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Mining for the Future:
Dynamics of Artisanal Gold Mining Practice and Governance in the
Balan-Bakama (Mande, Mali)
by
Esther Elisabeth Margretha Kühn
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Esther E.M. Kühn 2017
ii
Mining for the Future: Dynamics of Artisanal Gold Mining Practice and
Governance in the Balan-Bakama (Mande, Mali)
Esther Elisabeth Margretha Kühn
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto
2017
Abstract
This dissertation examines the social organization of artisanal gold mining in the Balan-Bakama,
a zone of the Mande area of southern Mali (West-Africa). Based on fieldwork conducted
primarily in 2010-11 I show how villagers and specifically their male and female mining
authorities govern mining sites in the territory of their village. Unlike many artisanal mines that
are described in the literature as enclaves disconnected from surrounding communities, Balan-
Bakama artisanal mines are part of a locally placed extractive economy.
Most inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama are both subsistence farmers and artisanal gold
miners (at home or as seasonal migrants). These livelihood activities had traditionally been
bound to the rainy season and dry season respectively. With a steadily rising gold price, women
miners were increasingly engaged in rainy season surface mining while men mined using the
new hard-rock mining technique. With placer mining, these techniques form the set of three
artisanal mining techniques applied in the Balan-Bakama.
iii
In Mande, gold is categorized as owned by bush spirits who control the uncivilized space
beyond villagers’ fields. In order to be able to mine safely and successfully, communities and
individual miners are obliged to convince bush spirits to share their gold with humans and to
refrain from causing accidents. People are able to gain access to gold through sacrifices, by
following the rules of mining sites and by avoiding conflict.
If local miners are successful, they will be joined by seasonal migrant miners. In an area
characterized by high rural-urban migration but some rural-rural migration, village communities
try manipulate migration patterns by stimulating mining to retain young men. Hoping to expand
the village in order to achieve a locally defined modernity and form a closer connection to
regional centers villagers work to attract informal miners and industrial mining corporations.
iv
Résumé Français
Cette thèse examine l'organisation sociale de l’orpaillage artisanale dans le Balan-Bakama, une
zone de la Manding dans le sud du Mali (Afrique de l'Ouest). Sur la base du travail de terrain
mené principalement en 2010-2011 je montre les façons dont les villageois et plus précisément
leurs autorités minières masculines et féminines contrôlent les sites miniers sur le territoire de
leur village. Contrairement à de nombreuses mines artisanales, décrites dans la littérature comme
des enclaves déconnectées des communautés environnantes, les mines artisanales de Balan-
Bakama font partie d'une économie extractive placée localement.
La plupart des habitants du Balan-Bakama sont à la fois des agriculteurs de subsistance et
des orpailleurs (chez eux ou en tant que migrants saisonniers). Ces activités de subsistance
étaient traditionnellement liées respectivement à la saison des pluies et à la saison sèche. Avec un
prix d’or en hausse constante, les femmes étaient de plus en plus impliquées dans les mines de
surface pendant la saison des pluies tandis que les hommes ont exploités des mines à l'aide de la
nouvelle technique d'extraction de roche dure. Avec l'exploitation des placers, ces techniques
forment l'ensemble des trois techniques minières artisanales appliquées dans le Balan-Bakama.
Dans le Manding, l'or est classé comme appartenant à des esprits de brousse qui
contrôlent l'espace non civilisé au-delà des champs des villageois. Afin de pouvoir creuser en
toute sécurité et avec succès, les communautés et les mineurs individuels sont obligés de
convaincre les esprits de partager leur or avec les humains et de s'abstenir de causer des
accidents. Les gens peuvent accéder à l'or grâce à des sacrifices, en suivant les règles des sites
miniers et en évitant les conflits.
Si les mineurs locaux réussissent, ils seront accompagnés par des mineurs migrants
saisonniers. Dans une zone caractérisée par une forte migration rurale-urbaine, mais aussi de la
v
migration rurale-rurale, les communautés villageoises essaient de manipuler les tendances
migratoires en stimulant les mines afin de retenir les jeunes hommes. Dans l'espoir d'élargir le
village afin d'atteindre une modernité définie localement et de se rapprocher des centres
régionaux, les villageois travaillent pour attirer les mineurs informels et les entreprises minières
industrielles.
vi
Acknowledgements
This dissertation is based on fieldwork carried out in the Balan-Bakama in the year 2010-11 and
preliminary fieldwork in early 2010 when I was based in Bancoumana. I am grateful to my hosts
Diakaridia Keita, Saran Magassouba, Nantene Doumbia and Nankinja Bakayogo for worrying
about me and for explaining so many things about life in the Balan-Bakama and to the
inhabitants of their compound and especially its lutigi Madi Keita who granted me access. Agnes
Kedzierska-Manzon graciously allowed me to build on her host-guest relationships in Selofara.
I thank Madi Kama Keita for accompanying me to so many interviews in the Balan-
Bakama and for worrying about the completeness of my data. I also thank Jogo Diabate, Ibrahim
Camara and Mahamadou Keita for their enthusiasm and thorough translations during interviews
in Balan-Mansala and Selofara.
Several people of different villages of the Balan-Bakama told me that they were one
community and that even though I lived in Selofara, they were all my hosts. I am so grateful that
they acted on this declaration and always made me feel welcome in their homes, communities
and at their mining sites. People were always willing to answer my questions, especially the
chiefs of mines and their assistants for whom I had many questions. I thank the staff of the town
hall of Balan-Mansala, and especially its then-mayor Lansine Keita, for access and for hosting
me during two weeks in December 2016. I also thank the directors and teachers of the school in
Selofara who were welcoming and supportive.
I am grateful for the care of my hosts Modibo Diabate and Assetou Diabate in
Bancoumana where I had previously done research and which had become my home in Mali
before I moved to Selofara. I feel privileged for having been become part of the family and
vii
especially for being entrusted with their two grandchildren. Over the years I have learned so
much from Modibo, Assetou and their extended family. I would like to single out Sidi Diabate,
who accompanied me to many different mining sites during the preliminary stage of the research
when I was based in Bancoumana.
Elsewhere in Mande, Daouda Diawarra, Moussa Traore and Daouda Keita and their
families were wonderful hosts who made me feel welcome and taught me about their
communities and about local variations in artisanal gold mining.
In Bamako the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique and
counterpart Institut des Sciences Humaines kindly authorized fieldwork in Mali. I am grateful for
the hospitality I experienced at the National Archives in ACI 2000 and at Koulouba, and at the
Direction Nationale de la Geologie et des Mines. I thank the Africa team of BBC World for their
invitation to join them in filming at the Kankou Moussa refinery in Bamako and their kindness
when they filmed at the artisanal gold mines of Selofara at the invitation of the village chief and
me. I thank geologist Fouseyni Diakite for clearly explaining geological concepts of artisanal
gold mining.
Many thanks to advisor Professor Michael Lambek for his support, patience and careful
editing. I also thank the other members of the committee for their helpful comments. Research
was funded through a ‘University of Toronto Fellowship’, a ‘Short-term Research Grant for
Doctoral Students’ Centre d’études de la France et du monde francophone at the University of
Toronto, the ‘Graduate Expansion Fund’, and a ‘Department of Anthropology Conference Travel
and PhD Pilot Research Fund’. The ‘Faculty of Arts and Science Fund for Study Elsewhere of
Less Commonly Taught Languages for Research Purposes’ funded my participation in a
viii
Bamana/Maninka language course and language learning during preliminary research. My
current employer World Renew allowed me time to write during study leave, I am grateful for
the recognition of the value of anthropological fieldwork.
I thank Jan Jansen for introducing me to fieldwork in Mande and Sabine Luning for
introducing me to the topic of artisanal gold mining and both for inviting me to an insightful trip
to Dagala.
My parents, siblings and extended family are a constant source of support no matter
where I land. I cannot thank them enough.
Above all, I am grateful for and always proud of Djessou (Johanna) and Solu.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ ii
Résumé Français .......................................................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................... vi
Glossary ...................................................................................................................................................... xii
Table of Figures ........................................................................................................................................ xvii
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................1
Industrial and Artisanal Mining ................................................................................................................6
Artisanal Mining as Heterotopia or Extension of Village Life ................................................................10
Selofara in the Balan-Bakama.................................................................................................................19
The Villages of the Balan-Bakama ..........................................................................................................24
The Balan-Bakama as a Mining Site .......................................................................................................27
Observations on Participant-Observation ..............................................................................................28
Production of Anthropological Knowledge .............................................................................................31
Outline .....................................................................................................................................................37
1. The Seasonality of Artisanal Gold Mining in the Balan-Bakama ...........................................................40
Balan-Bakama Livelihoods .....................................................................................................................41
Artisanal Gold Mining throughout the Year ...........................................................................................50
Geographical Distribution of Mining in the Balan-Bakama ...................................................................55
Geology of Balan-Bakama Artisanal Gold Mining .................................................................................60
Mining Governance by the State .............................................................................................................65
Buying and Selling Gold ..........................................................................................................................75
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................79
2. Social and Material Technologies of Artisanal Gold Mining in Mande .................................................81
Surface Mining: Yemasu .........................................................................................................................82
Placer Mining: Daman (yere yere) ..........................................................................................................89
Hard-Rock Mining: Woyon ...................................................................................................................108
Washing Ore ..........................................................................................................................................114
Trust and Transparency ........................................................................................................................119
Situated Risk in Artisanal Gold Mining .................................................................................................121
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................126
3. An Extraordinary Material: On Finding, Keeping, and Selling Gold in the Balan-Bakama .................128
x
An Ordinary Material ............................................................................................................................129
Golden Jewellery in the Balan-Bakama ................................................................................................132
“Gold, that is money” ...........................................................................................................................138
The Problem of Appropriating Gold .....................................................................................................145
Jinew: Guardians of Gold .....................................................................................................................149
Jinew and the Aversion of Dispute ........................................................................................................152
Divination of Jinew’s Desires ...............................................................................................................156
Making a Mining Career and Dealing with its Increasing Dangers .....................................................160
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................167
4. Negotiating Gender, Gold and Spirits in a Malian Islamic Borderland ................................................169
Changing interpretations of being Muslim in Selofara .........................................................................171
Musodugu: the Women’s Town .............................................................................................................183
Weighing Epistemologies at Balan-Bakama Sacrifices .........................................................................188
Maribayasa and the spatiality of the Mande village .............................................................................192
“Maribayasa, yeah, you are strong” ....................................................................................................195
Gender Relations at the Mine and the Home ........................................................................................201
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................204
5. Positions of Authority in Artisanal Gold Mining ..................................................................................206
Being Responsible for the Mines of the Village .....................................................................................206
The Chief of Mines and the Village Chief in the Balan-Bakama ...........................................................214
Tonbolomaw ..........................................................................................................................................216
Tonbolomaw at the Damanbe ...............................................................................................................221
Becoming Chief of Mines (damantigi) ...................................................................................................225
Finding the First Gold Nugget ..............................................................................................................228
Village and Mining Histories ................................................................................................................231
Kolanyinin: The Power of an Individual ...............................................................................................233
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................234
6. The Making of a Gold Rush: Artisanal and Industrial Gold Mining as Trajectories to Modernity ......236
Industrial Gold Mining for the Future ..................................................................................................242
Artisanal Gold Mining for the Future ...................................................................................................250
Mining Migrants in Balan-Mansala ......................................................................................................257
Regional Dynamics of Gold Mining in the Balan-Bakama ...................................................................260
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................263
xi
Concluding Remarks .................................................................................................................................265
References .................................................................................................................................................269
xii
Glossary
Maninka (Eastern dialect) is the main spoken language in the Balan-Bakama. This is a list of
Maninka (also written as Malinke; Mandinka is a different Mande language) words mentioned in
the text, spelling follows Bailleul 2007. To assure readability I have tried to limit the
independent use of Maninka words in the text. Only words that require a translation of more than
two English words are used regularly, without continuous English translation. These words are
marked here with an asterisk. In Maninka nouns are pluralized by adding a –w at the end of the
word. In Mali, personal names are usually written following French spelling. I will do that here
as well.
Badenya Positive kinship relationship, harmony (lit. mother-childness)
Bidon Yellow or green jug originally used for vegetable oil transportation. In
mining re-used for transportation of water or, cut open and with rope
attached, to haul ore out through a mining shaft (see also danka)
Biri Black sand, part of ore
Boko Mud, dirt
Bokoriya Short-handled piece of mining equipment used to loosen soil
Bolo Hand
Bonda Sub-unit of a clan, patrinlineally related group that traces descent to a
(possibly mythical) common ancestor who in most cases was the first to
move to the village of current habitation
Celon Unit of length of about 2m, from a person’s feet to outstretched arm
Dalilu Secret knowledge about specific sets of actions (including incantations)
that can be used to bring about desired results
Daman, damanda Mine: refers to both a mining site and a single shaft
Daman (yere yere) Placer-mining technique
Damanbe Event, including sacrifice, held at the beginning of the placer mining
season
Damansen ‘Foot of a mine’ area between mining shafts where soil has to be left in
place to ensure stability of the mine
Damantigi* Chief of mines (lit. one responsible for the mines)
Damantigimuso Female chief of mines
Danka Device used to haul ore out of mining shaft, often in form of a bidon
xiii
Dankun Border
Dege Millet mixed in milk, delicacy, used to offer to bush spirits during
sacrifices
Disi Unit of weight of one tenth of a gram
Dorome Five FCFA
Dugukolotigi Land chief
Duguso Washing pit at a mining site
Dugudage Calabash (or other vessel) of ore that a woman who washes ore in placer
or hard-rock mining is entitled to keep for herself; in conventional placer
mining this is every third calabash
Dugutigi Village chief
Fadenya Negative kinship relationship, jealousy (lit. father-childness, i.e. not of the
same mother)
Fanfa Ladle-like device, used to spread out last remaining ore with gold to
remove black sand
Farasen soli Short-handled pick axe
Finyewo Ventilation gallery cut between two mining galleries once gallery is at
length of a crouched person
Foro Men’s fields
Furumuso Bride
Horon Free person (as opposed to a slave)
I dansogo Praise term used by hunters and in gold mining rituals
Jamu Patronymic, last name
Jatigi Host
Jatigimuso Hostess
Jatigiya Hospitality
Jine* Bush spirit
Jine keman Male bush spirit
Jinemuso Female bush spirit
xiv
Jon Slave
Ka a diya To make something pleasant
Ka damun To eat, to consume
Ka kalifa To entrust oneself, to trust something or someone to do what one asks of it
Kalajan (soli) Long-handled pick axe
Kalajantigi Specialized miner working in gallery section of a gold mine, may work in
team or individually (lit. holder of long-handled pick axe)
Ka nya nyinin To seek success, to consult a diviner
Karamogo Teacher, diviner/healer using Islamic techniques
Kari Age group of men, in the Balan-Bakama a full age-group would be
recruited as tonbolomaw
Ka tinye To spoil, to waste
Ka wuli To stand up, to get excited
Kilisi Incantation, magic formula that may be part of a dalilu
Komugu Gallery, section of a gold mine
Koladon Ventilation gallery cut between two mining galleries at once gallery is at
length of a crouched person, lit. back-entry-place (see also finyewo)
Kunatige Soil which holds no gold but is cut by miners anyway to create a large
enough gallery for miners to move in (lit. head-space-cut)
Lolan Stranger, guest
Lu Compound, typically consisting of several households
Lutigi Head of a compound: the oldest man of the oldest generation present
Maloya Shame
Masin Machine, in 2012 masin referred especially to gold-detectors
Minan Houseware, trousseau
Minansiri Stage in wedding procedures when the bride takes her spot in the cooking-
rotation of her husband’s compound. At this point, the bride brings her
trousseau from her parents’ home. It takes place about two years after the
bride has moved in with the groom.
Musokuntigi Women’s leader, representative of all women of a village
xv
Nafen Condiments
Nara Layer of clay. In a placer, ore rests on this layer, nara itself may or may
not contain gold.
Numu Caste group whose male members are blacksmiths, women are potters
Nyama Life-force, dangerous to humans, gold that is invisible because bush spirits
do not want to share it with humans has nyama
Nyamakala Person of caste, eg. blacksmiths, griots and leatherworkers
Nye In mining: ore, i.e. soil that contains gold
Nyegedida Surface mining site (see also more commonly used yemasu)
Nyesira Row of connected mining pits
Samasen Foot or leg of a mine, where soil is left in place in the form of pillars to
ensure stability of the mine
Sanu Gold
Sanu kene ‘Living gold’: geological phenomenon whereby the ground at a mining
site cracks open, creating a fissure in the earth
Sen Foot or leg of a mine, where soil is left in place in the form of pillars to
ensure stability of the mine (see also samasen)
Senatige Ore cut from foot (sen) of a mine
Senekela Farmer
Si Clan, sub-group of people who carry the same last name (jamu). Members
of a si trace common lineage and may have a representative and powerful
objects
Sisa Smoke, gas (in artisanal mining sisa refers to carbon monoxide which is
commonly encountered danger in deep placer and hard-rock mines
Soma Diviner/healer using traditional (non-Islamic) techniques
Sugunti Triangular shaped space between the legs of a miner when digging a
mining shaft
Sugunbali Washing ore in the mining pit and the miners who do it
Togo First name
Ton Association
Tonboloma* Assistant to a chief of mines, member of an association
xvi
Woyon Hard-rock mining
Wula Bush, uncivilized space that is the realm of bush spirits
Yemasu Surface mine and technique used to mine it
xvii
Table of Figures
Figure i.1 Location of the Balan-Bakama within Mali
Figure i.2 Schematic of Balan-Bakama villages
Figure 1.1 Map of Bakama villages and active mining sites at the time of research.
Figure 1.2 Ticket to the Worofe site of Komana-Kuta
Figure 2.1 Miners collecting ore at the Musodugu surface mining site
Figure 2.2 Miners collecting ore at the Musodugu surface mining site
Figure 2.3 Landscape of the deserted part of Musodugu
Figure 2.4 Children, surrounded by water jugs, accompany their mother to Musodugu
Figure 2.5 Diagram of a placer mining gallery
Figure 2.6 Diagram of a system of eight placer mining shafts and connecting galleries
Figure 2.7 Miner starting to cut a shaft
Figure 2.8 Diagram of a row of seven placer mining shafts and their ventilation canals
Figure 2.9 Row of mining shafts
Figure 2.10 Miner hauling bucket filled with ore
Figure 2.11 Map of the Balanko placer mining site in Djelibani
Figure 2.12 Miner at work in her washing pit
Figure 2.13 Mining equipment
Figure 2.14 Diagram of a hard rock mining shaft
Figure 2.15 Miners sifting powdered hard-rock as preparation for washing
Figure 2.16 Hard-rock is broken down into smaller rocks so it can fit in metal mortars
Figure 2.17 A miner digs a new washing pit (duguso) at the Makono placer mine
Figure 2.18 Washed gold over black sand. The end product of the ore panning process
xviii
Figure 2.19 Miner mixing ore and water in a calabash
Figure 2.20 Gold washing ladle (fanfa) with a placer mining team’s findings of the day
Figure 2.21 Video-still of miner digging ore in a placer mining gallery
Figure 2.22 Traces of a placer mine, 20 to 30 years old
Figure 3.1 Receipts received by a gold trader from Balan-Mansala
Figure 3.2 Motorized water pump at the Selofara Balanko site
Figure 3.3 Gold buyer at the Balanko site of Selofara
Figure 3.4 Selofara mother of a bride with the trousseau she collected for her daughter
Figure 4.1 Maribayasa in the rainy season
Figure 4.2 ‘Kamalia’ (Kamalen) in 1796, (Park 2000[1799]
Figure 4.3 Chief of mines, Kariya Keita, is honoured by attendants
Figure 4.4 Attendants of the sacrifice at Musodugu discuss the rules that will apply during
the coming year
Figure 4.5 Three men libate the tree at Musodugu
Figure 4.6 Once slaughtered, the red goat is roasted and eaten immediately
Figure 4.7 Satellite photo showing Maribayasa’s location in the bush west of Selofara
Figure 4.8 Dance at Maribayasa
Figure 4.9 Balla Keita libates Dugunba while women and children of Selofara look on
Figure 4.10 Kids scramble for peanuts at the base of Dugunba
Figure 4.11 Nassu Keita performing libations at Maribayasa
Figure 5.1 Miners line up to claim their mining shaft during the Balan-Mansala damanbe
Figure 6.1 Solar-powered water tower in Balan-Mansala
Introduction
“L’or qui fait courir les hommes est toujours là” (Cissé, 1997: 2)
Inhabitants of what is now the modern state of Mali have engaged in artisanal gold mining for
centuries, if not millennia. It determined West-Africa and its relations with the rest of the world
(Gewald 2010) and brought some of their rulers indescribable wealth (Davidson 2015). Using
tools that resembled their agricultural and food processing tools, Mande speaking farmer-miners
mined gold from widely accessible placer deposits. They did so especially in the dry and hot
season (February-June) when rain-fed agriculture was impossible. During the Middle Ages,
people in Europe and the Arab peninsula, whose economies depended on West-African gold,
believed the gold was sourced from a “single well-defined mine” which was being hidden from
them (Gewald 2010: 140). In reality, the gold was sourced from many small mining sites spread
out over a large area.
During the 20th
century, as some nations elsewhere in the world rapidly grew richer,
artisanal mining became defined as a poverty-based economic activity, one that people take up
out of a lack of options (eg. World Bank Group in Aryee, Ntibery and Atorkui 2002: 131). This
is also the case in 21st century Mande. The experience of wealth and poverty is hard to compare
over time, but at least in 2010-11 people in Mande strongly experienced a lack of material
resources and options for employment. In the early 21st century the gold price continuously
trended upwards and all over West-Africa people from outside the gold mining zones, including
city-dwellers, joined intense gold rushes as well as lower profile gold mining operations, mostly
2
on sites that had been mined for generations. This way the number of people and communities
impacted by artisanal gold mining grew.
With the growing number of people involved in mining and the rising gold price (and the
drop in cotton prices), the Malian state has come to strongly depend on gold mining in its
artisanal and industrial forms. Gold is Mali’s largest export product. In 2016 30% of legally
exported gold1 was extracted by means of artisanal methods, 70% was extracted from industrial
mines (Diallo & Peyton 2017). In Mali, estimates of the number of people depending on artisanal
gold mining for their livelihood range from 200,000 to 1,000,000 (Keita 2001: 3; Diallo 2016).
In a situation unique to artisanal mining, women make up approximately 50-70% of this artisanal
mining workforce (Keita 2001; Panella 2010). In 2011 Mali had a total population 15.6 million
(World Bank 2016).
The increasing dependence on artisanal gold mining of Mali and many of its individual
citizens did not take place in a vacuum, but is part of a development that is pronounced in many
countries in Africa, Latin-America and Asia. Global factors in the increasing prominence of
artisanal gold mining are the rising gold price, youth unemployment and rural poverty.
This growing impact of mining has also led to increased interest of anthropologists in
issues of artisanal – and industrial – mining. However no extended study has been made of
socio-economic and local political processes in artisanal mining in Mande.2 This dissertation fills
a void on a means of production that has been central to West-African history. Mande artisanal
gold mining has several properties which make it stand out in the world of artisanal mining; first,
1 Because much of the artisanally mined gold is exported informally to avoid paying taxes, much of artisanally
mined gold goes unreported and so the total amount of gold mined by means of this method may be much higher. 2 Panella published three articles based on research in the Wasulu (2010; 2007; 2005), which are important
sources for this dissertation.
3
as mentioned, is the large share of women in the workforce of an activity that is usually defined
by men and masculinity (eg. Cuvelier 2014; Siu, Wight & Seeley 2012), secondly artisanal
mining in Mande has a long history that is recognized by miners, and thirdly artisanal mining in
Mande is strictly organized by local communities so there is no ‘frontier mentality’ (eg.
Ehrenreich 1998). In this introduction and the coming chapters I will discuss each of these topics
with regards to Mande artisanal gold mining.
In a volume on the social transformation engendered by mining in Africa (focusing on
Tanzania), Bryceson and Jønsson distinguish “[five] salient and interrelated themes … in the
African artisanal mining literature: first, debate about the significance of artisanal mining
livelihoods for poverty alleviation; second, contentious relations between artisanal and large
scale mining with regards to land, mineral rights and labour; third, artisanal miners’ extraction of
so-called conflict minerals; fourth, legal aspects of artisanal mining production and exchange;
and fifth, the environmental hazards associated with artisanal mining” (2014: 2). Bryceson and
Jønsson, and their collaborators Fisher and Mwaipopo, add to this series of themes the “largely
undocumented social and cultural dimensions of African artisanal mining, which are altering the
form and content of relations within the household, local community and nation-state, using
Tanzanian case study material for illustration” (ibid.). They claim that artisanal mining is
transformative at many different levels and that “[wherever] it commences in the African
countryside, artisanal mining is organizationally distinct from the economic principles and social
ties that pervade smallholder agriculture and pastoralism” (ibid.).
This observation of the distinction between social ties among artisanal miners and those
pervading smallholder agriculture is common (see below) but in the Mande Heartland the social
ties between small holder agriculturalists and miners are continuous. This is partly because the
4
people involved are often the same, but also because when large numbers of itinerant miners join
them temporarily in a gold rush the existing socio-economic relations of artisanal mining are
imposed on these guests. Migrant miners are forced to become part of the pattern of host-guest
relations of the village. Because the number of temporary migrants can be so great, the structure
of these relations is somewhat particular to mining but it is based on existing social ties and
hosting practices of the village. The control of village authorities concerns not only living
arrangements and other relations with people in the hosting community, but impacts all aspects
of the work including work hours, work team composition and labour relations among team
members, pricing of market products and so forth.
A similar argument can be made for economic principles; there are obviously differences
between the economic principles governing agriculture and mining because their material
realities are different and require different forms of specialized labour resulting in different
socio-economic relations. However, in Mande agriculture is firstly not necessarily the original
livelihood activity which structured socio-economic relations before new relations of mining
were imposed. The two activities have been combined in a yearly cycle for generations.
Secondly, as I will argue in chapter 1, the differences between socio-economic relations in
agriculture (which can be organized in more than one way) and in artisanal mining are not that
great and are based on the same understanding of socio-economic relations in general.
This thesis then, also analyses “social and cultural dimensions of African artisanal
mining” (ibid.), more specifically the social organization of artisanal gold mining in a part of
Mande known as the Balan-Bakama, but it does so to show how artisanal gold mining in Mande
is a particularly ‘placed’ endeavor that is strictly governed with the intent to achieve a better
future, not merely to deal with a miserable present (as the ‘artisanal mining as a symptom of
5
poverty’ thesis might imply). I use some material from gold rush sites elsewhere in the region as
these are the foci of seasonal migrant miners from the Balan-Bakama. The region itself did not
experience a gold rush – which I define as a spike of at least a 200% in the number of miners on
a particular mining site during one to five seasons – during the fieldwork period. Villagers did
hope for such a gold rush in order to attract new permanent inhabitants, especially young men
who are difficult to retain in isolated farming/mining villages. For the same reason, most Balan-
Bakama inhabitants hope that foreign mining companies will come to work in their village,
something which has only happened on a small scale up till now.
This dissertation is based on a 13 month fieldwork project in the Balan-Bakama (July
2010 to July 2011), 3 months of preliminary research in the wider Malian part of Mande
(January-March 2010), and short follow-up visits in 2012 and 2013. Many of the insights on
personal financial strategies in the context of Maninka extended families and small-scale trade
are also based on earlier fieldwork on women’s savings associations and the rituals these groups
organize. This MA and MPhil fieldwork took place January to April 2006 and October 2007 to
March 2008.
In 2010-2011, the price of gold rose from $1200 (US) to 1350$/troy ounce and also rose
rapidly in local currency, the euro-linked Franc CFA. Long-time gold miners expressed the
feeling that they were finally getting an appropriate price for their gold which is so labour-
intensive to extract. They were also relieved that because of the good rains of that year most of
them were not asked to buy complementary staple foods for the compound (or on some
‘Insufficiency’ compounds, no more than usual). Because of the high gold price, total time spent
on mining was increasing. In addition there was increasing interest from industrial mining
6
companies, especially exploration companies, which owned exploration permits but hadn’t used
them for serious exploration in previous years.
In the year following the fieldwork, the Malian government fell in a military coup. The
weakness of the state in the capital and in the rural areas had long been visible (Mann 2015)
including in its approach to artisanal gold mining; the main source of income for hundreds of
thousands of its citizens. The governance and taxation of artisanal gold mines had been left to
local traditional authorities. When in May 2011 local governments were suddenly instructed to
force a hiatus in mining for the rainy season, they were unable to do so and after some hesitation
the mining cycle continued.
Industrial and Artisanal Mining
Artisanal gold mining, also known as small-scale or traditional gold mining or abbreviated as
ASM (Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining) is characterized by its labour intensiveness, low level
of technology and small size of labour units (mining teams). Industrial gold mining on the other
hand, which is also known as large-scale or mechanized gold mining, is characterized by its low
level of labour intensiveness, aided by a high level of capital-intensive technology applied in
large size labour units. Some studies also identify a third middle level of organization with
smaller scale industrial operations generally run by individuals from the country where the
mining takes place (eg. Ghose 1997). This may apply to areas like Kenieba in western Mali and
increasingly to Dagala in the Mande Mountains where Malian investors have brought in ore
crushing and washing machines. In the Balan-Bakama, the region of focus here, no such middle
level is recognizable so I will only discuss artisanal and to a certain extent industrial modes of
gold mining.
7
Industrial and artisanal gold miners obviously have a similar goal of finding gold and
making a profit in the process but the differences are great and so are the anthropological
approaches used in studying them. Globally, actors of the two mining methods often meet
because they work in the same geographical areas, as they do in Siguiri (Guinea) and the Sikasso
and Kenieba areas of Mali, but this is not a given. The reason is that industrial gold miners
generally extract gold from hard-rock deposits while artisanal miners mostly mine alluvial placer
deposits. This global division of labour is changing because artisanal miners are increasingly
engaged in mining from hard-rock deposits (see chapters 1 and 3). Still, in the Balan-Bakama
and the surrounding area there were no large industrial mines even though nearby Kouremale,
Koflate and Dagala are important centers of artisanal gold mining. Industrial mining corporations
and junior exploration companies did hold exploration permits in the Balan-Bakama but they
were not engaged in more than the minimum investment of time and money required to hold
their permits (see chapter 6) so in this case there was hardly an opportunity for conflict between
representatives of the two modes of gold mining.
In their influential 2003 review of the anthropology of mining (with focus on large-scale
hard-rock mines located near indigenous communities), Ballard and Banks observe that the body
of anthropological literature on industrial mining has grown in tandem with the mining sector
itself. The sector experienced a “remarkable boom in mineral prices [in] the late 1970s and early
1980s [which] promoted an explosion of mineral prospecting activity across the globe.... Most of
the mining projects realized [in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s] as a result of the 1980s
exploration bonanza have been located in greenfield territories or frontier zones, among
relatively remote or marginalized indigenous communities … often precisely those communities
that have been the classic focus of ethnographic research” (288). Because many of the new mines
8
were opened in locations that were familiar to anthropology and individual anthropologists, a
large number of studies of mining in the 1990’s focused on the relations between ‘mines’ (as a
monolithic entity: op.cit.: 290) and local populations. This theme continues to be of great interest
to anthropologists though the field has been widened and specified since then. Anthropologists
have unpacked the actions and points of view of both corporations who have become more
intentionally involved in local communities through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
activities (Cochrane 2017; Dolan & Rajak 2016; Rajak 2011), of local communities as
complicated groups of diverse individuals and sub-groups who are made into ‘a stakeholder’
(Dyer 2017; Golub 2014; Vásquez 2014), and of national law and modes of governance
(Campbell 2013). Rajak for example, studied the Corporate Social Responsibility approach of
staff at one of Anglo-American’s South-African mines and its headquarters in London and found
that the discourse of CSR and its practical implementation allowed the corporation to become
even more invasive in the life of the town community and that of individual workers (2011).
Ballard and Banks (2003), though discussing some of the limits of the triad stakeholder
model, insist that “the various institutions that relate to the three categories – corporation, state,
and community – have a persistent presence” (290).3 This shared foundation of studies on
industrial mining – including more recent ones – is the main cause for the divide between the
anthropology of industrial mining and that of artisanal mining. In artisanal mining stakeholders
are less clearly defined and the three main categories of stakeholders of industrial mining are not
always present in artisanal mining. In the Balan-Bakama, the state has little involvement in
artisanal gold mining, and, as is central to the argument of this dissertation, miners are either
members of the community or they temporarily (and community members hope permanently)
3 In addition to these three categories, other stakeholders have been identified and analyzed by anthropologists
like for example NGO’s and activists, and anthropologists themselves.
9
become part of it at least to some extent.4 Though local communities may gain a stake in the
mine that is established in their vicinity (Kirsch 2014) or feel they have an interest through the
work of competent community liaisons (Cochrane 2017) the divide remains. This body of
anthropological literature on industrial mining is therefore based on the premise that an industrial
mine is an outside entity that comes to be imposed on the local community, often by invitation of
the national government, and this imposition is then mediated through ‘community stakeholder
consultations’, ‘community relations staff’ and ‘corporate social responsibility’. In artisanal
mining, miners may impose themselves on local communities, or ignore them, but in the Balan-
Bakama and wider Mande this is clearly not the case, sometimes to the surprise of miners from
outside the region who suddenly find themselves having to follow strict rules from a local chief
of mines.
The materiality of industrial gold mining is very different from that of artisanal gold
mining. As a result anthropologists tend to ask different questions of industrial gold mining and
come to different analyses. Industrial gold mining is highly capital intensive, often in contrast to
economic activities in the surrounding communities, and so analyses deal with global capital
flows, corporate investor relations etc. Much of this capital is used to pay for machinery,
logistics and for the highly educated – often expatriate – workforce that handles these within
industrial enclaves. Artisanal mining, on the other hand, requires per definition low capital
investment and this capital is commonly sourced locally and most of the time it is invested by the
miner him or herself. Because a low level of technology is used, miners do not need specific
formal education.
4 As a result, many of the arguments of classic and new studies on mine workers (those working with relatively
simple tools underground as studied in the 1970’s by Nash (1979) and Taussig (1980) as well as those manning large ore haul trucks (Rolston 2014)) do not apply to Mande artisanal miners. On the small mining sites of the Balan-Bakama where most miners are locals, hyper-masculinity and conspicuous consumption are not issues of note.
10
Even though the theme of the encounter between a mining community or individual
migrant miners and local sedentary communities is common to both artisanal and industrial
mining, the analyses of the two forms of mining have little in common. There is little actual
communication between the two bodies of anthropological literature, including in studies of
collision between the two modes of mining (eg. Hilson 2012; Banchirigah 2008). In chapter 6
however, I will discuss the way in which both industrial and artisanal gold mining were
envisioned by inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama as a way to a more modern future. People
imagined, in a way analogous to the actual experience of Zambian copperminers (Ferguson
1999), that if they were to establish a gold rush, their town and especially the lives of the young
men of the town would become more modern. This is an idea that is more common with regards
to industrial mines, and people in the Balan-Bakama were indeed also trying to attract an
industrial mine to their region. In order to secure an image of modernity in which salaried
employment for their young men was central, villagers attempted to either attract an industrial
mine or stimulate artisanal gold mining so the population of their village would increase and the
village would attract more services that would provide jobs.
Artisanal Mining as Heterotopia or Extension of Village Life
In the rainy season of 1797 Scottish explorer Mungo Park was welcomed into ‘Kamalia’ in what
is now the Balan-Bakama.5 His host Karfa Taura (Karifa Toure in current Malian spelling), a
slave trader, was also en route to the Gambian coast. Having travelled by horse and on foot from
what is now The Gambia to the banks of the Niger near Segou6 before heading south, Park was
5 The village of Kamalen to which Park refers (see also Kamalé on maps in Gallieni 1885: 627) does not exist
anymore. Kamalen was one of the five villages of the Bakama, but its inhabitants all moved to neighbouring villages during the 70’s and 80’s out of fear of sorcery. 6 A distance of 1,167 km.
11
struck by an apparent contradiction; he found himself in a region where “[Gold] is found in
considerable quantities throughout every part …; a country which is indeed hilly but cannot
properly be called mountainous, much less barren” (2000[1799]: 308). Having recovered from
supposed malaria he spent a month studying Maninka customs and devotes a number of pages of
his published journals to “gold dust, and the manner in which it is collected” (ibid.), a description
to which I will come back in chapter 4.
Park was obviously writing before the main gold rushes of the 19th
century which opened
up the gold fields of California and Witwatersrand; areas even less ‘barren’ than Mande.
However, his general assumption, of metals and minerals being found in harsh and isolated
environments has often been evoked. More often than not (gold) mining areas are imagined as a
socially empty frontier. Famous gold rushes certainly did not consider local populations much
(California, Australia, etc.) and quickly imprinted their own system of law and order and land
rights on the people and the landscape they encountered. Most mining operations, including gold
rushes, took place in inhabited areas (Ehrenreich 1998: 109) but the disregard for local systems
of governance by gold hungry miners (Ehrenreich 1998) and the construction of Wild-West
types of governance within mining communities have remained common themes in
anthropological accounts of artisanal mining.
When considering relations between artisanal mining operations and surrounding
communities, two diverging trends are discernable in the anthropological literature; one that
views artisanal mining communities as communities of occupation, disconnected from
surrounding permanent communities, and one that views these communities as placed. The first
observes that artisanal mining, though obviously concerned with the geological materiality of its
location, is often unconcerned with the socio-political place where it is exercised. In this view, a
12
mining camp is seen as “a community of occupation, not of place” (Muhly 1998: xv). Miners in
such camps are itinerant (see World Bank definition below), searching for their fortune by
following gold rushes from site to site (Bryceson et al. 2014; Douglass 1998),7 the governance of
which does not consider local and/or national political structures, religious sensitivities and
systems of land rights. Gold miners subsequently impress their own power structure on the new
community (Grätz 2010; Werthmann 2009a, 2009b; Walsh 2006; Bell 1998; Ehrenreich 1998;
Hardesty 1998).
In a study of North-Beninese artisanal gold miners which focuses on work relationships
and politics among people within mining camps and sites, Grätz’ interprets these mines as semi-
autonomous social fields (2010:105). A semi-autonomous social field is “generally characterised
by the existence of norms und sanctions which are valid within a limited social frame and which
are accepted by the interdependent actors the field is composed of” (Grätz 2004: 2). Grätz shows
that the Beninese artisanal mining communities are self-governed by sets of norms and rules that
are unique to mining sites and that do not follow the legal principles of the state8 which
categorizes small-scale mining as illegal. Miners however, also act within the structure of the
state – hence ‘semi-autonomous’ – which governs other aspects of their lives, thereby limiting
the possibilities for conflict resolution methods and migration dynamics in the mines (op.cit:
2,7,13). Grätz argues against the notion of a ‘wild west’; mining sites have their own norms,
rules, and methods of conflict resolution which may be different from those in other social fields
but that tend to be accepted by all miners present (op.cit: 17). Conflict is further discouraged by
7 Douglass suggests one of the main reasons for the sparseness of social anthropological literature on mining is its
geographical dynamism (1998: 97). 8 Grätz sees the Beninese state as the main point of reference for defining artisanal mines as a semi-autonomous
social field. However he also recognizes that miners’ degree of autonomy is much smaller in relation to rural communities in the vicinity of the mines which dictate to the mining community much more precisely their ways on issues like the integration of strangers (2004: 17).
13
patron-client relations (op.cit: 16) and friendships (Grätz 2003) in an economic field based on
debt and chance.
Where Grätz describes the social fields in Beninese mines as semi-autonomous social
fields, Werthmann classifies Burkinabe artisanal mines as heterotopias (2009a: 214). She
follows Douglass’ model of a mining site as a community without place (op.cit: 216), in
Foucault’s terms a heterotopia. A heterotopia is a ‘world apart’ and a ‘placeless place’ in which
people can go through certain processes of transformation and reflection which tend to be banned
from the space of daily interactions (op.cit: 218). In defining mine camps as ‘communities
without place’ Werthmann refers primarily to the community of itinerant miners who have met
each other at different mining sites throughout Burkina Faso since the start of the mining boom
in the early 1990’s.9 She defines gold mines as ‘heterotopias’ in connection to women who work
primarily as ore-crushers, petty traders or food servers (2009b). For these women, mines provide
a space where they can pursue economic activities without being closely watched by relatives
(op.cit: 20). The discovery of gold near her village offers a woman new income generating
opportunities and alternative lifestyles. Women with marriage problems are especially attracted
to life in the mines. This is typically due to the arrival of a second wife, delays in bride price
payments or her refusal of a levirate arrangement. Though mines offer them opportunities for
empowerment, women at mines are also in danger of acquiring a bad reputation (op.cit: 18)
precisely because different sets of rules are known to apply at mining sites.
Walsh describes how a (sapphire-) mining boom in northern Madagascar saw “a sleepy
village of several hundred rice farmers overtaken by hordes of disrespectful young prospectors
intent on nothing but sapphires, money and ‘la vie’” (2006: 4). Sapphire-hungry miners
transgressed the taboos concerning places and time of work of a community whose members had
9 Before the 1990’s small-scale gold mining had been absent from Burkina Faso for decades.
14
not realized the value of these stones before (Walsh 2009). However some villagers too dig for
sapphires and while doing so they also transgress those taboos which they support in other
situations. By situating ethics in particular places and social and economic relations, people
allow themselves to refer to different moral codes in different situations. This practice however,
does not challenge the “sense of how life ought to be in this community” (Walsh 2006: 6,
emphasis in original). Through this analysis we also see that mining and its accompanying
desires, ethics and relationships, are fundamentally different from those in the original rice-
growing community. Though at least some inhabitants rather easily switch from one mindset to
another, this practice does imply that mines are external to the community and are not
‘appropriated’ by it. During a boom, Malagasy miners cannot be made to follow existing taboos
and form a world apart.
