Undermining the ‘Local’: Migration, Development and Gold in Southern Kayes

Abstract

For nearly a century, successive authorities in Mali have created a ‘local’ identity in southern Kayes that naturalises state authority and justifies various interventions in the name of ‘development’. This identity has been used as a pretext for agricultural development policies that attempt to limit people's geographical and political mobility and access to one of the region's most valuable natural resources – gold. Populations in southern Kayes, however, through artisanal gold mining (orpaillage), migration and transnational protest movements, have resisted both this ‘identity’ and the state interventions influenced by it, constructing competing political systems that challenge official discourse and state power. Today, as both governance and resistance to it become increasingly transnational, questions about the meaning of ‘local’ and ‘localness’ have become particularly salient. Rather than disappearing, however, the category has become entrenched in new power hierarchies that include migrant hometown associations, NGOs, mining companies and state governments.

Keywords:

• Migration
• Transnationalism
• Transnationalism from Below
• Development
• Mali
• Kayes
• Mining

Acknowledgements

Field research was made possible by the Fulbright Student Grant for Research. I would like to acknowledge the comments made on this paper at the African Migrations Workshop, ‘The Contribution of African Research to Migration Theory’ in Dakar, 2010. The comments of Gunvor Johnson and Loren Landau were of invaluable help in synthesising ideas. The referees of this paper also provided many useful critiques and challenges. This research would not have been possible without generous help and encouragement from many people in Mali, far too numerous to name.

Notes

[1] This anecdote is based on field research in Djidjan in the fall of 2009. In Bambara, ‘toubab’ or ‘tubab’ or ‘toubabou’ may mean ‘white’, ‘European’, or sometimes, ‘French’. See Bailleul (1996). More importantly, here, the term also has a deep-seeded socioeconomic connotation. Non-whites from ‘the West’ are often referred to as ‘toubabs’ because of the assumed economic significance of their nationality or residency. Curry (2007: 1) includes, among other definitions of ‘toubab’, ‘the reflection of the way people … tend to perceive black Africans acting ‘white’ in an African setting’, and the ‘[loss of] identity and [conversion] to western values’.

[2] Centre des Archives d'Outre-mer, Affaires Politiques, 160: Rapport politique annuel, Soudan Francais 1924. Quoted in Rodet (2009: 257).

[3] In 1965, the mayor of Kayes and a US-RDA delegation even went to France to tell Malian migrants to return where their abor was needed (Dedieu 2012: 21).

[4] Garforth and Hilson (2012: 440–1) explain that, due to decades of pathologising artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), ‘the environmental and health-related aspects of ASM … have heavily overshadowed the socioeconomic importance of its activities’. This is still true of Mali, where international discourses still ignore the importance of artisanal mining as a survival strategy, and focus instead on environmental degradation and child labour (see e.g. Kippenberg 2011).

[5] For the development-integration link in France, see Daum and Leguay (2001), Leguay (2002), Gauvrit and Le Balers (2004), Trauner (2004), and Lacroix (2006). Duffield (2006: 72) describes similar trends in the UK; de Haas shows that the Netherlands government reversed this meaning, and saw economic connection to origin countries as working against integration of the migrant – but the author then counters and argues that integration and development work are positively correlated (2005: 1276); see Charef and Gonin (2005) for the theoretical relationship between development and integration.