Money, migration and masculinity among artisanal miners in Katanga (DR Congo)

ABSTRACT

The Katangese artisanal mining sector has grown spectacularly since the late 1990s. Faced with political instability and economic crisis, tens of thousands of men have moved to the mining areas in order to find new sources of income. This article offers a detailed ethnographic description of how male migrant workers experience and cope with the challenging realities of life on the mines against the backdrop of recent changes in Katanga’s political economy. More specifically, it examines the relationship between money, migration and masculinity through an extended case study of a money dispute among a group of artisanal miners working in the Kalabi mine near Lwambo, a small town situated 20 kilometres north of Likasi. It is found that the conspicuous consumption of money plays a vital role in the mining subculture; that credit and debt dominate life on the mines; and that artisanal mining has given rise to significant changes in gender relations and household organisation.

[L’argent, la migration et la masculinité parmi les mineurs artisanaux au Katanga (RD Congo).] Le secteur minier artisanal du Katanga a grandi de manière spectaculaire depuis la fin des années 90. Alors qu’ils font face à une instabilité politique et une crise économique, des dizaines de milliers d’hommes sont partis vers les zones minières afin de trouver de nouvelles sources de revenu. Cet article offre une description ethnographique détaillée de comment les travailleurs migrants masculins font l’expérience et font face à la réalité éprouvante de la vie dans les mines dans le contexte des changements récents dans l’économie politique du Katanga. En particulier, l’article examine la relation entre l’argent, la migration et la masculinité à travers une étude de cas sur un différent financier au sein d’un groupe de mineurs artisanaux qui travaillent dans la mine de Kalabi près de Lwambo, une petite ville située à 20 kilomètres au nord de Likasi. Les résultats sont les suivants : la consommation visible d’argent joue un rôle vital dans la sous-culture du secteur minier ; le crédit et les dettes dominent la vie dans les mines ; le travail artisanal dans les mines a donné lieu à des changements importants dans les relations de genre et dans l’organisation des ménages.

KEYWORDS:

• artisanal and small-scale mining
• gender
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• informal economy
• subculture
• monetary practices
• extended case method

MOTS-CLÉS:

• secteur minier artisanal et à petite échelle
• genre
• République démocratique du Congo
• économie informelle
• sous-culture
• pratiques monétaires
• méthode des cas

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of Review of African Political Economy who handled this article as well as the editors of this special issue, and three anonymous peer reviewers for their guidance and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Jeroen Cuvelier holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leuven (Belgium). His main research interest is the anthropology of mining in the eastern and southeastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since January 2012, he has been involved in two research projects, one dealing with the relationship between artisanal mining and access to land, and another focusing on the governance implications and socio-economic impact of national and international initiatives aimed at both formalising the artisanal and small-scale mining sector and breaking the assumed link between mining and conflict in the DRC.

ORCiD

Jeroen Cuvelier http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5772-1691

Notes

1 This article is to be part of a ROAPE special issue to be published in March 2017 provisionally titled ‘Beyond large-scale mining: people’s economic responses to restructuring in southern and central Africa’.

2 On 16 July 2015, Katanga was divided into four new provinces as part of a general reform of Congo’s administrative and territorial architecture. Research for this article was carried out in what is now called the province of Haut-Katanga.

3 These zones are known as Zones d'exploitation artisanale (artisanal exploitation zones). They are created by the National Minister of Mines.

4 According to the Congolese Mining Code of 2002, artisanal miners and mineral buyers need to purchase a licence for their activities.

5 Kivoyou is a loanword from French that has been integrated into the morphological system of Swahili. The meaning of the word voyou in French is ‘gangster’ or ‘rascal’.

6 The badly timed nationalisation of the Belgian mining company Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), the Zairianisation campaign, the Shaba wars, and the economic mismanagement and corruption practices of the Mobutu regime caused a sharp decline of the industrial mining industry in Katanga. The situation became outright disastrous in the 1990s, when the state mining company Gécamines – UMHK’s successor – almost went bankrupt and Congo got dragged into a long civil war. For a more detailed overview of Katanga’s political-economic history, see Cuvelier (2011b, 12–25).

7 The names of the persons that feature in this case study have been changed to protect their identity.

8 It happens quite frequently that artisanal miners illegally invade and occupy mining concessions to which private mining companies have gained exploration and/or exploitation rights. The companies usually call in the help of the Congolese police, the army or a private security company to forcefully evict the artisanal miners.

9 PPRD is the abbreviation of Parti du peuple pour la reconstruction et la démocratie. Unlike others named in the case study, Moïse Katumbi is a real person, not a pseudonym.

10 For a similar conceptualisation of space among young fortune-seekers in Cameroon, see Nyamnjoh (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on PhD research funded by the Belgian Ministry for Science Policy and the FWO-Flanders.