Herbert argues against such a ‘culture of mining’ which would imply that on mining sites
a culture develops which is purely based on the extractive economy, existing independently of
surrounding communities. She points out that “[artisanal] mining [in Sub-Saharan Africa]
involves a great variety of patterns, but individually these mirror the societies of which they are
part rather than being unique to the mining activity itself” (1998: 140). Herbert indicates that the
main differences lie in two areas; “the social and gender categories of the miners” and “the
degree of ritualization associated with mining and the elements of the rituals themselves” (ibid.).
She continues by introducing a number of examples that show the different constitution of
mining communities and different taboos and rituals associated with mining.
This thesis will take Herbert’s argument further by showing how communities in Mande
work actively and successfully to control and appropriate artisanal mines. In doing so, they make
artisanal gold mining a relatively mundane means of earning a living that reflects local patterns
15
of social relations, and an alternative to market horticulture and hunting. In contrast to the
Malagasy case presented by Walsh, Mande mines are governed by the authorities of the village
in whose territory they are located. Transgressions of taboos regarding times of work, location of
pits and (underground) directions of shafts are constantly policed by tonbolomaw, appointed by
the chief of mines. Mines and miners are not seen as external forces threatening the stability and
control of village communities, but instead present a path to a particular West-African rural
modernity and an element in inter-village rivalries. To attract miners from elsewhere and mine
successfully themselves, villagers (men and women) perform communal and individual rituals
whose styles are not unique to mining but follow patterns similar to those of other rituals. Mining
in Mande is a particular field of social action which is intentionally integrated into the social
relations, institutions and politics of village communities. This integration leads to important
differences in the governance of mines, not only between far-off regions as Herbert indicates but
also between neighbouring villages who claim that ‘our villages are all the same’.
Why mine?
“You know, when we lived in Narena I also washed for gold. I used to pull the cord. It
was very tough work; my shoulders always hurt [points at her shoulders, shoulder blades
and clavicles, EK]. When my sister-in-law came to visit she said to me “Assetou, you
shouldn’t be doing this, it’s too hard on your body. You’d be better off trading.” From
then on I sold bread for 10 dorome [50 FCFA, EK] per chunk and I sold spaghetti. Every
morning I would prepare a lot of spaghetti to sell at the mine” (Assetou Diabate,
Bancoumana, February 14 2011).10
Artisanal miners the world over have a tough job. They often work in harsh environments which
are very hot or very cold, too dry to work comfortably, or too humid. Their work is physically
10
All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
16
straining and often dangerous (Taussig 2004). In the Balan-Bakama many miners spoke about
how they suffered from exhaustion and aching bodies. Working in surface mining was most
straining in this regard; by working individually there were no regular breaks embedded in the
work. This stands in to contrast to work in placer and hard-rock mining, where men and women
worked in teams or regularly had to wait for their turn for other reasons (see chapter 2). Though
it was not uncommon to hear about accidents involving women, especially incurred on the
uneven surface mining landscape11
, miners only considered men’s work as dangerous. Since they
work under the surface in the galleries, men run the more obvious and dramatic risk of collapsing
mines, which either crush or trap them. Other dangers in the galleries included carbon monoxide
poisoning and drowning.12
Since the early 1980’s the gold price has slowly crept up and artisanal gold mining has
intensified worldwide (Godoy 1985), spurring gold rushes in areas that hadn’t seen this type of
mining for decades or longer like Burkina Faso (Werthmann 2009b: 18; Luning 2008),
California (BBC 2010) and Mongolia (High 2008: 2). In the Balan-Bakama, like in other parts of
Mande which have a centuries-long tradition of artisanal gold mining, artisanal mining occupied
a much larger share of the population than in the 1960’s and 70’s, and had spread into peripheral
areas like Selofara and into the rainy season.
According to the generally accepted World Bank Group interpretation, “Small-scale
mining is largely a poverty-driven activity, typically practiced in the poorest and most remote
rural areas of a country by a largely itinerant, poorly educated populace with few employment
11
While doing interviews with migrants in Balan-Mansala, Ibrahim Camara and I ran into the mother of a friend of his. She was on her way to a traditional healer. She had injured her back when she slipped on a hill on the surface mine while carrying a full calabash. In the rainy season of 2010 two women had been crushed and killed by falling boulders on the surface mine of Bokorila when they tried to remove ore from under the rocks. 12
See Chapter 4 for more on the gendered nature of accidents and the strategies miners follow individually and collectively to avoid them.
17
alternatives” (in Aryee, Ntibery and Atorkui 2002: 131). Though the Balan-Bakama was by far
not the poorest or most remote region of Mali because of relatively abundant rainfall and
proximity to the capital, artisanal mining can certainly be seen as a poverty-driven activity,
engaged in by people with few or no viable alternatives. People often talked to me about how
they would prefer to do other work, about their wish to live in Bamako or abroad where there are
more options, or about their wishes for more formal employment in the region, for example with
large scale-mining companies (see chapter 6).
Hilson adds that artisanal mining is not just an occupation but a way of life that is
generally associated with deteriorated socio-economic circumstances (2003: xxiiv, my
emphasis). He and others argue that the sudden expansion of artisanal mining in many so-called
developing countries is a result of the infamous Structural Adjustment Plans of the 1980’s and
90’s (eg. Banchirigah 2006; Hilson & Potter 2005: 113). Banchirigah points out that Ghanaian
former civil servants turned to (illegal) artisanal mining due to the inability of new industrial
mining operations to absorb them into their workforce (2006: 167). They become miners in an
attempt to uphold the standard of living of their families.
This analysis is not shared by Werthmann who states that in Burkina Faso there is no
significant number of dismissed state employees who work in artisanal mining. Instead,
“[informal] mining in Burkina Faso … provides an alternative to other kinds of work in the
informal sector and to labour migration, or it is a seasonal occupation during the non-farming
period” (2009b: 19). In this regard, the situation of Burkinabe miners is comparable to that of
miners in the Balan-Bakama where practically all miners hailed from rural areas. Even in gold
boom areas like Dagala and Dabale the large majority of miners farmed in the rainy season
18
instead of continuing to mine or going home to Bamako or another city. 13
In regions where gold
mining competes with other sectors that were strongly affected by Structural Adjustment Plans
(SAP’s) like the Wassoulou area in southern Mali where a lot of cotton is grown, the SAP’s
arguably had a more direct influence on the growing importance of mining since with a
diminished income from cotton, gold mining became more profitable for farmers by comparison
(Panella 2010).
However, the most important factor in the increasing prominence of gold mining in
Mande was the rising gold price (Panella 2005: 426,428; Keita 2001). After the abolition of the
gold exchange standard in 1971 the gold price has risen surprisingly steadily with peaks during
the financial and economic crises14
of the 2000’s and that of the early 1980’s.15
It is not a
coincidence that in the same period the gold deposits around Selofara and other villages
peripheral in Mande gold mining started to be mined more regularly by local villagers. Unlike in
other regions where gold mining seems to have boomed out of nothing recently (Grätz 2010;
Bryceson et al. 2014), in Mande gold mining always remained a realistic option that people
weighed against other dry season activities like hunting and horticulture. While the price of gold
rose, the relative isolation of the Balan-Bakama had intensified as the neighbouring Mande
Heartland became more closely connected to Bamako through road improvements, cell-phone
reception and the growth of Bamako. In the process of its intensification, gold mining came to be
seen as a path to modernity.
13
The mine of Kenieba, near Kayes on the border with Senegal may present a different case. Unfortunately no studies of this area have been published but it is a site that has been very intensively mined for a long time using more capital intensive technology. 14
An interesting aspect of the economic and financial crises was the return of artisanal miners to the historic goldfields of California and Australia. Though much of this could be considered tourism or recreation, for some miners full time artisanal gold mining paid off due to high gold prices and low prospects for a well-paying alternative (BBC 2008; NOS 2011). 15
Though gold is notorious for the countercyclical nature of its world market price; when looking at the price since 1971 one can see that historically the price has risen steadily, never returning to the gold standard price of $35 US per ounce.
19
Selofara in the Balan-Bakama
During my fieldwork I lived in the village of Selofara. The community was initially established
under the name Sidagu, located in the Mande Mountains just north of the present location of
Selofara. Sidagu was established by two brothers of the Bokori clan (si), the clan that still holds
the office of village chief (dugutigi, lit. person responsible for the village).16
A century ago the
villagers of Sidagu moved from the top of the escarpment to Kurukolo, a location close to the
current one, at the foot of the Mande Mountains, in a region known as the Balan-Bakama. Sixty
years ago, the inhabitants of Kurukolo moved again, because of a lack of water, and settled on
the west bank of a small stream where villagers made gardens. These gardens were abandoned in
favour of artisanal gold mining, but travelers still passed through a mango orchard before
entering the village of Selofara. As compounds moved their old homes, Selofara slowly crept
westwards to avoid flooding in the lower lying eastern part of the village. In 2011 Selofara had
approximately 1500 inhabitants, the majority of whom were members of one of the seven large
families of the village. Two of these were nyamakala (caste) families with the patronymics
(jamuw) Kante and Diabate, who both practiced their caste occupation of, respectively,
blacksmithing and public speaking (griots). Of the other families, 4 carried the patronymic Keita
but were all of different clans (siw), the fifth were called Traore.17
Many of the Keita clans had split up into different compounds (luw). Compounds are
architectural and social units, consisting of a cluster of huts and square rooms often surrounded
16
At the time of fieldwork there was a conflict about which of the two old Bokorisi compounds should hold the office of village chief, but as the village chief did not have much influence over the proceedings at the local mines – in Selofara and elsewhere in the Balan-Bakama – I will not discuss the issue here. Conflicts about the office of village chief are commonplace in Mande; my previous research location of Bancoumana had not had a village chief for the past 26 years due to such a conflict and in 2011 installed 2 chiefs. These conflicts generally have little impact on village life as the ‘first assistant’ to the village chief will take over his role in decision making. 17
Over half of the inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama (and the wider region) have the patronymic Keita. Named individuals presented in this dissertation are therefore also often named Keita (see for example table 5.1). This does not mean that they are considered related.
20
by a low (1-1.5m) wall inhabited by one or more households whose male heads of household are
patrilineally related, and guests. Most Selofara compounds were inhabited by several households.
The male heads of household were related as brothers, half-brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers etc.
Each man and his wife or wives, his children, and sometimes an elderly mother occupied a part
of the compound and formed their own household.
In classificatory terms, this virilocal residence pattern involves men who settle ‘at home’
with wives who are strangers to the compound. This is indeed the basic principle of settlement
and marriage but in the Balan-Bakama, several processes were at play that traversed virilocality.
The majority of men migrated to cities or other regions or countries and therefore did not
actually settle on the home compound. Often they were accompanied by a wife from their home
region but since women were always expected to move away from their compound of birth this
was rarely discussed by men or women, while men would often list all the men from the
compound or sons of their father who had moved elsewhere. Also, after a gold rush several
young men had stayed in Balan-Mansala and had married a wife from the village. Though they
set up new compounds and did not join the compound of their wife, many had initially struggled
with the relative matrilocality (see chapter 6). Finally, the distance between the home of the bride
and that of the groom was decreasing. Increasingly, women from the Balan-Bakama married in
their village of origin and because they already had strong ties there, they would be well-
positioned for informal positions of leadership. Another group of women marrying Balan-
Bakama men came from villages on the Mande Plateau. In Selofara these women had organized
themselves in an association and among this group the younger women tended to come from
villages closer to the escarpment and thus closer to Selofara than older women.
21
In all villages of the Balan-Bakama, endogamy was strongly adhered to at the level of
caste; freemen (horonw) and people of caste nyamakalaw like blacksmiths and griots would not
intermarry. In some villages of the Mande Heartland endogamy was abandoned in the twentieth
century (Florusbosch 2011: 237) but in the Balan-Bakama elders strongly supported the practice.
Intermarriage among families of different ethnic backgrounds, primarily Maninka and Fulani (or
Fula, Peul in francophone literature), was common and generally accepted.18
On a compound, each of the household clusters had its own kitchen (sometimes each co-
wife had her own), a latrine, women’s granaries and a number of huts or a larger building with
bedrooms. On most Selofara compounds, all members ate together (split by gender and age)
three times a day and these meals were cooked for them by the women of the compound in
rotation. 19
The men of the compound farmed the staple food – millet – together in a farm team
while the women farmed sauce ingredients individually on neighbouring plots. The land they
farmed was owned by the compound. Each compound was headed by the oldest man of the
oldest generation who, often together with the other married men, would make decisions on land,
guests and conflict-resolution. I lived on a compound of the Kasuma clan which held the office
of chief of the mines (damantigi, lit. person responsible for the mine). The clan, whose ancestors
had moved here from neighbouring Djelibani and who came originally from Taboun, had
established four compounds when the one original compound had become overcrowded.
However, when a conflict about the control of land erupted between people of my compound and
the village chief (whose position was already contested), the Kasuma relatives combined their
18
The great majority of inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama identifies as Maninka; Fulani form a small minority of one to two small families per village. As Maninka dominate in numbers and in the organization of gold mining, I will primarily refer to them. Mining is not restricted to any ethnic group. 19
Only married women who do not (yet) have a resident daughter-in-law cook compound meals.
22
diplomatic powers, invited their relatives from Djelibani, and eventually managed to retain the
status quo.
In 1962, two years after Malian independence an elementary school was built in Selofara.
The advisor of the first president Modibo Keita hailed from Komana-Kuta and insisted on
building a school in the region of his birth. The school had later expanded to include a middle
school, which still served as a regional school for Djelibani, whose students came by bike, and
Namakana and Mambila which had both built compound-style dorms in Selofara. Students lived
here during the school year and were served meals by women from their villages who lived in
Selofara in rotation. In 2011, Mambila started building its own middle school (grades 7-9) as
school attendance and the population were increasing. Because generations of villagers of
Selofara had had the opportunity to attend school, the population was relatively well-educated;
with more adults (both male and female) literate in French or Maninka than I had experienced
elsewhere in rural Mande.
Besides the school, other public services in the village were the clinic which was built by
Plan international and staffed by a locally paid midwife and nurse. In the winter of 2010-2011
the nurse left the village and the local health committee started looking for a new nurse or doctor.
Due to bureaucratic barriers it took almost a year but through contacts in Bamako a Malian
doctor who had worked for MSF in Chad was found willing to work in Selofara. By the time I
visited in 2012, his services were so well used by people from Selofara and surrounding villages
that his full salary could be paid from consultation and medicine fees so the health committee
had cancelled the special tax they had imposed earlier. Selofara was traversed by a local dirt road
that connected all Balan-Bakama villages. The road was used throughout the year. Once or twice
23
a day a Sotrama (van with benches in the back) travelled through the Balan-Bakama and brought
people to or from Bamako (see below).
Inhabitants of Selofara obtained their food primarily through subsistence agriculture which
for men was a family enterprise in which all men of a compound worked together (see chapter
1). Women grew ingredients for the sauce (especially peanuts) on individual parcels they
requested from and that were allocated by their compounds’ male workgroup. The main source
of money (Francs CFA) at the time of research was gold mining. Almost all capable adults were
involved in gold mining at some point during the year. Very few other informal resource
generating activities were developed by inhabitants of Selofara; some women sold breakfast or
snacks (especially at the school gates), there was one mechanic and three general store owners.
The local school counted approximately 15 teachers, none of whom were from Selofara itself.
Many sons and daughters of Selofara had moved to Bamako or abroad; Ivory Coast, Guinea and
Senegal being popular destinations. Some had moved out of Sub-Saharan Africa to Spain or
Libya.20
20
After the fall of the Khadaffi regime, the Malian government repatriated many Malians who had lived and worked in Libya.
24
Figure i.1 Location of the Balan-Bakama within Mali
The Villages of the Balan-Bakama
Balan-Bakama is the name of a ‘commune rurale’, located 110 kilometers south of the Malian
capital of Bamako, straddling the border with Guinea (Conakry) (see Figure i.1). It is part of the
cercle of Kangaba and the region of Koulikoro. As the name indicates, the region is constituted
of two customary regions known as the Balan and the Bakama. The Balan encompasses the
villages of Balan-Komana, Balan-Mansala and Djelibani. Since Kamalen had ceased to exist, the
Bakama consisted of Selofara, Namakana, Mambila and Komana-Kuta. At the time of
decentralization (1995-96) (Zobel 2004), internal politics had led Balan-Komana, one of the two
large villages comprising the Balan, to decide to join the commune rurale of its founding village
Narena. Outside of the politics related to the state, Balan-Komana was considered to be part of
the Balan-Bakama and therefore for the purposes of this study it is included in the term Balan-
Bakama unless otherwise noted.
25
Six villages were formally united by a decentralized local government, based in Balan-
Mansala, but in daily experience the main uniting factor was a particular spatial pattern; all
villages of the Balan-Bakama were strung together by the unpaved road to Niagassola in Guinea
that branched off the international road (paved in 2006) from Bamako to Conakry. This is the
only road in the region that is navigable by car:
Figure i.2 Schematic of Balan-Bakama villages (see figure 1.1 for map of the Bakama)
The road cut through the centres of all seven villages, whose inhabitants run into each other
whenever they travel. Once a day, a large van fitted with seats travelled from Komana-Kuta to
Bamako and back, picking up and dropping off villagers from the whole region as it moved
through the Balan-Bakama. On Mondays, when the only week-market of the region was held in
Balan-Mansala and kids went back to school in Selofara, one Sotrama made several trips through
the region. The once-daily Sotramas to Bamako and the Monday Sotrama to Balan-Mansala were
the only form of public transportation available. Private transportation between villages took
place primarily on motorbike, by bicycle and on foot (neighbourhing villages are are at 5-10
kilometres distance).
26
The population of each of the seven villages was for the largest part of Maninka ethnicity.
Maninka are a Mande ethnic group who in West-Africa were primarily known for inhabiting the
artisanal mining zone and for their expertise in mining. Other ethnic groups inhabiting the region
were Fula (Peul) who traditionally are cattle herders and many of whom made a living by
herding cattle belonging to themselves and their Maninka neighbours, and Bamana, the largest
ethnic group of Mali. With few exceptions all inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama were Muslim.
Villages are important spatial and political entities in Maninka social organization. In the
Balan-Bakama there were a number of hamlets where a number of work teams from one specific
village live during the rainy season but otherwise no one lives outside the grouping of
compounds that comprise a village. All seven villages had a founding family; a group of people
whose male ancestor(s) had first established the village and who had the right to appoint a village
chief (dugutigi) from among their ranks. Most villages, like Selofara, also had other large
compounds inhabited by people of a particular clan (si) and sub-clan (bonda) whose ancestors
had lived in the village for a long time. Men of these compounds were closely involved in village
politics. Other villages like Djelibani and Balan-Mansala were primarily inhabited by one large
founding family and some small one-household compounds who had recently migrated to the
village and whose involvement in village politics would not be easily accepted. Villages were
political entities that presented themselves as a unit to outsiders, had a number of institutions in
which people from all over the village organized themselves and governed certain aspects of
their lives (eg. the women’s group, the village health committee). Villages selected a
27
representative chief of mines who governed the mines and villages formed set of relations for the
organization of life stage rituals like weddings and funerals.21
The Balan-Bakama as a Mining Site
In 1935 the French colonial administration considered implementing ‘Reserves en faveur des
indigenes’; areas where foreign mining companies would be banned in favor of artisanal gold
mining by ‘indigenous’ subjects. Engineers mapped the main mining regions of the South-
Soudan (as Mali was called before independence); the Kenieba region south of Kayes in western
Mali, and the Mande Heartland area to the south east of Bamako on the border with Guinea. On
the map of the Mande Heartland, the main mining area noted was that of border town Kuremale,
with Koflate to the south and Balankomana and Balansamaya (Balan-Mansala) to the east.
Selofara and other Bakama villages went unmentioned.22
This spatial distribution of mining matched the experience of elderly people23
in Selofara.
They explained me how they would walk with their relatives to Balan-Mansala to search for gold
(sanu). Only in the 1980’s, when the price of gold started rising globally and the prices of local
agricultural products dropped, did those who stayed home to take care of children and elderly
again start mining the low-density deposits of the Bakama. This was certainly not the first time
in history that gold had been searched for and found in the Bakama. Mungo Park, who travelled
through the region in 1797 observed people of Kamalen (then a Bakama village) employing at
least three different gold mining techniques.
21
In Selofara, boys’ circumcision used to be one of the rituals organized collectively by the village but at the time of research each compound organized the ritual for their own sons. Girls’ excision rituals were still organized collectively. 22
Malian National Archives at ACI2000 (MNAA) Tome I.3Q1508 (1935). 23
I interviewed many men and women who were in their 70’s and 80’s.
28
At the time of my research, in 2010-11, artisanal gold mining was a vital industry in all
villages of the Balan-Bakama. Almost all able bodied adults worked in the mines during the dry
season. Some travelled to far-away mines in larger Mande (eg. Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire), but many
tried to sleep at home and travel each day to the mines of their own village or a neighbouring
village (see chapter 6). During the rainy season women worked at surface mines whenever they
could find the time and enough free water (later they started paying for water). The recent
discovery and popularization of hard-rock mining had opened up the opportunity for men to
continue mining during the rainy season as well. This changed the nature of this season, during
which men used to be almost exclusively working on the fields. Now a few men living in
Selofara were year round miners, others mined whenever they were not needed in the fields.
Observations on Participant-Observation
Participatory observation is the core methodology of sociocultural anthropology. In a volume on
anthropologists’ experiences with the methodology and the seeming contradiction between
participation and observation Hume and Mulcock explain that “the rationale for this approach is
that; by ‘being there’ and actively taking part in the interactions at hand, the researcher can come
closer to experiencing and understanding the ‘insider’s’ point of view” (2004: xi). So the
rationale is that through participation in interactions, work and events, ie. through doing, one
learns about the experience, the thinking, of the people being studied. Anthropologists have long
debated the level to which they should participate as well as the level to which this participation
and the words of informants allow one to draw conclusions about values and lived experiences of
those informants.
Was Evans-Pritchard engaging in participant-observation when he peeked from under his
tent flaps to catch a glimpse of village life before summoning a Zande informant for an interview
29
(1965: 15)? To what extent does one’s need to share in the daily life of ones informants to gain
insight into their lived world? And does this necessarily include participation in the activities of
one’s main research topic, in this case artisanal gold mining? And even if a foreign
anthropologist participates in practically all of the daily activities of her informants, does this
necessarily bring her that much closer to the lived experiences of her informants? Hume and
Mulcock conclude that in addition to being a source of much useful data, “participant
observation is primarily an ‘advanced’ exercise in forming and maintaining intimate
relationships for professional purposes” (2004: xii). I would at least add that in many places
where anthropologists do their research (especially in rural areas) participation in daily life is a
prerequisite for survival.
In Mande, an often-heard compliment to foreign visitors is ‘you have become a real
Maninka’ (’I kera Maninka yere yere di’). The compliment is freely distributed; I was thus
complimented in 2006 when I uttered my first Maninka greetings, and then when I found my
way to a savings association’s meeting without help. Though I was painfully aware of my own
inadequacy at acting like ‘a real Maninka’, I appreciated the encouragement, the attempt at
inclusion and the self-confidence that was expressed in the compliment (In Maninka eyes, who
in the world would not aspire to be recognized as real Maninka?). Through the years, my body
and brain learned to do more things the Maninka way and kept ‘becoming real Maninka’; when
correctly establishing a joking relationship with a visiting stranger, when dancing to end a lunar
eclipse, when I panned gold and actually found some. This was actually the one and only time I
panned; most of the time, rules of hospitality dictated that I as a guest was not allowed to do this
kind of work.24
At the same time I was very aware of the limits of my supposed participation. As
24
I had thought that gold panning was a practical skill I would be able to learn during fieldwork to better understand the bodily experience of gold mining. Women miners however were of the opinion that it would be
30
a foreign anthropologist I may choose to participate in many aspects of Maninka life but it is just
that; my choice. To illustrate; in 2010-11 I took care of two grandchildren of my hosts in
Bancoumana while doing fieldwork in Selofara so they could start school in a classroom with 25
children instead of 120. This type of fostering by a relative and the inclusion of long-term
visitors into a kinship relation are very common in Mali, but had I not hinted at being open to
such a fostering arrangement, I would certainly not have been pressed as had been my urban
host-siblings.25
Also, no host relative ever seriously tried to marry me off, as would commonly
be done with educated children of my age.26
In Mande I would carry the name and introduce
myself as the daughter of Modibo and Assetou Diabate from Bancoumana, which allowed me to
participate in daily interactions that were imbued with references to joking relationships,
relatives and home villages. They were my first hosting couple and named me after Modibo
Diabate’s mother Saran Diabate. I was however rarely constrained by the control that elderly
men and women exercise over the life choices of Malian women of my age and educational
status; participation more than that necessary for social and physical survival remained a choice.
inappropriate to let a guest do this, and I was after all the guest of the whole village. They also figured I would not be strong enough to do this work. With only a few months left in Selofara I set out to find myself a teacher in the village because “staying put and sitting still” at mines on an almost daily basis (the Maninka way of learning as an apprentice; Florusbosch 2011: 55) and dropping hints at my wanting to learn had not had results. My host asked the wife of a friend, the sister-in-law of my main research assistant, to teach me and I told her that I would like to learn from her and was not looking to make money but that I had been there for many months and still had not learned. She accepted and the next day we went to Musodugu, the surface mining site near Selofara. She told me to sit down next to her pit and take a rest because the walk had been long and I must be tired. My protests that day were to no avail; she would not let me try and at the end of the day insisted to split the money she made that day with me because I had helped. I ended up bying peanuts for the children with it. After this I gave up on learning to pan. 25
Our host family in Selofara gladly accepted against the customary payment of a bag of millet per child. The hosting of children during the school year is common practice in Mande, with children going to and from cities and villages to stay with relatives in places where schools are deemed better suited for their needs. For me, in addition to the ability to give something back to the family that had hosted me several times and the children being a pleasant distraction, it allowed more responsibilities than a Maninka host will usually allow his/her guest, and gave me insight into family and village dynamics that I may otherwise not have noticed. 26
Educated sons and daughters are generally allowed to select their own spouse, but their father or his brothers will take over this responsibility if the unmarried child passes a certain age, ie. about 25 years for women, 30 for men.
31
In chapter 4 I will analyze the libations women of Selofara did at the Maribayasa tree at the
official start of the gold mining season. Women addressed the spirits at this tree, which stands in
the liminal space between the civilized village and the spirit-inhabited bush, to allow them to
find gold. At the end of the ceremony however, they freely ventured into one additional topic;
their traveling children. Many women had children who had set out on ‘adventure’, traveling to
Cote d’Ivoire, Europe, Senegal or other places in West or Central Africa. Several of them had
not heard from their children for years. The lamentations were heartbreaking and I realized that
my parents would never have to deal with this kind of uncertainty about my fate. So besides
being privileged to make sweeping decisions about my own life I was also structurally protected
from many of the uncertainties that characterize life of people in the Balan-Bakama. A medical
insurance plan, protections related to a nationality of a member country of the European Union,
and the general sense of protection stemming from my social capital assured me that I could
always find the resources to evacuate if something went terribly wrong. Any person, of any age,
health status or location runs some risk, but the risk involved in my life in Mali was never as
extreme and my life never as structurally precarious as that of the Maninka gold miners and their
families among whom I lived. My position as a guest constrained my participation in gold
mining but nonetheless, the strategies I undertook in my research fit well within the definition of
participant-observation as a combination of participation and observation.
Production of Anthropological Knowledge
In discussing the status of the anthropological fieldworker in Mande, Zobel and Jansen (2004)
stress two aspects of the presentation of self that are important to the work of participating
researchers in Mande; the researcher’s patronymic and the perpetual ‘guest’-status of the
researcher. This status does not necessarily set the researcher apart from others as practically
32
everybody in Mande is in a permanent state of guest-hood in some way. Migrant families were
the guest of one of the older families in town, all non-founding families were themselves guests
of the founding family, and they were the guests of the village that had owned the land before it
was settled by a new village. All adults also had hosts in other villages where they had stayed
when they were travelling, often to engage in artisanal gold mining.
In Mande a jamu (patronymic) is a ‘prerequisite for decent behaviour’ (Zobel and Jansen,
2004: 118) since a jamu is necessary to introduce people, to establish joking relations, and
determines how one addresses someone. But “the acceptance of a jamu [also] inevitably results
in a personal statement on Mande society as well as on the role which has to be played in this
society” (op.cit. 119). So in January 2006, when I first arrived in Mande village of Bancoumana
to do research on women’s money managing strategies, I was immediately assigned a jamu and a
first name (togo) by my host Modibo Diabate. In typical Mande fashion he named me after his
mother, the late Saran Diabate. Since then I have always introduced myself as Saran Diabate. In
the Mande Heartland and the Balan-Bakama Diabate is a name typical for griots. As griots are
supposed to be well-spoken, loud and good singers (with an eye on receiving gifts of money) I
was often made fun of that first stay (3 months) as I did not have the Maninka words to cultivate
any of these qualities. Though I never sang or performed other griot tasks (but did to my
embarrassment sometimes receive a share of the ‘griot money’ for attending an event) I was
unconsciously taught how to behave as a griot. While living on a compound of horon (free,
noble) people in Selofara my hosts found it acceptable for me to yell across the compound or
laugh loudly in public even though they would rarely do so. Had I adopted their patronymic,
Keita, I would almost certainly have been nudged to behave differently. As a Diabate, I was well
positioned to ask lots of blunt questions and to create special kin-like ties with the Diabate of
33
Selofara who were the town’s griots. The youngest son and the mother of the three brothers
inhabiting this compound, who was related by marriage to my first host family in Bancoumana,
played a leading role in practically all town meetings and events.
In Bancoumana the most important identification related to my name had been as the
namesake of Saran Diabate. For my trades-women informants she had been a great support as a
healer and wise woman when they were vulnerable as new mothers and spouses. Carrying her
name engendered trust and brought back memories of a past that I was interested in. In Selofara,
this history was unknown. However, my host’s mother’s first name was also Saran and many
people automatically assumed I had accepted the name because of her. Several people asked me
why I would not change my patronymic to Keita, the name of my host family, but I had decided
against this because of the opportunities the name gave me. I became a Diabate guest of a Keita
compound. The patronymic was significant in my research practice because griots are allowed to
barge into meetings and parties uninvited, to pose inappropriate questions and in specific
situations they can ignore the all-important shame (maloya) that permeates Mande social life.
Though I was a foster mother, confidante and participant in many ways, I obviously
remained a guest. I was the guest of Diakaridia Keita and by extension the whole Kasumasi
Keita clan, one of the large clans in Selofara. Members of this clan held the position of chief of
mines for Selofara (see chapter 5). Hosting (jatigiya) is an important Mande institution and it
plays a large role in migration patterns of artisanal miners. A host (jatigi) is responsible for their
(usually his) guests. He is responsible for hospitality and introduction to other villagers but also
for social control of the guest. It is a big honor to have a guest and Mande people will try to
become jatigi to as many people as possible (see chapter 5). At the same time the responsibility
would lead to much anxiety because a host would be blamed for the bad behaviour of a guest. As
34
long as the guest is based in the village, they remain a guest of their jatigi, also if an artisanal
miner decides to settle permanently. Though one individual is responsible for their guest as a
representative of the village community, people from all over the Balan-Bakama expressed that
they were my collective host: “if you are a guest of Selofara, you are also our guest, because in
the Balan-Bakama, we are all one”.
During a preliminary research phase in early 2010 I had visited a number of large and small
artisanal mines in the Mande Heartland27
and Mande Mountains. I had three main objectives; to
study Maninka mining vocabulary, to map and make a preliminary study of the different mining
sites, and to find a location and host for the participant-observation stage of the project that
started later that year. With research assistant Sidi Diabate I visited different mines, where we
spoke with assistants of chiefs of mines and other miners, mapped the sites and kept our eyes
open for details necessary for choosing a fieldwork site. Through a contact of Agnes
Kedwierska-Manzon who had done research on Mande hunters I visited Selofara and eventually
chose it as a base. In August 2010 a large Diabate delegation from Bancoumana brought me to
Selofara. There I lived on one of the compounds of the Kasumasi clan as part of the household of
my host Diakaridia Keita and his wives Nantene Doumbia and Nankinja Bakayogo.
The research entailed a variety of methods; formal interviews, participatory observation at
mining sites, in the village and on the compound where I lived, observations at numerous mines
elsewhere in Mande, observations of mining related work in the village, a survey of all
inhabitants of Selofara, focus groups, recordings of songs and of mining rituals,28
archival work
27
The Mande Heartland is the triangle between Bamako, Kouremale and Kangaba. It is the mythic zone of origin of all Mande people who live spread out over Mali, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Senegal. 28
Except for rituals at women’s sites these were all men-only events so I was not allowed to be present. I was present during preparations and during the planning of the mine that follows the sacrifice and meeting and in two instances I was able to record the ritual on a voice recorder.
35
in Balan-Mansala, Narena (copying the census of Balan-Komana which is part of the Narena
municipality) and in Bamako (at the National Archives in ACI2000 and Koulouba, and at the
Directorate of Mines of the government of Mali), and GPS mapping.
In Mande, mines are left to the bush spirits on Mondays and mining on Friday morning
(before the Friday prayer) is frowned upon so research assistant Madi Kama Keita and the
informants I wanted to do interviews with were usually available on these days. We tried to do
one interview every Monday and Friday, though it often did not happen because of travel,
funerals which involved the whole village, or other contingencies. In planning interviews I
focused on several demographics along various lines of interest: mining chiefs of the Balan-
Bakama (men and women), elderly women and men in Selofara, men of Selofara who were
considered mining specialists, women miners in Selofara (as no women were recognized as
specialists, we interviewed a more random selection of women miners than men), and men who
had migrated to Balan-Mansala to mine during one of its mining booms of the last decade and
had stayed. For these formal interviews Madi Kama Keita accompanied me to introduce me and
the research and to translate. Most other days I would visit a mine in the region by myself and
would run into people I knew from Selofara or through interviews or social visits in other
villages and would manage information gathering in Maninka. During a week of interviews on
mining and migration in Balan-Mansala I was assisted by Ibrahim Camara. In Selofara Jogo
Diabate accompanied me for a series of interviews with women miners.
All forms of artisanal mining are exhausting. Placer mining and hard-rock mining are done
in teams (see chapter 2) and so parts of the teams are usually resting and chatting at the mouth of
the pit. Women who wash the ore also do so in turns. At surface mines women may be
continuously busy but as the name of the technique says, they are at the surface and panning for
36
long periods at a time. In all cases I could quite naturally join miners who were resting and
chatting and learn about the mining going on around us and about many other topics.
Throughout the year of research I often visited Musodugu, a mining site near Selofara that
started as a surface mining site but where local men later opened some hard-rock mining pits (3-
4). It was a pleasant walk from Selofara so even if I just had a few hours to spare I would often
go for a visit. During much of the cold season (November-February), before the main mining
season, I often visited with Oumou and Karifa Keita, a brother and sister from Selofara. Having
traveled to mines in greater Mande for years (especially Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire) they both
consistently mined near their village during my stay. Every day at the mouth of their mine pit
taught me something new about ‘ordinary’ mining and about the difference with the migratory
mining life-style that Oumou and Karifa had also engaged in. Other days I would travel to larger
mines near other villages of the Balan-Bakama. I traveled most intensively in the Balan-Bakama
in the April-June period, after I had visited other mines in the Kangaba region. This is the hottest
time of the year, right before the rainy season and as a result the water table is at its lowest and
placer and hard-rock mining are possible at most locations. During this period I often wished I
could be at more than one place at a time; I attended as many mining opening sacrifices
(damanbew) as I could, visited the hot-spots of the day and tried to keep track of migration
patterns and mining gossip. This period ended with a few days of frantic work when the
presidents of Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso made the joint decision that artisanal gold mining
would have to cease for the season on May 15th 2011 so that miners would be forced to go back
to the farms. Debate about the necessity of mining, the role of government and the relation
between farming and mining became urgent and ubiquitous as the Guinean army and Malian
police tried to send miners home from the large gold rush sites (outside the Balan-Bakama) and
37
into farming. My Jakarta motorbike and I traveled many kilometers as I recorded as many points
of view, impressions about events outside the region, and local developments as possible.
More than once during an interview with a village leader, did he ask me to help his village
by bringing mining companies to the area to start an industrial mine (see chapter 6). This had
more to do with associations made because of my (white) skin colour than with the fact that I
was there as a student of the University of Toronto. When Canada or Toronto came up, people
usually had questions about the role of the French language in Canada but not once did anyone
note Toronto or Canada’s role in the global mining sector. Toronto is a hub in the world of
mining and especially in gold mining and this was visible in the number of industry and activist
conferences held there, some of which I attended, and in the partnerships/sponsorships between
the University of Toronto and mining companies and industrials (these did not involve the
department of anthropology).
Outline
Artisanal gold mining in the Balan-Bakama was a seasonal phenomenon. The great majority of
miners primarily identified as farmers and worked in artisanal mines when they were not
occupied as a member of their compound’s workteam. In chapter one I will show Balan-Bakama
artisanal gold mining as a placed endeavor by identifying general economic, migratory and
geographical patterns related to it. This chapter introduces the mines in the Balan-Bakama and
the miners who worked there at the time of research.
The second chapter focuses on the actual activity of artisanal gold mining. Depending on
geology, miners applied one of three techniques when mining: surface mining, placer mining and
hard-rock mining. This chapter describes the geology of gold mining as experienced by miners
38
and the social and physical technologies used to extract gold. It discusses the three mining
techniques and their implications for daily life at the mines and for the miners involved. Each
mining technique involved not merely different geological formations and mining tools but also
specific spatial organizations of the mining site, relations between miners and involvement of
different categories of miners; men and women, specialists and non-specialists, migrants and
locals.
Unlike in other regions in the world, artisanal gold mining in Mande was experienced as
an ordinary activity. In the mines, the regular social relations as they exist in the village
continued and village authorities were respected in the same way as they were in the village.
However, on another level gold mining was an extraordinary activity, since it took place in the
bush where bush spirits (jinew) reigned. Chapter three will show that what made artisanal gold
mining extraordinary was its conceptual location of activity in the bush, in the domain of bush
spirits, and the consequences of this spatial configuration.
The discussion of mining as both and ordinary and extraordinary activity continues in
chapter four. In order to gain permission from bush spirits to take their gold, people needed to
follow their rules and make sacrifices Here I will describe and analyze sacrifices that women of
Selofara organized to appease the bush spirits and convince them to give up some of their gold at
surface mines so that people will be able to find it. This was of vital importance to the villagers
as they are dependent on money for their daily meals and social reproduction. They were in fact
so important for women that they were willing to defy instructions of the imam and urbanized
children who were less concerned about bush spirits. Women continued what is known as
‘traditional style’ sacrifices and libations to appease the spirits.
39
Chapter five shows how men’s and women’s village authorities in the Balan-Bakama
organized the mines in their territories. The holders of the position of chief of mines back up
their control of this role with histories of their families’ vital role in the history of gold mining in
their villages’ territories or in the history of the village itself. This chapter will discuss the tasks
and responsibilities of the chiefs of mines and their assistants (tonbolomaw), the different
histories of mining told in villages in the Balan-Bakama and the impact these have on processes
of control of mining sites.
The final sixth chapter shows that the desire for success in mining was not only a desire
for immediate monetary gain but also a desire for modernity and connection. During the mining
season miners chose regularly where they would mine, changing their site of work every two
weeks on average. It was the aim of the sacrifices described in chapters 4 and 5 to convince bush
spirits to allow miners to find much gold. Personal gain for villagers was not the only motivation,
as in the end each village wanted what Balan-Mansala had achieved; immigration of young men
who start families in the village thereby easing the isolation of the village. This chapter analyzes
how and why villagers attempted to create gold rushes. Industrial mining companies had a small
role in the regional dynamics at the time of research but in the imagined future they had a very
large role since the desire for modernity and ending villagers’ isolation was primarily expressed
as a desire for formal jobs for young men.
40
1. The Seasonality of Artisanal Gold Mining in the Balan-Bakama
Almost all artisanal miners in the Balan-Bakama were also subsistence farmers. For Maninka
peasants, subsistence farming – primarily of millet and peanuts – took precedence over mining,
so their seasonal livelihood strategies led to a yearly cycle of mining intensity. During the dry
season, almost all able-bodied adults could be found at a mine (close to home or far away),
during the rainy season only a few people mined full-time though an increasing number mined
one or two days a week. The yearly cycle is not only a cycle of intensity but also of method with
climatological circumstances determining the mining methods that can be applied in different
seasons.
In this first chapter I will ‘place’governance of artisanal gold mining in its yearly cycle
and spatial distribution by discussing the relationship between subsistence farming and artisanal
gold mining and by explaining the spatial and geological context in which gold mining takes
place. Though the government of Mali did not often enforce its laws on artisanal mining, in 2011
it attempted to stem changes in the mining cycle so I will also discuss the politico-legal context
of artisanal mining in Mali which is unique for its acceptance of artisanal mining as part of the
mining landscape though in practice it left the organization of artisanal mining to local
‘traditional’ governance structures. This applies to the organization of work on mining sites as
well as to the gold trade with which this chapter will end.
41
Balan-Bakama Livelihoods
“We are farmers. We work at the mines a lot, but what we are is farmers” said the young men
convening in front of a store on the Selofara village square during the confusing days that
followed their president’s decree to cease all artisanal mining activities during the coming rainy
season (see below). Though the recent introduction of hard-rock mining allowed a small number
of three to five male villagers to commit themselves to gold mining year round, the prime
occupational identity in Selofara and the wider Balan-Bakama was that of farmer (senekela).
