergence of the Diamond Fields.
The session continued in Southern Africa with Jack Boulton from Université Libre de Bruxelles. Drawing from a range of poetic sources, including HP Lovecraft, he explained uranium mining in Namibia as something monstrous yet not quite tangible. Quoting anthropologist Michael Taussig, Boulton likened the danger of radioactive uranium to the nervous system, which paradoxically alerts one to the fear of losing a sense of peace that can never be attained, due to the very nervous system that constantly triggers such alarms in the first place. Meanwhile, Wesley Mwatwara from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam shifted the focus to the more grounded realities of Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke, examining the intersection of gang violence and artisanal gold mining, and the impact of such intersections on livelihoods.
After a much-needed lunch break, the afternoon session began with Elijah Doro visiting fellow at Leiden University, who presented on the Cam and Motor Mine arsenic fallout in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe). His research explored the long-term environmental and health impacts of arsenic contamination from the early 1900s to the present. With a touch of cynical humor, he highlighted the absurdities of colonial science. Doro argued that violence, in a legal context, is narrowly defined as direct and is incongruous with the ‘slow violence’ of pollution, making justice hard to obtain. Following Elijah, my colleague Walker Swindell, also part of the Boom2Dust project, shared his plans to write an environmental history of Kabwe, Zambia. Similar to my own research in Tsumeb, he discussed the multispecies lens and the methodological challenges it presents. Specifically in Zambia, animals are neglected in historical research and animal studies focused largely on the tsetse fly.
The session then shifted to the future, and the emerging field of green hydrogen, where Sam Matthews Boehmer from Cambridge University and Eric Cezne from Leiden University explored the critical question of whether hydrogen can truly break from the extractive logics of the past. Very simply put, their answer was ‘no.’ Both pointed out how fossil fuel companies are driving the push for green hydrogen based on the same old colonial narratives we've seen in earlier waves of resource extraction. First, Sam presented his study on Namibia’s $10 billion Hyphen Project, Africa's largest green investment to date. Following Sam, Eric discussed the concept of ‘H2-scapes’, offering a critical perspective on how green hydrogen projects are reshaping local and global power dynamics. Both presentations criticized the promise of hydrogen and their potential to reinforce existing inequalities.
The final presentation of the day was by Jackson Tamunosaki Jack from the University of Groningen, who discussed oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Although oil production is not considered ‘mining’ in the strictest geological sense, it is conceptually linked to mining within broader extractivist economies. Much like the situations in Kabwe and Tsumeb, the Niger Delta grapples with an irreversible toxic legacy. However, Jackson ended the two-day workshop on an insightful note for future research, demonstrating how people in the region find ways to coexist with the pollution. They have reimagined it not just as a threat, but also as a source of economic, medicinal, and even spiritual value.
This marked the conclusion of the workshop, and I think we were all tired but fulfilled, at least I certainly was.
The two-day workshop provided a wonderful platform for researchers of all stages of their careers to connect, share ideas and engage in inspiring discussions. As I sit down to write this blog post, and I would like to share my reflections on what were the things that I personally learned from this experience.
I want to thank all the speakers for their thoughtful contributions on these two days. Moreover, I want to specifically thank my colleagues and fellow students: Christiana Banja, Jan-Jan Joubert, and Walker Swindell, whose hard work made the entire workshop possible. And of course, I would like to thank Jan-Bart Gewald, who guided us through the organization with much patience and dedication.