This is especially the case for those who were not a member of an occupational status group
(nyamakalaw) like griots and blacksmiths, but were instead horonw; often translated as
‘freemen’ or ‘noblemen’. For horonw, farming was their occupational marker, especially since
the abolition of slavery during the colonial era after which the Maninka horon/slave (jon)
opposition was rendered meaningless in the Balan-Bakama.29
There is a paradox at play here; on
the one hand, farming was highly regarded and those who worked hard on their compound’s and
their individual fields were commended and celebrated30
, on the other hand farmers stressed the
exacting nature of the work and longed for a more urban lifestyle (see chapter 6) or for old-age
29
Though formally abolished, social categories of slaves and freemen (or masters) still mattered greatly among certain ethnic groups of Mali like the Touareg and Fulani (Pelckmans 2011; Lecocq 2005). Among Maninka this was much less the case. After independence, griots and the African Socialist government of Modibo Keita worked hard to eliminate the opposition between freemen and slaves (jonw) in the telling of history and in national politics. Many slaves, whose last names (jamuw) are indistinguishable from those of freemen (unlike those of occupational status groups), completed this process by migrating to emerging urban areas (Mann 2004: 186) or rural areas where people did not know of their previous status. For example, the Office du Niger, an irrigation project of new villages north of Segou attracted many farmers during and after the colonial period. As far as I was able to find out, no one in Selofara was known as a descendant of former slaves though people left open the possibility that some of the ‘recent’ immigrants were descendants of slaves. 30
Villages in the Balan-Bakama did not dance Ci-wara masks like their neighbours on the Mande Plateau who danced them to celebrate a successful day of communal work on the fields of individuals from neighbouring villages and to commend those who worked hardest (Kühn 2006). There were however other ways in which people recognized the work of farmers. Villagers in Selofara attached high prestige to working hard in the fields and clearing new fields, regularly discussing the achievement of relatives and other villagers. People who returned from the field (or from the mine) were greeted and praised with ‘I ni baara’, ‘You and the work’, instead of ‘I ni wula’, ‘You and the afternoon’ by everybody they passed in the village.
42
when they would be released from their duties on the compound’s fields (men and women) or
regarding the compound’s meals (women).
In the Balan-Bakama, as alsewhere in Mande, cultivation was divided into cultivation for
compound-wide consumption and for individual consumption or sale, into men’s and women’s
fields and crops, and into rainy season staple food cultivation and dry season horticulture. Balan-
Bakama farmers almost exclusively cultivated millet, corn and peanuts, all of which are rainfed
crops, grown during the 4 month rainy season that typifies the Sahel climate. In the Balan-
Bakama, this season lasted from May/June to September, after which the crops were harvested in
October and November. During this season, adult villagers spent many days on the fields though
labour requirements vary throughout the season.
During the rainy season, all able-bodied people (except for a few full-time miners)
engaged in subsistence agriculture with the goal of producing the ingredients for the meals all
inhabitants of a compound are served three times a day. In the gendered division of agricultural
labour, men were responsible for the staple food which is mostly millet, a grain that grows well
in the hot climate with a short rainy season. In addition men grew some corn in small plots in the
village, which were at times interspersed with women’s kitchen gardens where okra and peppers
are grown. This corn, irrigated by hand if need be, was the first crop ripe to harvest which breaks
the lean season that precedes the harvest. Women were responsible for providing ingredients for
the sauce, and devoted their farming time primarily to the cultivation of peanuts on land that
belonged to their husband’s lineage and was cleared by the men’s workteam. The only time
people worked on the fields of the opposite gender was during the busy harvest season when
women were charged with the transportation of the millet to a central site and later to the
43
compound, and men were responsible for the unearthing of women’s peanuts.31
Crops like
peanuts, millet or corn, were certainly not taboo to grow for farmers of the other sex. Men would
grow peanuts and women grew rice and corn but these farmers were not required to add this to
the compound’s stock, but instead could sell it or cook it for their households.
Fields were divided into men’s fields and women’s fields. The men’s fields (foro),
normally located farthest from the village (see chapter 3 for the concept of concentric circles of
fields surrounding Mande villages), were planted with millet by the able-bodied men of a
compound (lu). These brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews worked together in their
compound’s work-team which they would join at around age 13 (only on weekends if they were
in school) and from which they were dismissed when considered ‘too old’. Some men also
planted their own individual fields with crops that they planned to eat with their own household,
or sell on the market (beans, rice, or corn). They worked on these plots in the afternoons, after
the dismissal of the compound’s work-team, and on their days off.32
This work was often done
by small groups of related men (two or three) who chose to work together to grow a product they
could sell or keep for their own household. This type of rainy season agriculture functioned as
dry season livelihood activities, like mining, more than the workteam agriculture that the men
would be involved in in the morning. The women of a compound did not work together in a
work-team. Unable to spend all days on their fields because of housework, they had their
31
In the Balan-Bakama it was generally expected of the men’s work-team of a household to unearth their women’s peanuts because “this is too straining for women”. Notwithstanding this argument, people were well aware of the fact that women on the Plateau and near the Niger (for example in my former fieldwork site of Bancoumana) did not structurally receive any help from their men. 32
The work-team leader (the oldest member), in conversation with other influential team members, would decide how much labour was necessary and decided on workdays and days off. On the compound where I lived, all working men were allowed to pick one day off each week, even during the busy harvest season when the team worked every day. This way, the man owning a store could stock up on Mondays, another could visit his friends at the Narena market, some young men worked on the Kandani/Bokorila mine, and boys working during the summer vacation took a day off for soccer tournaments or a day of rest. Most compounds in the village organized their work team more haphazardly.
44
individual plots33
on which they grew condiments (nafenw), primarily peanuts, which they would
use during their turns in the cooking schedule. All married women on a compound who did not
have a daughter-in-law to take over their tasks, took turns in the cooking schedule (usually each
cooking two days in a row). To cook the three meals of the day they were provided with a staple
food (millet or corn) from the compound stock by the head of the compound. To this they added
a sauce made from their individual stock of peanuts and other condiments, and added to this
condiments bought with their own money. Men’s teams who did not manage to grow enough
millet to feed the inhabitants of their compound would also be required to purchase additional
staple foods. Men who were considered residents of the compound were automatically a member
of its work-team. Outside of the collective agriculture, household members were free to pursue
their individual needs and desires such as individual agriculture, (migrant) labour and travel.
This individual pursuit of monetary (or other) gain was concentrated in the dry season when the
compound laid little claim on a man’s work, except maybe for clearing a new field and some
other preparatory activities from which travelling men were excused.
This division of labour and land was able to flourish in the Balan-Bakama because there
was an abundance of land suitable for millet and peanut cultivation (though not for individual
rice cultivation). Some compounds, considered by others as ‘poor’, structurally did not manage
to cultivate enough staple foods and had been forced to decide to only provide for two or even
one communal meal a day. The households of these compounds would then need to cook other
meals themselves with purchased or individually cultivated ingredients. In Kita, Koenig found
that rich households (in Koenig’s terms ‘More-than-Sufficiency’) were larger than ‘Sufficiency’
33
These plots were assigned by the household head or the head of the men’s work team. Around Selofara, enough cultivable land was available so that women’s requests for an additional plot (to grow cash crops for example) were always granted.
45
or ‘Insufficiency’ households for two reasons; because with more individuals they had more
assets available, and could control the labour of more people which could be invested in a variety
of ventures (2005: 52). Koenig explains the cyclical nature of this pattern with the ease by which
men in rich households can pay bride price and thereby expand their household. In Selofara and
surrounding villages however, this was not a sufficient explanation since practically all men
could pay bride price with money they earned from gold mining. The resulting scramble for
wives meant that brides were getting younger on average, some of them 13 years old, men
generally were 25 years old (which is on the lower end of the marriageable age range of 25-30
for Mande men). In Bamako, where marrying had become so expensive that many men delayed
their first wedding till they were well into their 30’s, their brides were usually in their early 20s.
The difference between ‘Insufficiency’ and ‘More-than-sufficiency’ compounds in the Balan-
Bakama was not the labour of wives and their children that they were able to attract, but the
potential husbands they were able to retain in the first place. Women had an average of 7-8
children but were lucky if in their old age they were taken care of by one son and his household.
Outmigration from the Balan-Bakama is so common that I estimate that no more than one in four
men stayed or came back after an ‘adventure’. ‘More-than-sufficiency’ compounds were those
that managed to retain enough young men, with their households, to work on its communal fields
and as a result had a men’s workteam large enough that they could feed all inhabitants of their
compound.
In the region south of Bamako (Siby, Narena, Bancoumana, Kangaba), an increasing
share of meals was grown or purchased by individuals and eaten by household as people
preferred rice-based meals and rice was not grown by the men’s work-team and instead
purchased or grown on individual plots. There, the importance of the men’s work-team in terms
46
of providing food and in time management was decreasing and the importance of the money
economy for the provision of basic meals was increasing.
In the Balan-Bakama, men also professed a desire to devote more time to individual
economic pursuits like gold mining or their individual fields. However, on no compound in
Selofara have the men decided to shift subsistence cultivation responsibilities to the household
and thus from the work-team to its individual members. A few individual men who desired to
function independently from their compound of birth had moved their household out of the
family compound and set up their own small compounds on the edges of the village. These men
were fully integrated into the social life of the village and of their compound of origin (had they
left because of a major conflict, they would likely have moved to another village) but were
individually responsible for the nourishment of their households. Most men however did
participate in compound work-teams but freed themselves through the decision to pool some of
their own money to buy herbicides and/or hire tonw (groups of young men or women who made
money for their socializing group by working in agriculture) to lessen their workloads. Balan-
Bakama farmers used money earned through individual economic pursuits (eg. farming, mining,
paid labour, remittances) to partly free themselves of the demands of the subsistence economy
and in turn devote more time to an individualized and market-dependent economy. In recent
years, herbicides have quickly become a common tool of men’s subsistence agriculture in the
Balan-Bakama. Due to the high gold price, men working on their compound’s millet fields had
money available to buy the chemicals and back-pack spray pumps, and they had an additional
incentive to finish their collective labour as soon as possible; that way they would have more
days left to spend in the mines and make more money. Men who worked on their compound’s
fields during the rainy season could mine for their own profit on days their labour was not
47
required on the millet fields. They could choose to farm individual fields during this time, and
many did, but increasing numbers of subsistence farmers would spend this time at a hard-rock
mining site. The few men who worked in the mines all rainy season did so instead of the
collective labour on the fields and were required to hand over their proceeds to the head of their
compound (who would subsequently return part of the money as an ‘encouragement’).
As Wooten argues in a monograph on Mande agriculture: Mande agriculture is an ancient
pursuit that “is an inherently and quintessentially creative process” (Wooten 2009: 67).
Agriculture, very much like gold mining, is continuously remade by integrating new social and
physical techniques into an existing social situation and well-known farming techniques. Mande
farmers, “improvising on an ancient script” (op.cit.: 69), eagerly applied organizational
techniques from other realms like communal harvesting of staple crops (op.cit.: 64) and
technologies like herbicides. While Mande agriculture and gold mining can look like they are
strict continuations of ancient practices, possibly in opposition to newer pursuits like horticulture
or wage labour (cf. Wooten 2009: 65), farmers continuously improvised and changed the social
organization of their labour to suit their needs. When Mande Plateau villagers decided to harvest
each other’s’ fields with a work-team made up of all men from two villages so that they could
devote more time to their profitable vegetable gardens (Wooten 2009: 64), they were applying a
system from another realm (that of social associations; tonw) to communal farming. When
villagers danced ci-wara masks to celebrate a successful event of collective labour on the fields
of a prosperous individual, they were selecting a practice from their own past to apply it to a new
social situation (Jansen 2006: 62). The same applies to goldmining; when villagers of Selofara
worried that they had installed the wrong person as chief of mines, evidenced by the meagre
results of their mining efforts in recent years, they considered testing the candidates (all adult
48
men from the same clan; the kasumasi) with a practice they had observed in the Guinean part of
Mande.34
With continuously changing demands made on the agricultural and mining complexes,
agents improvise and introduce new social and physical technologies, leading to a dynamic
system of production.
Balan-Bakama farmers limiting themselves to cultivating millet, corn and peanuts is
indeed not an ‘ancient tradition’.35
The landscape shows traces of other agricultural pursuits
which have been abandoned; there are many mango orchards and abandoned gardens in which
tomatoes, onions and other vegetables used to be grown during the dry season (using irrigation).
Both pursuits were abandoned during the 1980’s and 90’s due to the rising gold price which
provided an alternative path through which to acquire these items and to buy other things.
Previously, it was more common for Balan-Bakama adults to do other things than gold mining
during the rainy season. Some certainly travelled to the big, profitable, mining sites in Guinea
(the Balan-Bakama sites not producing enough gold to be worth the effort), but many opted to
work in their mango orchards or gardens, chose to hunt, etc.
At the time of fieldwork, no one worked in gardens or plantations anymore. Instead,
people bought fruits and vegetables from women who descended the escarpment from Nyumala
where horticulture is an important dry season activity (Wooten 2009). When Selofara opened up
a mine near an old mango orchard, people brought home as many mangoes as they could to have
free mangoes; no one could claim the mangoes anymore because the owner of the orchard did
not actively work there. Hunters were certainly active, hunting small deer, monkeys (especially
34
They planned to assign each candidate a plot of land and after mining each plot declare the person on whose piece of land most gold had been found the new chief of mines. Finding the most gold on his plot of land would be evidence of the bush spirits’ favour on him. 35
Many women did grow some peppers or okra but this was a minor pursuit compared to peanuts. These crops never sufficed for the whole year. People also ate wild fruits that they found on their way to the gold mines or were given by boys who played in the bush.
49
when these ate recently harvested peanuts from the women’s fields) and other small game in the
evenings or on days that the mines were closed. Hunting was however not a full-time dry season
pursuit as it had been in the past. The reason for this is twofold; with the rising price of gold,
hunting has become comparatively less profitable but also large game has been hunted to
extinction in the region meaning that hunters have less meat to sell. Some people did engage in
seasonal migration to cities (sometimes as far as in northern Ivory Coast) to make money on the
informal labour market. However, this became harder due to increased urbanization and
subsequent permanent availability of labour in the cities.
Many compounds in the Balan-Bakama could provide three meals through subsistence
agriculture, but people need more than food. While previous to colonization Maninka miners
only needed gold to pay for marriages and taxes, which are (and were) both paid at the level of
the household, in 2010-11 they needed money for individual purchases like cooking pots,
motorized transportation, education, clothing, etc. (Jansen 2006; see also chapter 3). A few
people in Selofara were able to earn this money through a specific paid profession like the
mason, imam, tailor, owners of stores, bakers, blacksmiths, mechanics and the health worker.
The great majority of people however, would decide at the end of each agricultural season what
economic activity they would pursue during the coming dry season (as did some of those with a
paid profession like some blacksmiths and mechanics). At the time of fieldwork most men and
women decided to devote themselves to gold mining and then continued to set their strategy
concerning location and mining technique (see especially chapter 6).
50
Artisanal Gold Mining throughout the Year
The timing of artisanal gold mining in Mande was closely intertwined with the agricultural
calendar but the ways in which they were intertwined changed continuously. In old and new
written accounts of artisanal gold mining in the Malian part of Mande the pursuit is classified as
a dry season activity that complements the rain-fed farming season in terms of climate and
cultural classification of economic pursuits (eg. Park 2000[1799]: 295, 296; Panella 2007: 348;
Jansen 2010: 95).
36 Gold miners themselves also classify gold mining as such, opening the gold
mining season with sacrifices to the bush-spirits (owners of gold in the ground) in March.37
Though this ritual and discursive preference for dry-season mining indicates the prominence of
placer mining in the mental mapping of artisanal gold mining, it should not blind us to mining
taking place in other seasons.
During the dry season people did have more freedom to pursue their individual activities,
there was less disease (especially malaria) and because the harvest of millet and peanuts was
done in November and October there was also enough food. Though it could get very hot, people
also looked forward to this season and to mining when they could travel far away or work in
mines close-by with friends from the village or from neighbouring communities. As mining was
done in teams (primarily men) or in rotation (women), miners had many opportunities to take
breaks to rest from the straining work and talk to friends. If people had had real alternatives they
36
In the region around Siguiri in Guinea it was more common for miners to work year round though this had also become more widespread in recent decades due to the presence of industrial mining companies. By digging deep open pits these companies which started working here in the colonial era (Balandier 1957) had brought down the water table. The open pits themselves had also induced a cottage industry of artisanal mining where miners enter the mine at night to take ore which they wash back home, sharing their profits with the guards who let them in (see also Nugent 2009). 37
Park notes that in December 1796, the surface mining season was started collectively by the men and women of Kamalen (2000[1799]: 294). In the same period people searched gold between pebbles of river torrents. This is a gold mining method I have not observed. During the height of the dry season Park observed placer mining whereby miners stopped digging a shaft if they hit a layer of rock (op.cit.: 296).
51
may well have decided to leave the hard work and pursue other activities, but with the situation
as it was the artisanal mining high-season on the local placers was still something farmer-miners
looked forward to.
In February and March, chiefs of mines in the Balan-Bakama and surroundings organized
events known as danmanbew. These ceremonies formally opened the mining season with a
discussion of the rules of mining, a selection of the mine on which the village would focus its
efforts and a sacrifice to the bush spirits (see chapters 4 and 5 for descriptions and analyses).38
This is the period of the year when the land is dry and the water table slowly declines, allowing
for placer mining. Through placer mining, the quintessential form of mining for miners and
observers alike, miners exploited a layer of soil typically at 10-15 meters depth (see chapter 2 for
more precise explications of all three different artisanal mining techniques). The richest ore of
the Balan-Bakama was found on the ancient banks of the Balan river (Balanko). As the river ran
close to the mining sites of 2010-11 the mining pits filled with water in the rainy season and in
the case of Selofara during the dry season as well. Though some miners did start placer mining a
few weeks before the local damanbe, they could not do this at any other time in the year because
of water blocking their way and because the wet soil makes the galleries unstable, increasing the
risk of collapse.
The placer mining season lasted only three months and ended with the first big rains
which normally fall in early June. The planting season that followed (of millet, corn and peanuts)
is labour intensive and so even though some people may have had some free days to mine the not
38
The first damanbe I attended in 2011 was the one in Narena (just East of the Balan-Bakama) on February 3 2011. This was followed by those in Mambila (February 13), Djelibani (February 20), Selofara (women’s site, March 13) Balan-Mansala and Balan-Komana (both on March 20), and Selofara (men’s site, March 27).
52
yet filled pits, they would not find their team sufficiently intact which was a requirement for
placer mining.
Where rainfall practically prohibited placer mining39
, water was a prerequisite for surface
mining. Surface mining was possible throughout the year but because it was not very profitable
the miners who engaged in it (mostly women) avoided paying for water which they habitually
did in placer mining. After each major daytime rain, Selofara women could be seen rushing to
the surface mining site Musodugu to benefit from the free water. During the rainy season of
2010, women in Selofara talked about surface mining as an activity purely reserved for the rainy
season, in which they made some extra cash with which to pull their household through the
difficult season.40
Some women made the time to spend some full days at Musodugu and when a
miner had been successful in Balan-Mansala some even walked there to mine for the day, but
mostly surface mining was something women would do when much of the day had already been
lost to a big rain or cooking and the peanut field was just too far to make walking there
worthwhile. Then in January 2011, when the surface mining season should have been drawing to
a close because nearby pools were drying up, Sayi Keita found ‘a lot’ of gold on the other side of
the path and the nature of surface mining in Selofara changed.41
Till the end of March,
Musodugu was packed, mostly with women miners but some men also tried their luck and
together they dug an enormous crater just off the old Musodugu site. No one was ever as lucky
as Sayi Keita had been but with the ever rising gold price surface mining remained profitable
39
A placer site in Balan-Komana was an exception. It was located right next to the village on a relatively high and thus dry spot. Villagers had mined this site during the rainy season for decades. 40
Malaria, pre-harvest hunger, the hard labour of farming and an absence of fruits and vegetables on the market because no one is gardening all conspire to make this a harsh and unhealthy season. Some days of September 2010 half the members of my host compound were unable to work on the fields or in the kitchen because of ill health. 41
I was never able to find out how much she had found because Mande miners do not talk about the amount of gold they find (see also chapter 4).
53
enough to continue in the dry season. As miners were willing to pay for water now (50F to get
your own plastic jug filled), boys driving bicycles or donkey carts made some extra cash and
quickly the pumps in the village were drying up. The water committee introduced a tax levied
per jug of water pumped (this is common practice in larger villages), which led the women of
Selofara to go on strike: “We cook and clean without complaints, even though our husbands do
not give us any money for condiments [like men in the city are expected to do, EK]. We pay for
the condiments and work hard all the time. Now they want us to pay for the water and we do not
have the money to pay for this!” (speaker expressing the general sentiment of the women’s
meeting held the night of the implementation of the tax, at the home of Fatoumata Keita, the
assistant to the musokuntigi, the women’s leader, February 12, 2011). The women of Selofara
refused to pump water and got washing and cooking water from the well instead, meaning that
men had to get their own drinking water from the pumps. The following evening the tax was
removed. Eventually, the women and the water committee came to the agreement that pump
water would not be used for mining anymore and women continued surface mining till the lure
of higher profits drew almost everybody to the placer mines in March.
Even considering the higher investment in water, placer mining was more profitable than
surface mining and so the two existed in a complementary seasonal relationship in 2011. In
previous years no artisanal mining had taken place between October and February when there
was no rainwater to permit surface mining and the water table was still too high for placer
mining. Since 2008/2009 however, hard-rock mining has made its entrance in this part of Mande.
This technique can be applied almost all year round and had thereby allowed three to five
Selofara men to abandon farming and devote themselves full-time to mining. These men had
agreed with the head of their household’s farming work-team that they would contribute their
54
profits to the compound budget. But hard-rock mining also had another effect. Since there was
little risk of mine collapse in the hand-cut shafts of the Balan-Bakama (there was much more
danger on big capital intensive hard-rock mining sites like that of Dagala where dynamite was
used to dig shafts), and because the constitution of a work-team was more flexible than in placer
mining, male farmers could mine for just a day or two. For men, mining had previously been a
choice for the season, and one that could only be made for the dry season. Men would join a
mining team and unless they were called away because of an emergency, would at least have to
see through the life of a mine (until the gallery was depleted). In the rainy and harvesting seasons
of 2010 and even more in 2011, men from Selofara who identified as farmers and worked on the
millet fields with their compound’s work-team would spend some days working in the hard-rock
mines of Musodugu (about five shafts were dug) or of Kandani/Bokorila (another mine that
started as a surface mine but was found to also hold hard-rock deposits, located between
Namakana and Mambila), earning money for their individual expenses (ie. expenses for
themselves or their household, not for the compound budget).
With the introduction of the new technology of hard-rock mining, and the increasing
profitability of surface mining, artisanal gold mining had come to increasingly occupy those who
identified as farmers in the Balan-Bakama. Labour in placer and surface mining had previously
been confined to specific seasons, ie. the dry and hot season of March-May and the rainy season
of June-September. Now people could work in hard-rock mining all year round except when it
rained and they could afford to buy water to extract surface gold on days without rain. The few
men who had permission from their compound to mine for the compound coffers presented an
obvious change because they are moving away from farming. This concerned a small group of
miners however who, if unsuccessful (for example if the gold price decreases) could easily be
55
reintegrated into the compound work-team. The seasonal extension of opportunities for mining
for those engaged in farming however, implied a change for almost all villagers (with the
exception of those with an occupation like the mechanic, store-owner and health worker). The
rigid occupational, financial, and cultural division between dry and rainy season was slowly
being eroded and with it a defining feature of rural Mande life.
Geographical Distribution of Mining in the Balan-Bakama
The Balan-Bakama consists of seven villages, all located at the foot of the Mande Plateau (also
known as the Mande Mountains). Each village had several mining sites in its territory and its
own chief of mines to govern them (Balan-Komana has two chiefs of mines). The village of
Selofara, where I was based, had initially started placer and surface mining on a site right next to
the village but this site had been abandoned. In 2010-11 Selofara’s miners and guests mined a
surface and hard-rock mine at two kilometers from the village (Musodugu), an old placer mine
close to the village (Damanfenin), and after the yearly sacrifice to the bush-spirits Selofara
miners started working at the Balanko placer mine. Balanko is a river that runs south of the
Balan-Bakama villages and the lands surrounding it had some of the most profitable placer mines
in the area. The four villages whose territory included the Balanko, all had their most popular
placer mines by the river banks.
56
Figure 1.1 Map of Bakama villages and active mining sites (flags) at the time of research
Customary land-rights in the Balan-Bakama existed at two levels; village-rights and household-
rights. In addition, the state also gave out different types of mining rights to companies (see
chapter 6). In the Balan-Bakama the state had not yet started formalizing land rights (droits
fonciers) as it had in the neighbouring region directly south of Bamako where individuals could
get land titles which can be bought and sold. In 2010-2011 land in the Balan-Bakama was not
monetized.
In the customary land tenure system of Mande, an extended household (compound - lu)
obtained property rights to a piece of land by clearing it. This land could then be used for
cultivation and could be left fallow for years without the household losing its rights. This way,
each extended household in Selofara had rights to a number of fields, scattered in the ring around
the village. Individual compound members could obtain the right to farm an individual field by
requesting it from the compound head but this field did not become their property. In between
57
and behind the cultivated fields was the bush (wula) which did not belong to any household and
which could potentially be cleared for cultivation. The Balan-Bakama, being relatively isolated
and under-populated in comparison with the Mande heartland, had much of this bush available
and this was one of the reasons the villages were eager to attract migrants. In the Mande
conception of space, the bush was that area that is not governed by human relations but by bush
spirits. The bush was precisely the zone where gold mining took place, oftentimes literally,
otherwise conceptually (see chapter 3).
Though households did not have rights to bush-land, villages did have rights to this area.
As a result, a village’s land rights covered all the land, unlike farming rights of households. Each
village had a territory that borders the territories of neighbouring villages. According to the
village foundation histories that I collected, Namakana was the first of the villages to be settled:
“When Namakana was founded by our ancestors, there was no village anywhere between this
place and Kangaba” explained Lamine Keita, the chief of mines of Namakana (December 17,
2010). Each time an actor (a household head, a set of brothers, a village desiring to relocate)
desired to settle a village in the region, it would request an existing village if it could settle in its
territory and be allocated a piece of land around the village. Though the new village’s status of
‘guest’ of the land-donating village could be brought up in case of a dispute, the new village did
receive the village rights to the land including mining rights.
The boundaries between village territories were defined as lines between landmarks. For
example, the border between Selofara and Djelibani was defined as the line from the big tree on
the ridge of the escarpment, through the grave of a founding ancestor (who was buried on the
border deliberately following a conflict) to a landmark on the river, kilometers further south.
58
Mines that cross village borders were a regular source of conflict, especially if there were
complicating circumstances. The Kandani/Bokorila surface and hard-rock mining mine was
located on a field that belonged to a compound originally from Kamalen and crossed the current
border between the Mambila and Namakana territories at the Kandani landmark (a ridge of rocks
in the field). Both villages claimed the mine, using different names that would support their
claim, arguing over days of mourning (mines close on the day of the funeral of an important
person) and taxes. Initially Kandani/Bokorila was primarily a surface mine so there was little tax
money to claim and the conflict simmered along for a while but became more pronounced when
a number of hard-rock mining shafts were opened. During my fieldwork the conflict remained
unresolved but did not escalate. In a similar conflict between Balan-Mansala and Balan-Komana
however, the Balan-Komana youth had gotten so upset with the Balan-Mansala claim on a mine
that one night they purposefully angered the bush spirits and made gold disappear by hanging
dead dogs in the mining pits.
Gold mining was seen as an activity that benefitted the village community and therefore,
if gold was found under cultivated fields, the village interest was deemed more important than
that of the owners and miners were allowed to mine in the fields. In the Balan-Bakama it was
common to see placer mines expand into recently harvested fields. I regularly inquired about this
practice as I expected this to be a source of conflict but it was not; the owners of the fields were
expected to clear another field and if this were ever to become a problem due to a lack of land,
village leaders indicated their willingness to assign it to them. As there was an abundance of
land, this was never really an issue. The Balanko mine that Djelibani worked on in 2011 even
covered a field suitable for the cultivation of rice. Such fields are rare and produce a treasured
59
crop but the destruction of the field by forty 15-meter deep pits and connecting galleries was not
seen as a problem.
Claims to mines, whether made by villages or potential chiefs of mines (see chapter 5),
ultimately concerned attempts to expand responsibility for resources and people. Villages or
chiefs of mines did not lay claim to a mine with the intention to claim the gold that was mined or
the people who would be allowed to mine. As long as a miner was willing to submit to the rules
of the mine, he or she would be allowed to mine in the artisanal mines of Mande and would get
to keep all gold that was found. Mande villages and their chiefs of mines could gain some mining
tax money (usually 3000F per shaft dug) from controlling a mine, but they did not levy taxes on
the gold that is being mined. The majority of Balan-Bakama village and village-mining funds did
not gain money from gold mining in their territories in 2010-11. This was due to relatively low
levels of mining activity (the funds only really grow during a gold rush) and because of the
particular organization of mining which allowed miners to keep all proceeds from their gold
mining labour.
Balan-Bakama miners often spoke of the different gold mining organization systems they
encountered on their travels. In many cases national law or local customary law allowed
owners/chiefs of mines and/or the national state to impose taxes on gold found by artisanal
miners. In Guinea for example, mining teams were obliged to share their gold with an assistant to
the chief of mines who would be counted as one of their team. In northern Ivory Coast artisanal
mines were privately owned, with the owner employing artisanal miners. While this is not the
place for a thorough comparative analysis of other Mande systems of artisanal mining
60
governance42
, it is clear that the local land tenure system and national mining and land tenure
laws have a great impact on the local organization of artisanal gold mining and on the daily life
and earnings of miners.
Geology of Balan-Bakama Artisanal Gold Mining
The Balan-Bakama is part of the Bure goldfield which covers southern Mali and northeastern
Guinea.43
A gold field is a geographical region where gold mining takes place. In a gold field
gold is not evenly distributed; one does not find gold in even quantities everywhere but there are
many places where it can be found. In the Balan-Bakama, which does not have a very high
concentration of gold compared to the Siguiri or Kofulate regions, people would still say that
“gold can be found anywhere here”. Saying so, they referred to a probability issue; one could dig
in the ground anywhere and have the possibility of finding gold. Gold might be found in the
rocks of the Mande Plateau, at the base of the Plateau in the low-lying area where the villages
were located, in the Balanko river and on its (former) banks.
In the Balan-Bakama, each village had a number of active and inactive mining sites. The
chiefs of mines whom I interviewed listed the mining sites of their villages and each counted
between five and twenty sites. Even within each mining site and within each mining shaft, gold
is unevenly distributed. Therefore, much of the work of miners down in mining shafts consisted
of prospecting; washing ore from different sides of the gallery in order to find the most profitable
direction.
42
For such analyses see for example Nyame & Blocher 2010; Luning 2006; Grätz 2010. 43
All the gold deposits in the southern part of Mali are part of the Bure gold fields. The West of Mali, south of Kayes, is part of the Bambouk gold field that Mali shares with Senegal.
61
In chapter 2 I will describe the three main methods of gold mining employed by Mande
miners; surface mining, placer mining and hard rock mining. Geologically however, these
methods access two main types of deposits, namely – primary – rock deposits (quartz) and
alluvial deposits. The quartz is the original source of gold and is mined by hard-rock mining
(woyon). Some of the rock that contained gold was eroded by water, heat and natural chemical
processes. Gold however is a very stable element and while the rock may erode away, gold does
not dissolve (Whyte & Cumming 2007: 17; Armbruster 1991: 187). Gold from eroded rocks that
stays in its original place is known as eluvial gold. Balan-Bakama artisanal miners used eluvial
gold as a sign of the presence of gold in the quartz by washing the grit (eroded rock) around the
hard rock they dug out and only made the effort to pulverize the hard rock if they had first found
gold in the grit.44
Much of the eroded rock and its eluvial gold will be washed away by rain
and/or streams and when the gold settles in sediment it is known as alluvial gold. Gold found on
the floor of the Niger river which is mined by people around Kangaba (Kelly 2008) is alluvial
gold (with mining organized like surface mining, see chapter 2), as is gold mined on the banks of
rivers (Panella 2005: 436), and in the Balan-Bakama placer gold and surface mining gold. In the
past, the course of rivers in this region used to be different and so there are many sites that used
to be old river banks or floors that contain gold. This alluvial gold has settled in the soil in
specific layered patterns through erosion, sedimentation and chemical processes caused by the
rising and setting of the water table in the dry and wet seasons.
44
Gold in the eluvial matter was seen as a strong indicator for the presence of gold in the quartz. One day, my jatigimuso (hostess) Nantene Doumbia washed the rocks that I was given by a Selofara miner. She did not find any gold in the eluvial material and concluded it was not worth pulverizing the rocks. I looked at the rocks and found a speck of gold on one. Though gold was obviously present, Nantene concluded that it would not be enough to make pulverizing and washing it worthwhile.
62
In the Balan-Bakama, locations with alluvial gold generally contain gold deposits on two
levels: in low concentrations just below the surface of the soil (up to 70-100cm deep) and in a
higher concentration on top of a layer of clay (at 10-20m). The first layer of alluvial gold is
accessed by surface mining; the second layer is known as a placer and is mined by placer mining.
Fouseyni Diakite, a Bamako-based geologist with industrial mining corporation RAND-gold,
explained to me on July 19, 2011 that placer gold has not been washed down into the soil with
rain or river water. Instead it sinks into the soil, down to the layer of clay known in Maninka as
nara, through seasonal changes in acid levels of the soil. With the seasonal rising and settling of
the water table and the washing in of rotten organic materials (eg. tree leaves) the acidity of the
soil changes from acidic to basic and back again each year. Through this process, gold specks
sitting in the soil that are ‘touched’ by the water table precipitate into the soil. Eventually this
gold settles on the layer of clay that artisanal gold miners search for in placer mining (see chapter
2).
Termites dig all the way down to the water table to survive, bringing soil particles up to
the surface which they then use to build their mounds. Sometimes the termites bring gold along
with them which ends up in the termite mound above ground. Both artisanal and industrial
miners have discovered gold deposits through this medium; several artisanal sites in the Balan-
Bakama were discovered by chicken holders who chopped off a termite mound to bring home
(chickens eat termites). According to Fouseyni Diakite, industrial mining prospectors nowadays
also cut off termite mounds in their search for gold deposits in Mande (see also Stewart, Anand
& Balkau 2012; Afrol News 2003).
63
Globally, the main environmental and health hazard of artisanal gold mining is the use of
mercury (Telmer & Veiga 2009; UNEP 2008;).45
Mercury amalgamates with gold when added to
ore which allows the miner to extract a higher percentage of the gold present. The resulting ball
of mercury and gold is heated to allow the mercury to evaporate leaving the miner with the gold.
The mercury vapors from the burning process and mercury waste end up in the environment (air
and water). Through breathing in mercury or eating contaminated fish, miners, their families and
people living in mining areas, ingest mercury which “may cause damages to the respiratory and
neurological systems” especially in children (Castilhos et al. 2015: 11256). Because the use of
mercury can lead to higher profits and because of unawareness among the general population,
mercury use remains popular in many places even there where it is formally illegal, as it is in
Brazil (Veiga & Hinton 2002).
Mercury was rarely used in the Balan-Bakama because it was too expensive for miners
who mine ore with very low concentrations of gold and because it is less useful in washing
alluvial gold than hard-rock gold. Because of labour migration to the Bambouk gold field where
mercury use is common (Niane et al. 2014; Callimachi & Klapper 2008: 10) Balan-Bakama
miners were well aware of the potential of mercury, but also of its monetary cost. The only
miners applying mercury to their ore in the Balan-Bakama were the Burkinabe crushing-machine
owners who reworked already pulverized and washed (by hand) hard-rock ore using well water
outside of Mambila (see chapter 2) far from a river or stream.
Gold-as-mined is not pure gold but is mixed with other minerals. The purity of gold is
measured in karats (k), with 24 karats being pure gold. Gold mined from the placers of the
45
Another environmental hazard is the destruction of forests which was somewhat of an issue in the Balan-Bakama though mining sites in the region tended to be small and their impact on the forest was much less than that of charcoal production. For other health hazards see chapter 2.
64
Balan-Bakama is usually between 21 and 23 karats (see also chapter 3). Artisanal miners do not
recover all gold from the area that they are mining. There are many areas of a mine that they do
not reach (see chapter 2) and the washing method leaves about 50% of gold in the ore (Gewald
2010: 23).
Balan-Bakama miners closely studied the layers of the earth on known mining sites. They
especially looked for sandiness, water levels and presence of rocks, all of which have
consequences for the stability of the shaft and the gallery. Though artisanal miners distinguished
some types of rock, they shared little knowledge with industrial (university-trained) geologists.
The Balan-Bakama miners who were known as specialists were pointed out to me on the basis of
their experience working in artisanal mining sites of different countries. Having gained
experience with different geological and governance situations, they were said to recognize more
geological situations, know where to find gold in new situations, and react faster (which could be
a matter of life or death when a gallery caves in). I was not able to directly observe the work that
takes place in the mining galleries (because of my gender)46
but it seems to me that formal
geological knowledge would not be very useful to them. It is a well-known geological fact that
“the most likely place to find a new ore-body is: next to a known body” (Gewald 2010: 21) and
this corresponds to the experience of artisanal gold miners who continued expanding existing
sites until a new site would be found (see chapter 5).
46
Research assistant Madi Kama Keita made some video material in the mine of Djelibani so I could see what it looked like underground (see figure 2.21).
65
Mining Governance by the State
On May 6 2011, the prefect of the ‘cercle’ of Kangaba, of which the Balan-Bakama was a part,
passed on a decision of president Amadou Toumani Toure (ATT) of Mali that “all artisanal gold
mining sites will have to be closed in the period May 15 to November 30 2011 to facilitate a
smooth and productive cultivation season” (Décision N° 11-10/CK). In addition to the heads of
various governmental institutions, the chiefs of villages and chiefs of mines (“Chefs de village et
les Chefs des placers”) were charged with the implementation of this decision. ATT had made
this decision together with the presidents of Guinea and Burkina Faso. The three presidents
urged artisanal gold miners to go back to their villages now that the rainy season was starting.
When Malian president ATT called for a seasonal closure of artisanal gold mines he drew
on existing seasonal labour patterns that sustained informal miners in Mande throughout the
farming-mining cycle. I initially understood the decision as a major change in the governance of
artisanal mining as the national and local governments did not usually intervene in artisanal
mining. As elsewhere in Africa this leads to “a large divergence between government laws,
policy and actual practice” (Bryceson & Fisher 2014: 184). Instead, governance of artisanal
mining was left to traditional authorities like chiefs of mines, chiefs of villages and/or chiefs of
land. Exercising authority over this socio-economic activity for the first time in Balan-Bakama
memory implied to my mind the start of a new relationship between the state and artisanal
mining.47
The arrival of the message through copies of a letter from the ‘sous-prefet’ and radio
messages did set off a great deal of discussion among miners and government personnel (namely
47
Legally, ATT was fully in his right to make this decision. He reinforced a ministerial order of July 15 1985 which “stipulated that: ‘gold washing activities were suspended on the entire territory of the Republic of Mali during the cultivation period from 1 June to 30 November of each year.’” (Keita 2001: 25).
66
the staff of the town hall and the border police based in Balan-Mansala) but very few villagers
were very surprised or upset about a decision that I assumed could force many of them to change
their rainy season plans. In the unhealthy rainy season most inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama
managed to feed their families sufficiently and take them to the doctor if need be, but only
because of women’s surface mining and men’s incidental work in hard-rock mining. Though
surface mining was also covered by ATT’s decision, as confirmed to me by mayor Lansine
Keita, it appeared that no one actually believed that the decision would be implemented in the
Balan-Bakama, and especially not at the surface mines. Through their analysis of the purpose of
Décision N° 11-10/CK and the power and habits of the Malian state the mayor, the policemen,
chiefs of mines and artisanal miners all came to the conclusion that the impact on mining in the
Balan-Bakama would be negligible. Those in formal positions said what they thought was
expected of them and farmer-miners talked excitedly more than worriedly about the decision and
resulting police action elsewhere (in Guinea and at Dagala in the Malian Mande Mountains) for
as long as ATT attempted to implement his decision.
According to the miners, the purpose of the joint decision lay in each country’s need for
peasant labour in different sectors. Miners in the Balan-Bakama themselves had been concerned
about colleagues who stayed on hard-rock mining sites like Dagala for too long, hoping for a
lucky break. Many migrant miners had invested much money and time in their hard-rock mining
shafts and hesitated to go home at the start of the farming season, thereby risking being too late
to sow and thus to farm during the rainy season. So as a general measure, many miners who did
not expect to be affected by it, supported the government’s decision or could at least understand
it in this light. They thought however, that the purpose of the three presidents was to claim
peasant labour for millet farming in Guinea which had experienced a food deficit in the previous
67
year, and for cotton farming in Burkina Faso and southeastern Mali (Sikasso region). Ever in
need of foreign exchange, the Malian government and the World Bank have watched the number
of cotton farmers dwindle due to low prices of cotton, uncertainty about the ability to pay back
the debt incurred to buy seeds and pesticides, and decreasing support from the government’s
cotton corporation. Many Balan-Bakama farmers once used to cultivate cotton as well, some
making a fair amount of money in the process (like gold trader Lamine Keita, cited below), but
at the time of fieldwork no cotton was grown in the region.
Hopkins ethnographically describes the functioning of the newly independent Malian
state in 1960’s Kita (Hopkins 1969; Hopkins 2008): “Apart from … written instructions [in
French, while the political language was Maninka], communications with the capital were also
often face to face and involved Kita people visiting their patrons in the capital. Mail came by
train three times a week, and telephoning was rare. This pattern of communications was slow and
creaky and it undercut the efforts of the national leaders to impact directly on the base” (Hopkins
2008: 76). In 2011 little had changed in the Balan-Bakama. The Malian state had gone through a
process of decentralization, intended to bring government services closer to its citizens and
adjust the government’s bureaucratic approach to the mainly oral and consensual decision
making processes of the population (Zobel 2004: 244). As a result, the Balan-Bakama (except for
Balan-Komana) had become its own rural administrative area (commune rurale) with a town hall
in Balan-Mansala. The town hall had four employees and a representative in each village, but
like almost all Malian ‘communes rurales’ it had practically no disposable budget. As a result, it
was close to the inhabitants as intended by decentralization but had almost no services to offer
them. Though the Malian state officially employed a consensual mode of government, the
colonial and postcolonial traditions of top-down government and continuing logistical
68
difficulties48
meant that the Balan-Bakama mayor regularly received decisions from the prefect
or president he was expected to implement without any consultation of (rural) stakeholders.
As a result, the inhabitants and government workers in the Balan-Bakama were used to
receiving decisions from the centers of government. On Monday49
May 16th
I interviewed
several people in Balan-Mansala about the recently arrived decision concerning the moratorium
on artisanal gold mining:
Mayor Lansine Keita:
“I am on the list of people who have to make sure that the decision is being respected. So
with the copies I received from the prefect I informed all village and mining chiefs… I
informed them all and told them they should respect the decision. That is all I can do…
For this region June 1 is indeed an early date to halt mining [the rains have not started
yet], June 20 would have been better, but June 1 works better for the Dagala region where
there was a famine last year, unlike here. It will not be easy to implement this but it was a
decision of the central government so we have to comply with the rules, it is my task to
convince people of this.”
Modibo Kourouma, Balan-Mansala school principal and government representative:
“The paper [with the decision] is not here but with the village chiefs. This will not be
easy but it [artisanal mining] is already fully stopped”.
Banjugu Keita, Djelibani male chief of mines:
48
Sending messages to the Balan-Bakama went faster than in the past. However, regular two-way communication between the commune and Bamako or Kangaba (the seat of the sub-prefect) was impossible. Where French colonial officials once travelled through the region on horseback, photocopied letters with instructions were now delivered by motorbike from Narena or Kangaba both of which had – limited – internet connections. In Balan-Mansala, the seat of the town hall, one could make phonecalls standing on the roots of a tree close to the town hall. Town hall staff regularly travelled to Bamako and Kangaba for consultations, salary payments and the reception of orders and documents. 49
In Mande no mining was done on Mondays (see chapter 3). Monday was also market day in Balan-Mansala. This was the only weekly market in the region.
69
“No we did not stop mining yet. You can come tomorrow; we’ll be working at the
Balanko mine. No, we certainly have not stopped mining.”
Falaye Keita, tailor and Balan-Mansala tonboloma:
“There has not been a meeting of tonbolomaw but there was a meeting of village chiefs
and the mayor in Selofara. The village chief told people that they have to follow the
instructions. Balan-Komana though [part of the Narena commune rurale] was instructed
to continue while their mayor sends a representative to the government. They are waiting
for the answer. Here we have not really decided yet.”
His friend Madi Kama Keita, Selofara miner, continues:
“It will just continue. How could they forbid people to make money? We need gold
mining here, even for agriculture, for herbicides, pesticides and seeds. It is going well
here [in Balan-Mansala] because of artisanal mining, that is why this village is so large.
Everything depends on mining; he is a tailor but people can only pay him because of
artisanal mining. The houses you see here, all the motorbikes, that people are nicely
dressed; all artisanal mining. They did not even inform people. They should at least have
organized meetings in all communes to decide what to do. These beds [points at carpenter
next door], they are only getting sold because of gold.”
Numuri Magassouba, Selofara miner:
- “No tomorrow we will not be working at Balanko [of Selofara] because we would
need the pump for that.”
- “Did the pump leave the village?”
- “No, it is still in the village but it is not used anymore. There was this document, did
you see it?”
- “Yes, I saw it. So it is easier to stop the work when everybody depends on a
machine?”
- “That is it.”
As artisanal mining continued as before in the Balan-Bakama, except for the already unprofitable
Balanko operations of Selofara, the local radio station reported about the situation in Guinea
where miners had been chased from mining sites by the police. The Malian police had also tried
to clear the Dagala mine in the Mande Mountains that had experienced famine in the previous
70
year. They did however not enforce the president’s decision, apparently in exchange for a
payment. Eventually, attempts by the mayors of Narena and other communes succeeded and
Décision N° 11-10/CK was withdrawn; artisanal mining continued unobstructed during the rainy
season of 2011.50
The national government continued to delegate artisanal mining governance to village
and mining chiefs. Formally, artisanal mining “can be done by anyone with a gold-washer’s card
(costing $7)” (Keita 2001: 25), but I have never seen anyone with such a card which was issued
by the National Directorate of Geology and Mines and should be purchased annually (see also
AIRD-ENA in Panella 2007: 351). In practice, artisanal mining was managed by local non-state
governance structures, especially the chief of mines and his assistants (tonbolomaw), unless a
mining site became so large that there may be incidents (including fights between miners of
different nationalities) they could not manage. When Nyumumakana, on the Mande Plateau,
experienced an influx of migrant miners in 2010, the local police received reinforcements who
managed situations tonbolomaw were unable to control.
In Mali, artisanal mining was a legal occupation, particularly in designated zones known
as couloirs d’orpaillage. “Couloirs d’orpaillage were reserved for artisanal mining and were set
by a joined administrative decision of the Minister charged with Mining and the Minister
charged with Territorial Communities. These zones … are announced to the public. No mining
permit may be awarded for these zones by the Ministry charged with Mines, except for permits
which are applied for through the Territorial Communities. However, traditional gold mining is
tolerated in areas free from any mining permit or within the perimeters of mining permits with
50
I do not know whether the decision was withdrawn formally or only informally but it was not heard of again during the remainder of my fieldwork in 2011 and follow-up visits.
71
the preliminary written agreement of the permit holder” (Code Minier en Republique du Mali
1999, Section III Article 57).51
Though the system of couloirs created legal work locations for artisanal miners, it did not
respond to their lived reality. Miners for whom artisanal mining is the prime occupation were
very mobile (see chapter 6) and would lose profit if they stayed in one place, something the
couloir d’orpaillage system pressured them to do. Additionally, in the Balan-Bakama no
artisanal miner held a government gold-washer’s card and people were not aware of the limits of
permit zones or the rules pertaining to these areas.52
The town-hall could not answer my
questions on the possible existence of a couloir d’orpaillage in the Balan-Bakama though they
would have been responsible for the administration of this area and for the sale of gold-washer’s
cards (a very small area was designated a couloir on a 2010 permit-map but then disappeared
from it on the 2011 maps). Mali counted a few (5-10) couloirs d’orpaillage, but most artisanal
miners operated outside of these areas, under the authority of local chiefs of mines. Though not
within the designated legal system for artisanal mining (because they did not carry gold-washer’s
cards), such labour was also not defined as illegal in Malian law. Unlike in some West-African
countries where miners were obligated to seek protection from state interventions (Grätz 2009:
14) artisanal miners in Mali did their work without fear of police or army.
51
The new Mineral Code of Mali of February 2012 contained the same language in Chapter 3, Article 51 (Code Minier 2012). In 2014 the Malian government discussed changing this system. It hoped to disallow artisanal mining outside of the couloirs d’orpaillage and limit the number of permits to 90,000 with miners organized in cooperatives that were connected to specific couloirs (maliweb 2014). In 2017 these proposals had not (yet) been made into law and no major changes regarding artisanal miners’ relation to the state had occurred in the Balan-Bakama. 52
This is different from the system of gold-washer’s cards, mentioned in the previous paragraph. A couloir d’orpaillage is a geographic area that is reserved for artisanal gold miners. The gold-washer’s cards permitted individual artisanal miners to search for gold in more areas of the country, including those that may be claimed by industrial miners who did not currently mine in their permit zone (but excluding areas where industrial miners were actively mining).
72
In the Balan-Bakama, the local decentralized government had little involvement in
artisanal mining. When Komana-Kuta sold entrance tickets to its popular Worofe mining site
(see chapter 5) that seemed to indicate local government involvement (see figure 1.2) it turned
out that town hall staff knew nothing about it. Once, during the mining boom of Balan-Mansala
the government had levied taxes in this manner but during 2010-2011 taxing artisanal gold
miners was limited to the mining chiefs of individual villages. Komana-Kuta had wanted to give
some legitimacy to its mining tax tickets but the chief of mines and his assistants acted
independently of the government of the commune rurale and all tax money was designated for
the local artisanal mining fund (see chapter 6).
Figure 1.2 Ticket to the Worofe site of Komana-Kuta that claimed to be sold by the ‘Commune
Rurale’ but instead raised money for the local Komana-Kuta artisanal mining fund
(Komana-Kuta, May 13 2011)
Unlike artisanal mining, mechanized mining was regulated by the national government through
the National Directorate of Geology and Mines (DNGM) in Bamako. The directorate gave out
mining permits to Malian and foreign companies. These permits were limited to specific
73
activities (exploration, prospecting, extraction), minerals and geographical locations. DNGM
produced maps of mineral zones that showed which company held the permit for gold mining for
which area and the maps showed that all of the Balan-Bakama had been sliced up into gold
mining permit zones. This did not mean that the companies or DNGM expected to open a
mechanized mine in the near future. The mining permits in periferous zones like the Balan-
Bakama were primarily kept for speculative purposes (see Collier & Venables 2008 in Bryceson
& Fisher 2014: 190) so that companies would be able to trade their rights in case more gold was
found in the region or the gold price would rise enough to make exploitation of known deposits
profitable.
Though the Balan-Bakama did not seem to hold enough gold deposits to justify the
launch of a mechanized mine at 2010-11 prices, a holder of a gold mining permit was obliged to
show a willingness to develop their permit-area. If the company did not invest anything in its
permit-area it risked losing the permit. As a result, I regularly encountered exploration teams,
sent by one of the 10-15 mining companies holding permits in the Balan-Bakama, who would do
tests. The number of permits changed as a result of the slicing up or merging of existing permits
which were regularly bought and sold. Therefore, I cannot say with certainty that each of the
permit holders visited the region at least once a year, as required by their permit. I did not check
each visitor but all industrial miners who visited to do tests represented companies that held
permits in the Balan-Bakama.
Once, an exploration team asked the village chief of Selofara for permission to do tests in
a zone for which they did not have a permit but were interested in acquiring the permit. The
village chief did not give his permission, referring the team to the town hall in Balan-Mansala
instead. It is unlikely that the mayor or his assistants would have been able to help this team
74
much further since the DNGM works independently of the local government. The map of mining
permit zones which was available for free at the DNGM in Bamako but was unavailable and
unknown at the town hall.
During fieldwork, one industrial mining company, Macomin, developed some activities
in the Balan-Bakama, in the territory of Selofara. It had acquired a permit to this area from
DNGM and once in the area it did contact the town hall staff and worked closely with them. The
town hall selected the local workers (guards) the company wanted to hire and acted as a
moderator when a dispute about salary payments arose when the company left the area.
Macomin however, did not intend to establish a mechanized mine in the Balan-Bakama but
instead set up its equipment as a demonstration site, wishing to sell the machinery to DNGM,
which was not interested. Balan-Komana and Komana-Kuta used to have small mechanized
mining operations, but both had disappeared years before I started fieldwork (see chapter 6).
Shortly after the end of my fieldwork in the Balan-Bakama, the Republic of Mali became
increasingly unstable when Tuareg seperatists and jihadis took over large swaths of northern
Mali. On March 21 2012 the Malian state was taken over by the military in a coup shortly before
a planned election. Swift intervention by regional body ECOWAS assured that a transitional
government took power and organized elections that elected current president Ibrahim Boubakar
Keita (IBK). Many problems collided and led to the coup and the war in northern Mali but a
prominent overarching issue was and is the weakness of the Malian state. Though the Balan-
Bakama is in the South of Mali where the government was relatively strong, this weakness was
visible, especially in the realm of artisanal mining. The local government and artisanal miners
were unaware of laws relating to artisanal gold mining (a major economic activity in the region)
and so the law would not be implemented. When the president issued a decree to halt artisanal
75
mining for the rainy season, government officials informed their representatives in the villages as
well as the village chiefs but ultimately the government had no real means of assuring the decree
was implemented as there was no police permanently based in the area. On the large mining sites
that police did target they were ultimately ‘convinced’ by local leaders (we can assume this
required bribes) and the work continued.
Buying and Selling Gold
The Malian state’s approach to the trade in artisanally mined gold was similar to its approach to
artisanal mining itself; it did not intervene in the gold trade up to the point where the metal left
the country when a tax of 3% was levied (Keita 2001: 11). Much gold however is assumed to be
smuggled out of the country to avoid the tax (op.cit.: 9). As a result, the total mass of gold mined
by the artisanal miners of Mali is unknown.53
The bulk of artisanally mined gold was exported by a small group of five gold traders
based in Bamako (Callimachi & Klapper 2008: 10) who had the resources to buy large quantities
of gold and contacts with banks or other buyers abroad (especially in Switzerland, Brussels and
Dubai). These traders each relied on a network of local traders to supply them with artisanal
gold, their loyalty assured through gifts and loans. Some gold traders in Balan-Mansala would
sell directly to one of the five gold exporters, but most, like the gold traders of Selofara would
sell their gold through a middleman. As a result, the gold traders in Selofara offered a slightly
lower price than buyers in Balan-Mansala (with a difference of about 500 FCFA/gram) and
miners with much gold to sell would travel to Balan-Mansala to sell their gold.
53
Another reason was the smuggling of gold into Mali from neighbouring countries (Callimachi & Klapper 2008: 10) with stricter regulations on artisanal gold mining and exportation of gold.
76
In 2010-11, Selofara had two main gold traders; one a shopkeeper, the other – my host –
a part time trader who would buy gold at the end of the day when he and his clients were back
from the mines and fields. On Mondays, market days, a third trader would often come down
from Balan-Mansala to buy gold in Selofara. I regularly observed my host buying gold and saw
that most sellers were women who sold small quantities of gold. Like the traders I observed at
larger mining sites, the buyer would open up the cigarette wrapper, observe and clean the gold
(using a magnet and wind), and weigh it carefully before calculating and announcing his offer.
With only two traders in a small village, people did not always go to the same buyer; instead
they split their business in order to maintain good relations with both so they could get credit
from both traders. The extension of credit is the main way Mande traders retain regular clients.
All gold buyers of Selofara offered the same price and worked with the same middleman;
Lamine Keita from Namakana. The local buyers had been given working capital and used it to
buy gold, which Lamine picked up once a week on his way to his ‘patron’ in Bamako. Lamine
Keita had earned his working capital by cultivating cotton, then invested it in his own store, and
in 2010-11 divided his time between his hometown of Namakana and Bamako, buying gold from
local traders in the Balan-Bakama and the Sikasso area. He told me that his profit was between
250 and 500 FCFA per gram, from which he still would have to pay his transportation to the city.
Malian artisanal miners receive a high price for the gold they mine, with traders paying
them only slightly less than the world market price. For example, on October 6 2010 gold buyers
in Selofara paid 17,000 FCFA for a full gram and 1600 FCFA for a tenth of a gram (disi) of gold
mined south of Selofara (gold from mines north of the village is known to be less pure). The
previous day, the last day for which information was available in this region without cellphone
connections, the world market gold price was 1330.50 USD/oz for 24 karats gold. Using the
77
conversion rates of that day, this would indicate a price of 18906 FCFA/gram for 22.5 karat gold
(the typical purity of gold in this area according to Lamine Keita).54
This means that gold miners
are paid 90 to 85% of the world market price (depending on the quantity they sell).
During fieldwork in 2010 and 2011, the gold price in FCFA rose fairly consistently
(January 2011 being the exception). Traders therefore had little risk of losing their meagre profit
in the time between purchase and sale. In 2013 however, the price fell just as consistently as it
had previously risen, which led to losses for gold traders, driving many of them out of business
and enlarging the difference between the price paid to miners and the world market price. This
difference had already been great in April 2012, when Mali experienced a coup d’état, which led
to a sudden drop in prices paid to miners because of growing uncertainty among traders.
The coup d’etat of March 21, 2012 created an exceptional circumstance in which the
properties of gold as a trade item needed to be questioned. Under normal circumstance, gold
could easily be sold locally and on the world market (it is a very liquid commodity). Malian
traders and miners sold their gold in a system where they sought out trading partners in whom
they had confidence.55
This confidence was based on earlier interactions and/or reputation. At
the same time there was a high level of trust in the trading system as a whole where traders
continuously made new connections with miners and amongst each other.56
Traders would
54
The world market price was 1330.50 USD/oz (24 karat gold), which on October 5 2010 was the equivalent of 965.16 EUR/oz, which is equal to 30.74 EUR/gram, which is equivalent to 20166 FCFA/gram. For gold of 22.5 karats this leads to a price of 18,906 FCFA. 55
Traders often worked with people they have previously known through different channels, as when former shop-owner Lamine Keita set up trading relationships with other (former) shop owners in the Bakama when he entered the intermediary gold trade. Miners sold their gold to local traders or mid-scale traders in Balan-Mansala, all of whom they would know through other channels like kinship, school or mining. 56
Following Gratz (2004) who describes a similar system, though with more threats of government intervention, for northern Benin, I use the terms ‘confidence’ and ‘trust’ as in Seligman (1997, in Gratz 2004: 146). In this distinction “['confidence'] relates to particular persons, 'trust' to a social system, institution, general norms and roles” (ibid.).
78
minimize their risk by carefully cleaning and weighing the gold they were offered but they did
not check its purity, basing their price per gram on the source of the gold as indicated by the
seller. As a result, the market was relatively open and little expertise was needed to engage in it.
Since gold is also easily transportable, with a high price for a small quantity making
transportation to market places inexpensive, miners were able to command a high price. In 2012,
the political instability in the southern half of Mali, which includes the gold mining areas and the
trade and transportation hub Bamako, called into question the transportability and thus liquidity,
and taxation and customs conventions. The difference between the price paid to miners and the
world market price rose to at least 2000 FCFA, but quickly fell as a transitional president –
Dyonkounda Traore – was installed, elections planned and coup leader Amadou Sanogo
eventually imprisoned.
As a result of the high prices miners were paid, the remaining profit margin for traders
was small. In order to earn money by buying and selling gold, traders tried to maximize the
amount of gold they ‘moved’. To gain access to gold, traders had to engage in relations with
miners and other gold traders who traded at different levels. Lamine Keita, the whole sale trader
in the Balan-Bakama, lent trading capital to a number of (former) storeowners in his native
region. These storeowners used the money to buy gold which they subsequently sold to Lamine.
The traders would sometimes sell gold to Balan-Mansala traders if they suddenly needed money
in between Lamine’s weekly visits. Though Lamine Keita insisted during an interview that such
sales were not allowed under his (informal) agreement with the gold buyers, he had little power
over them. The agreement was understood as an extension of credit; a proper way of creating a
lasting relationship with a client in a patron-client relationship, but not limiting the client in his
(gold traders are always men) economic activities as long as he is still planning to pay it back.
79
Since 2011, Lamine has left the gold trade after some of the local gold traders exited the business
by paying him back their trading funds.
Conclusion
The rules governing artisanal gold mining in the Balan-Bakama at any one time were strict (see
chapter 2), but it remained a profoundly dynamic enterprise that took place in a specific socio-
economic, cultural, political and geological context. This was not an activity or community
without a place, or one identifying its place as a frontier (cf. Bryceson and Jønnson 2014: 16),
but instead was determined by its place and the people who claimed it as their village’s territory.
At the time of research the yearly mining cycle of Balan-Bakama farmer-miners was being
changed by the recent introduction of hard-rock mining which allowed men to mine for gold in
the rainy season (women had long engaged in surface mining during this season), and also by
farmer-miners’ ever increasing need for money and the high gold price. As a result, some male
miners were able to support their compounds by mining in the rainy season, instead of farming
with the compound’s work team. In a place where everyone, including the mason, the
shopkeeper and the blacksmiths, were also farmers, this presented a potential challenge to the
primacy of farming in economic structure and identity-formation (Jønsson & Bryceson 2014:
31). At the moment of research however, when mining was the most important source of money
for most people in the Balan-Bakama, this did not destabilize their identity as farmers. This may
have been different for miners who work at large sites permanently like some do in the mines
around Kenieba in the west of Mali. For those who had worked on mines elsewhere and returned
to their village, the identity that had most been reinforced by their travels was a regional ethnic
identity. Their sense of being part of a wider Mande region where people speak mutually
80
intelligible languages and organize their mining in structurally similar ways had been reinforced.
Some of the basic relations of artisanal mining which may have given rise to new identities if
they were new, like its team work and division of profits, resemble those of rainy season
agriculture outside of the compound workteam, so artisanal mining does not ‘introduce’ new
types of economic or social relations to existing ones. First, it merely follows one set of known
principles more than another. Then secondly, artisanal mining itself is not a newly introduced
socio-economic pursuit but instead has been part of the Balan-Bakama livelihood cycle for
centuries.
Though the – usually distant – national government made attempts to push farmer-miners
back to exclusively cultivating in the rainy season, its decree was ineffective because its
institutions lacked the trust of its citizens, lacked means for implementing an unpopular – and
unpractical – decision and because people were convinced that they needed to continue mining to
provide for their needs and those of their families and so they were willing to at least await the
government’s resolve. The decree did not fit with the usual practice of Malian national and local
government to leave the governance of artisanal gold mining to local ‘traditional’ institutions
like mining chiefs and village chiefs (see chapter 5). These institutions shaped the practices and
relations at artisanal gold mines as representatives of their villages, molding them into extensions
of village life.
81
2. Social and Material Technologies of Artisanal Gold Mining in Mande
Having discussed the placing of artisanal gold mining in the previous chapter, I now turn to
practices on the mining sites themselves. The mining sites were governed by chiefs of mines
with support of assistants and co-villagers. Office holders were tasked with imposing certain
practices and punishing those who broke their rules, though the latter was rarely necessary in the
Balan-Bakama because the great majority of miners were locals who were familiar with local
mining regulations. Each village of the Balan-Bakama had one or two chiefs of mines
(damantigiw) who were responsible for the artisanal gold mines within the territory of that
village. The chief of mines was represented by so-called tonbolomaw, who represented the chief
of mines and supervised the gold mines. Tonbolomaw advised the chief of mines on the rules
governing the mine57
and they enforced these rules.
There were three main categories of artisanal gold mining in the Balan-Bakama and
elsewhere in Mande; surface mining (yemasu), placer-mining (daman), and hard-rock mining
(woyon). Each of the categories had its own basic set of rules that were similar (though not
identical) all over Mande and the chief of mines and their tonbolomaw of a locality came up with
their own variation on these rules according to the specific situation of their village and its mines
at a particular point in time. Each of the three types of mining is unique in four fundamental
ways; the layer of earth in which gold is found, the material technology used, the gendered
organization of labour, and the rules applied by the chief of mines and his/her tonbolomaw. In
57
Most chiefs of mines were elderly and did not usually leave the village to visit the mining sites. As a result, tonbolomaw, who were formally their assistants, had a lot of power to set minor rules that responded to problems occurring at the mines and to decide on the specific manner of enforcement (see chapter 4 on female chiefs of mines and chapter 5 on leadership positions and relations).
82
this chapter I will answer two main questions, namely ‘how is artisanal gold mining practiced in
the Balan-Bakama?’ and ‘how does governance by chiefs of mine and especially their
tonbolomaw function at the level of the mine?’ I will discuss each of the three types of gold
mining, showing which social processes tonbolomaw were trying to bring under control in each.
For each type this chapter describes the basic geological situation, the material technology used,
the gendered organization of labour, and social processes that are particular to each mining
situation.
Surface Mining: Yemasu
In what I will call ‘surface mining’ (yemasu), miners searched for alluvial deposits of gold in the
upper laterite layers of the soil, just under the ground’s surface (between 10 and 60 cm deep,
avoiding most plant roots, see figure 2.1). At sites that were known to contain gold deposits in
this layer, miners dug out ore using a long-handled pickaxe (kalajan) and an oval shaped scraper
cut out of a plastic palm oil container. Having filled one or two tubs, they then took the ore to a
washing pit (duguso) to pan out the gold using calabashes (see figure 2.19).
83
Figures 2.1 and 2.2 Miners collecting ore at the Musodugu surface mining site (January 26
2011, Selofara)
Surface mining sites were very compact. Miners usually dug on the edges of an existing pit,
expanding it further and further. In the process they encountered washing pits that used to be
located at some distance from the ore-pit(s), and trees that slowly lost their footing and were
pulled down when judged at risk of falling soon.
During fieldwork I made the 2km walk to Selofara’s single active surface mining site,
Musodugu, at least once a week. I learned about the work, observed the changing shape of the
site and the workforce and discussed a wide range of topics with miners who were washing ore
or resting. Though surface-mines, like all other mines in the Balan-Bakama, were open to
outsiders, Musodugu was almost exclusively used by miners from Selofara. In December and
January, some women did travel to the surface mine of Balan-Mansala to mine there.
Surface miners were overwhelmingly female and the sites where they worked were
defined as women’s mining sites. In the Bakama these sites were governed by a female chief of
84
mines whose authority was independent of the male chief of mines (in Djelibani, Selofara, and
Namakana). In the Balan (in Balan-Mansala) there was no separate women’s chief of mines
office; the surface mining site was governed by the male chief of mines who also oversaw the
placer mines. Men were not barred from surface mining by either spatial rules or gender
expectations. In Selofara there was one Djelibani man who formed a team with a local woman
using an arrangement where he would cut the ore which she then washed, both taking half of the
profits. Other men would at times work at the site for a day or two, either teaming up with a
female relative (like a sister, never a wife) or working individually. By forming a team, men and
women would split the work in activities that were gender appropriate in placer mining where
men also dig for ore (in pits) and women wash the ore (see below). When they were not working
with a man, women never worked in teams but individually.
Work in surface mining was tough: “You get so tired, it is very hard. You earn a little bit,
you work but you only earn a little bit, some days you get a disi [0.10 grams], other days only
half a disi [0.05 grams] per day” (Narama Cisse, March 28 2011, Selofara). In an interview series
with thirteen women miners from Selofara, most interviewees (11) preferred placer or hard-rock
mining. Most preferred this primarily because they earned more gold this way, some also
mentioned that work on placer mines is less tough. Two women preferred surface mining for the
same financial reason. The latter’s experience of placer mining was affected by the feeling that
those digging the galleries of placer mines(kalajantigiw) cheated women out of their gold by
giving them a calabash filled with kunatige (soil from the ceiling of the gallery see figure 2.5),
typically free of gold, while keeping the ore for themselves (see also chapter 4). These miners
had a preference for surface mining over other types of mining, exactly because of the individual
nature of the work and profits: “I have done both placer mining and surface mining. I like surface
85
mining best, I go to Musodugu. At the placer you don’t get any gold. The work at Musodugu,
that is how I get my gold. Yes, that is where I get my profit” (Sanaba Keita, April 1 2011,
Selofara).
Practically all able-bodied women from Selofara would at times walk to Musodugu
because they needed money and because it was so easy to fit into their schedule. Like me, they
could just go to Musodugu to work and socialize if they had a few hours to spare. They did not
need to arrange any team members, transportation or special equipment.
Another reason that almost all women of Selofara would sometimes mine at Musodugu is
that surface mining could be done during any season. Unlike placer and hard-rock mining, whose
deep narrow pits fill with water during the rainy season, surface mining is facilitated by rain.
After a strong shower, there would always be women speeding to Musodugu to take advantage
of the free, clear water that had accumulated in their washing pits. Since the dry season was the
time during which men worked in placer and hard-rock mining, techniques which could prompt
widely known gold rushes, artisanal gold mining has come to be portrayed as a dry-season
activity (see chapter 1). For women in the Balan-Bakama however, it was as much a rainy season
as a dry season activity, both seasons associated with a different technique.
During the rainy season, many compounds had little staple food (mostly millet) left in
their granaries. They needed to buy food and needed money to pay medical bills due to a high
incidence of malaria and malnutrition during this time. As soon as they found some gold, women
sold this to a local trader to cook extra meals, buy medicine or clothes for themselves or their
children, or to save for their daughters’ trousseaus (the most important women’s expense). As
Narama Cisse stated above, a day of mining at Musodugu generally allowed a woman to take
86
home half to one disi of gold (0.05-0.10 gram), i.e. 875-1750 FCFA (1.60-3.20 CAD in early
201158
). These were very significant amounts in a poor country like Mali and it sustained many
families in the difficult time leading up to the next harvest.
In the Balan-Bakama surface mining was usually a rainy season only technique because
of the need for water. Using the free water that stood in their washing pits or nearby shallow
lakes in the rainy season, women found it worth the try to go pan at the mine for some time, but
during the dry months when water carriers needed to be paid 50F per jug women would stay
home, waiting for the men to start working on placer and hard-rock mining so they could pan
there.59
When I visited in January 2010, Musodugu was predictably deserted. In January 2011
however, it was busily mined (see also chapter 1). The reason was that some women had kept
mining occasionally during the harvest time (November, December) because of the high gold
price and one day in mid-January Sayi Keita had found a full gram of gold on the other side of
the path from where the miners had dug for ore previously. Miners flooded to Musodugu and
kept working on the site all year.
58
In early 2011, one Canadian dollar was worth 549 FCFA. I will use this rate throughout this thesis. 59
On an average day, a surface miner needed about 5 jugs of water, which would cost 250 FCFA. These yellow or green jugs (bidonw), originally used to bring cooking oil to stores, were ubiquitous on mining sites. They were used as water jugs and, cut in half and attached to a rope, as tubs used to pull ore out of pits (see figure 2.4). Panella observes that in the Sankarani valley, women only engaged in surface mining in the dry season as they grow peanuts in the rainy season (as do women in the Balan-Bakama). Unlike Musodugu and other surface mines in the Balan-Bakama however, the surface mines of the Sankarani valley are located near a lake (2005: 435) which may flood the surface mining in the rainy season.
87
Figure 2.3 Landscape of the deserted part of Musodugu (January 26 2011, Selofara)
Figure 2.4 Children, surrounded by water jugs, accompany their mother to Musodugu (January
27 2011, Selofara)
Limited to the top-layer of the soil, surface miners find gold in a very low concentration,
distributed over a large area. This means that the most rational strategy is to pan as much ore as
possible. Since so little gold is present, investments in technical solutions except for possibly the
cheapest aides60
, are rarely cost-efficient (cf. Panella 2005: 436). Because of the resulting low
level of technology and incremental pace of finding gold, surface mining was defined as a
women’s activity.
Though there are no clear veins of gold in the upper part of the soil as miners find in
hard-rock mining, women did try to look for places with higher concentrations of gold. Like
Panella’s Sankarani valley informants who tested a spot for gold and moved on elsewhere if they
60
On my way to the Dabale mine, in the area of Kangaba, I met a young woman who used a sluice box made of wood and carpet. It had cost her mother 15,000 FCFA (27 CAD). She used it standing in a small stream. The women of Selofara would unfortunately not be able to find enough water near their ore deposits to use this kind of technology.
88
didn’t find anything (ibid.), the miners at Musodugu also moved around if they found little to no
gold but in the end, all miners dug on the edges of the same hole (see figures 2.1 and 2.2) or the
same site (see figure 2.3 as well as the surface mining sites of Namakana and Balan-Mansala).
Miners explained that if they found more gold than expected at a surface mine, a rare occasion,
they would try to keep this a secret and go back to the spot to retrieve more ore, usually finding
that the next calabash contained no more gold than usual. It was hard to keep a secret on a
mining site; miners watched each other closely, and many came to the mine partly to catch up on
the latest news already so observations were quickly shared. Since no one had individual rights
to the source of ore, like in other types of mining, other women could immediately start digging
in the promising spot. This is what happened when Sayi Keita found her gram of gold on the
other side of the path at Musodugu. Following this find, all miners shifted to the ever expanding
pit on that side of the path, digging new washing pits and intensifying their work even outside of
the rainy season.
The only thing that a miner had individual ownership rights to on a surface mine was her
washing pit (duguso). Whenever someone was new to a mining site she would first need to dig a
washing pit at a safe distance from the digging spots, before being able to wash ore. No other
miner would be allowed to use this pit. An argument over the use of a Selofara woman’s washing
pit by another miner had led to the first conflict on a site to the east of Selofara, a conflict that
had angered the jinew and needed to be settled by the village council. On sites owned by women,
(female) assistants to the chief of mines were reluctant to allow miners to destroy a fellow
woman’s washing pit in order to wash the underlying ore. Many active surface mines therefore
looked like the part of Musodugu pictured in figure 2.3; a zone empty of vegetation with
washing pits and ore pits interspersed with mountains of washed ore. On these sites, female
89
assistants to the chief of mines61
imposed rules and settle disputes, but besides the ownership
rights to washing pits and the absence of ownership rights to ore, the main rules were the
observance of taboos related to jinew (see chapter 3).
Though surface mining was conceptualized as a women’s activity, in 2012 there was a
boom in surface mining throughout Mande primarily driven by men. This sudden surge in
interest was prompted by the introduction of metal detectors that were calibrated to detect gold.
The detectors (masinw) could ‘see’ gold up to a depth of 30-50 cm, depending on the type and
price. Using metal detectors supplied by patrons, men fanned out over Mande to look for gold
nuggets in the upper layers of the soil (the detectors could not detect the gold powder that
women usually pan at Musodugu), leading some especially popular regions in western Mali to
charge a high tax of 50,000 FCFA (91 CAD) for scanning their soil since they were being
overrun by groups of strangers with metal detectors. A year later, the upheaval had already
subsided because the entire bush surface in mining areas had been scanned. Yemasu mining was
defined as a women’s activity again.
Placer Mining: Daman (yere yere)
Placer mining was the quintessential form of mining in Mande; its Maninka designation daman
is also the term for mining overall. As such, research assistants would often translate placer
mining as daman yere yere; ‘real daman’ to set it apart from mining techniques that were
grouped under the general term ‘mine’ but were not actually placer mines. In the academic
literature on Mande mining, the technology of placer mining has been well described and is
61
Djelibani, Selofara and Namakana had a female chief of mines and female assistants (tonbolomaw; see chapter 5) and they set the rules and settled disputes. In villages which did not have a female mining authority, like Balan-Mansala, the male chief of mines and his assistants ruled the surface mines.
90
generally presented as the only mining technique in existence (eg. Keita 2001; Armbruster 1991;
Balandier 1947; but see Panella 2007) while, at least in 2010-11, it was one out of three. Though
hard-rock mining was a relatively recent invention (see below), surface mining as a topic of
anthropological data collection (Milton 1979: 43,44) suffers from gender bias (it is mostly a
women’s endeavor) and seasonal bias (for climatic reasons most research in Mande takes place
in the dry season when almost all artisanal miners are engaged in placer and hard-rock mining).
For the Balan-Bakama I estimate that about 50% of the hours of labour spent on artisanal gold
mining were dedicated to placer mining, 45% of time dedicated to surface mining and 5% to
hard rock mining. These proportions were of course not the same everywhere; especially the
balance between placer and hard-rock mining, both dry season endeauvours involving teams of
men, depended much on the type of known deposits.
The placer mining technique was employed to mine alluvial gold deposits located at
depths of between 5 and 30 meters (in the Balan-Bakama mostly between 10 and 20m62
). Miners
dug a shaft to the layer of ore (nye) which is about 30cm thick and rests on a layer of clay (nara).
The clay may or may not contain gold.63
In mining geology such a formation is known as a
placer. The 30cm layer of ore was removed by the cutting of a gallery (komugu), but 30cm is not
enough space for a miner to work and he would therefore also remove a layer known as kunatige
(lit. ‘head-space-cut’) (see figure 2.5).
62
5-10 celon in Maninka, a celon is the length of a man, from the tip of his stretched out hand to his toes. 63
In the mines of Selofara and Kouremale the clay does contain gold, in many other places it does not. Gold miners would test the nara to decide whether to wash it or not.
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Figure 2.5 Diagram of a placer mining gallery showing the three soil layers miners work with
Unlike surface mining where miners had a high level of independence from each other, placer
mining had a high level of coordination above as well as under ground-level. The location of
placer mining shafts were determined by the (male) chief of mines or his assistants (tonbolomaw)
who placed the shafts on regularly spaced rows (15-20m distance). Between the shafts of one
row was about 2-3m (see figure 2.9). Once they had marked the spots where miners could dig,
miners selected a spot and started digging straight down. As shown in figure 2.5, miners would
dig the shaft (average diameter 71cm)64
all the way down to the layer of clay. This took about a
week during which the team (damantigiw) worked in shifts. To save time, they made the shaft as
narrow as possible; they sat in a cross-legged position, using a short-handled pickaxe to remove
the earth from the space between their legs (this triangle-shaped space is known as a sugunti) and
turning around to create a circular shaft (see figure 2.7), cutting feet rests in the wall.65
Having
arrived at the layer of clay they would start digging in a straight horizontal line towards the next
64
At the placer mine of Djelibani, whose shafts were average in size, I measured the diameter of ten shafts. Their width was between 65 and 78 cm, with an average of 70.5 cm (June 14 2011). 65
One of the reasons women did not usually undertake the task of digging the shaft is because they wear skirts which do not leave space when sitting cross-legged. At the Musodugu site in Selofara, a group of women had started digging a shaft which was very wide and uneven. This mine never reached the clay layer.
92
row of shafts. Once they arrived at the site of the next shaft, miners started removing the ore
between two galleries by cutting tunnels.
Figure 2.6 Diagram of a system of eight placer mining shafts and connecting galleries. The
miners working on the far left do not have to cut straight to a neighbouring shaft as
one does not exist. When cutting ore to their left, they are allowed to cut irregularly
shaped galleries. Nb. This diagram is not to scale, in reality galleries are longer and
will have many more ‘feet’ and perpendicular galleries
Figure 2.7 Miner starting to cut a shaft (after about a half day of work). Note his legs leaving a
sugunti (Balan-Komana, April 24 2011)
Little by little all the ore was removed till only a few pillars remained, these were known as
‘feet’ (senw). The fewer pillars supported the soil above the gallery, the higher the risk of the
mine collapsing. Madi Keita explained: “When you are removing ore from between the galleries,
sometimes there is almost no ore left; you can see from gallery to gallery. There comes a point at
which the members of the team of kalajantigiw decide that cutting more ore from the pillars is
not worth the risk and they leave the mine” (Selofara, May 16 2011).
93
Besides collapsing, a second major risk to miners working in the galleries is carbon
monoxide poisoning (sisa). Kanda Keita explained: “Gas is a big problem. It is very dangerous.
Someone can be working in the mine and not notice. Then suddenly they are out of air”
(Selofara, May 16 2011).66
To avoid this, miners used two techniques; they fanned air into the
shaft and cut ventilation canals. The fanning technique involved the miners or an aide using an
item (eg. cardboard, a pair of jeans) to wave wind into a shaft. When carbon monoxide became a
big issue at the Balanko mine of Selofara in 2011, miners sowed a tube out of plastic which they
placed in the shaft before fanning air through it. The second technique involved the cutting of
ventilation canals between pairs of galleries. When the mining shaft arrived at the layer of clay,
miners started cutting the gallery but ventilation was very limited. Miners were therefore allowed
to cut through one ventilation canal to a neighbouring gallery before the gallery arrived at the
next row of mining shafts. As the area around the shaft was protected (see figure 2.22), they were
allowed to cut through at the moment that the miner can disappear inside the gallery. Besides
finyewo (‘air-hole’/window) the canal was also known as a koladon (‘back-entry-place’). A
ventilation canal was cut between each pair of galleries67
, though an exception is made for the
last shaft in a row of mining shafts of an uneven number. In that case, a second ventilation canal
could be cut through to the neighbouring mining shaft, though it will have to pass by the opposite
side (see figure 2.8). Having cut the ventilation canals, miners would have to cut the whole
gallery. Only once they had arrived at the next row of shafts were they allowed to cut sideways,
towards the neighbouring galleries (see also figure 2.6).
66
Once, when I was visiting the mine near Selofara where Kanda Keita was working with his wife and mother, Kanda stepped out to ventilate the shaft, using an old pair of jeans. I stepped back, but unwittingly found myself next to the connecting ventilation shaft. I almost fainted because of the large bubble of (invisible) carbon monoxide that suddenly filled the air. 67
As the ventilation canal was located at the same level as the gallery, ore was removed to cut it. This ore could be washed and gold retrieved.
94
Figure 2.8 Diagram of a row of seven placer mining shafts and their ventilation canals
Unlike in surface mining, where an individual miner could work through all stages of mining
alone, placer mining is divided into four stages, each of which typically involved another group
of laborers. These four stages were: digging the mining shaft, digging the gallery, washing ore
and a potential fourth stage in which specialists entered the mine to remove the last bit of ore.
Typically, a mine was started by a group of three or four miners; two or three men and a
woman.68
This team is known as the damantigiw, the owners of the mine. They would pay a tax
to the chief of mines (in the Balan-Bakama 3000 FCFA, i.e. 5.46 CAD69
) and thus gain control
over the mining pit until they stopped working on it (control over a mining pit was indicated by
hanging the bucket used to haul ore (danka) over the mining pit). While the two men dug the
shaft using a short-handled pickaxe, the woman’s job was to haul soil and ore (see figures 2.10
and 2.12) and to test potential ore by washing it. In the mines of the Balan-Bakama it took about
a week of team labour to dig a mining shaft and arrive at the layer of clay (nara) on which the
ore rests.
68
The constitution of teams could differ especially on small sites due to personal preferences or incidental labour needs. When a group of three male friends wanted to work together they created a group of four. When someone dropped out of the team and require replacement this could take a while leaving a smaller team. 69
This was the regular amount for placer mines, in hard rock mines the tax was often higher or differently organized (see below).
95
In interviews people in Selofara often lamented that gold was disappearing; miners found
less gold per day of labour than they used to in the past. They attributed this decline to a trend in
which miners increasingly favored their relatives when constituting work teams70
, which in turn
led to dissatisfaction among miners. The breaking of the mining ethic and the dissatisfaction
among miners who had difficulty joining a team had induced the bush spirits who guard the gold
to withhold gold from people and so miners found less. According to villagers the mining ethic
dictated that everybody should have an equal chance to become part of a work team, to being
invited to join a team by anyone one even vaguely knows and this ethic was increasingly being
violated. This expectation that work teams should not be compound-based was however a very
new development as previously (in elderly people’s memories and Balandier 1947: 543, 544)
labour on artisanal gold mines was primarily organized by compound. The work team had
covered all stages of the mining process (digging of the shaft, gallery, washing) but had involved
different members of the compound for each stage. Balandier describes how the chief of the
compound (lutigi) stayed home with a wife and the youngest children, while all other inhabitants
of the compound travelled to a mine together, collecting gold that they would eventually hand
over to the head of the compound back home, with the exception of every third calabash that a
woman washed since this was for herself (Balandier 1947: 544). 71
This system has changed
completely. Previously, the size of a work-team and the division of labour had depended on the
constitution of the compound – the number of brothers living together, the number of women
traveling with them, the age of the individuals – but the identification of the team-members was
predetermined as they were all members of the same family unit. At the time of research
70
I have not been able to verify this trend but the perception was strong, including among elderly people who also remembered the era when compound members would exclusively mine together and travel to distant mines as a group. 71
Though, according to elderly people of Selofara, women would often give part of their own gold to the head of the compound as well, to help him pay for family needs (marriages of sons, tax payments, and fines).
96
however, the size of the different teams was fixed, as were the genders of the individual team
members, and the division of money among them, while teams were very flexible in accepting
individuals from different families and villages.
The descent based workteam used to be vertically integrated, covering all stages of the
gold mining process, possibly inviting experts for some specific jobs. At the time of fieldwork
four separate teams72
(shaft miners; gallery miners; haulers; washers) each worked on a different
task. The teams I observed often came into being when two people decided to form a team and
start a shaft and found one or two other members in the village (for a small site) or in the mining
camp (from among new arrivals at a gold rush site) to join them. When they arrived at the gold
bearing layer (nara) they would try to find a team of gallery miners interested in digging in their
mine and women to haul and wash ore (as the one female team-member would not be able to
haul the large amount of ore alone at this stage). People were not obliged to stay with their team
throughout the cycle so some teams switched members regularly, for example because of travel,
or loss of interest. Others teams were more stable and had worked together for several years. The
membership of mining teams was thus very fluid and based on trust (in gold rushes, rumour and
reputation are very important), friendship (in gold rushes solidified by conspicuous consumption)
and in the case of placer mining equality (Grätz 2009: 14). Teams were more hierarchichal in
situations where digging a shaft required serious investment of resources (for food or
technological implements) that regular artisanal miners did not usually have access to (Grätz
2009: 13; Panella 2007: 353) like on the hard-rock mining site of Dagala. At Dagala, it could
take miners weeks or months to find gold vein, if they found it at all. To deal with this problem,
many teams had an investor who paid for the meals and equipment of the shaft miners up to the
72
In some situations haulers and washers are the same women.
97
point that they found gold, in which case it was often a lot of gold. This gold was shared equally
among team members, including the investor.
In the era of Malian independence (1960), great changes were taking place in Mande,
including the Balan-Bakama; the money economy was expanding (Diarra 1965), the impact of
the central government changed (Selofara for example built its first school, see also Hopkins
1969 but people did were not required anymore to collect rubber or provide horses to travellers),
travel became easier through popularisation of bicycles and motorized transport, and as a result
social relations were changing (Leynaud & Cissé 1978). In 2010-11, informants explained the
changes of this era mainly in terms of individuals’ increasing need for money, especially young
people’s. In response to their demands, labour relations in the mines had changed dramatically.
Work-teams would not anymore be based on kinship but on friendship and reputation; unless
someone had a particularly bad reputation he or she would have to be accepted by a team with a
spot to fill.
At the time of fieldwork team members were expected to disregard kinship when
searching new members for their team or when inviting women to lift ore out of the shaft or
wash ore from their mine. Many villagers had come to the conclusion that other miners did not
always live up to this ideal and they suspected that this disregard of the (new) central values of
social relations at goldmines was the reason bush spirits were dissatisfied with the miners and
that these spirits had therefore limited the availability of gold in Mande (see also chapters 3 and
4).
Having arrived at the layer of clay and having found gold, the shaft miners would invite
another team of three miners to dig out the ore. These gallery miners (kalajantigiw lit. holders of
98
long-handled pickaxes) were known as mining specialists; there were many people working as
gallery miners but they tended to have more experience in mining than shaft miners.73
The
kalajantigiw were all men. Because I did not enter the mining pits my knowledge of the work
done by kalajantigiw is based primarily on (formal and informal) interview data while I was able
to directly observe all the work involved in surface mining. Research assistant Madi Kama Keita
did once take videos of the work in the gallery. I could see how the team worked with a division
of labour with one man cutting ore at the end of the gallery (see video still in figure 2.21), one
man transporting the ore in a vegetable-oil can (with the opening on the side), and one man
taking this ore to fill the bucket which he tapped as a sign for the women on the surface to start
hauling. I am not sure if this is a common division of labour or unique to this team. At the time
of research, women did not enter the mine shaft and galleries. While the gallery miners cut the
ore, women hauled the ore but this is not the female member of the team of shaft miners; like the
other team members her work ended when the shaft arrived at the level of clay and she and the
team could move on to another pit or join other teams (or in her case, wash or haul ore
individually). Other women took turns hauling ore in return for which they got to keep every 12th
can of ore for themselves. Women did this work in groups of two, where the second woman (see
figure 2.10) was the next in line to take the position over the shaft (and to receive the content of
the 12th
haul).
A cut vegetable oil can of ore filled one of the aluminum tubs that women miners used
for transportation which also filled one large calabash in which women washed ore. When gold
73
Exceptions to this depended primarily on the availability of low-skilled damantigi labour. During the rainy season (the off-season for mining), skilled miners who want to keep mining sometimes had to dig shafts as those who would do so during the mining-intensive dry season were working on the fields. On small sites like the Balanko site of Selofara in 2011 this was also the case because several skilled miners decided to stay close to home and support their village by working on its designated site, while most low-skilled miners travelled to sites in the region or farther afield.
99
was found in a pit, women would flock to it and place their tubs in line, waiting for their turn to
wash ore. After each washing, they went back to the pit to get a new load (up to three) and report
the result to a pit owner at the surface or gallery-miner in the pit. This way the gallery miners
would know if they should continue digging in the same spot. Each woman waiting to wash ore
received three tubs of ore of which she returned the gold from the first two and kept the gold she
found in the third calabash (known as the dugudage). Though the technique of washing ore was
seen as a typical woman’s job (the movements were very similar to those used in washing rice)
some gallery miners had learned to wash ore as well. These miners washed inside the pit, making
a washing pit at the base of the shaft. For male miners this skill was seen as the third stage in
mining expertise (the four stages were: shaft digging – gallery digging – washing – individual
gallery digging) and they used it to avoid having to pay women the gold from the third calabash,
a development that was resented by women. However, this seemed to be a problem specific to
low-yield sites like those of Selofara and Djelibani, etc. When a mining site had high yields of
gold, it was in the interest of the gallery miners to move quickly and try to work through as many
galleries as they could. In those circumstances they did not hesitate to share their gold with the
women who hauled and washed ore (this was different in hard-rock mining where washing
machines could be used, see below).
In the most cases however (and a situation known as the standard one among Balan-
Bakama miners), the (female) miner who lifts the ore received 1/12 of the ore. Then, the (female)
miner who washed three calabashes of the remaining ore received one third of that. The gold that
she found in the other two calabashes was divided equally between the team of shaft miners (two
to three men and a woman) and the team of three to four (male) gallery miners. So these teams
100
also each received a third which they then sold to divide the money equally amongst their team
members.
Figure 2.9 Row of mining shafts (nyesira) (June 11 2011, Djelibani)
Figure 2.10 Miner hauling bucket filled with ore (April 24 2011, Balan-Komana)
At some point in the life of a mine, the gallery miners would determine that the little gold they
would be able to find by removing some of the last pillars did not weigh up against the
increasing risk of collapse of the mine. At that moment they and the owners of the mine shaft
(damantigiw) would leave and thereby give up their rights to the mine and its profits. From then
on another, even more specialized gallery miner could enter the mine. For these miners (also
known as kalajantigiw), removing ore from the remaining pillars could be worth the risk because
they would not need to share it with a large team or with the former owners of the mine shaft.
These gallery miners who worked in old abandoned mines used to be gallery miners working in
teams before they learned the trade from a master miner with whom they would initially work as
101
an apprentice. Even after this period these experienced miners often work in pairs for security
reasons (see below for other risk avoidance methods).
One of the principal tasks of the chief of mines and his assistants on a placer (or hard-
rock) mine was the spatial arrangement of the mine. Miners and trades(wo)men were not free to
work anywhere on a site. Mande mining sites were typically divided into three zones: mining
pits, washing pits, and a commercial area. On large gold-rush sites, there were several mining
and washing zones, while the single commercial area on a site like Dagala was enormous (that of
Dabale, close to the large town of Kangaba was quite a bit smaller). In early 2010, when the site
was extremely popular and attracted miners from all over West-Africa, its commercial zone
included sellers of motorbikes, alcoholic drinks, as well as products seen on smaller sites like
clothing and of course food. Except for sellers of water and ice cream who may send a child to
the mining zone to sell their wares, vendors never hawked their products, being restricted to the
market area.
The vendors’ prices were also controlled by the tonbolomaw. Mines are often described
as be spaces of hyper-consumption where seasonal migrants use their windfall after a day of hard
work to buy items for a high price. Miners who had travelled from far to reach a large mining
site clearly bought more items than they would at small mines at home. The ‘markets’ of the
Balan-Bakama mines were very small, usually with only a one or two female traders selling
meals and sometimes a male trader with a table with tea, sugar, flashlights etc. Though there was
more consumption at large and small mining sites, charging a high price was not allowed on any
of the mining sites I visited in the course of fieldwork. In Dagala a tonboloma asked a woman
who was selling fish about her prices and having figured that she was asking a higher price than
she would have in her own village he tipped over her tray in anger.
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Figure 2.11 Map of the Balanko placer mining site in Djelibani
The mines of the Balan-Bakama were very different in size and atmosphere, but their
organization was based on the same principles; a division into three zones and continuous
monitoring by tonbolomaw. The Balanko mine of Djelibani (see figure 2.11) was a clear example
of this. The northern part of the mine was reserved for two clusters of washing pits (see figure
2.12). The rows of mining pits interspersed with mountains of waste (kunatige) and shelters were
in the south east (a zone that would later be extended to the north east), and each day around
lunch time two or three food sellers from the village would set up shop next to the blacksmith in
the south west corner of the mine.
103
Figure 2.12 Miner at work in her washing pit in the zone reserved for this activity at the Balanko
placer mine of Djelibani. These are the rows of washing pits in the top right corner
of figure 2.11 (April 27 2011)
Figure 2.13 Mining equipment, from top to bottom: kalajan soli (long-handled pick axe), farasen
soli (short-handled pick axe) and bokoriya (used to loosen soil, ‘boko’)
The organization of placer mines was more formalized than that of surface mines; there are more
rules including rules that govern teams and work that takes place underground. The male chief of
mines and his assistants were therefore more involved in the day to day work and relations at the
mine than their female counterparts. The responsibility of female tonbolomaw at surface mines
was primarily to collect the contributions of all women of their compound and to represent the
female chief of mines. When there was a conflict at a surface mine it tended to be a personal
conflict as there were few rules to break. Tonbolomaw were formally responsible for conflict
resolution but in practice anyone who felt they had authority (because of seniority, kinship or
other reasons) could interfere. Where the female surface mining tonbolomaw were selected by
the women of their compound to supervise a mine primarily mined by inhabitants of one village,
104
the male tonbolomaw were members of one or two age groups and supervised mines that they
hoped would be mined by many migrant miners. An adult age-group in the villages of the Balan-
Bakama included between 10 and 25 men living in the village permanently.74
Depending on
need, one or two age groups of middle-aged men (around 45 years old) were selected to act as
tonbolomaw for the season. The need for a second age group could arise from the size of the
mining site and the number of migrant miners. Balan-Mansala for example appointed two age
groups as tonbolomaw because every year it welcomed many migrant miners, some of whom
lived in the village permanently but had not joined an age-group (see chapter 6). Because
tonbolomaw were selected as an age-group, there could be more than one male tonboloma on a
compound or none at all. Where women tonbolomaw were selected as members of a specific
compound and represented this compound on a site with people from only one village, the male
tonbolomaw were selected as age-group members and represented the village on mining sites
where there were often many mining migrants.
In the Balan-Bakama, tonbolomaw worked at the mines themselves as well. Miners who
had worked in Guinea told me that in the Suigiri region (the heart of the Bure gold field) there
were so many migrant miners the tonbolomaw did not mine but worked full-time as mining
authorities. As such, the taxes on mining were higher, with tonbolomaw formally being part of
the group of shaft miners; taking their share of the gold found without doing the actual physical
work. In the Balan-Bakama and all the Malian sites that I have visited, such a system had not
been introduced. Instead, any groups of future damantigiw who wanted to dig a shaft paid a
small tax of 3000 FCFA. The position of tonboloma was presented as an honourable one;
tonbolomaw did not get paid. Men of the age group who had a village-based job or business were
74
The age-group would have had many more members at initiation when they were about ten years old but high levels of mobility and mortality would have decreased their numbers.
105
involved in the meetings of tonbolomaw but were not forced to be present at the mine. At Balan-
Mansala which had large mining sites for example, the two age groups that were tonbolomaw in
2011 included a successful tailor who functioned as secretary at meetings but was not expected
to work at the mine. Those who did mine however were urged, though they could not be forced,
to work on the site of the village. In Balan-Mansala with its successful mining history, this was
not difficult, but in Selofara in whose territory little placer mining gold was usually found this
was harder to do. When it became clear thar the mine that had been selected proved to contain
little gold, and that this gold was also extremely hard to access because of the high water table,
more and more tonbolomaw left to mine in Djelibani and Komana-Kuta. The attempt to keep
tonbolomaw working on the mines of their village is not based on the argument that there should
be enough of them to control the site; a lack of tonbolomaw was never an issue. Instead,
tonbolomaw, even more than others who did not have a formal responsibility, were supposed to
support their village by mining its mining sites (see also chapter 6) which if done by many
miners had more chance of finding much gold thereby attracting outside miners who might
eventually stay in the village. If a mine started to attract people from (far) outside the village, the
team of tonbolomaw could try to strengthen itself by inviting experienced miners who had shown
themselves to be leaders of particular groups of migrant miners to join them. This was for
example common practice in Narena, a town just outside the Balan-Bakama which regularly
attracted outside miners even when it did not experience an actual gold rush.
On the placer mine, tonbolomaw had a number of responsibilities: monitoring miners’
obedience to the rules, organizing the mining site, collecting taxes, resolving conflict and
organizing the yearly (or more) sacrifices. At the mines of the Balan-Bakama, tonbolomaw were
not very visible. In their role as assistant to the chief of mines they acted primarily at the time of
106
sacrifice (see chapters 3 and 4). There were not many conflicts among miners here since, at the
time of field work, they all hailed from this small region and knew each other well. All gold
miners from this region were experienced and knew what was expected of them at the mine. The
situation at gold rush sites was very different as miners from different countries came together in
an overcrowded village and the stakes were high. For example, at the mines of the Balan-
Bakama there were no prime spots at the market to vie for as there were always fewer than ten
vendors at a site. Miners could only increase their chances of finding gold by mining more ore,
not by staying informed on gossip and making sure they got a mining pit in the right spot.
At the small, local and regional mines of the Balan-Bakama, tonbolomaw’s conflict
resolution and policing tasks were primarily used to deal with issues that came up under ground
level. For example, when a team of gallery miners at the Djelibani mine veered off course –
because they were following a trace of gold – and ended up in the gallery of a neighbouring
team, tonbolomaw entered the mine to confirm the infraction of the rule to dig straight to the next
line of pits before digging perpendicularly. As a result, the team of gallery miners was banned
from the site for a few days, effectively undoing their advantage over their neighbours who
would be past the same point in their mine at the offenders’ return. In addition to temporary
banishment, punishments usually came in the form of fines. To punish traders, tonbolomaw
resorted to destruction of (part of) the traders’ goods or a forced move to another, less profitable,
part of the market place.
Placer mines and the work that takes place on them were strictly structured by village
authorities. This was different from surface mines, where each miner worked for herself so there
were no work teams with an externally imposed division of ore and there were few rules that
structured the spatial order of the site or ownership of sources of ore. Conflicts at a placer mine
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mostly involved people breaking certain rules like the rule that a team should cut its gallery
straight from one shaft to the next (see figure 2.6). In reaction to recurrent conflict that is
recognized as having become a structural issue, new rules would be developed. This did not
happen during the relatively short time of fieldwork but the process did become clear by
listening to stories of past conflict and by looking at the rules that were imposed which dealt with
potential conflicts of interest as indicated by miners and chiefs of mines. While at the time of
fieldwork the issue of women being cheated out of their rich ore by gallery miners that would
give them kunatige instead of ore was dealt with by instructing women (through jinew, see also
chapter 4) to avoid conflict, it is likely that this issue will become more salient in the future and
demand a more structural solution. Other low-intensity issues were tolerated or avoided. Gallery
miners for example, who were deep in a mining pit regularly got annoyed when they had to wait
a long time for women to sort out the order in which they had the right to haul the ore (and
receive the 12th
calabash). This however, was generally accepted as a fact of life, except for those
rare situations where the soil was very sandy. Because the risk of the gallery caving in would be
so much higher in this situation, men would pull the cord.75
75
When interviewee Moro Magassouba first told me about this exceptional situation he had encountered in mines near Kouremale, I interpreted it as being a comment deriving from prejudice about women and their work. I then observed several situations in Selofara where women took a long time sorting out whose turn it was to haul the ore and hearing gallery miners trying to hurry them up from inside the pit which needed to be emptied of groundwater about once an hour. I conclude that it is (possibly among other reasons) a result of the particular ways women’s work was organized: they would get a specific number of turns, 12, for which they were rewarded with the contents of one calabash. At this stage of the life of the mine they were not attached to the team working in the gallery so it was most important to them to avoid conflict among the women by making sure no one could be thought of as taking advantage of others by jumping the queue. Since women and men were associated with specific modes of organization of mining labour (i.e. longterm membership of a small team vs. individuals taking up one-off tasks), the solution to this problem was found in the choice for a male teammember to pull the cord every time.
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Hard-Rock Mining: Woyon
Within Mande artisanal mining, hard-rock mining was a new technology. Thirty years ago, it
was not known in the Balan-Bakama (and probably the wider Mande goldfields) that it was
possible to mine gold from rocks. With the intensification of industrial hard-rock gold mining in
the Siguiri (northern Guinea) and Kenieba (western Mali/eastern Senegal) mining areas, both of
which were seasonal migration destinations for Balan-Bakama farmer-miners, the basic idea was
appropriated and new technologies developed. 76
Madi Kama Keita: “In Siguiri, many people
who work for the mining company also work on the artisanal mines. They would invest in
mining shafts77
or work there on their days off. They saw that the mining company found much
gold in the rocks and so they also tried to mine in the rocks. That is how, little by little, hard-rock
mining spread over Mande. [The hard-rock deposits at] Dagala [were] also discovered by men
from Guinea. Three specialists went there and they discovered that the rocks there contained a lot
of gold. That was the first hard-rock mining pit of Dagala. Very soon people heard about their
success and then everybody went to Dagala.”
Though placer mining and hard-rock mining applied many of the same principles in their
physical and social technologies of mining, there were also important differences. Unlike surface
and placer deposits, hard rock deposits are not alluvial deposits. Instead, hard rock gold is found
in the shape of veins in the rock and is thus not (relatively) evenly distributed as are alluvial
deposits (which geologically are eroded hard-rock deposits, displaced by rivers). The gold
extracted from hard-rock is also less pure. As miners followed veins and often used machines to
76
Those who worked on the artisanal mines of Guinea say hard-rock mining was first attempted there about 10 years ago. A miner who had worked in the Kenieba area in western Mali said the technology was first applied there 30 years ago. 77
On successful hard-rock mines one could ‘invest’ in a mining shaft which meant one pays for food and cigarettes and possibly dynamite for the shaft-miners until they reached the nara. This way, one could become a member of the team of shaft-miners without actively participating in the labour process.
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wash the ore (recovering more than when washing by hand), this source of gold is likely to
deplete more quickly. Where placer mines or surface mines could be mined several times over as
a rising gold price made the remaining gold interesting for extraction, hard-rock mines could not
be this easily revisited, except possibly by digging even deeper using new or more capital
intensive technologies (Bryceson & Fisher 2014: 191).
Because of the particular distribution of gold in hard-rock mines, the underground
organization of the mining was different from placer mining. Miners were assigned a spot to dig
by the tonbolomaw but once they hit a gold vein they were allowed to follow this vein.78
These
pits therefore were not straight, but followed a crooked path (see figure 2.14). Though hard-rock
mining shafts were more widely spaced than those on placer mines, the shafts often met
underground, as veins tended to merge as well. In such cased tonbolomaw would enter the shaft
to observe the situation and to decide who arrived at the spot first and would be allowed to
continue in that direction.
78
Another reason for this was the amount of labour needed to cut through hard-rock; tonbolomaw would likely have had trouble forcing miners to spend much labour, time and money on cutting through hard-rock without gold.
110
Figure 2.14 Diagram of a hard rock mining shaft at the Musodugu mining site in Selofara
following description and drawing by the miners. One miner hacks away hard-rock ore,
four others are needed to guide this ore to the surface
Because it was a relatively new technology, hard rock mining had opened up deposits that had
previously been inaccessible to Mande miners. Placer miners often worked on deposits that had
been mined for centuries; they reworked old sites (by searching for the ‘feet’ of mines that
collapsed long ago or by rewashing ore) or they mined at sites that were previously of little
interest because of the low density of gold. Lucky discoveries of large gold nuggets on placer
mines, like Balandier witnessed in Siguiri in the 1950’s, had become extremely rare and the
amount of gold found per miner per day had dropped. As such, the discovery of the hard-rock
deposits at the Dagala site near Nyumumakana in the Mande Mountains had great impact on
artisanal gold mining in the Malian part of Mande. Miners from all over West-Africa flocked to
the site whose promises of riches also lured in people who had never been involved in the mining
economy like Mande villagers from outside the gold mining zone and inhabitants of Bamako.
Many miners from the Balan-Bakama travelled to Dagala in the dry season of 2010.
Though it was always hard to estimate how much gold people found, it was clear that most did
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not find what they were hoping for; few of them went back to Dagala in 2011. The reason for
this was twofold; artisanal hard-rock mining is extremely arduous and also the majority of
miners did not find much gold while only a few struck it rich due to hard-rock gold deposits’
particular geology (Werthmann 2009b: 102).
Gold that is found in hard-rock is attached to this rock and so it cannot simply be washed
out as in placer mining. Miners hauled large chunks of rock out of the galleries. They determined
the direction in which they should continue by washing the rocks as they were hauled out of the
mine. If gold was found in the eluvial matter of the rocks pulverized by the shaft miners, the
rocks would be pounded down to powder using a mortar and pestle made out of metal. Because
this was so much work, miners brought rocks home to pound them there. This changed the nature
of the ‘rest’ days Monday and Friday. These were not real days of rest anymore but instead had
become days during which miners were busy pounding rocks in the village.
The gendered division of labour and the system of remuneration in hard-rock mining was
based on that of placer mining; a team of three men and a woman dug a shaft down to the point
where it hit a vein, after which a second team took over the work. The two teams divided in half
the gold or the rocks that were left after the washer, hauler and pounder had taken their part. The
ore was mostly washed by women who did not, however, receive each third calabash but each
twelfth, which reflected the amount of labour that went into the digging of the mine (see below).
Those who pound the ore also received a twelfth of the ore they pulverized.
Miners digging the pit and their teammember who invested in it had an interest in
avoiding having to part with some of the ore/gold they found to pay washers, haulers and
pounders, most of whom are women. As a result large sites like Dagala and Kenieba were
becoming increasingly mechanized. This is a process that had been going on in artisanal mining
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in West-Africa for many years but on the new site of Dagala it took about two years of an
intensive gold rush for crushing machines and large sluice boxes79
to become common.80
In early
2011, at the beginning of its third season of mass hard-rock mining, there were so many of these
machines in Dagala that a team of Burkinabe men to left to work in the Balan-Bakama. Just
outside Mambila near the Kandani/Bokorila surface/hard-rock site, they set up their crushing
machine in which they re-pulverized already washed hard-rock ore (i.e. refuse) that they bought
from villagers at 100 FCFA per calabash. They washed this ore using a sluice box and mercury
(which artisanal miners of the Balan-Bakama did not use) and quickly became a regular part of
the mining landscape in the area.
Figure 2.15 Miners sifting powdered hard-rock as preparation for washing (Nyumumakana,
January 14 2010)
Figure 2.16 Hard-rock is broken down into smaller rocks so it can fit in metal mortars where it
will be pounded into powder (Nyumumakana, January 14 2010).
79
A sluice box is a ramp over which is laid a mat. Ore, made muddy with water, is made to run down over it, causing the (heavier) gold to get stuck in the mat. The mud that accumulates in the mat is washed to remove the gold. 80
See Werthmann (2009b: 103-108) for a description of the organization of labour on a Burkinabe hard rock mining site comparable to Dagala
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Clearly, the new hard-rock mining technique had rapidly diffused over Mande. The adaptation of
the industrial technology of hard-rock mining by Mande artisans resembled the introduction of
aluminium casting in West-Africa as described by Osborn (2009). She shows how Senegalese
workers of two industrial iron foundries in Dakar discovered that the process could also be used
to manipulate aluminium (2009: 376). Some of the formal sector workers quit their jobs to start
their own, informal sector, workshops where they and their new apprentices produced goods for
the local market, especially cooking pots and utensils. Through these Senegalese, Malian and
Guinean apprentices the technology spread throughout West-Africa, crossing national and
language borders and became a fixture of the informal sector in the region (ibid.).
The diffusion process of artisanal hard-rock gold mining in Mande is similar to that of
aluminium sand-casting in that practical and technical knowledge of the technologies were
acquired by low-level (and thus underpaid) West-African employees of foreign-owned formal
sector industrial companies who understood the potential of this technology under the conditions
of the informal sector (op.cit.: 378). Unlike sand-casting however, artisanal hard-rock gold
mining is an adaptation of existing artisanal technologies of placer gold mining. Workers of
industrial mines understood the possibility of hard-rock gold when they saw it in the course of
their work but the adapted technology and skilled labour used in the artisanal hard-rock mining
process in the Balan-Bakama and elsewhere had its source in the artisanal placer mining process,
instead of in the industrial process as is the case with aluminium sand-casting. Miners with
knowledge of placer mining could, with some adjusted tools (eg. mortar and pestle made of iron
instead of wood) and an inquisitive spirit81
, easily learn the new technique, thereby avoiding the
relatively slow apprenticeship system through which the technology of aluminium sand-casting
81
Knowledge about mining techniques or the particular geological circumstances of a site were quite freely shared among miners, especially among those with some experience and social connections in the mining community.
114
was acquired and spread through the region (Schler et al. 2009: 294). This facilitated the rapid
diffusion of the technology once appropriate sites were found like the one in Dagala.
In early 2010, with Dagala entering the second year of its gold rush, miners had started to
try mining the rocky soils of Musodugu in Selofara and Bokorila in Namakama/Mambila. As the
presence of the Burkinabe attests, they were quite successful. The Balan-Bakama hard-rock
mines did not attract other miners from outside the region but were functional during the rainy
season. The reason for this is that hard-rock mines are much less likely to collapse than placer
mines. They also do not fill with carbon monoxide though the air becomes thinner the deeper one
digs. A small number of Bakama miners were able to mine all year, being freed from farming by
their compound’s heads (during this time they mined for the compound, giving their profits to
the head of their compound). Others divided their days between farming and mining.
In many aspects, hard-rock mining resembled placer mining, especially when seen from
above the ground. However, the introduction of this new technology caused a revolution in
Mande gold mining, not only in the boomtown of Nyumumakana on the previously isolated and
disdained Mande Plateau, but also in the Balan-Bakama where people were now longingly
looking up to the escarpment. Villagers were reminded that gold mining could suddenly
transform a region and hoped that the same would happen in their communities (see chapter 6).
Washing Ore
Following extraction (and in the case of hard-rock mining the pulverization of rocks) the ore was
washed. This washing was done mostly by female miners (but see above for strategies male
miners used to avoid having to share the gold they found with female miners). Women dug out
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washing pits (dugusow) which thereby become theirs for as long as the site was in use.82
A
washing pit was 70-100cm in diameter and 30-40 cm deep (see figure 2.17). Once dug, a miner
would fill the pit with water and after having procured ore they could begin washing.
Figure 2.17 A miner digs a new washing pit (duguso) at the Makono placer mine (January 16
2011, Namakana)
Figure 2.18 Washed gold over black sand; the end product of the ore panning process (May 25
2011, Komana-Kuta)
Malian miners panned gold using calabashes. Panning entailed three techniques which were
alternated; mixing water and ore, agitating the calabash and skimming the top layer. Gold has a
higher volumetric mass density than the mud or hard-rock dust it is found in. The panning
technique would employ gravity and the centripetal force of the calabash to cause the gold to
sink to the bottom-center of the calabash. This way the mud was sorted with the largest chunks
(which the miner breaks up) and rock on top and powdery sand and gold at the bottom. Little by
little the ore-washer would remove each layer, repeat the process of agitation to ensure no gold
82
Women could be forced collectively to abandon their washing pits in a particular area if the tonbolomaw decided the zone would be mined as happened in Djelibani in 2011.
116
was lost and end up with black metallic sand which is only slightly lighter in weight than gold,
and the gold itself (see figure 2.18). The miner skimmed off the visible gold and the layer of
black sand because this might still contain hidden gold and they would either bring this to the
mining team for which she washed it or collect it in a container; usually a small calabash filled
with some water (to hide the gold from nosy and possibly greedy visitors). At the end of the day
the miner would wash the accumulated high-grade ore again, removing more and more of the
black sand (biri). This sand, which is typical for placer formations, is magnetic. The last step in
the washing process was normally done by the gold buyer who removed the last bit of sand with
a magnet (gold is not magnetic).
The process of washing a full calabash of ore took miners between 5 and 10 minutes.
Miners washed ore with their bare hands, standing in the water pit themselves (see figure 2.19);
it was very exhausting work that was painful on the back and hands. Washing eluvial matter of
hard-rock mining was most painful because the rocks were large and sharp.
During panning, mud constantly spilled over the rim of the calabash so that even after
washing one load the water in the water pit became dirty. Since dirty water would keep gold
from properly sinking to the bottom of the calabash and made it harder to see the gold, women
employed several techniques to keep the water of their washing pit clean; they skimmed mud off
the top of the water in the washing pit, threw dirt from the calabash outside of the washing pit as
much as possible (see the mountains of dirt that had grown around the washing pit in figure
2.19), they kept a calabash of clean water next to the water pit to wash the last remaining black
sand and gold, and they regularly replaced the dirty water in their washing pit with clean water.
As the washing pit still quickly filled with mud during by the washing process, women began
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each day at the mine by scooping out the accumulated sediment from the bottom of the washing
pit.
Water was a crucial component of the ore washing process. Where miners in galleries
often suffered from an overabundance of water and spent resources on removing it (with pumps
or manual labour), those who washed ore often had too little water and needed to buy it instead.
Depending on the distance to the source this cost them 50-100 FCFA per jug that they had the
haulers fill. This work was usually done by local boys who transported the jugs on a bicycle or
donkey cart. On the Worofe placer-site of Komana-Kuta, which was thriving in May 2011, I
spoke to men who had made hauling water their business. They tallied the number of jugs they
had brought on their motor-cart, collecting the money (100F per jug) from the washers at the end
of the day when they had sold their gold.83
Though 100F is not much money, even for poor Malian subsistence farmers, the upfront
expense of paying for 5 jugs for a day of washing introduced risk of financial loss into an activity
that otherwise required no inputs (unlike the mining pit, no taxes were paid for the establishment
of a washing pit). Because women often found very little gold during a day, this fee made them
hesitant to take the risk at sites like Musodugu. In 2011, the site was still popular during the dry
season because of Sayi Keita’s windfall, but most years women would only engage in surface
mining when free rainwater was available.
83
In daily life in the Balan-Bakama writing was rare. Writing was primarily associated with religion or government. Sometimes, as in this case, traders would use writing (of numbers and names) to track client debt.
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Figure 2.19 Miner mixing ore and water in, fully submersed, calabash. Notice the mountain of
mud by the side of the washing pit. This is the mud remaining from many cycles of
ore-washing (March 5 2011, Selofara)
Figure 2.20 Gold washing ladle (fanfa) with a placer mining team’s findings of the day (April 30
2011, Selofara)
In placer and hard-rock gold mining, a large number of people worked on the extraction of gold
from one mine. Shaft miners, gallery miners, haulers and gold washers worked on the same mine
and divided the gold that was found, the amount of which nearly always disappointed. Such a
situation could easily cause conflict. Conflict in turn would exacerbate shame (maloya) which, as
Holten points out, “is one of the most fundamental aspects of Mande personhood” (2013: 70; see
also Brand 2001; Grosz-Ngaté 1989). Since jinew’s values were in accordance with those of
humans on this point, conflict would also lead to the disappearance of gold from the ground (see
chapter 3) so people tried to avoid this conflict.
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Trust and Transparency
In gold mining, and other social arenas where large groups of people had to cooperate and felt
they could not depend on strict social hierarchy and relations of trust, Mande villagers preferred
transparency. Structural conflict – simmering or recurrent – was habitually dealt with through the
introduction of new rules for the whole village, or even a wider region. These rules generally
aimed at transparency. For example, when around the year 2000 two women in Namakana died
of rabies after they were bitten by a dog, Namakana and then Selofara banned all dogs. When a
new rule succeeded in the elimination of a particular problem, the new arrangement could
rapidly be adopted by the village chiefs or chiefs of mines of other villages.
In the early 21st century, social scientists became increasingly concerned with the
decrease of public trust within large (Western) organizations and between individual citizens and
institutions (eg. Jimenez 2011: 177; Lahsen 2007: 10; Cook 2001; Strathern 2000a: 1; Strathern
2000b). In an introduction to a volume on the topic, Cook argues that “trust plays a significant
role in the functioning of social groups and societies. In the absence of trust, what are often fairly
complex systems must be put in place to protect against exploitation and opportunism and to
produce close monitoring and effective sanctioning” (Cook 2001: xxvii). The new ‘fairly
complex systems’ are part of what became known as ‘audit cultures’ and new systems of
accountability (Strathern 2000a) which according to Strathern started to develop in the 1980s,
changing the nature of organizations, including the university (Strathern 2000b). However, as
Cook, Hardin and Levi argue, the fear that such an erosion of trust would lead societies,
institutions and individuals to become ungovernable is misplaced because “many interactions in
which there is successful coordination or cooperation do not actually involve trust” (2005: 8).
Systems of accountability and auditing of university staff may be new and not conducive to what
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is seen as good research or teaching (Strathern 2000b: 318) but this does not imply that systems
aimed at transparency instead of trust are necessarily dysfunctional and/or unpleasant for the
individual participant.
Cook, Hardin and Levi illustrate their point with vehicular traffic, where trust in other
participants or an honest interest in their wellbeing is not an issue, merely an interest in one’s
own survival generally suffices (2005:8).84
In Mande gold mining, a similar system was in place.
In a manner parallel with the rules of traffic, the rules of mining regulated the use of space both
under and above ground and regulated exactly those points of interaction that were likely to lead
to conflict. These were the authority over the mine, especially the position of chief of mines
(damantigi, see chapter 5) and the division of gold among mining team members.
In Mande trust between individuals, even between individuals of the same compound,
was low (i.e. both public and private trust were low). A commonly cited saying goes: “to trust is
good, but to be certain is better”. In organizational systems, especially those that underpinned its
participants’ livelihoods, people in Mande had a preference for organizational clarity and
transparency to achieve accountability for participants. This was the case in the goldmines of the
Balan-Bakama as well as in women’s savings organizations. Both institutions used a discourse of
‘helping’ and ‘assistance’, and both consisted of people who knew each other well and had deep
kin- and/or historical ties. I would argue that exactly because of their close ties and the shame
related to them, which made it hard to reclaim a debt or demand an unpaid share in the gold
found, this ‘help’ was structured by strict rules that attempted to neutralize potential points of
contention through public displays of transparency.
84
I would suggest that this example pertains especially to cities like Toronto where traffic is relatively orderly. In Bamako, trust, or more precisely mistrust, plays a much larger role in traffic participation.
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For gold miners, a main point of contention was the division of the gold found by a team.
This problem was solved by a fixed and public division of said gold and the fact that the gold
was taken out of the soil by women who were not members of the team. The division of the gold
found by the mining team was the same for all teams on the mining site and mostly followed a
regional standard. This regional standard divided the money made from selling the gold that was
left after the ore washers take 1/3 and haulers take 1/12 equally between the teams of shaft-
miners and gallery-miners who then divided it in equal parts among each other. The standard was
only altered (by the local chief of mines, so for all teams) when one of the tasks required much
more work (time and/or effort) than usual. This was the case in hard-rock mining where the
division of ore had been altered and ore washers only received 1/12 of the ore they washed
instead of 1/3. In savings associations, women used an extensive written administration in which
each payment was publicly shown to the group at a meeting and subsequently recorded. This not
only happened in large structured groups like those of Bancoumana, but also in small groups like
those in Selofara where 22 members paid 1000 FCFA per person each week and were all
illiterate except for the secretary.
Situated Risk in Artisanal Gold Mining
Life was rife with uncertainty for Mande subsistence farmers and miners of all ages, sexes and
wealth categories. One’s life, health, friend or relative could be lost without warning. In an
environment that was too vulnerable to support a livelihood based only on agriculture (Jansen
2010: 96), gold mining was part of an over-all precarious life-experience and its dangers were
unremarkable for miners. Boholm, searching for an anthropological approach to uncertainty,
points out that “[the] psychometric model of risk perception involves dimensions such as a
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knowledge, degree of novelty and familiarity, degree of personal control and catastrophic
potential” (2003: 161). Boholm stresses that the experience of risk is neither fully subjective in
terms of cultural theory (Douglas & Widalvsky 1982) nor fully objective in terms of
mathematical risk calculations (2003: 165, 166) and advocated in favour of a focus on
uncertainty as a lived experience. This dual approach explains why the seemingly dangerous
endeavor of artisanal gold mining was not necessarily experienced as such by Mande miners and
their families.
Placer and hard-rock mining look scary for those uninvolved, as miners without any
protection work in the dark, at great depths, and with rudimentary technologies. Artisanal mining
introduces specific new dangers to the life of subsistence farmers, and foremost among these is
the collapsing of placer or – less likely – hard-rock mines on gallery miners. However, within
Mande subsistence farmers’ daily negotiations of risk (of hunger, disease, accidents, etc.),
artisanal mining’s known risks were accepted because they were relatively rare, familiar, and
because those most at risk – i.e. gallery miners – experienced a high degree of personal control
over the dangers they subjected themselves to (see below). This does not mean that miners were
unaware of the risks they were subject to or that they did not try to avoid those. Though many
people decided not to travel to Dagala in 2011 because the hard-rock mine had become too
unhealthy, they primarily meant that the work of hard-rock mining was too hard on the body
while one risks not finding any gold (for the lucky few who do hit a gold vein, the rewards can
be enormous); no one in Selofara avoided gold mining altogether because of its risks.
Both traditional and bio-medical healers confirmed the status of gold mining as merely
one of many reasons people request medical care. Members of the Diarrala compound of
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Selofara were known for their traditional healing skills. They specialized in bone fractures.85
Fasa Keita, an elderly gold miner of this compound told me that the primary cause of fractures
were motor accidents and that these also tended to cause the most complicated cases, of people
with multiple fractures. Gold mining accidents were the second largest cause of accidents that
led to bone fractures. The head doctor of the CSCOM – the government supported medical clinic
– of Balan-Mansala had even fewer patients who had been hurt by mining accidents. Most of his
patients suffered from malaria or lower respiratory infections and since mining accidents
primarily cause fractures – the healing of which people in Mande did not seek in clinics but with
traditional healers – he rarely treated people with mining related health issues.
This does not mean that accidents never happened. During the course of fieldwork I
heard of several mining accidents; a woman slipped and hurt her back at a surface mine, the
Diarrala compound hosted a miner with broken ribs and leg due to a mining collapse86
, a gallery
mining team had died due to the collapse of the mine in which they were working at
Bokorila/Kandani, and an individual gallery miner in Dabale near Kangaba suffered the same
fate.87
However, having spent many days at the mines of the Balan-Bakama and beyond, I never
once was present while such an accident occurred, nor were any miners from Selofara the victim
of one during 2010-2011.
85
Traditional healing methods for bone fractures generally involved a splint and the application of herbal medicines and speaking of incantations. As bone growth takes a long time, patients were housed on the Diarrala compound, or on other compounds of Selofara, for long periods of time (three month stays were not exceptional). 86
This was the man’s second time at the compound within a year. The family was upset about him not paying them anything for his first months’-long stay and threatened not to treat him this time. At the end of his stay of three months he thanked them profusely with gifts and a personal message on the local radio station. 87
When I visited Dabale in early 2010, the deceased’s body had been laid on the ground and covered with leafy treebranches. I was told that in the past the victims of mining accidents would be laid to rest permanently this way as their lives had been taken by jinew underground, their bodies should stay above ground, possibly to avoid angering jinew again. Their woolen cap however had to stay underground, creating memento mori for modern miners who would find them when reworking old sites. In 2010 I was told the corpse at Dabale would be buried elsewhere after at least a full day at ground level at the mine.
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Miners, and especially gallery miners, were always aware of the possibility of accidents.
In addition to keeping to the safety rules of the mines they tried to elude a variety of dangers
through prudence, and supernatural methods. One day I discussed the dangers of gallery mining
and protection methods with three experienced Selofara miners. There are many types of
accidents that could befall gallery miners: “people can get wounded in the mine, or they can die
in the mine. Things can fall in the mine and hit you, like what happened to Kaba last year. Also,
you can fall when you are entering the mine. Accidents can also happen when you are in the
mine; the mine can collapse, and also you can become a victim of gas” (Madi Keita, May 16
2011, Selofara). Much of their safety depended on the people on the surface. They should watch
children who might be tempted to throw rocks in the mining shafts, should listen for the noise of
a collapsing mine, and keep an eye out for the lone gallery miners who mark their presence by
putting their bag by the entrance of the mine. When a mine collapsed blocking the exit for a
gallery miner he wanted to maximize the chances of miners on the surface being able to dig him
out. The collapse of a mine was a very real possibility for the gallery miners, many of whom had
experienced it (Grätz 2010: 78, 79).
Working as a gallery miner in abandoned mines was a specialty: “to work in old mines,
one does an apprenticeship with a master. There are techniques for cutting, for moving, for
sitting. In an old gallery you can’t just sit like this because you could be hit by fragments and you
could not get away as quickly as you need. Before you start working you have to study the mine
closely, as there may be a fissure. This, you cannot neglect, and while working you also have to
observe the mine very closely. You also cannot just cut ore from any spot, this you have to
learn”.
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Through the apprenticeship and by working with other miners, gallery miners acquired a
range of gold mining ‘secrets’ (daliluw) which are well-defined pieces of knowledge, secret
clues allowing one more success or safety in mining. Some daliluw needed to be bought (often in
exchange for an animal), others were given to trusted friends and colleagues. These secrets can
be incantations to be uttered while descending into a mine, specific ways of moving through a
gallery (eg. starting from the left, or right), trees whose leaves can be put in a calabash so more
gold will appear, items to slash into the ground with a pick-axe before entering the mine,
bracelets which warn the miner for specific dangers by contracting etc. etc. (see also chapter 3).
Figure 2.21 Video-still of miner digging ore in a placer mining gallery (June 11 2011, Djelibani)
Figure 2.22 Traces of a placer mine, 20 to 30 years old. Most of the gallery has collapsed but the
first meter has not because miners are not allowed to dig sideways here. See also
figure 2.8 (May 31 2011, Selofara)
Artisanal gold mining did involve many risks to the individual, especially for those who worked
in abandoned galleries. As life in Mande was generally uncertain, gold mining did not stand out
as a particularly dangerous activity and practically all inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama accepted
126
the risks that came with it. Gallery mining specialists who worked in abandoned mines did so
with very little regulation from tonbolomaw, except for their work hours which were the same as
everybody else’s. The rules of artisanal gold mines were not generally designed to protect
individual miners. They aimed at transparency so they would not force individual miners to mark
the pits in which they worked, which was their own responsibility. Instead rules were designed to
diminish uncertainties (like banning children of certain ages so they would not throw stones into
pits) and the effects of conflict for the collective by regulating the spatial design of the mining
site, the direction of work underground, the market, and the division of money. These conflicts
would anger bush spirits which would bring them to cause accidents in retaliation.
Conclusion
Artisanal gold mining in the Balan-Bakama was subdivided into three techniques: Surface
mining, placer mining and hard rock mining. Each of these techniques had its own geological,
gender, material technology and governance characteristics. All miners fell under the authority of
chiefs of mines and their extensive rules and practically all miners abide by these. This implies
that mining in Mande is not a frontier or Wild-West type of activity where the strongest or most
cunning person wins by creating rules that benefit them but an ordinary one in which all villagers
and migrants participated without fear of being cheated out of their earnings or their turn.
Where surface mining was primarily associated with women and surface mining sites in
several villages were governed by village women, placer and hard rock mining were typified by
a clear gendered division of labour. In these two types of mines where ore is cut in galleries
underground, men did sub-terranean labour and women brought the ore to the surface and
washed it to retrieve the gold. The gold then was shared among the different categories of
127
teammembers according to standards determined not by the team itself but by the mining
authorities of the village.
In the past (in living memory) women used to enter the mining pits to scoop the ore that
was cut by the gallery miners into a calabash so another woman could lift it to the surface.
However, because of fear of rumor about sexual activities in the galleries, women had abandoned
the practice and now one of the male gallery miners filled the cooking oil cans. Though the risk
of sexualized shame is an extreme example, Mande miners (and villagers in general) preferred
transparent solutions when problems arose that could cause shame to individuals. Gold was
divided by clear ratios; in calabashes to washing and hauling women and in the form of money
among team members who may not trust the division of gold and prefer to sell it together to a
gold buyer to dividing the gold so every team member could decide himself when and to whom
to sell it.
Of the three mining techniques, surface mining was the least dangerous but also the least
profitable, a reason for it to be gendered female. Placer mining and hard rock mining were
especially dangerous for gallery miners who risked the mine collapsing on them in addition to
carbon monoxide poisoning, falls and falling stones. These dangers were exacerbated for miners
who worked alone in old mining shafts after these were abandoned by the original mine owners.
Though accidents sometimes happened, mining was not seen as too dangerous for anyone to
cease their activities, partly because there were few possible alternatives but also because
individual and communal attempts at limiting the risk made the remaining risk culturally
acceptable. Unfortunately mining accidents were not the only dangers to which Mande villagers
were exposed. Motorbike accidents and illnesses took lives even more often, diminishing the
prominence of the danger of mining in an area where life and wealth were extremely precarious.
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3. An Extraordinary Material: On Finding, Keeping, and Selling Gold in
the Balan-Bakama
As explained in chapters 1 and 2, in the Balan-Bakama artisanal gold mining was an ordinary
socio-economic activity performed by almost all able-bodied inhabitants of the region because it
was their best chance of earning money (cf. Bernus 1956: 13). I never heard of miners who had
quit gold mining altogether because of disenchantment with the exhausting work or low earnings
which may be more common among people from outside the gold fields who were drawn to
hard-rock mines because of the stories of extreme finds (cf. Jønnson & Bryceson 2014: 41). For
the great majority of Balan-Bakama adults, artisanal gold mining served as their principal cash-
generating form of labour. Their labour was also invested in subsistence agriculture and
housework and some specialized endeavours. Unlike in Burkina Faso (Werthmann 2009a: 214),
Madagascar (Walsh 2009), Tanzania (Bryceson et al. 2014) and many other places, artisanal
mining sites in the Balan-Bakama were not exceptional social spaces, separate and possibly
juxtaposed to life in the civilized village. Here, nearby villages established systems of authority
and control of the mining space and rules of labour in order to enhance the success of all miners.
Artisanal gold mines needed to be thus controlled (unlike for example labour in
agriculture88
) because gold mining involved humans appropriating a material that conceptually
came from the bush and therefore did not belong to them but to bush spirits (jinew). These spirits
needed to be persuaded to share their gold with humans and needed to be kept from causing
accidents.
88
Which did not take place in the ‘bush’ and was organized by leaders of compounds who each control the labour of their own men and women.
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After investigating the limited symbolic value of gold in 21st century Mande and the
spatial conceptualization of gold mines, this chapter will problematize the issue of ownership of
gold and the nature of bush spirits and miners’ relations to these unknown spirits. The next
chapter will analyze the place of jinew in a changing religious landscape and the villages’ yearly
sacrifices to jinew during which these village communities presented themselves as
organizational units and tried to assure continued success in mining.
An Ordinary Material
Gold (Au) is an intensively mined metal that has little applied use value. Unlike most other
mined metals and minerals (with the notable exception of diamonds), very little gold is used for
industrial purposes; 78% of gold that is extracted from the earth is used in jewellery
(geology.com 2011).89
As Renfrew established in his archeological study of golden artefacts
found in Varna graves, gold has prime value (i.e. ascribed intrinsic value) in many cultural
contexts due to material properties that have made it attractive to people in a range of cultural
and historical contexts (1986: 159). Gold has prime value because it is exclusive, durable and
shiny, and as a result gold is in many contexts attributed much higher value than could be
expected from its - generally low - use value. The purity of gold is measured in carats (k), with
24 carats being pure gold. The gold found in the placers of the Balan-Bakama has a purity of 21
to 23 carats, which is high but not uncommon for placer gold (see figure 3.1).
89
Other applications include dental implants, electronics and monetary uses.
130
Figure 3.1 Receipts received by a gold trader from Balan-Mansala reflecting the sale of gold to a
wholesale gold buyer in Bamako. Note the high purity of the gold offered; 22.1 and
21.6 carats (K) respectively. The P stands for the weight (poids) in grams, at the
bottom the price paid in Francs CFA (Balan-Mansala, May 4 2011).
Gold is in many contexts symbolic for an individual’s beauty and wealth in this or the afterlife
(Renfrew 1986) and is often imbued with symbolism related to larger sets of social relations; it is
used to bolster families’ prestige during life-cycle rituals and festivals (Larmer 2009: 53),
embodies kinship relations as a part of dowries or gifts to a bride (Moors 2003a:103) or honours
the gods (Taussig 2004). As an investment, gold is valued for the practicality of transportation,
its maximum liquidity (Moors 2003a: 102) and counter-cyclical price movement on the
globalized stock-exchanges. Both artisanal and industrial mining methods require a lot of labor
input to obtain a limited volume of gold, but because of its high price this has proven to be worth
the investment to both categories of miners.90
90
As noted elsewhere, at the time of fieldwork Balan-Bakama miners were satisfied with the price they were getting, pointing out that in earlier years they mined for gold because there was no other option but received a price that was actually too low compared to the work they put in it.
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In an article analyzing financial strategies of rural Gambians in the late 1980’s and early
1990’s, Shipton argues against the propensity of many development agencies to focus on
providing credit as a way to enhance the financial situation of the poor in this outer edge of
Mande. He points out that rural Gambians were more concerned with saving the limited
resources they have access to. They held savings in a variety of forms and strategies which do
not include money held in a bank account (1995: 249). Shipton argues that “[rural] Gambian
savings strategies are mainly concerned … with removing wealth from the form of readily
available cash, without appearing antisocial” (1995: 257, emphasis in original). Contrary to the
assumption of many rural development economists these farmers had an illiquidity preference,
they attempted to resist claims from spouses and other relatives and protect themselves from
their own inclination to spend money by saving in forms that were valuable but not too easily
exchanged for money. Besides holding small and large livestock and entrusting money to
financially secure relatives or co-villagers a major form of saving in Gambia was golden
jewellery, a female preserve, whose splendor continued to stun visitors (1995: 245, 246). In the
late 1980’s Mandinka91
women received gold worth at least 1000 dalasis ($145) at the time of
their marriage. If their financial situation permitted it they would add to this later in life (Shipton
1995:251).
In 2006, inspired by the work of Shipton (1995), Shunk (1991) and Moors (2003a;
2003b), I set out to study the use of golden jewellery as gendered adornment and savings method
in Bankoumana. In this relatively prosperous Mande town, not far from the gold mining zone, I
talked to many women and attended events that would be obvious arenas for showing off one’s
jewellery. Within days, I realized this line of research would be fruitless since practically no
91
Mandinka are not the same ethnic group as the Maninka of the Mande Heartland but they are a Mande people nonetheless.
132
one92
in this town owned golden jewellery anymore. Moreover, no one aspired to buy new gold
if they were to gain access to enough money in the future. As golden jewellery had become too
liquid93
(cf. Shipton 1995) and the risk of theft too high, women asserted that nowadays there
were many other purposes to which one could and should put one’s money. I decided to shift my
attention to the most prominent system of saving for women in Mali’s democratic era; the
Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCA), or tonw (see Kühn 2007; 2008; 2010).
RoSCA’s are especially suitable for small-scale traders who earn money in small but steady
increments but who need large amounts for buying new stock or for personal, ritual, expenses.
These savings systems are also becoming increasingly popular among women in the subsistence
agriculture and gold mining based economy of the Balan-Bakama (see above).
Golden Jewellery in the Balan-Bakama
“Before, once you had found some gold, you went to the jeweller maker to make it into earrings
or bracelets. Compound heads from Selofara collected the gold that their relatives had found and
had it transformed into jewellery by itinerant blacksmiths who would visit the village in the dry
season. There used to be a rich man over there [points it out, EK]. He would have his wives wear
the jewellery during festivities. Most families of Selofara used to have at least some gold but
some had much more than others. My grandmother had quite a lot. One day, the village chief
was imprisoned and all people were asked to contribute gold so that he could be released. My
grandmother gave some as well. But most gold was sold when there were problems like hunger
92
In Bancoumana I only met two women who owned golden jewellery. 93
The last pieces of golden jewellery had been sold during the droughts of the 1980’s which was incidentally also the time during which the price of gold started to rise. As a result, it became easier to sell gold (there were many traders who would buy gold, in any form, for a high price).
133
or the need to pay tax. People back then had a lot of shame; if they were told to pay they would
do it” (Numan Keita, Selofara, January 14 2011).94
While gold (sanu) seems to be present practically everywhere in the soils of the Balan-
Bakama, it was notably absent from view above ground. Gold was not on display in the form of
jewellery or otherwise and it was not even kept hidden under mattresses the way money was.
Instead, gold was immediately exchanged for money once it was found. A pragmatic observer
would conclude that gold and money are commensurate items of value especially since the price
of gold was fairly stable during my fieldwork. In a way, Mande miners were indirectly digging
for money. When a miner found a substantial amount of gold in a calabash, they would
immediately calculate the amount of money this would be worth, sell it and then use the money.
As Panella found in the Wasulu area of Mali, the expansion of the money-based economy
has shifted entitlement to gold/money earned through mining towards more fragmented,
individual budgets (2005: 439). Elderly people of Selofara remembered how all the ore that was
mined by the men of a compound was brought from the mines of Selofara to the village where
the women of the compound would wash it after the end of the dry season. In the late colonial
era most of the gold earned through mining in the dry season would thus be handed over to the
94
Bala Keita, chief of mines of Selofara, further explained why the colonial administration imprisoned the village chief of Selofara: “There was a war between the people of Selofara and those of the region behind this hill; it was a conflict about borders. They were with many; the Sobara comprises twelve villages [The Sobara is a region directly to the north of Selofara, on the Mande Plateau, EK]. So all the hunters of these twelve villages came together, against this one village, because of the land issue. When one of my grandfathers went there, he was tied and threatened with death, but his brother arrived just in time and he was carrying a gun. People tried to tie him down too but he managed to get to his gun and shot at the people who all ran. The brothers came back to Selofara and explained what had happened. The hunters of Selofara were called, though there were only 18 of them. They have an incantation here, against bullets. They all used this incantation and became impenetrable to bullets. They went on their way and encountered the group of hunters from all 12 villages of the Sobara. That day they killed many people but the 18 hunters from here were all alive and well. Because they had killed so many people, the government had to intervene. When the authorities came, they arrested the village chief and took him to Bamako… Then, to save the honor and the chief of the village, the villagers collected their jewellery, to liberate the village chief” (Bala Keita, January 18, 2011, Selofara).
134
head of the compound95
(lutigi) who would use it to arrange marriages for the sons of the
compound and handle other family affairs including food cultivation. In 2010-11, all gold/money
that an individual miner found (or his or her share of the team’s gold) was automatically
controlled by the miner.96
So the authority of heads of compounds has decreased enormously.
Though they hold the formal authority over the inhabitants of their compounds (luw), heads of
compound have lost control of much of the financial resources of the compound. Where
cultivation of staple foods by men and the allocation of land for individual cultivation plots
continue to be organized at the level of the compound and thus formally under the authority of
the head of compound97
, the arrangements of first marriages of sons98
, and the payment of fines
and medical bills have on most compounds become the responsibility of individual adult men.99
At the Balanko site of Djelibani I met an elderly lady who was there to visit her sister.
She wore a golden earring100
that she had received at the time of her wedding. Once I had shown
my interest, she and the women around her explained that even though she wore her earring, no
one considered saving up gold or buying their own jewellery out of fear of bandits (pronounced
as in French) who would not flinch at cutting the throat of an unexpected traveller to gain
95
The head of the compound is the oldest male of the oldest generation living on the compound. 96
The exception was gold found by miners who mined during the rainy season as a substitute for their labour on the fields (see chapter 1). 97
Many practical decisions however, were taken during the workday. This meant that the head of the compound who was generally an older man had formal authority but was not actually taking many of the decisions. 98
The father’s brother of the groom contacts the father’s brothers of the bride, but behind the scenes the father of the groom selects the bride, pays the bride price and makes most decisions about the celebrations. 99
My host family was a notable exception to this individualization of responsibility, though they had not held on to the old system. During a visit to the village, an older male relative residing in Spain had instated a system whereby all adult males who were originally from the compound who were not working on the compound’s fields and not hosting students from the village in the city, would yearly pay 50,000 FCFA into a fund. From this fund, those living on the compound would pay its taxes (1750 FCFA/adult in 2011), bride price for the first marriages of men residing on the compound, and medical fees for women delivering at the Selofara clinic. Any other expenses would have to be paid by the individuals concerned or their parents or husbands. With this system, the authority of the compound head (lutigi) over communal funds was however not reinstated. Decisions about use of the fund were taken by all married men together and the money was kept by a man of the younger generation. The compound head merely presided over the meetings where decisions were made. 100
As with other earrings, it was not uncommon in Mande to wear only one earring if the second one had been lost, or in this case, sold.
135
possession of her earrings. While it had always been hard for women to hold on to their gold
because of claims from husbands and other relatives in times of crisis (cf. Shipton 1995: 251), it
was said to be practically impossible and even dangerous now.
Fear of bandits was ubiquitous in Mande. Stories abound about people being ordered at
gunpoint to hand over motorbikes, money, gold or other expensive items, though the actual
incidence was very low.101
Crime was a popular topic of casual conversation and fear mongering
in many places, and in the Balan-Bakama talk of bandits led to much anxiety because they did
not fit in the social structure which so strongly determined the lives and conduct of those living
in villages. Bandits’ names, kinship relations and villages of origin were unknown so the usual
means of control of deviancy could not be applied. Crime by people who were known was dealt
with by discussions with influential kin, temporary banishment from the compound or village,
and other methods that were supposed to induce shame. Bandits placed themselves outside of
human society and because they mostly worked in the bush (coming into villages at night to steal
valuable items) they were invisible and unpredictable, taking on a jine-like nature (see below)
and impervious to shame.
Another reason for the disappearance of gold as a method to store wealth102
from Mande
was the increased liquidity and price of gold and the increased need for money (see below). In
the Balan-Bakama villages and gold mines gold buyers were always present and ready to buy
gold. With an ever increasing gold price and a stable and transparent Malian gold market103
, gold
101
During my year of fieldwork I would hear people talk about specific incidents but none of the incidents involving guns had taken place in the Balan-Bakama. There was a wave of thefts from stores in and around Narena, just outside the Balan-Bakama and in Balan-Mansale several motorbikes and the sewing machines of the tailor were stolen one night. 102
As well as gold stored in other forms like gold powder that used to be kept in jars and bottles, dug in the ground under huts of owners or trustees (see below). 103
Under the influence of the Franc CFA which is linked to the euro and a stable enough political system, the local gold price was relatively stable, rising and falling by small increments following the world market price, and transparent with the only differences stemming from bulk prices and ease of transportation for the gold trader.
136
was a stable though not very profitable item of trade that enticed existing shop keepers and other
traders into the trade (for more on the system of the gold trade see chapter 1). Any placer or
hard-rock gold mine104
where some gold was found attracted at least one gold buyer. This could
involve one local buyer arriving in the late afternoon at Selofara’s small Balanko operation in
2011 (see below) to dozens of buyers occupying their own quarter of the market on popular sites
like Dabale and Kofulate that were the destinations of gold rushes (see figure 3.2).105
These gold-
buyers regularly travelled to the city to sell their gold or sold to itinerant merchants to avoid
becoming a target for theft or robbery.106
During my 2010-2011 fieldwork practically no one in the Balan-Bakama kept gold at
home or on their person as a way of storing wealth (the elderly lady with one earring cited above
was the only exception). All jewellery that was owned by families and individual women had
been sold over time. Much of this was sold during the late colonial period, the last pieces during
the droughts of the 1980’s. Having lost its function as a savings mechanism, gold, once found is
immediately sold to local gold traders. I spent many a late afternoon observing my host buying
gold from the women and men returning from the gold mines of Selofara. Most clients were
women who would sell him one tenth of a gram (disi) at a time. This would have been their gain
Prices were slightly higher on the weekly market of Mansala, than in for example Namakana (say 1800 vs. 1700 FCFA per tenth of a gram), which is located farther from the main road. The prices paid at a gold mine and a village close-by were normally the same resulting from village gold traders’ fierce competition for clients. 104
At surface mining sites people (mostly women) did not usually find enough gold in one day to make a sale. These miners tended to save up the gold for the next market day or sooner if they found themselves in sudden need and became willing to accept the slightly lower price given by gold buyers in their village. 105
At Dagala, a site that was booming with woyon (hard rock) mining when I visited in January 2010, there were conspicuously few gold buyers. Most miners spent their five days a week at the mine extracting hard rock, only washing and rarely pulverising to test for the presence of gold, on these days there was little gold to sell. On Mondays and Fridays everyone would stay in the villages and neighboring gold mining camps, pulverising and washing the collected rocks, to find and sell gold. In other, less frantic environments, women and men would allow themselves more time to perform other tasks and more testing at the mine, resulting in more gold available to sell on mining days. 106
Additionally they protected their gold and money through supernatural means (amulets, incantations, etc.) and by hiding it (the volume of their gold was very small).
137
after one or two days of work at Musodugu (ie. 1600-1800 FCFA). Miners immediately
exchanged their gold for cash and used the money to buy condiments (Panella 2005), extra food
or clothes for their children or pans or plates to add to the stock of trousseau materials they saved
up in their bedroom, waiting for the future wedding of a daughter. Those who were able to save
up money (see below for why this would be difficult) would use their gains to pay work teams of
young men to weed or harvest their peanut fields. These teams worked on people’s fields for a
day in exchange for a good meal and money (20,000 FCFA/day for a team of 15 to 20 youth)
that the group used to celebrate holidays, buy team shirts, etc.
Fewer of the local gold buyers’ customers were men. Men mostly worked in teams (see
chapter 2) that divided up the money that they made.107
During the days that these teams actually
worked in the layer of ore, individuals amassed more gold per person than a woman would make
at the surface mine. As such, it was worth it for the team or a group of individuals to have
someone sell their gold in Balan-Mansala since the higher price (50-100 FCFA per tenth of a
gram) would cover the price of gas (1 liter, ie. 600-700 FCFA). Sometimes a workteam would
stop by our compound to check the weight of their gold before one of them would sell to trader
in Balan-Mansala. Selofara villagers’ teams who mined at Balanko during the dry season of 2011
were obliged to sell their gold on site since it had been agreed that the owner of the pump would
receive a third of the gold that teams found (see figure 3.2). This agreement only covered the
teams of miners who dug the pits and galleries, not the women who washed the ore in exchange
for their share of each third calabash. Miners sold their gold at the end of the day (see figure 3.3)
and immediately gave the pump owner and team members their share. Because of this system
107
Dividing up the actual gold was not deemed precise enough and too susceptible to (suspicion of) theft and thereby conflict. Money allowed for a higher level of transparency than a division of gold on the basis on inexact and corruptible scales.
138
men and women who made up the mining teams did not bring gold home but always went home
with money instead.
Figure 3.2 Motorized water pump at the Selofara Balanko site. The tonbolomaw of the village
had agreed with the Guinean pump owner to award him a share of a third of the gold
found by mining teams in exchange for use of the pump, including fuel (Selofara,
April 23 2011)
Figure 3.3 Gold buyer at the Balanko site of Selofara. The teams would immediately divide up
the money they were paid among the individual team members and the pump owner
(whose son was present to man the pump and collect money). The price paid for gold
was the same as that in the village (April 30 2011)
“Gold, that is money”108
Besides increased liquidity of gold and the organization of mining labour, a third reason for the
immediate sale of gold, and therefore the absence of golden jewellery, was individuals’ ever
108
Falaye Keita, Balan-Mansala, March 20 2011.
139
increasing need for money in Mande.109
Within the subsistence economy of the compound the
provision of meals and shelter were typically not commodified110
, but there was no exit option
from the monetarized economy as money had become indispensable for men, women, and the
compound as a socio-economic unit (Hyden 1986: 56). Mande adults needed money because the
transaction of money was an essential requirement for the maintenance of social relations and
because money allowed people to buy necessary consumption items and services.
Guyer and the contributors to the collection ‘Money Matters’ stressed that the history of
money transactions in West-Africa did not start with colonialism but that people had been
involved in wide trade networks and various forms of money exchange for centuries (Guyer
1995; Stiansen & Guyer 1999; Webb 1999; Maurer 2006: 22). The Balan-Bakama for example
hosted slave traders who were able to amass large amounts of wealth (gold, money and slaves) in
one place before transportation during the dry season (Park 2000[1799]; cf. Hogendorn 1999). In
these trade networks, gold was an important means of exchange (Law 1995; Arhin 1995) as it
had high liquidity, fungibility and portability.111
In the Mali empire, ruler Mansa Musa (1312-
1337) was able to collect large amounts of gold from artisanal miners, gold that he spent and
gave away in Cairo, causing a major devaluation of gold on which the economy was based
(Gewald 2010: 147).
109
During the colonial era Mali used the French West-African Franc. Between 1962 and 1984 Mali had its own Malian Franc which was abolished in favor of the West African Franc CFA that was still in use in 2011. 110
With certain notable exceptions that all affected the money management strategies of villagers; the need for maggi cubes for the sauce of the main meal (Lepidi 2015), the need for the members of the compound’s work team to pay villagers who helped them thrash millet after the harvest, payments to work teams that helped in the fields (cf. Jansen 2002), or the desire to build square houses with paid tin roofs instead of huts with straw roofs that needed to be replaced every three to five years. 111
The fact that gold had relatively high liquidity (see above) meant that it could easily be sold, its high fungibility meant that gold is interchangeable (all 22 karat gold is worth the same) and a transaction is therefore a relatively simple affair. Compare this for example to the sale of cloth where the worth would need to be established taking into account the quality of the material used, workmanship, as well as fashion and personal preference.
140
During the 20th
century, state-backed money in the form of coins and bank notes had
become increasingly important for daily expenses and for social reproductive purposes like
marriage, religious feasts, gifts etc. (Geschiere 1995). It thus replaced gold as the primary means
of exchange.112
In Bancoumana in the 1940’s and 50’s, weekly markets were held but people
bought items only sporadically, purchasing mostly locally produced food products and cloth
(Diarra 1965). Increasingly, items that need to be purchased with money have become
indispensable for basic daily living in Mande; i.e. battery-powered flashlights (for night-time
vision and mining in galleries), cooking pots, maggi cubes, school fees, gas, doctor’s fees,
clothes, herbicides, radios, tea, etc. Thus, people in Mande have become dependent on money,
though the pace of this change has varied throughout the region (Jansen 2006: 54; Wooten 2004:
27, 28).
In a study of consumption patterns of involuntarily-immobile young men in the Senegal
valley of western Mali Jónnson (2010) shows how young villagers from a region that has sent
many of its sons to France in the 1960’s and 70’s engaged in ‘political consumption’. In an
attempt to become a part of an imagined community of global consumers, villagers who were
dreaming of migrating to France consumed Western products like spaghetti, brand name clothes
and mobile phones. Like their compatriots, Balan-Bakama villagers were longing for
connectedness to a more globalized community (see introduction and chapter 6). However, since
their ‘global’ community of reference was mainly situated in Bamako and the Mande Heartland,
much more than in Europe, consumption patterns of youth and real and imagined migration
patterns reflected this fact. While young men tried to buy new clothes in styles popular in
Bamako, adult men aspired to marry and to own tin roofs on square houses and a motorbike
112
Gold was an important storage of wealth and method of exchange for large purchases, but it was unsuitable for small transactions which came to form the bulk of transactions in the modern era.
141
which would increase their mobility and thus social relations with people in other villages and
the city. Because of the high gold price, many (though not all) of them were able to achieve these
goals. While men in Bamako were marrying at increasingly higher age (30-35), men in the
Balan-Bakama generally married their first wife at age 25, the lowest age within the common
spectrum for Mande men (25-30). Since money was easily accessible, wives were in high
demand and therefore men were marrying younger wives than their counterparts in the Mande
Heartland. Girls who would not continue their schooling were marrying at age 13 or 14, at least a
year younger than common in the Mande Heartland.
Since the role of women in the subsistence agriculture based society of Mande was so
different from that of men (Turrittin 1987), women needed money for different transactions. For
women, young and old, trousseau components (minanw) were the main consumption items they
saved for and purchased. Cunningham (2009) explains how trousseaus, and in particular the
enamel vessels they contain, displayed a bride’s economic and social power at a liminal and thus
insecure stage of her life; the months and years after she moved to her husband’s compound for
good. In this way, the trousseau took the place of golden jewellery that used to have this
function. As this was the time, known as minansiri, that the bride (furumuso) took her place in
the cooking roster of the compound, the cooking materials would be of practical use, but as
Cunningham explains, the materiality of the large piles of pots and pans that she bought also
serve as protection for the young bride (2009: 287). While the family-in-law read the power of
the bride’s relatives’ connections in the size of her trousseau, her mother would be praised as a
serious woman and mother because she and her daughter were able to collect an impressive
trousseau (see figure 3.4).113
Transactions, money-based or not, are always social-cultural acts.
113
The different compounds in the bride’s village of origin contributed small gifts like plastic bowls to the trousseau which were subsequently distributed in the village of the husband, but the majority of expenses were
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For Balan-Bakama agriculturalists, money had become indispensable for daily life, identity
formation and social reproduction and they gained access to this resource by mining gold.
Figure 3.4 Selofara mother of a bride with the trousseau she collected for her daughter (Selofara,
May 18 2011)
Tracing further the incorporation of money into Mande sociality shows that money is not merely
a means to acquire goods but that the transaction of money using gifting discourse has become
an integral part of Mande friendship, kinship and community relationships (Muurling 2005: 185;
see also Browne 2009: 6, 9). Gifts of money were a part of many types of Mande relationships;
from an expression of love in the closest of kinship relationships like the gifts of small coins that
grandparents gave their favored grandchildren, to the confirmation of a newly established
relationship between an anthropologist and a (short-term) host (Zobel & Jansen 2002: 381).
The moment a person received money, for example by finding gold, this would
immediately be claimed by relatives who could not be denied (Muurling 2005: 185). Because of
the ‘obligation to share’ “money in Mali represents a far less substantial and durable form in
incurred by the mother of the bride and the bride herself. Most of these latter items, the bride would be able to keep for herself.
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which to store wealth than social relationships, a condition that yields distinctive kinds of
conversions between money and sociality” (Roth 2005: 129). It was considered to be impossible
(and undesirable) to keep money in one’s possession for a long time because of the moral
obligation to share (Roth 2008: 87), since “the creation and maintenance of social networks is the
basic goal (and not the means) of economic action” (Jansen 2005: 86). Without sharing, one
would become isolated; a scary prospect considering the very notion of Mande personhood lay in
social relationships (Brand 1996: 145).
In her study of the relation between gifts of money, identity and meaning in Malian jeliya
(the work of griots), Roth finds that “gifts of money are essential to jeliya’s signifying process,
that the jeli’s [griot’s] performances must be compensated for by the jatigi (‘host’ or ‘patron’) to
enjoy their full effect. Money is the seal that ‘realizes’ the jeli’s performance. The jeli sings the
praise of a nobility predicated on generations-long traditions of protection of and generosity to
clients. The gift of money endows the predicate with reality and truth. Thus it is paying money
(or equivalent goods) to the jeli that ennobles” (2008: 7). Roth’s observations show how the gift
of money is crucial to Mande formation of personhood. It is not merely the words of the jeli
themselves that establish a link to past generations, but these words are shown to be powerful
and true by the transaction of money (Roth 2005: 131).
Western economic and early anthropological theories of money have long focused on the
impact of the introduction of a money-based economy on people who previously relied on barter
and subsistence (eg. Bohannan 1959). Commodification of economic spheres was said to disrupt
traditional morality and sociality. Having mostly retreated from the grand narratives that tended
towards judgement of socio-cultural change, anthropologists subsequently narrowed their fields
of study to the specific ways in which societies incorporated money into their social lives (Hart
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& Ortiz 2014: 472; Maurer 2006: 19; Zelizer 2000: 7; Parry & Bloch 1989) and the ways in
which these societies were transformed by many processes of change taking place at the same
time (eg. Parkin 1972; Koenig 2005: 31; cf. Conrad 2005: 7-9).
In a study of artisanal gold miners in southwestern Burkina Faso, Werthmann points out
that money earned with the sale of water, food or consumption items was more likely to be
brought home than money earned from mining itself (2009b: 166). She argues this is due to the
notion of ‘bitter money’ (Shipton 1989). Money earned by gold mining in Burkina Faso lacked
blessing and was therefore not generative by itself so it needed to be spent quickly. Using it to
establish reciprocal gift-relationships may redeem some of the generative nature of this money
(Werthmann 2005). In Mande money was not classified in such a manner. As in several other
Sahelian communities (eg. Buggenhagen 2012; Stoller 2002), money was not classified into
immoral and moral (or bitter/non-bitter, etc.) types of money but on a continuum of hard-earned
to windfall (cf. Bohannan 1997[1955]). Hard-earned money, for which someone had worked for
a long time (for example through cultivation), was unlikely to ‘fall’ and one could hold on to it
for a long time without trouble, save it and use it for large investments like marriage, housing
and so on. Money that was earned through windfall, without productive labour taking place
(betting on horses and literally ‘found’ money fell on the far end of the continuum, but petty
trade also fell on this half of the scale), was much harder to hold on to and was prone to ‘falling’.
The latter type of money was easily ‘eaten’ (ka damun) which points not merely to the fact that it
had been used to buy things but also that it had been used by the community, which eats together
(Jansen 2005: 86).114
Through certain mechanisms like a savings association one could transform
money earned through windfall, into hard-earned money. Money earned through gold mining did
not have a fixed classification; when earned in small increments through hard work over several
114
This stands in contrast to money that is ‘spoiled’ (ka tinye).
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days it was comparable to money earned through petty trade (and women often invested this in
savings associations to accumulate it), large sums earned at once through a lucky find were
classified as a typical windfall and were even harder to hold on to. The source of money did not,
however, formally limit the objective to which it could be put, unlike the ‘bitter’ money of Luo
in Kenya (Shipton 1989) and miners in southwestern Burkina Faso (Werthmann 2009) or
decrease its value like money earned in the Mongolian artisanal gold mines (High 2013). In
Mande, money that had been begotten by ‘windfall’, like that from an unexpectedly large find of
gold, could be used to wed, if one was strong enough to hold onto it (Daouda Keita, February 13
2008, Narena).
In the Balan-Bakama, gold was directly commensurate to money and the material had
little symbolic value.115
Because of the monetization of the Mande economy as well as the
development of new systems of organization in both gold mining and the compound, Mande
miners’ daily lives in Mande required money. Gold was therefore immediately sold to readily
available gold traders (see chapter 1), after which the miner was left with the difficult task of
making sure the money did not ‘fall’.
The Problem of Appropriating Gold
In the early 21st century, owning or selling gold was not problematized in Mande, but the
appropriation of gold by humans was. In the process of mining, humans and their civilization
became owners of gold that was heretofore buried in the bush (wula); a place controlled by bush
spirits (jinew). As such, unextracted gold belonged to the realm of bush spirits. People would
need to convince these jinew to give up the gold and give it to humans, which could be done
115
The colour of gold was considered beautiful. For aesthetic reasons almost all jewellery worn in Mande had a gold colour. However, outside of the circles of rich women in Bamako, practically none of the jewellery seen in Mande was made of actual gold.
146
through the respect of taboos, performance of sacrifices, and specific ordering of the system of
control of mining sites.
In an article describing the technique of daman mining in Mande, based on research
around Kuremale, Armbruster (1991:190) cites an origin myth from Levtzion (1973). It relates
how gold became plentiful in the Bure gold fields in which the Balan-Bakama is located.
According to the myth, the gold of the Bure was first located in the Soninke Wagadu empire
(also known as the Ghana empire) which sacrificed a virgin each year to a snake called Bida to
assure rainfall and success in gold mining. One year, the lover of the virgin to be sacrificed
defended his bride and killed the snake. Dying, the snake cursed the Wagadu empire, eliminating
the rains and gold profits. The snake’s head fell on the Bure, land of the Maninka, making it the
land of gold and assuring the fall of the Wagadu empire.
Though I regularly probed informants by asking them where gold came from, how it
arrived in the ground of Mande, or what it actually was, I never heard a similar origin story.
Most miners stated that gold came from Allah, who had created the whole earth, gold included.
Balandier found the same in the Siguiri area (over the border in Guinea) in the 1940’s.
According to Balandier gold was said to “have been created by the Supreme Being [pre-Islamic]
and its control entrusted to ‘specialized’ spirits” (1947: 539). Kariya Keita, female chief of the
mine of Selofara and consequently occupied with the organization of the women’s sacrifices to
the bush spirits (see chapter 4), joked that she should ask me where gold came from; didn’t white
people know much more about these things?
Clearly in Mande of the early 2000’s gold that has been mined was an expensive but
symbolically ordinary material whose origin went unquestioned. When asked, it could be
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explained by reference to either science or Islam, but generally the origin of the gold found in the
soil of their country was not a significant question to Mande gold miners.
Whereas the origin of gold was not elaborated upon, the location and ownership of the
unextracted precious metal were. In the lived experience of the Balan-Bakama and wider Mande,
there was a clear classificatory opposition between the world which was under control of humans
and located in the village, and the world that was under control of bush spirits (jinew) and
located in the bush (wula). The extraordinary aspect of gold lay in the fact that it was
conceptualized as a material from this bush area and thus owned by bush spirits (see Balandier
1947 above). The bush (wula) was that uncultured area outside the ring of millet fields in the
well-known conception of Mande spatiality.116
In his study of the Sunjata epic, Johnson
identifies the different zones surrounding the ideal typical Mande village:
“The farther away from one’s own home one goes, the more social dislocation will
be encountered and the greater will be the need for assistance from such institutions
as the occult arts… Beyond the borders of the compound one encounters people not
in one’s nuclear family. An even more dangerous step is taken when the village
border (dankun) is crossed, and the ring of women’s vegetable gardens (na-ko) is
entered… The cosmological ring outside the vegetable gardens is that of the toilets
(bo-ke-yoro), which is followed by a ring mixed with the men’s fields being
cultivated (foro) and those being left fallow (san-gwan). Beyond this ring lies the
most dangerous area of all, the wilderness (wula), which continues until the fields
of the next village are encountered” (Johnson 2003: 11,12).
116
In Mande-focused academic literature this division goes unquestioned and I will not elaborate much on exceptions here since it applies to the Balan-Bakama. When in 2017 I spoke to groups of Karanko farmers in northern Sierra Leone however, they told me they did not farm on Mondays and Fridays. Like jinew who roam the mines in the Balan-Bakama on these days jinew were also said to be present on the fields on those days. For Karanko farmers then, the fields of both men and women were conceptualized as located in the jine-controlled ‘bush’, not in the zone controlled by humans and should thus be left to their proprietors on Mondays and Fridays. To deal with jinew farmers would present a sacrifice of pounded rice in water to find out if jinew would accept them burning a specific part of the forest for a 1-2 year field.
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This ‘wilderness’ was a dangerous place, not only because it was an uncultured landscape
unknown to many travelers and the habitat of wild animals117
, but especially since it was the
domain of bush spirits (jinew). Gold was controlled by jinew who needed to be wooed to release
gold that would otherwise remain hidden in the ground. Hidden in the ground was a lot of gold
but most of it could not be found by humans because bush spirits were hiding it. People could
dig shafts and sift soil as much as they wanted but if the spirits did not allow them to find the
gold they were hiding the work would be unfruitful. People would only be able to find and
appropriate gold when jinew had been persuaded to grant it to them through the appropriate
sacrifice (Balandier 1947: 540; see chapter 4).
Gold that could be found by humans was known as ‘dead gold’ because it lay still in the
earth, ready for humans to find it. Jinew divided all the gold they control up into dead gold and
hidden gold. This hidden gold contained ‘nyama’ the vital force that also invigorated wild
animals and people. Nyama was of major concern to hunters as nyama was released when an
animal was killed and this would cause social disequilibrium if the hunter were unable to control
it (Camara 2004: 314). Miners did not need specific training to contain nyama; all gold they were
able find had already been undone of its nyama by the bush spirits (cf. Balandier 1947: 539).118
In Mande, all gold was owned by jinew. It did not matter if it was found in the
geographical sphere of human civilization, or in an area conceptually controlled by bush spirits.
For example, many mining sites were situated on former millet fields or in zones even closer to
117
Since most wild game had disappeared from Mande due to relative human overpopulation and hunting, the most danger was posed by poisonous snakes (cf. Johnson 2003: 11) and the possibility of accidents in isolated territory. 118
‘Living gold’ (sanu kene) refers to a geological event; when the soil on a mining site cracks open, creating a fissure in the earth. It indicates that the gold that had been in the ground (hidden or not) has left the area in a big whirl of gold looking for a new place to settle. ‘Living gold’ is rare; many well-travelled miners had never seen it and neither have I. It was however explained to me as simultaneously a supernatural departure of gold and a geological phenomenon that can happen in soil that has been mined too much. With a deep layer of the ground having been almost entirely removed, the upper layer crashes in on it as the pillars in the subterranean galleries cannot keep it in place anymore.
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the village. When the inhabitants of Balan-Komana mined right next to the huts of their village
during the rainy season, or when people inspected the main road for the presence of gold specks
after a major thunderstorm (the uneven gravel road works as a giant sluice box drawing many
casual gold searchers119
), this gold located in a ‘human area’ still needed to be unveiled by jinew
so that people could find it.
Jinew: Guardians of Gold
One evening, while I was sitting outside working on my notes, my host was called to another
part of the compound where Mrs. Keita120
, the wife of the head of the compound, was in distress.
For a well-known hunter and therefore healer, being called over in the night was a common
event, but the consternation was not (Camara 2010: 114, 115). Searching and mixing ingredients
in the dark, he ran up and down to his Mrs. Keita’s hut on the compound until the medicine had
worked. Mrs. Keita had seen a bush spirit. Diakaridia explained to me that Mrs. Keita had been
sleeping and when she woke up she thought she saw her brother in law. She had soon realized
from the looks of the creature that it was not the brother in law but a bush spirit, a sighting that
had greatly upset her.
Most of the time bush spirits cannot be seen by humans. Jinew are physical beings that
form a parallel society in the bush and the exact nature of this society or of individual jinew is by
definition unknown to humans. As if in another dimension, jinew can observe and impact the
world of humans whereas humans cannot see jinew but for fleeting moments unexpectedly
appear to them like they did to Mrs. Keita. Such an appearance was a frightening event which
could be followed by more sightings and eventually lead to a request by the jine to enter into a
119
Actual digging for gold on the road was forbidden. 120
Because of the personal and sensitive nature of jine-encounters, I use only last names to designate people who experienced them.
150
pact which promises the person many riches in return for regular sacrifices (starting with the
sacrifice of a family member), a relationship that would ultimately lead to their destruction.121
Therefore, as soon as someone in Mande saw a jine, they would try to avoid future sightings by
drinking a medicine which certain people had in stock. These were most often hunters, who work
in the bush at dusk and therefore were more likely to encounter jinew and needed to know how to
protect themselves and their communities from such a sighting (Leach & Fairhead 2002: 305). 122
Because of hunters’ ability to cope with the dangers of jinew, some of the hunter society’s
practices were used in the gold mining sacrifice rituals as well. For example, to show respect to
the women’s chief of mines, people covered her feet with leafy twigs, a practice that was directly
sourced from hunter society rituals.
Mr. Keita had once seen a jine when he was working on the compound’s millet field, the
type of field that is farthest away from the village: “I was working on the fields with a friend and
saw a jine sitting in a tree, looking at me. It was a woman with a baby. I asked my friend if he
also saw the woman but he didn’t see anything. I urged my friend to climb the tree and pointed
out to him where the woman was. When my friend reached the right branch, the jine shifted
suddenly to another branch and laughed loudly at me. Oh Saran, I was so frightened! I ran home
to tell my father about it and he went to get medicine immediately. I have never seen a jine after
that” (Selofara, January 13 2011).
121
Such a ‘pact with the devil’ allowing people to acquire great riches at the expense of ohers is a common theme in the anthropology of West-Africa where this imagery has been used especially since the 70’s/80’s to explain and deal with the new inequalities brought about by modernity (eg. Frank 1995: 331; Fisiy & Geschiere 1991). 122
According to my host, who was a known master hunter (Kedzierska-Manzon 2014), it is possible for a hunter to kill a bush spirit. If a strong hunter, who is strong in his ability to handle the nyama (life-force) that is freed when an animal is killed and who is skilled at corporal transformation, encountered a jine in the bush he could kill it with bullets that are mixed with jine hair. This was a very dangerous act because jinew travel in pairs and the other jine would chase the hunter and try to kill him. It was key for a hunter to be able to make himself invisible and to transform into a rock or tree. In addition to heightened prestige, a hunter would want to kill a jine to take the hair and bones and mix the powdered bones with powder from a tree and bullets. Using this ammunition, one could never miss when trying to shoot wild animals for food.
151
Jinew inhabit an elusive world that centers on specific sites in the bush; around open
water and in pits like clay pits and gold mines. Sometimes jinew were spotted in the village,
usually at dusk or during thunderstorms. Like humans, jinew have babies and grow old, they may
be physically handicapped and many of them have a special interest. “There are jinew who guard
wild game and protect them. If that happens you will find a piece of bush where there are many
animal traces but you cannot find them. This depends on the jine who controls them. Other jinew
are interested in gold, others in sheep. The latter jinew like to be offered sheep through sacrifice.
In this way, every jine has their own task” (Mr. Keita, January 12 2011). People who had seen
them, told me that jinew have the same first names as people (“Nassira, Fanta, or Sayo for
example”) and look like people for the most part. Jinew supposedly have the same range of skin-
colors as people123
but are immediately recognizable as non-human because of their long, strange
fingers and deep black hair. Mr. Keita’s narrative about his jine-encounter was typical in that it
took him some time to realize that what he was seeing was actually a jine. This moment of
realization tends to be the most frightening instance of the experience, as it was for Mrs. Keita.
The lived world of Mande jinew shares similarities with that of humans but it does not
have a productive economy; bush spirits do not make or grow anything, like people do.124
Their
tasks consist of the protection of certain bush products that people may want to use, like gold,
wild game, clay, etc. It was only by enticing jinew to give up their possessions that people are
able to find gold, and do so safely. One could appease jinew by bringing sacrifices to sites they
were known to frequent like the aforementioned trees or gold mines, and by avoiding actions that
123
When speaking of jinew in general, many informants said they were most often white and said that this is why children are often afraid of white visitors. People who spoke of specific sightings however, all reported seeing a dark-skinned bush spirit (though I encountered only three people who spoke of such sightings). 124
In the Mande system of freeman and casted lineages, one’s main productive enterprise is a major identity and status marker.
152
may anger jinew or give them the wrong ideas. For example, in all of Mande, people did not
search for gold on Mondays because on this day jinew were said to roam the gold mines and they
may cause accidents to people who disturb them (Balandier 1947: 541).125
Also, it was forbidden
to carry a bundle of wood on one’s head on a mining site since this was the way a body of a dead
miner would be carried. Seeing this imagery might make jinew consider causing a deadly
accident. Miners were allowed to chop wood around a mine but they should postpone tying it
into a bundle until they were at a safe distance from the work area. Once at Musodugu, the
surface mining site of Selofara, a woman was planning to carry chopped wood home on her head
and several women who realized what she was about to do called out to her. The woman untied
the firewood and carried it in her hands before tying it back together and placing it on her head
again at about 200 meters from the mine.
Jinew and the Aversion of Dispute
The attribute of jinew that had the most impact on the daily practice of Mande artisanal gold
mining was their aversion of conflict among humans who were in the bush. Mande miners had
no clear explanation available for this aversion like they did for the taboo on carrying firewood
on one’s head on a mining site. However, the preference for harmony on the mining site and in
the organization of the work reflected an outspoken cultural preference for such social harmony,
known as badenya (Wooten 2009: 71, 88; Bird & Kendall 1980); a concept fundamental to
Mande understanding of social life. As such, jinew’s preoccupation with social order and clarity
125
Balandier observed that if a miner died in the mine, the death would be attributed to supernatural causes and the miner would be ‘buried’ at the mining site on a Monday. At that time, the body would be placed on the ground and covered with rocks, without the saying of prayers which would normally accompany a burial (1947: 541; see also chapter 2).
153
within the organization of artisanal mining can be interpreted as a Durkheimian reflection of
important Mande cultural values.
Jinew’s aversion to human conflict could have devastating effects. Both Selofara and
neighbouring Djelibani had experienced a period during which no gold was found at their mine.
In both cases jinew hid the gold that was present in the ground as a reaction to a conflict about
the person (and lineage) that was to have authority over the mine. As will be further discussed in
chapter 5, the position of damantigi (chief of mines) was supposed to be held by the person who
first found gold within the territory of these villages and his offspring/her daughters-in-law. It
was reasoned that by allowing this person to find gold, jinew had shown that this was the person
they favored as facilitator of sacrifices and authority over the mine.
When the women of Djelibani, at the instigation of Kolanyinin (see chapter 4) performed
the first sacrifice at their mine (Nyegedida), they installed Jogoro Coulibaly as first female chief
of mines because she had been the first person to find gold and mine the site. The (male) village
chief was not able to travel to the mine because of his old age and had asked for a piece of the
meat to be brought to his home. The spirits denied this request and all the meat was eaten at the
site of the sacrifice, as is the common requirement and the women tried to offer the chief a
chicken instead. The village chief (who had wanted his wife to become chief of the mine)
subsequently insulted Jogoro Coulibaly so strongly that she withdrew and said “Ok, that is not a
problem, if it is true that I do not have the right to this, if it is true that I was the first to find gold
at this site, and if another person is chosen as chief of this mine, may gold never be found” (as
retold by Jogoro Coulibaly, January 25 2011, Djelibani).126
As a result the women’s mine of
126
In the same period, two men had gone to mine at Nyegedida on a Monday, which contributed to the jinew’s anger.
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Djelibani was unproductive for years until in 2011 the new male chief of mines forced the parties
to reconcile and Jogoro Coulibaly was finally able to fulfill her duty.
Multiple social hierarchies intersect within Mande status discourse and this combines
with an appreciation of formality. The type of conflict that Mrs. Coulibaly experienced is
common in such a social framework. The norms of jinew establishing the chief of mines were
well known but people who wanted to lay claim to the position could refer to other hierarchies
that establish authority within Mande society such as individual seniority, relative autochthony
of the compound and kinship relations to a former chief of mines.127
People involved in such
conflict are regularly reminded by other people of jinew’s potential for resentment and
retaliation. To avoid the shame that would result from an apology, disputes often end in a
stalemate that requires exceptional circumstances or an outsider to be resolved.128
Selofara had also experienced a period during which no gold was found as a result of a
conflict. Namagan Keita recalled: “A conflict took place between the grandfather of Nankoman
Balla [of the Kasumasi, EK] who had discovered gold under the termite mound, and the
founding family of the village [Banjugusi, EK]. Because of this, the village took away his title of
mining chief, something that is forbidden in the tradition of bush spirits. Following that tradition,
he who discovers gold first in an area becomes chief of the mining site automatically no matter
127
In the Bakama polygamy was common as was remarriage after the early death of a spouse or divorce (about a third of marriages ended in divorce), and kinship relations were an important source of authority. In a village like Selofara and even more in Djelibani, where all inhabitants traced decent to a single village founder, kinship relations were complicated and people could commonly allude to a multitude of kinship connections between themselves and any other villager in commonly accepted genealogies (the exception were pairs of people where one was of caste (nyamakala) and the other a freeman (horon) due to endogamy rules). 128
This type of dispute was not unique to the position of chief of mines but was also very common in the selection of village chiefs; it took Selofara several years and multiple attempts at intervention from surrounding villages and local government to resolve a dispute between two Banjugusi groups that both had a candidate for the position of village chief. Bancoumana was without a village chief for 25 years after the three founding families (descendants of three brothers) could not decide on the appointment of the next village chief.
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which family he belongs to.129
Once he lost authority over the site, Nankoman Balla’s uncle
[father’s brother, EK] said maledictions and from then on gold disappeared from the site, while
before it produced much gold… A Maninka proverb says ‘Gold does not see but it does hear’.
This means that gold and all other property of bush spirits react to the disrespect of mythic
norms” (Selofara, January 18 2011). Years later, when the price of gold rose and the people of
Selofara became eager to mine close to home again, the position of chief of the mines was
returned to the lineage of the man who first found gold in Selofara (see chapter 5 for the effort it
took the lineage members to find out who the bush spirits wanted as the new chief of mines).
To avoid jine retribution in the form of accidents or the disappearance of gold, people in
the Balan-Bakama would stress time and again that one should avoid conflict. People
remembered a previous era during which much more gold was found. The large quantities of
gold that were found during that time were attributed to the respect people had for jinew and
their rules (and to better diviners, see below). The public displays of transparency that were a
standard part of gold mining practice (see chapter 2) seemed successful in avoiding public
interpersonal disputes at the mines but they could not prevent conflict about leadership and
structural inequalities between different groups at the mines (see for example the outcome of the
sacrifice at Narena, chapter 4). Balandier comes to the conclusion that “one and the same person,
the chief of the mine, is at the same time organizer of a sacrifice and technical director of
operations” (1947: 541). He observes that these activities are not opposites as they may seem in a
Durkheimian sacred vs. profane system. However, where Balandier explains the absence of
oppositional tasks by stating that both sacrifices and hard work as directed by the chief of the
129
In theory this applied to everybody, including recent migrants and caste lineages. In practice, all male chiefs of mines are members of long-time Balan-Bakama farming families (horonw). In the case of Jogoro Coulibaly, female chief of mines of Djelibani, the fact that she came from outside the Balan-Bakama and therefore did not have kinship ties in the village of her husband may have played a role in the conflict that erupted over her position.
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mine are necessary to ‘capture’ capricious gold (ibid.), I would argue that both the organization
of sacrifices and authority over mines and miners are necessary to appease jinew, have gold be
unveiled, and as a result ensure prosperity for the miners and the village.
Divination of Jinew’s Desires
As indicated by the prohibition on walking through a mining site carrying wood on one’s head,
jinew are known to be inspired by human behavior, and to replicate their emotions. Jinew were
especially sensitive to the positive emotions of children because, as people in Selofara said
“children do not think about showing they are happy”, whereas adults may have an agenda when
they show an emotion. This gave miners in Mande a window through which to affect the sacred
decision makers. So during the sacrifice at Dugunba (a tree on the outskirts of Selofara, see
chapter 4), women poured peanuts on the ground for children to scramble for. This way the
children would be happy, affecting the jine-children, whose parents would be pleased about this.
Another method to set this mechanism in motion was to give individual children a gift. Miners in
Selofara regularly gave gifts like milk or peanuts to a child, explicitly as a sacrifice, in order to
increase their luck or continue their good streak. They would not consult a diviner of the type of
gift to give; most miners had a personal preference for a specific gift and would give this
regularly.
For sacrifices that concerned the larger community standardized individual sacrifices of
gifts to children are insufficient. Communal sacrifices took place in each village of the Balan-
Bakama at the beginning of the dry season. They were reinforced by new sacrifices later in the
season in those places where much gold was found and migrant miners had started mining and
paying taxes. The items that were to be sacrificed varied because jinew were fickle in their
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desires. People needed to use divination techniques to find out which sacrifice would be most
effective in convincing the bush spirits to share their gold with people and refrain from causing
accidents. The act of consulting a diviner is known as ‘ka nya nyini’: to get to the bottom of
something or to search success (see also Keita 2010: 127). The chief of mines, aided by his or
her tonbolomaw, was tasked with this search and with the sacrifice itself.
Chiefs of mines were tasked with the selection of a diviner. In 2011, Banjugu Keita,
damantigi of Djelibani consulted a diviner in Nyumala, a town in the Mande Mountains just
north of Selofara. The Sobara region in which Nyumala is located was known for its isolation
and traditional practices. Its diviners were popular among people from the Balan-Bakama
because they were said to be less interested in money than diviners in more populated areas or in
Guinea and because their techniques were said to be authentic.130
The chief of mines of Selofara
and his assistants however, decided to consult a diviner who lived north of Bamako; a region
dominated by Bamana and far outside of the gold mining region. They argued that this diviner
would be more likely to speak the truth because he did not know the people of Selofara or details
about the practice of gold mining.131
This diviner was a karamogo (lit. teacher, a name often
used for Islamic religious specialists) who used the power of words from the Koran and magical
shapes and numbers to decide on the correct sacrifice (Schulz 2005: 96, Mommersteeg 1996).
The diviners of the Mande Mountains were mostly somaw who used what were known as
traditional techniques which could be mathematical in nature (Keita 2010: 130; Jansen 2009) or
used divination objects like cowry shells. Though no miners from the Balan-Bakama travelled to
Guinea to consult a diviner, the diviners of Guinea did have a reputation for their deep
knowledge of gold mining and therefore the capacity to give gold miners the exact requirements
130
See Jansen (2009) for an analysis of divining practices and a popular technique for divining in the Sobara. 131
He thus gave some rather unusual instructions for the sacrifice, which I will come back to in chapter 5.
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for a sacrifice. Miners from the Balan-Bakama did not consult diviners in Guinea because they
said these were known to have developed too deep a desire for money through their work with
gold miners. Because of this they charged high prices and could not be trusted.132
A diviner would instruct gold miners on what items to sacrifice to the bush spirits in
order to please them and convince them to share their gold with the miners. This was usually a
specific number of kolanuts (80 or 100), chickens (often 2), a larger animal like a goat or a
sheep, and possibly other items like corn (as in Narena) or a tax-exemption on the first pits
(Balan-Mansala). Diviners also gave instructions on the color the animals and the kolanuts
should have (all white or all red), and might give additional instructions regarding the manner in
which the items should be sacrificed and on rules for the mine that would be especially important
this year.
For Mande miners the existence of bush spirits and their control over the bush are
unquestioned facts of life, akin to Moore and Sanders’ understanding of witchcraft as “a matter
of social diagnostics rather than belief” (2001: 4). Trust in individual diviners however, was very
low. Chiefs of mines navigated a landscape with a wide range of diviners and did so mostly
through trial-and-error, error meaning that little gold was found in a mine in the year the sacrifice
was performed. Selofara had not been satisfied with its previous diviner; in 2010 so little gold
was found in its location of choice that the chief of mines and his tonbolomaw decided in a
meeting to switch diviners radically. Banjugu Keita from Djelibani on the other hand, had always
consulted the same two diviners, who were never far apart in their advice, comparing the two
outcomes being his preferred method of testing the diviners. As the mines of Djelibani had done
quite well over the years, he had no reason to change his strategy.
132
For example, people said Guinean diviners may cite the wrong sacrifice and send their own miners later who had done the correct sacrifice and would find al the gold.
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The fact that less gold was found in the mines today than in the past not only contributed
to increased conflict (or less shame) among miners than in the past but was also attributed to a
general decline in skill among diviners: “In the past the diviners were very efficient. So when
they worked on gold, they never missed. People started mining the first sites, following
instructions from these diviners. So, there was a lot of gold, but they received less money for it.
Now there is less gold, but it is worth more” (Madi Keita, May 24 2011). People came to this
conclusion, not through observation of the actions or speech of diviners but through observation
of the results of their craft.
A third method to establish sacrifices, after personal preferences and divination, was the
following up of instructions that were received in dreams. During deliberations at the first
sacrifice at the Balanko mine of Balan-Mansala a man informed the crowd about a dream he had
had. Later in the day, the tonbolomaw convened and decided to take action. Afterwards one of
them, Falaye Keita, explained me what had happened:
“What we have just discussed is that there is a young man who lost his father about three
years ago. His father was a very experienced miner. He saw his father in a dream who said ‘Oh
this year, my son, it looks like the village has taken a new group of tonbolomaw. So you should
tell them that their first sacrifice should be to give the first shafts for free, for the first round you
should give people their mining spot for free.’ So now we selected a committee to go discuss this
with the village chief” (Balan-Mansala, March 20 2011).
In Mande, truths that are revealed in dreams were held in high regard, especially as a way
for recent ancestors to speak to the living. In Balan-Mansala this meant that the tonbolomaw
were going to waive the tax that miners usually paid for each hole that they dug (3000 FCFA per
hole). Since the village used this money for different projects like the water tower and road
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improvements, the assistants of the chief of mines needed to ask the village chief for his approval
for an action that would have cost about 300,000 FCFA (approximately 546 CAD).
Making a Mining Career and Dealing with its Increasing Dangers
The role of jinew in gold mining appeared primarily at times of sacrifice and in the observation
of taboos like the prohibition on entering the mine on Monday. In a focus group on the dangers
of gold mining, experienced gallery-miners (kalajantigiw) stressed that during the work of
mining “your safety depends on the people with whom you work or, if you work alone, your
safety depends on yourself, on your knowledge” (Madi Kama Keita, May 16 2011, Selofara).
This knowledge consisted of both technical and supernatural knowledge and experience: a
gallery-miner apprentice learned to interpret the state of the pillars, listen for rumblings in the
ground around him to anticipate accidents, and to cut ore from the right places. But in addition,
his master and the friends he would meet at different mines would teach him secrets (daliluw).
As mentioned above, a male miner’s career would run from shaft digging to gallery
digging, then washing and then individual gallery digging. While a miner gained expertise by
learning these different techniques from different teachers (or teams willing to take him on), he
would visit different sites and gain knowledge of different geological formations and
organizational principles, eventually becoming known as a mining expert. In the Balan-Bakama,
people became known as mining specialists as a result of their travel to different, far off, mining
sites; the quantity of gold they managed to find mattered little. Jønsson and Bryceson show a
similar situation in Tanzania where the miners of their sample who had visited most sites “were
usually known as experts” (2014: 31). Because these Tanzanian miners worked in hard-rock
mining which requires higher investments (especially in a situation where machines are used) the
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number of sites they had visited was much lower than that of Mande miners (between one and
eight). Jønnson and Bryceson’s method of interviewing the miners about the number of sites they
had visited yields interesting results but would unfortunately not be applicable to the situation in
the Balan-Bakama where people worked on many sites, often for short periods of time and
therefore would not be able to reflect on their mining career by listing all the sites they worked
on; when word comes that someone has found more gold than usual on the surface mining site of
Balan-Mansala and a Selofara miner tries their luck for one or two days, they are unlikely to
include this in a listing of their mining experience years later. The data would be very
incomplete.
Increasing expertise did not escalate into travel to ever farther and profitable mines and
acquiring an occupational identity as a miner (cf. Jønsson & Bryceson 2014: 30). As the
individuals who were part of my focus group like Madi Kama Keita and Karifa Keita – but also
his sister Oumou mentioned above – demonstrated, travelling to far-away sites was part of the
adventures of youth. Travel to mining sites was clearly not limited to the circa five years of
adventure men undertook between the ages of 20 and 25 because men continued to travel
seasonally after settling in the village of their fathers (or elsewhere) but their journeys did tend to
become shorter. For women, travel to gold mines was almost always seasonal and the experience
they gained was rarely recognized. However, at a point in their lives typified by having a number
of children and aging parents, the male miners I knew in Selofara (who were by definition those
who came back to their village as there was no mining-oriented permanent migration towards the
village like in Balan-Mansala, see chapter 6) had come back to their village and most of the time
worked in gold mines closeby because as they said, at their age their families needed them and
they wanted to support their village or region by developing its mines. Of course, at this age they
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would also have gained in authority and individual freedom vis-à-vis older relatives (see chapter
5) which may have made it more appealing to return permanently.
The miners explained to me that secrets, daliluw, are primarily used by those with the
highest level of expertise – individual gallery diggers – who also take the biggest risks because
they mine abandoned and potentially unstable galleries and work alone, without teammembers to
immediately help them in case of an accident or warn them before an accident even happens. The
gallery-miners who participated in the focus group were convinced that they may be the last
generation to work with daliluw. According to them, youth were not very interested in daliluw
and did not have the masters of the past to teach them: “they do not even know how to ask for
daliluw, they do not even want to know. If they know how to mine a gallery, to wash ore, that is
enough, they find their gold. Now for their safety, they say ‘well Allah is going to save me’,
while there are secrets, ha!” (Kanda Keita, May 16 2011, Selofara).
These experienced miners however were senior miners, teaching a younger generation of
miners who were working locally and may still be learning simpler mining tasks like shaft
digging and ore washing. Young local miners were not yet able to claim expertise and could
therefore not yet show an interest in daliluw since these are associated with a higher stage in a
mining career (with individual gallery digging). On this point, the careers of young miners may
resemble those of griots who are only seen as inheritors of the secrets of their parents after these
parents have been deceased for some years (see Jansen 2000: 33).
McNaughton defines daliluw as “small, explicit goal-oriented bodies of knowledge,
recipes that help people carry out acts” (1982: 488). A wide variety of daliluw exists in Mande,
all tied to a specific goal. People can collect different daliluw in their lifetime and use them for
themselves or others. McNaughton argues that “power is the ultimate goal of this Mande system
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of knowledge” (op.cit.: 501). This is true for gold mining daliluw as well, but it does not work in
the way the daliluw presented by McNaughton do. Instead of drawing people to the owner of the
secret or allowing the owner to empower himself in relation to other people, they empower
miners in dangerous situations or they allow miners to be successful in their search for gold, i.e.
they convince jinew to release more gold. Gold mining related daliluw could come in the form of
incantations (also known as kilisiw), as objects, or as instructions. One miner explained to me
how he would lay leaves of a particular tree in the bottom of a calabash with ore, this way more
gold would appear. Other daliluw were incantations of protection that gallery-miners could utter
when entering a pit, or objects they placed at a strategic point (often at the entrance of the shaft).
The work of gallery-miners who entered abandoned mines was especially dangerous
because they work in mines that the team of gallery-miners had judged too dangerous to continue
to work in. These miners used gold mining daliluw much more than the majority of Mande
miners who washed ore or dug shafts; work that was technically not very dangerous. Some of
these miners however, did travel far into areas unknown to them. With the rising gold price this
group had come to include miners from Bamako and other cities and people of ethnicities other
than Maninka. As Maninka were known in Bamako for their capacity for sorcery, these miners
would protect themselves with amulets and other treatments prescribed by karamogow (Islamic
diviners/healers) or somaw (diviners/healers using traditional techniques, see above). As miners
of the Balan-Bakama were not very concerned with their safety when travelling to the mines, I
assume that Jansen’s informant referred to this fear when he asked ‘do you know how much it
costs to protect myself?’ (Jansen 2010: 108).
Though some miners owned daliluw which allowed them to extract more gold out of a
calabash, miners in the Balan-Bakama were sure that they could not find more gold than the bush
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spirits permitted. People did not steal gold from jinew (cf. Jansen 2010: 100) because this was
simply not possible. Gold that jinew did not want to share with humans would effectively be
hidden. This was why it was crucial to do sacrifices before the start of the mining season; these
were meant to convince jinew to unveil gold, not as compensation for gold that people had
already taken. Jinew compensated humans for their sacrifices, not the other way around (cf.
Keita 2010: 127).
When humans find gold in the ground it becomes their property. As Bala Kante from
Farabako in the Mande Mountains (just north of the Balan-Bakama) stated:
“If you find much gold, it is your luck, it is your luck. Even if there are a hundred
miners, each one will have their luck. If you find something by chance, and you
haven’t tricked anyone or stolen gold, you have found it by the grace of the jinew, it
is your luck. Some get a kilo, two kilos, others get ten grams, twenty grams and
even forty grams, everybody has their luck in the gold mines. Well, if you have
such luck, there is nothing bad about it, it is your luck and nobody will try to take
this away from you” (in Keita 2010: 134)
This was a widely shared sentiment in the Balan-Bakama and beyond. Miners may
perform sacrifices individually and as a village and try to avoid conflict and respect taboos and
honour Allah and they may have much experience in mining but in the end the amount of gold
one finds is based on luck. And this luck or blessing that happens to an individual should not be
cause for jealousy on the part of fellow miners or on the part of bush spirits. Because this luck
was bestowed on people by the bush spirits, stealing gold was a very serious offense as it undid
the distribution of gold that the spirits had decided on. Members of mining teams had an interest
in dividing up their gold in public, using easily divisible money, because they need to avoid
conflict to ensure continued success in mining, but there is a second layer of motivation which
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depends on the idea that bush spirits allocate gold according to their capricious will. Resisting
their decisions may lead to disaster as they would interpret this as theft.
Balandier, studying the artisanal mines of Siguiri in 1947, observed that sometimes, the
barrier between the realms of jinew and of people was feared to be broken (1957: 91). Someone
named Ngolo at the Doko mine found a gold nugget that weighed more than one kilo. It led to
consternation among miners because of the “dangerous generosity of a ginné” (op.cit.: 92). The
jine was dispelled by gunfire fired at the nugget by the mining chief’s assistants (tonbolomaw)
and the sacrifice of a young red bull.
Having read about this event, I regularly asked people if they remembered an instance
where they or someone they knew had been afraid because of a large find. While most people
insisted, like Bala Kante above, that the gold one finds is one’s luck, that it cannot have negative
consequences for the finder, some elderly people explained that nowadays people wanted money
so badly that they were not afraid anymore. In the past, people had been much more afraid:
“In my mother’s village (Mansakoloma in the Sobara) a woman had found a large
gold nugget. She brought it into the village where the elders were afraid of it, saying
that it was too large to be eaten by people. They wrapped it in cloth to protect
themselves from possible consequences and put it in a chicken coop for a whole
year. Then the gold nugget disappeared and people concluded that it was the jinew
who had taken it back. The woman who had found the gold had 15 children after
she found the gold. All the children died young so people said this was because she
had found the gold nugget. It is much better to find gold little by little” (Kanfin
Keita, April 3 2011, Selofara).133
Like Ngolo in Doko, people in Mansakoloma were afraid that the division (dan) between the
realm of jinew and that of people had been broken. The large gold nugget could not possibly
have been left there intentionally for people to find but must have been a nugget that was
133
Kanfin Keita’s co-wife Nyene Keita confirmed the story, adding that the unfortunate woman who had found the gold nugget and subsequently lost all her children had been her sister.
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supposed to remain hidden. Though the woman found the gold by accident, the jinew may have
felt as though it had been stolen from them since normally they divide their gold between
themselves and humans (see chapter 4). After this violation of one of the most important taboos
(stealing), the jinew retaliated with the gravest punishment possible.
In the past, the border between jinew and humans could apparently be breached by jinew
so they could take back gold that would be too much for people to acquire. Following sacrifices
jinew divide their gold between themselves and people so it would be only logical for people to
find gold in small increments (Balandier 1947: 540). In 2010/11 the breaching of the division
between jinew and humans was not a concern anymore. Elderly people who remembered events
like this (generally taking place before the independence of Mali) insisted that nowadays people
would not react to a large find with such fear but instead would welcome the find with joy.134
According to Kanfin Keita, people these days were much more absorbed by their need for money
than at the time of the Mansokoloma gold find. Back then “people did not really know what to
do with their money” so instead of seeing all the things they were able to buy with the gold they
found, people were more likely to see supernatural messages in the amount of gold they found.
Others added to this commonly heard explanation with the observation that the youth of today
experienced much less shame (maloya) and with that less fear of jine violence than they had in
the past.
While working in the mines and finding and selling gold, miners in the Balan-Bakama of
the early 21st century generally followed the rules of the mine and tried to avoid conflict and
transgression of taboos. Still, they were not particularly concerned with jinew and their potential
impact on miner’s lives and deaths outside of ritually marked moments of sacrifice and taboos.
134
Because such unexpectedly large finds did not seem to happen anymore I was not able to confirm this.
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However, by immediately selling the gold they had found, Mande miners precluded the
possibility that bush spirits would take back the gold that they had found.
Conclusion
In the previous chapters I argued that artisanal gold mining in the Balan-Bakama (and elsewhere
in Mande) was an ordinary activity in the sense that social relationships and restrictions on
behavior from the village continue at the mining site. Mande gold mines were not ‘communities
without a place’ (cf. Douglass in Werthmann 2009a: 216; Bryceson et al. 2014) but were clearly
placed. They were located within the territory of a village; a community which exercises control
over the mine. In addition, the techniques employed depended on local geology and knowledge
of technology and the governance by village authorities was made possible by national laws and
the particular ways these are enforced (or not enforced). However, the enactment of strict
governance of the mine and all its individual workers by the chief of mines and his assistants was
necessary because the location of the mine and the unextracted gold are extraordinary. Gold and
the soil in which it is found were not controlled by human civilization but were under the control
of bush spirits, the opposites of human civilization. To make sure that humans could work safely
and productively in the realm of bush-spirits, people needed to avoid disturbing the mores of
bush-spirit society (eg. leaving the mines to the spirits on Mondays when spirits liked to roam
the galleries) and avoid provoking the capricious spirits (especially by avoiding conflict).
Through the ritual labor of sacrifice and entertainment (eg. by making their own children
happy), humans enticed bush spirits to give up part of their gold. Collective and individual
sacrifices to bush spirits were seen as gifts which the spirits were invited to reciprocate with a
gift of part of their gold. Other, often less expensive, sacrifices were made by giving free gifts to
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other people, mostly children, so that their resulting happiness would give off on bush spirits.
With bush spirits thus placated, they would be inclined to share their gold. Aided by a high gold
price, jine generosity allowed the inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama to pay for their needs and
those of their children.
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4. Negotiating Gender, Gold and Spirits in a Malian Islamic Borderland
Maribayasa Maribayasa
Ja, I ka fadin lee Yeah, you are strong
Maribayasa Maribayasa
Sanuko son lee Provide gold
Maribayasa Maribayasa
Muso kura ka soro lee For us to receive new women
Maribayasa Maribayasa
Sanubere ka ta lee For us to take a gold nugget
Detail of a song, sung by women of Selofara at the occasion of the yearly sacrifice at the
Maribayasa tree (March 3 2011).
Maribayasa is the name of a visually unassuming tree (see figure 4.1), located on the ritually
productive outskirts (see chapter 3) of Selofara. It is also the name of the ritual complex which is
attached to this tree and a tree called Dugunba and to similar sites in neighbouring communities
like Namakana and Djelibani which have their own Maribayasas. As a women’s site of sacrifice
and divination, Maribayasa goes unmentioned in the extensive classic literature on Mande
initiation societies which exclusively studies male initiation societies and sites of sacrifice and
divination (eg. Zahan 1970; Zahan 1960; Dieterlen 1951; see also Ebermann 1989).135
. Though
135
To my knowledge, Ebermann’s collection of interview transcriptions on Bamana secret societies is the only place in the literature where Maribayasa is mentioned. In an introductory interview his (anonymous) interlocutor answers the following question: Question: Which secret societies are there in your village? Answer: “The Bambara secret societies that are in our village are the Ntomo After the Ntomo, you go to the Mere, After the Mere, you go to the Komo, After the Komo, you go to the Nama. Then, there are also some women’s secret societies here, There is Maribayasa, the Maribayasa sacrifice is done, After the Maribayasa sacrifice, the Sinsin sacrifice is also done,
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the practice has been abandoned in some Mande villages as a result of pressure from Islamic
renewal movements, in many locations women nonetheless continued to sacrifice and pledge at
Maribayasa and Dugunba or variations thereof.
Men also performed sacrifices at the onset of the gold mining season, but they did so only
at mining sites controlled by the male chief of mines (see chapter 5). While these events were
also intended to cause bush spirits to unveil gold in the ground (see chapter 3) and to prevent
bush spirit harassment that may have led to – potentially lethal – accidents, these men’s
sacrifices were not directly aimed at bush spirits but at Allah. The male equivalent of
Maribayasa, Nyamatintin, a tree atop the escarpment that used to be libated for the good of the
whole village (especially to ask for rain), has practically been abandoned though some men
claimed that in case of great need they would sacrifice at it again. They said they did not do so
regularly because of the complicated and expensive requirements of the site.
This chapter will discuss the collective sacrifices136
performed at Maribayasa and
Dugunba, and the ways in which these continued to appeal to many women in this artisanal
mining village in southern Mali. I will argue that the continuity and vibrancy of the cult of
Maribayasa is not a direct result of the community’s supposed geographical and infrastructural
isolation from national and regional centers of Islamic power and debate, an argument expressed
in – popular Malian – discussions on the relative non-Muslim attachments of people on the
These six secret societies are with us here”. (Ebermann 1989: 67) Ebermann follows up on this answer with chapters on the Ntomo, Mere, Koma and Nama; all four male initiation societies. Maribayasa and Sinsin are never mentioned again. 136
During fieldwork in Selofara, no individual went to Maribayasa to dance and repay the spirits for their concession to her outspoken wishes. Selofara griot Jogo Diabate told me that if this happens it usually concerns a formerly barren woman thanking the spirits for conceiving and delivering a baby. Anyone, also people from other villages, can tell the spirits of Selofara’s Maribayasa that if they grant the asker what she wishes for, she will dance at Maribayasa. The previous year someone had come from another village to dance here, but I have never witnessed such an event. I will therefore limit myself to a description and analysis of the collective sacrifices.
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Mande plateau which overlooks Selofara (Wooten 2000: 19; see also observations by Saran
Magassouba below). Instead it was based on recognition by Maribayasa’s female adherents of
their dependence on artisanal gold mining, an activity that could only be successful if the
generosity of jinew was assured on a yearly basis. Relative geographical isolation was deeply
felt, but the region has long been connected to a larger world through trade routes, colonialism,
radio etc. Challenges to Maribayasa were not new, but the women who performed and attended
the ritual viewed it as a necessity to their economic and social well-being.
Figure 4.1 Maribayasa in the rainy season. The tree has no specific markings indicating a special
status, except for some dried leaves and rocks that are left at the base of the tree after
a libation (July 28 2011)
Changing interpretations of being Muslim in Selofara
In 1796 Scottish explorer Mungo Park spent a long rainy season in the village he called
‘Kamalia’ (Kamalen in Maninka) in the Bakama region. Having lost all his possessions and
suffering from what was probably malaria he had to recover before continuing to the Gambia
River by which he could find his way back home to Scotland. Having to spend seven months in a
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hospitable place he found “it was an opportunity not to be neglected of augmenting and
extending the observations I had already made, on the climate and productions of the country
[among which gold, EK]” (Park 2000[1799]: 383). We therefore have available very early and
detailed sociocultural information about a village in the Bakama.
Park describes (and draws, see figure 4.2) a divided village where those who had
converted to Islam lived in huts “built in a scattered manner” and separated by an empty field
from the main, animist, village which was very compact (2000[1799]: 376). Located on an
important corridor in the slave trading system of the time, one can assume a larger presence of
Muslims than elsewhere in Mande since many traders were Muslim. The introduction of Islam in
West-Africa has long been connected to the routes of Muslim traders (Bravmann 1980: 6, 7;
Florusbosch 2011: 118). Park describes a mostly animist village where, according to Park,
people were very superstitious and believe that “[the] concerns of this world…are committed by
the Almighty to the superintendence and direction of subordinate spirits, over whom they
suppose that certain magical ceremonies have great influence” (2000[1799]: 409).
Figure 4.2 ‘Kamalia’ (Kamalen) in 1796, (Park 2000[1799], plate between pages 376 and 377)
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During Park’s stay, the distinction between animists and Muslims was expressed in a spatial
division between the compounds in Kamalen. Two centuries later, all inhabitants of Selofara,
except for one immigrant Christian137
, self-identified as Muslim and the animist-Muslim
distinction had lost all meaning.138
Though almost all inhabitants self-identified as Muslim, not all were recognized as ‘real’
or ‘serious’ Muslims by other members of the community. The aspects of socio-religious
practice that served to define a ‘real’ Muslim were in flux, as they had been in earlier times. Old
religious practices that had been acceptably Islamized at one time, so that Muslims could
legitimately participate, could be abandoned altogether in the name of Islam at a later date. The
identification of practices as appropriate or inappropriate for good Muslims was a gendered
process that is illustrated in this chapter by the libations at Maribayasa and the men’s and
women’s sacrifices at gold mines.
What it means to be Muslim has changed significantly over time, in a process
characteristic of Mande, and wider, Islam. Florusbosch notes how “people (individually or as a
group) can ‘become Muslim’ more than once, at different points in time. [Griots may place
ancestors in lineages going back to companions of the Prophet. This] does not mean they could
necessarily measure up against current local standards of what it takes to be a Muslim, such that
people can still remember their own grandparents and great-parents as ‘not yet Muslim’” (2011:
116).
137
To avoid confusion, in the remainder of this chapter I will not mention this Christian hunter from Kita who was married to a local Muslim woman. 138
However, the spatial pattern of a core village, surrounded by scattered, smaller, compounds was still common in the Balan-Bakama. In 2010-11, the compounds surrounding the core village (not as compact as in figure 4.2, but nonetheless discernable) were inhabited by recent immigrants or sons of some of the large local compounds who had set out to establish their own compound in their home village.
174
Saran Magassouba, the oldest woman of the household in Selofara that hosted me, gave
me a clear example of this process of changing identity-markers for Muslims when she told me
about her youth in a village on the plateau that overlooks Selofara. This area is commonly known
among Malian gold miners and anthropologists as the place to find serious Maninka diviners139
and ‘real’ Bamana; people who have resisted conversion to Islam and adhere to animist religious
practices (eg. Wooten 2000: 18). Saran Magassouba told me and her grandchildren that she had
grown up with these animist religious practices, like habitually reading the position of chickens
that were killed in the compound, and that she had become a Muslim when she married and
moved to Selofara, at the foot of the Mande Mountains. Nonetheless her parents’ names were
Musa and Fatimata, typical Mande Muslim first names and in other Mande contexts a clear
indication of adherence to Islam. This is either an indication of the significant influence of
Islamic discourse on the plateau (and probably elsewhere) before widespread conversions or,
more likely, an indication that her family, including her grandparents, in fact self-identified as
Muslims.140
To Saran Magassouba however, her parents’ names were unremarkable and did not
indicate a Muslim identity for her parents; to her, her decision to become Muslim had been
sudden and complete. She converted from animism to Islam, expressing her faith by praying,
fasting and participation in Islamic feasts.
139
Miners looking for a diviner (see chapter 3) to clarify what jinew may want to receive as a sacrifice in order for the miner to be successful, were primarily concerned with finding ‘serious’ diviners. People were hesitant to discuss specific quests for good diviners but did tell me about encounters with diviners who were not serious. These diviners were portrayed as divining only for money and so they were uninterested in the actual outcome of their craft. People’s mental landscapes regarding diviners varied on the basis of two premises. Some sought diviners who were known as experts on gold mining and these specialists were primarily found in Guinea. Others were convinced that these experts had been corrupted by the money that could be made from gold miners and so they looked for diviners were untainted by greed. The latter type of diviner was said to be primarily found in the Mande Mountains. The men of Selofara followed the latter logic when they selected a diviner north of Bamako who would not be knowledgeable on gold mining. 140
In 2010-11, most children born to Muslim families received Muslim names. Parents who adhered to Islamic reformist movements tended to avoid the Maninka forms of these names and used Arabized forms instead. Christian families tended to give their children French names.
175
This was not the first period in Mande history in which religious practices, religious
identities, and judgement of others and of the self changed significantly. There have been periods
during which these changes are said to have been specifically intense though there is little data
available from years in between these periods, when identification of religious practices may or
may not have been stable. Jansen for example, notes how “Islam became an important political
factor on the [Mande] political stage around 1800”, the time Mungo Park traversed the region
(1995: 89). The sovereign of Segou for example was unwilling to receive Park, as he was afraid
to provoke other kings by hosting a Christian (ibid.).
The late colonial period, the 1950’s, was another time with a strong wind of Islamic renewal in
Mande. Florusbosch indicates pilgrims returning to their villages from Mecca as the main
influence at this time. Pilgrims brought back new, Middle-Eastern inspired, modes of practicing
Islam; especially a new form of prayer (2011: 123, 124; Schulz 2008: 25). Jansen, citing Ranc,
notes that this period was a break point “because in the seventies people suddenly started calling
certain ritual activities ‘heathen’” (1995: 49). During this period, many pre-Islamic religious
practices were abandoned. These practices had previously coexisted with Islam or had been
Islamized by incorporating Islamic symbols, terms, actions or meanings.141
The incorporation of
such symbols or meanings at one time does however not necessarily mean that this will remain
acceptable. During this period masked dances were abandoned (ibid.), as were the nightlong
rituals at Maribayasa in Selofara. This was likely also the period during which the Selofara
men’s sacrifice at Nyamatintin was abandoned. This sacrifice was the male equivalent of the
women’s libations at Maribayasa. It may very well be that the men’s sacrifice to Allah at the
mining site at the beginning of the mining season will not always be considered Islamic enough.
141
The identification of bush spirits as jinew (from the Arabic jinn) was one of these adaptations.
176
During the tenure of the previous women’s chief of mines (damantigimuso), the libations
at Maribayasa and Dugunba had been abandoned completely. When this chief died the position
was passed on to her daughter-in-law, Kariya Keita. She and the other women of the village
reinstated the libations but not as an all-night affair for which they would need the participation
of a large number of women and a group of male drummers, but as a short day-time event that
did not need much preparation or the participation of a large group of people (see below).
Elderly people in Selofara, as well as in Bancoumana, looked at their past with a very
relativist disposition. Though most would not dream of practicing the religious rituals of their
childhood, their past actions and ideas were not so much constructed as morally negative, but
much more as timely, or at worst ignorant. Practices may have been constructed as
inappropriately animist for the present era, but elderly villagers did judge positively the practices
that are firmly placed in the past.142
During fieldwork I would often listen to stories from the past and experienced that unlike
the elderly in The Netherlands who had the strong sense that their society was undergoing moral
decay, most members of the older generation of Selofara and Bancoumana would withhold
sweeping judgements about the current era or that of their childhood. During an interview on the
women’s associations of the late colonial era, Sitan Koita of Bancoumana (+/- 80 years old)
overlooked her courtyard where a granddaughter of about 18 years of age was working. After
discussing celebrations of her childhood and the low prices she had paid for food during the late
colonial era (cf. Diarra 1965: 159), Sitan Koita discussed the marriage practices of her youth:
142
Some of their children who were influenced by urban Islamic schools of thought were more willing to condemn practices as not merely ignorant but also sinful.
177
“Our behaviour was different from the young people of today, we were very respectful.
At the time, at 15 you had to be married otherwise it would not happen anymore, now
girls are staying home for 20 years and that is dangerous.
EK: Would you say that things were better back then?
Sitan Koita: Oh no, it was just different. Now children are studying and that did not exist
back then. There are also good things now that we did not have at the time.
(Bancoumana, February 3 2008)
Only one person ever explicitly judged the experience of life during her youth when comparing it
to that of the present143
:
Jogoro Coulibaly (responsible for the women’s surface mine in Djelibani): “When I was a young
girl in Kenieba144
I was a member of a dance troupe. A woman from our village would train us
(Mrs. Coulibaly does some dance moves while sitting on her stool) and we performed at all
events that happened in our villages. All villages had a dance group of young girls at the time.
Life was actually more fun then, wasn’t it Madi [Kama Keita, research assistant]?” (Djelibani,
January 25 2011).
The identification of Muslim vs. non-Muslim practices changes over time whereby the
directionality of this change is generally interpreted as a move away from a pagan past towards
an increasingly Muslim future. Most discussions on this topic centered on the present; do we
define the current practice as non-Muslim (pagan, ignorant, backward) and should it therefore be
abandoned and new practices adopted so that we become Muslim (again) or are present practices
143
This conversation took place during a period when I had taught myself not to ask about this anymore because answers would invariably be a variation of that of Sitan Koita (see above). 144
This is Balandugu Kenieba, a town near Kouremale, a regional centre of gold mining, but a different Kenieba than that near the border with Senegal which is also a major gold mining centre.
178
already sufficiently Muslim so that they can be allowed to continue? As in the 1950’s when
masked dances and the libations at Nyamatintin were abandoned practices were abandoned so
that villagers would become better Muslims. Looking back, they explained their participation in
these ‘non-Muslim’ practices in terms of ignorance, or backwardness.
Namagan Keita, an elderly man from Selofara knowledgeable about local history who
despite his blindness kept himself involved in village life by singing at agricultural work parties
presented me with a different view. According to him, the community of Selofara had become
less serious about Islam after an initial eagerness to learn and propensity to celebrate religious
festivals as a community in the years shortly after they had become Muslim:
“Before, people were very serious about religion. When the Guinean [the second
imam of Selofara, EK] was here, everybody went to the mosque. We did
ablutions and went straight into the mosque. Even the meal we eat during
Ramadan, when you have to eat before dawn, everybody took their meals to the
mosque and ate it there. The porridge – after the break of the fast people eat
porridge – people brought all the porridge to the mosque. So everybody ate and
then we prayed immediately because you can start eating at sundown and then
it’s almost time for prayer. Today there are more people [the population of
Selofara has increased in recent decades, EK], but fewer Muslims. There are
people who go to the mosque but many are not really praying the way they
should.” (Selofara, June 1 2011)
To Mr. Keita, good Muslims practice their faith as a community and he observed that in
Selofara this was less the case than before, at the time of the second imam of Selofara. Counting
back145
, this would have been in the 1960’s or 70’s. This was shortly after the period of Mande-
wide Islamic renewal of the 1950’s (see above), during which Selofara had invited its first imam,
and had built a mosque like many other villages in the region. Generalizing a point about
145
In the same interview Namagan Keita gave a chronology of the imams of Selofara.
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processes within Malian Islam, Brenner indicates the “tensions which exist between the notions
of Islam as a force for unification of all Muslims within the universal umma, and the powerful
potential which Islamic ideologies provide for the expression of difference” (1993: 4). This
contradiction also reminds of the opposition between badenya (mother-childness, i.e. harmony),
and fadenya (father-childness, i.e. strife, conflict). Mande society may prefer the harmony of
badenya but also recognizes that it needs adventurousness and supports the exceptionality of
people who would tend towards fadenya (Bird & Kendall 1980; Wooten 2009: 88). The
emphasis on collective experience of religious practices is also a continuation of a mode of
religious praxis originating in those aspects of pre-Islamic religious experience which relied on
village-wide participation in rituals.146
The community-approach to religious practice in
combination with ubiquitous Mande inter-village rivalry (Zobel 2004: 253, 254) leads to a
situation where village populations as a whole are judged by others as good or bad Muslims
based on their relatively early or late construction of a mosque (Florusbosch 2011: 129).
Though Selofara had one mosque and one imam, and conflict on religious issues was
limited, participation in religious events had become more fragmented. Villagers did not break
the fast of Ramadan collectively but with their household or friends, a large group of women
defied objections by the imam and danced at Maribayasa, and some local artisanal miners
146
Maninka animist collective religious practice was based primarily on initiation societies like the Komo (McNaughton 1979), N’domo and Ci-wara (Zahan 1960; Imperato 1970). Colleyn (2006: 7) states that the Ci-wara was a non-religious village association that organized masked dances to inspire cultivators to hard work. The activities of other, more secret, initiation societies were limited to men from the same village. Women from Selofara explained that in the past, the libations at Maribayasa were an all-night-event – from sunset till sunrise – that all village women had to participate in for logistical reasons. To fill all dance shifts, all women would have to participate.
180
worked at Dajan, a placer-mine close to the village or Musodugu on Friday afternoons, defying
part of the taboo on working in the mines on Mondays and Fridays147
.
This differentiation and individualization of religious practice coincided with a
democratic, capitalist, neo-liberal era in Mali that started with the overthrow of the dictatorial
regime of Moussa Traore in 1991. After the National Conference, where “nearly 2,000
individuals representing a broad range of society participated in reimagining Malian government
and creating the Third Republic” (Wing 2014: 477), a regime was established that was
democratic on a number of aspects like regular elections, a high judicial court and dialogue.
Important for international aid, Mali was internationally recognized as democratic (Wing 2014:
476). The new government extended freedoms of expression and association. As a result, non-
governmental organizations, radio stations, print media, and a variety of associations148
were
founded, and many of them flourished in the 1990’s (Soares 2006: 85). Soares describes Muslim
leaders’ concern for moral degradation in the period immediately following the 1991 coup that
led to a democratic transition (2006: 86). A broad range of print media, radio stations and
national television slots opened to religious leaders with influence in Bamako but the fact that
the discursive field of Malian Islam is so heterogeneous (Schulz 2008: 30) and that religious
147
A well-known rule for any miner in Mande wass that there was to be no mining on Mondays and Fridays (see chapter 3). The Monday work-prohibition is in place to avoid disturbing jinew who wander the galleries on Mondays. On Friday people are supposed to go to the mosque to pray, afterwards people generally stayed in the village and caught up with friends. Some miners of Selofara would go to Dajan, a site close to the village on Friday afternoons, indicating they had already prayed and why would they then stay home? On a large site like Dagala near Njumumakana on the Mande plateau, where tonbolomaw worked full-time on the policing of the site, the placer was deserted all Friday because of the threat of (temporary) banishment. 148
Shortly after 1991 Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCA’s) became popular among women in urban and rural Mali and have remained a widespread and important phenomenon for cash strapped women trying to save up money for daughters’ weddings or large consumer items during times of ever-increasing hardship (see Kühn 2007: 46). Until 1991, under the regime of Moussa Traore, all women’s associations were illegal, except for the Union des Femmes du Mali (UNFM) (Brand 2001: 58).
181
leaders are in competition over support of Malian Muslims illustrates the fact that “in the secular
postcolonial state, any such instruction or advice is of course not compulsory” (Soares 2006: 84).
In Namagan Keita’s experience, religious practices have ceased to be uncontested in
Selofara, as they have in Mali in general. There have, of course, always been debates; on masked
dances, modes of prayer, the status of jinew, etc. It has however become rare, even in a rather
homogeneous village like Selofara to see a collective experience of a ritual, something that
seems to have been more common in the past (see above). At the time of research, individuals or
persons with power over a small group of people like heads of households decided whether they
would participate in a ritual, or organize one. Many enthusiastic youths would engage in debates
and try to convince others, including their elders, of their particular convictions. This
differentiation of religious practices on the level of the village community and individualization
of decisions on this issue may not be as extreme as in Western Europe where causes for the
decrease in church attendance (Pollack & Pickel 2007) or radicalizing Muslim youth’s avoidance
of local religious authorities in favour of tightknit peer groups of choice (Peter 2006;
Weggemans et.al. 2014) are much reported on. However, this process, and accompanying
individualization of religious experience had great impact on Malian social relations and the
organization of religious events.
Namagan Keita was not alone in his observation of the increasing fragmentation of
Muslim religious practices in Selofara, but no one gave an indication of sharing his judgement of
this process as one leading to a decrease in (real) Muslims (it was not a topic I discussed often so
this may well have been a coincidence). In an article on urban Malian women who are part of
Islamic renewal movements, Schulz observes that “[the] emphasis that many supporters of the
moral reform movement place on the embodied enactment of virtue leaves them in a double
182
bind: contrary to their claim to moral unity, their conception of the relationship between
individual ethics and the common good, combined with the tendency among Muslim women
(and men) to claim a truthful reversion process for themselves by distancing themselves from
others, reinforces existing trends of internal differentiation among Muslims who aspire to a new
moral community” (2008: 36, 37).
At a time when national Muslim leaders were vying for influence and attention, Namagan
Keita’s view contrasted with hegemonic premises of current debates about what one should or
should not do to be a good Muslim (cf. Schulz 2008). In Selofara in 2010/2011 the local imam
argued that to be good Muslims, villagers should renounce a number of practices that were
common in the village or had been until very recently; non-Islamised types of divination, village
wide boys’ circumcision ceremonies, and rituals aimed directly at jinew, like those at
Maribayasa. Though these debates often centered on the value of local practices, they are
embedded in regional and international Islamic discourses and government politics. Though
people in Selofara often complained about the relative isolation of their community,149
there was
a constant and influential stream of information through visitors, returning travelers150
, a local
radio station (based in Balandugu Kenieba, across the paved road), and formal education. These
all introduced new ideas and ways of thinking to the village. This dynamic was intensified by the
gold mining complex through which men and women travelled through the region for months at
a time, while working and living with people from all over West-Africa. Because of the high
gold price and ubiquitous unemployment, artisanal goldmines increasingly attracted urban and
149
Selofara is located off the main road and at the foot of the Mande Mountains, a plateau that blocks the signals of the national television channel ORTM and cellphone reception that has become commonplace in most of Mali. Still, there is a lot of regular contact with surrounding communities and the capital, and almost all adult villagers, men and women, have travelled to work in gold mines or to search other economic opportunities elsewhere in West-Africa. See also introduction. 150
People travel back and forth with the daily bus to Bamako all the time, for family or doctors’ visits, shopping, or education.
183
less-poor youth, whose presence increased the range of discourses that gold miners may
encounter and (temporarily) partake in.
Musodugu: the Women’s Town
The mining site Musodugu (lit. the women’s town) was not a site that attracted miners from the
city, or from anywhere outside of Selofara. It was a small site that was primarily used for surface
mining (yemasu) by the women of Selofara. There were a few pits, where two to three teams of
men from the village searched for gold in hard-rock (woyon). The composition of these teams
changed quickly. Since little gold was found, men were not loyal to teams working at Musodugu.
They saw their work on the site as either assistance for village women and/or as an attempt to
earn a little extra cash on a quiet day. During most years, Musodugu was primarily mined during
the rainy season when the washing pits that women had dug (see chapter 2 for surface mining
strategies) filled up naturally. In December 2010, a Spanish junior mining company that was
about to establish a demonstration site on Selofara territory, widened the path up to Musodugu
before shifting sites and abandoning their newly bulldozered road. The path seemed to attract
more women to the site even though they did not use the new infrastructure much; everybody
still walked. Then, a month later, Sayi Keita found ‘a lot of gold’ at Musodugu151
and the site
became much more popular than it had been before, though still only with Selofara women.
During the first half of 2011 when the gold price was creeping up to 20,000 FCFA/gram,
Musodugu doubled in size and women put a lot of effort into bringing water to the site during the
early dry season when there was not yet much to do in the placer mines (damanw).
151
Sayi Keita, or anyone else, could not tell me how much she found exactly. It was certainly less than one gram.
184
With the benefit of hindsight, people argued that more gold had been found this year
because the women of Selofara had finally settled on the selection of their chief of mines; Kariya
Keita. Her predecessor had been her mother-in-law, who had been very old and had appointed
Kariya as her representative.152
After the death of her mother-in-law, Kariya had continued her
work, now as chief of mines, but she had not formally been appointed. Not everybody agreed
with this procedure and since jinew do not like conflict about mining, the spirits had withheld the
gold. During the yearly sacrifice at Musodugu, the matter was publicly settled (see below). With
spirits placated, miners of Selofara were able to find more gold than in previous years.
The night before March 13, 2011, Korotimi Kouyate, the only adult woman of the local
griot compound, had announced that there would be a libation at Musodugu and that all villagers
should come.153
Afraid to miss the event I went to the mine in the morning and waited while
chatting with the few miners present. They would be attending the sacrifice but, like others, they
did not seem much concerned with it. At 1pm a small parade of women, men and children
arrived, playing music and singing to Musodugu154
and its female jinew. The crowd moved
towards to a wooded site that overlooked the mining site where women danced around a tree that
would become the center of the ceremony. I was instructed to follow people in breaking branches
of surrounding trees and to lay them at the base of the central tree and on the legs of Kariya
Keita, the female chief of mines who sat to the side of the area where onlookers would sit. In an
ebullient atmosphere, people said benedictions for her and for Musodugu: “May Allah hear us,
152
“She became very old and could not travel into the bush anymore. I was her son’s wife so she presented me to the women of the village” (Kariya Keita, October 25, 2010, Selofara). 153
Korotimi Kouyate and her sons (Diabate) were the main griots of Selofara. As such they spoke at family and village events like weddings, tonboloma meetings and political gatherings. Korotimi’s son, Jogo Diabate, did his village announcements in the same manner; ringing a bell before calling out his message at a number of strategic points in the village. 154
Musodugu was the most popular surface mining site (yemasu or nyegedida) of Selofara. It was regularly referred to during the sacrifice, unlike the other surface mining sites that were formally also covered by this sacrifice (eg. Dalaninjan, Djelibasila and Balankosila).
185
May Allah agree with everything, May Allah chase all bad things from the mine, I dansogo
(praise term commonly used among hunters). Gold is owned by both jinew and by people.”
People confirmed that if they were to respect each other, the jinew would appreciate this and give
more gold, if the village did not act as one, they might just as well not do a sacrifice.
The proceedings continued with speeches, starting with elderly men who stressed the
importance of Musodugu to the women of Selofara and by extension to the prosperity and peace
of all people of Selofara, ‘even to little children’. They confirmed the presence of the items that
were to be sacrificed; 80 red kola nuts and a red goat. They commemorated Kolanyinin, the man
who had organized the first sacrifices at Musodugu ‘one man, who has had such a great impact
on Selofara’.155
They confirmed the importance of the women to all members of the community,
especially to them as men. They confirmed the importance and the workings of the sacrifice. An
elderly woman at times confirmed the speeches with specific benedictions for the men and
Musodugu, but it took seven speeches before the first woman; Kariya Keita, spoke about the role
of a damantigi. Then a problem surfaced; Kariya Keita’s claim to the position of chief of the
women’s mine was questioned publicly. After some consternation, women were explicitly
invited to speak and ‘say what they think’ and many did. Though many women did agree with
the idea that they had not confirmed Kariya as chief of the mine, they said that she had done her
job well while she represented her mother-in-law who was formally chief of mines into old age.
After her mother-in-law’s death, Kariya had continued the work without being confirmed as
chief of mines herself, but after some uncommonly open accusations, people came to the
155
Kolanyinin had organized the women of Selofara, appointing a chief of mines and assistants (tonbolomaw). He used to sacrifice a red goat and 80 red kola nuts each year, and Kariya Keita continued to do this before each dry season. She therefore did not consult a diviner each year like other damantigiw (men and women) commonly do (see chapter 5).
186
agreement that they should formally appoint her as chief of mines. They terminated the
discussion with the ‘decision’ to do the sacrifice.
Three men from Selofara crouched at the base of the tree while the rest of the group sat
down on rocks and watched. Jinew were instructed to provide gold for the good of all the village
of Selofara and in return they would be presented with the red goat and the kola nuts. The idea
that this would be good for the village was repeated many times; jinew are assumed to care about
the well-being of the village and so they were reminded of all the good they had already done for
the village. Millet mixed with milk (dege) was thrown onto the branches at the base of the tree
and a broken kola nut was thrown to see the response of the bush spirits (see below for Nassu
Keita’s recounting of her words during the libation of Maribayasa). The sacrifice completed, the
crowd applauded and people spoke benedictions. Immediately, the red goat that had been tied to
the tree all this time was pushed to the ground and slaughtered. The dying animal was soon let
loose and twinged on the ground. Less than half a minute after being slaughtered (see Gregory et
al. 2010), the dead goat was studied by a group of men who then walked back to the crowd to
give account to the women of what they had said and seen in the position of the goat. The
position of the goat showed that the sacrifice had been accepted by the bush spirits. A group of
young men was already making a fire on which the goat would be roasted. All attendants, male
and female, adults and children, received a piece of meat and a kola nut – which had to be fully
consumed at Musodugu before the person returned to the village – and women proceeded to
dance around the tree, before everybody went home or continued mining.
This manner of killing an animal was uncommon in Selofara as most slaughter followed
Islamic rules that dictate that the animal should be restrained while it dies. In the Balan-Bakama,
the traditional slaughter method was still frequently used in ritual settings where chickens were
187
slaughtered, for example at the men’s sacrifices at Narena and Balan-Mansala. However, except
for the sacrifice at Musodugu, I have not seen a goat or other large animal die in this fashion and
its position interpreted.
Figures 4.3-4.6 Kariya Keita, chief of mines of Selofara , is honoured by attendants who place
leafy branches on her legs; attendants of the sacrifice at Musodugu discuss the
rules that will apply at Selofara’s surface mining sites in the coming year; three
men libate a tree at Musodugu to demand the bush spirits to share their gold with
the women of Selofara; once slaughtered, the red goat is roasted and eaten
immediately (Musodugu, Selofara, March 13 2011).
188
Weighing Epistemologies at Balan-Bakama Sacrifices
At sacrifices at mining sites, ‘interpreting’ the position of a dead (or dying) animal meant coming
to a consensus on correct interpretation. Mande counts many well-known divination specialists
who are recognized as experts (Jansen 2009; Graw 2009; Eglash 1997) and whose services may
be used to establish the correct gold mining sacrifices. However, Balan-Bakama communities did
not invite such specialists to their sacrifice at a mine. Instead, all adult men, many of whom had
some knowledge of one or two methods of divination, were invited to propose an interpretation
of the manner of dying of the slaughter animal. Through repetition by influential men a
consensus was reached on an interpretation that seemed particularly pertinent and that would be
expressed as the official outcome of the sacrifice. Being a woman, I was not usually able to
observe the process of interpretation and the position of the animal myself in order to establish
the connection between the interpretation and the image but interpretations that were eventually
established as ‘correct’ were those that related the position of the animal (where the legs or the
head were said to be pointing to something in the environment) or its posture (where semiotic
systems related certain postures with particular explanations eg. crossed legs or the side an
animal falls on, see below) to a current issue in the community. For an interpretation to reach the
status of the official interpretation of a sacrifice, it needed to logically follow from the position
of the animal and also be informed by knowledge of local processes. This way, the process of
interpretation of a sacrifice to bush spirits made public, issues that otherwise went unspoken.
At the collective mining sacrifice (damanbe) at the Kurubanbé site of Narena for
example, the chicken had fallen on its right side (February 3 2011). According to an observer this
indicated that the jinew wanted to say something about women, since the right side stands for
women, the left for men. While said women, me included, waited a little farther in the bush the
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men concluded that this meant that the jinew were particularly concerned by theft of gold by
women. The lady next to me agreed that this was indeed an important issue. The problem of theft
had led to tension on Narena sites the year before. According to Diakaridia Keita this theft was a
result of men giving women soil without gold while keeping – gold-containing – ore (nye) for
themselves.156
Here the side the chicken fell to was significant to the interpretation of its
position. The manner of dying of the red goat that was sacrificed at Musodugu in Selofara, was
seen as confirming the position of the kola nuts which had also indicated that the jinew had
accepted the sacrifice, because after standing for some time after having its throat slit, the goat
fell down and never stood up again during convulsions before it died. Here the goat falling to its
left or right side, male or female, was not used in the interpretation of the sacrifice.
The chain of signifiers that was presented by observers of a sacrifice was not at all fixed.
Men from different villages, ethnicities, divination backgrounds and links to the mining work,
met at the sacrifice. Each was allowed to suggest an interpretation or support the observations of
someone who had already spoken. While some basic rules exist in Mande (preference for an
open and closed kola nut, see below, and the numbers two and three being associated with
women and men respectively), each man was allowed to explain the event using his own system.
Through repetition of explanations that were seen as pertinent, the group of men would come to
a consensus on the ‘right’ explanation.
All sacrifices at mines followed the same pattern as that of Musodugu; arrival, clarifying
speeches, sacrifice, consumption, followed by mining. I observed major differences in style
156
Diakaridia Keita explained to me that women had increasingly resorted to stealing gold out of first and second calabashes that were not theirs because male miners in the pits would cheat them out of gold. They would start by having a woman wash two calabashes of ore (nye), before filling the third calabash that is for the woman to keep with kunatige or senatige, soil from the top or bottom of the gallery, which is unlikely to contain gold. Being thus cheated out of gold, women would resort to ‘stealing’ gold from the two gold-rich calabashes.
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between this sacrifice by women at Musodugu and other sacrifices organized by men at the
placer mines of different villages, in that it was a more festive event with dance and music which
is absent at sacrifices at placer mines, also the position of a goat was interpreted and the sacrifice
made directly to jinew at the meeting place under the tree. However, people in the Balan-Bakama
did not see much of a difference. The sacrifice at Musodugu was done ‘the way it had always
been done’ since Kolanyinin did the first sacrifices with them. The differences that I saw, and
that the imam of Selofara objected to, were explained by villagers as inconsequential.
The neighbouring village of Djelibani had also been involved with Kolanyinin but while
the women of the village tried to select a female chief of mines, conflict broke out between two
women who both claimed the position. Since jinew are unfavourable to people who are in
contention, it was important to solve the problem so that jinew would unveil the gold again and
the women of Djelibani would be able to take care of their families. In 2010 the male chief of
mines, Banjugu Keita, mediated in the conflict and the women finally concluded to select Jogoro
Coulibaly as their first female chief of mines (see chapter 5).
Jogoro Coulibaly decided not to sacrifice or libate with women but to have the male
damantigi, Banjugu Keita, sacrifice at the site for her, accompanied by her son, after Banjugu
had consulted three diviners for both the men’s and the women’s site. The sacrifice for this new
women’s site157
was done in the same manner as that at the men’s site:
EK: “So the sacrifice was done by men?”
JC: “Yes, men know the words that you use in a sacrifice. It’s generally the men who do
the sacrifice, even on sites that belong to women”
EK: “But in Selofara, the sacrifice was attended by a lot of women as well”
157
Because of a conflict about the holder of the office of women’s damantigi, the post had only recently been filled. This was the first time there was a sacrifice specifically for a surface (women’s) mining site in Djelibani.
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MK: “She was represented by her son. One can send a representative who you tell the
words that will be spoken in your name. Then they did the sacrifice in front of the women.”
EK: “Ah, so women did attend the sacrifice?”
JC: “No, but they went the same day to get water”
(Jogoro Coulibaly, May 24 2011, Djelibani)
This practice confused translator Madi Kama Keita who, coming from Selofara assumed that a
sacrifice at a women’s site would be directed specifically towards jinew, under a tree, since in
Selofara (and Namakana) this has been customary practice for decades. However, in Djelibani,
where the women’s site did not have this continuous tradition and where the elderly female chief
of mines worked with the male chief of mines, she opted for a sacrifice by men, which was
directed at Allah, in order to influence bush spirits.
Before an actual sacrifice, all attendants were invited to speak and the opportunity was
commonly used to publicly confirm and clarify leadership, the rules of the mine and the items to
be sacrificed. Transparency through speech is a common way to avoid conflict in Mande
organizations (see chapter 2). In gold mining, conflict avoidance is not merely a human desire;
jinew are known to be especially sensitive to conflict among humans, preventing humans from
finding gold as a result. For example, jinew withheld gold in Djelibani when several women
claimed the position of chief of mines. It is especially this type of discord that was said to upset
bush spirits. Jinew were not very sensitive to miners who break rules as long as tonbolomaw,
who are charged with policing the mines, do their work. However, jinew would be particularly
affected by leaders who held grudges against each other or by a community that was split on an
issue related to mining. In combination with Mande society’s own aversion to this type of
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conflict (fadenya, see chapter 3), the sensitivity of jinew has led to a high level of organization in
Mande gold mining as conflicts are ideally solved by the introduction of a new rule which will
avoid this conflict in the future.
Maribayasa and the spatiality of the Mande village
When leaving Selofara in a northwest direction and crossing the schoolyard and the adjoining
soccer field where the teenagers’ teams practice every evening and play their inter-village
matches, you will find a small patch of bush which seems larger on the ground than on the
satellite photo (see figure 4.7). It is an unremarkable bush, not looking any different from other
specks of forest that surround the village. One of these trees is Maribayasa, marked by a small
pile of rocks that is placed underneath to honor the bush spirits (jinew) which live underneath all
trees but which are encountered at this tree (see figure 4.1).
Figure 4.7 Satellite photo showing Maribayasa’s location in the bush west of Selofara. The
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Mande plateau is to the north, the women’s mining site (Musodugu) to the southwest
(based on Google Maps 2012)
Each year before the formal start of the gold mining season at Musodugu, the women’s mining
site (see chapter 2), the women of Selofara merrily danced to Maribayasa to offer sacrifices to
the bush spirits (jinew) who are encountered underneath this tree and to ask them to allow the
women to find much gold this year. A week later, this is followed by a sacrifice of a red goat
plus kola nuts underneath a tree at the women’s mining site of Selofara, Musodugu.
Maribayasa is not the only tree on the edge of Selofara where people can communicate
with jinew. The yearly celebration also libated Dugunba; a much more impressive tree on the
northern edge of the village (not visible in figure 4.7) and the site where women organize
sacrifices to ask for things that are seen as necessary for the village as a collective – like rain –
more than for an individual woman. For problems that relate to individuals (even when this
concerns practically all individuals like a lack of money or missing a travelling child) the latter
kind of problem one would turn to Maribayasa. The fact that the sacrifices and libations that ask
jinew to release gold for the women of Selofara were done at both Dugunba and Maribayasa
shows the importance of gold mining for both the village as a collective and for its individual
(female) members. These sacrifices normally took place the week before the sacrifice at
Musodugu, for which the whole community was invited. In 2011 though, Kariya Keita ‘had
forgotten’ about organizing the event and after being found to be at fault during the sacrifice at
Musodugu where there was an opportunity for attendees to say some words about the sacrifice, it
was done the day after, on a Monday afternoon.
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It is no coincidence that both trees are located just outside the village; their location is the
reason for them being singled out, named and libated. Previously, another tree was libated as
Selofara’s Maribayasa but as the village slowly moved east-ward158
, this tree and the surrounding
bush was cut down and another tree was selected.159
The outskirts of a village are a liminal area
in the Mande conceptualization of the village (see chapter 3 for an analysis of the place of gold
in the spatial conceptualization of the village). Both Dugunba and Maribayasa stand on the
current border (dankun) between the civilized village and the decreasingly civilized bush. This
conceptual wilderness is a dangerous area because it is the realm of bush spirits (jinew).
Figure 4.8 Dance at Maribayasa (Selofara, March 14 2011)
158
Like those in many other Mande villages, Selofara compounds regularly suffered flooding due to erratic rainfall, because of the village’s location below an escarpment and gradual soil erosion in the village. Water flows from the higher located north-western part of the village towards the south-east which is the oldest part of the village. The village used to extend farther south-east of here but in a classic pattern, the ground level became too low and prone to flooding so people moved to the north-west of the village leaving a mango-orchard in the wet location of their old homes (Jansen 2000). 159
Selofara women told me that they selected a tree in the right location, just outside the village. They had not consulted a diviner.
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“Maribayasa, yeah, you are strong”
The day after the sacrifice at Musodugu, the women of Selofara libated two trees on the edge of
the village; Dugunba and Maribayasa.
Nassu Keita explains:
“Once that’s done, after doing the sacrifice at Musodugu we go to a place called
Maribayasa. We go to Dugunba over there to entrust ourselves160
and speak to that and
then we leave and go to Maribayasa to also entrust ourselves to that. So once we come
from the libation place at Musodugu we entrust ourselves to all big trees. The big trees,
we entrust ourselves to all of them. And the old things that are related to Musodugu. We
all like Musodugu very, very much…We do this every year. Since a very long time we go
to the big trees to entrust ourselves to it. We go to Musodugu. If you go to Musodugu,
then you also go to the old things to entrust yourselves to it. The female bush spirits
(jinemusow) that are there, to entrust ourselves to them, to entrust ourselves to the male
bush spirits (jine keman). So we do a sacrifice, we go to the Musodugu sacrifice site. Oh,
may Allah make it good, may Allah make Musodugu pleasant (ka a diya), for women and
for men, we go there to receive something, may the jine people be willing to receive us.
That is why we go to the big trees every year” (April 2 2011, Selofara).
On March 14th
2011 at one o’clock, I met up with a group of elderly ladies on the village
square. We chatted a bit about the sacrifice they had performed the day before at Musodugu.
Once we were ‘complete’161
, the women started singing and we walked northwards to the site of
Dugunba. The group of mostly elderly women danced around the tree while some broke off
branches of the same tree which they placed at the bottom, on the pile of rocks that had been left
there during earlier sacrifices. Then Balla Keita (the village baker) arrived. He sometimes
160
“To entrust oneself, ka kalifa, means that you trust something or someone, that when you ask them to solve your problem you trust that they will solve it. So when we say we entrust ourselves to the tree, it means we are confident that the tree will solve the problem we present it with” (Madi Kama Keita, April 1 2017, Selofara). 161
At this moment there were about 20 women, including some recognized as leaders. Many women and children joined later when they heard the singing and the vegetable oil can-drum.
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worked as a diviner and he was going to perform the libation. While he splashed the millet
powder mixed with milk (dege) that the women had brought on the tree and instructed the jinew
to provide the women with gold this year, some were still busy breaking branches while others
tried to keep children at a distance.
Figure 4.9 Balla Keita libates Dugunba while women and children of Selofara look on
(Selofara, March 14 2011)
Once Mr. Keita had broken and thrown kola nuts to find out if the libation had been accepted,
two elderly women took the calabashes of peanuts they had brought and poured them over the
ground. Suddenly a mass of children (mostly boys) came running out of seemingly nowhere to
grab as many peanuts as they could. Later, Nassu Keita explained to me that the women had
offered the peanuts this way so that the excitement of the children would affect the jine-children.
The jine-children would also be happy, since children could be observed to be easily influenced
by the emotions of those around them. This would please the jinew parents and makes them more
likely to give the women the gold they asked for.
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Figure 4.10 Kids scramble for peanuts at the base of Dugunba. It is believed that jine children
will be affected by the happiness of human children and that their jine parents will
subsequently be inclined to reward the women of Selofara with gold (March 14
2011)
More women and children joined us as we started moving to the west in the direction of
Maribayasa, leaving Balla Keita, the only man present at the Dugunba libation, behind. We
crossed some compounds, then the schoolyard and the soccer field and entered the small patch of
bush. The libations took place during the school’s lunch break so there was not much activity.
Many more children joined us but they were forced to keep a distance from the small tree by
women wielding twigs. 162
The elderly women danced around Maribayasa and as at Dugunba
they lay leafy branches on the rocks surrounding the tree (see figure 4.11). Among hunters it is a
common sign of respect to lay these branches on someone’s legs. The day before, at the mine,
the women’s mine chief was thus honored because she manages an activity located in the bush
and thus a hunters’ method of showing respect is applied (see chapter 3). Since Maribayasa, like
162
Hitting at people’s feet with twigs is the standard Mande method for keeping a crowd from moving too close to the activity they are watching.
198
gold mining and hunting, is considered to be located in the bush, it too was covered by leaves to
show respect to the jinew. Maribayasa can only be approached by women163
and therefore Balla
Keita had not accompanied the group of women here. Elderly lady Nassu Keita crouched at the
base of the tree and started doing libations similar to those Balla Keita did just before at
Dugunba. She told the jinew what she was giving them (millet powder in milk – dege – and kola
nuts) and instructed them to provide the women with gold, with children and daughters-in-law.
The women that surrounded Mrs. Keita and Maribayasa added that they also wanted to see their
children who were travelling (this concerns mostly sons). 164
The atmosphere became intense
with so many women shouting that they wanted to see their children of whom they haven’t heard
for a long time.
Nassu Keita broke a kola nut and threw the two halves on the ground to see if the libation
had been accepted. She did this up to ten times. Every time she threw the kola nut, one of the
halves fell on its flat side, the other on the round side. At the moment I assumed she was doing
this because she needs another, possibly clearer, answer with both halves on their flat side or
both on their round side. Mrs. Keita later explains to me that having the kola nuts fall on opposite
sides was a good sign. She threw them a number of times to be sure about the answer of the
jinew. Kola nuts falling on opposite sides meant that the jinew wanted to keep something for
themselves but also that they were willing to share the other half. With the kola nuts falling the
right way, Mrs. Keita took one half for herself and from the other half she bit off a piece, chewed
it, and spit it out over the base of the tree. The rest of that half was also left there. Even if jinew
163
Boys are present at the libation of Maribayasa, the interdiction is against adult men. 164
It is common for young men in Mande to travel before getting married and settling in the village. Between the ages of circa 18 and 25 they try to make money and make a name for themselves. In 2010 in Selofara most of these men travelled abroad and they ended up in many different countries; from Gabon to Spain, from Libya to Guinea. Many of them would settle in these countries and marry there. Many others did not survive. Their families often had no idea of what happened to them. Some young women also travelled, mostly to neighbouring countries like Guinea and Ivory Coast where they had relatives.
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had said they wanted to give the people everything without keeping any for themselves, this
would have been a less positive result since people cannot know what jinew would demand in
return for such generosity.
The libations terminated, Mrs. Bagayogo started playing the vegetable oil can-drum again
and everybody sang the song quoted at the beginning of this chapter: Maribayasa was called on
to provide women and their children with babies, daughters-in-law, wealth, and gold. Singing,
we walk over the main road to the village square where we had started an hour ago. There the
women of Selofara danced and sang in the regular Mande party fashion. After a few songs a shop
owner came out to give one of the ladies a bag of candy which was shared among the adult
women present. Around 2.30pm the party broke up and everybody went home, this year’s
libations for Selofara’s women’s mine had been completed.
Figure 4.11 Nassu Keita performing libations at Maribayasa (March 14 2011, Selofara)
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A few weeks after the libations I asked Nassu Keita to tell me what she had said and done during
the libations:
“Oh yes, the kola nuts showed good things, I agree. I will show you: Maribayasa, I came
to ask you something. The kola nuts which I have here, we came to try them with you. I
came so that you can do good things for us; to provide us with nourishment, for both men
and women. I ask you to provide us with that. If you provide us all with something,
Musodugu; our village will be pleasant. Yes, we come to receive that. We will all thank
you for it. Now I am going to throw kola nuts, Maribayasa. You can take some kola nuts
to give us ours, oh is this one not shining? Right, the other is rough. [Nassu imitates her
actions at Maribayasa using peanut shells, EK] It is the same as with kola nuts. Women
are clapping and saying “Kuu-kuu-kuuuu, Maribayasa, kuu-kuu-kuuu”. Ah, so my right
hand is here and I say ‘Maribayasa, you are good, you are strong. By Allah, Maribayasa,
Maribayasa, Musodugu should rise165
. If Musodugu were to rise, women will give you
important things. If it is the case that Musodugu has risen right now, you should take your
kola nut and give us ours. [Throws two peanut shells which fall on opposite – round and
hollow – sides, EK]’ Is that not it? This is what we have said. Eh, it will be good!”
(Nassu Keita, April 2 2011, Selofara)
In the increasingly fragmented and individualized religious landscape of the twenty-first century,
participation in libations and other religious rituals has become optional. The celebrations at
Maribayasa used to take all night and thereby required the participation of many. Around the turn
of the millennium the libations had stopped since as a village-wide affair it led to strong protests
from the imam and others. With a new chief of mines, a group of – mostly elderly –women
decided to reinstate the event but they transformed it into a short daytime ceremony which
allowed for much more flexibility. Interestingly, the organizers and early participants of the
sacrifice were precisely those elderly women who met each other at the mosque each evening.166
165
When discussing a mining site, ‘ka wuli’ (lit. to rise) refers to the gold becoming visible and possible for people to find. 166
A group of elderly women, prayed at the mosque each evening. Several events that took place in the village during the year I spent in Selofara were planned during their walk back home. On June 15, 2011 for example they noticed that there was a lunar eclipse (see Espenak in National Aeronautics and Space Association 2015) that was
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When a sermon in the week before the sacrifice urged them to refrain from their planned
sacrifice at Maribayasa however, they were defiant: “how else are we going to feed and clothe
our children? Yes, the imam said that we should not do the sacrifice, but we do it. We pray at the
mosque, we do the Friday prayers, we fast for 30 days, but we do it! We do not do anything bad
for people, we do not hit anyone, we do what we can for people, whatever we can do for people
in addition to prayer, we do it” (Kariya Keita, April 4 2011, Selofara).
Gender Relations at the Mine and the Home
In all of Mande, surface mining (yemasu) is generally considered a women’s activity (Panella
2005). However, the installation of a female dominated system of leadership within a village
seems to be limited to those villages in the Bakama and its neighbours in Guinea where
Kolanyinin did his work.167
Hoffman shows how Mande gender ideology defines the position of
women as ‘ambiguous’ (2002: 13). Women and their assigned tasks are generally accorded less
prestige than men and their tasks and women are excluded from structures that have the highest
power in society (op.cit.: 12). However, this male dominance is situational; it is restricted to
specific domains and situations. “The ambiguity of woman’s status grants her many possibilities,
for the most part within the kinship structures of home and extended family, but increasingly also
within public expressions of the domains of power and authority” (Hoffman 2002: 13). Mande
women are ideologically subordinate to men but they are also considered to be very important, in
taking ‘too long’ (it is predicted to be the second longest lunar eclipse of the decade: National Aeronautics and Space Association 2011) and decided to call on some of their friends and dance to hasten the end of the eclipse. Singing ‘The cat has eaten the moon, he should release it’, they passed by all compounds of the village, finishing at the village square, where they danced and shared a bag of candy donated by a store owner. After about 15 minutes of dancing, all women went home. The moon reappeared that same night. 167
Miners from the Bakama had not heard of the existence of female chiefs of the mines (damantigimusow) outside of their home region. However, female chiefs of mines only govern yemasu mines which are typically not visited by migrant miners. My informants would normally arrive in a village after the sacrifices (the moment when a damantigimuso is most visible) had already been performed (see chapter 6).
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their roles as mothers, care-takers and as those responsible for the reproduction of society.
Though males are seen as dominant, women live their daily lives mostly independently, carving
out autonomous spaces that are uniquely female (Simard 1993), leading Turrittin to define a
particular women’s ‘sub-culture’ within Bamana rural society (Turrittin 1987). Within this sub-
culture where women are autonomous one finds for example women’s savings organizations
(Kühn 2008), women’s work on their fields and birthing practices (Freeman 2004). Hoffman
indicates that women’s “acceptance of and submission to a public ideology of subordination
gives them the cultural space in which to cultivate substantial quantities of actual power and
effective authority” (2002: 16).
Outside of the expressedly female domain however, gender role ideology is also
ambiguous. Within the compound roles may be clearly circumscribed as male or female but they
are only clear-cut in standard situations when both males and females are available. On the
compound, household chores like sweeping, cooking, and laundry are typical female tasks that
men would never engage in. However, when they are travelling without female company, it is
very common for men to do this type of work. Also, situations may come up in which women are
unable to do all the work that is typically assigned to them in which case many men will take on
some of these tasks. For example, when my host’s wife was ill he would cook my meals because
it would be worse to have neighbours see the guest having to cook her own meal. Surface mining
may have been seen as a female activity but when men thought it was the surest way to make
some money, they would not shy away from it. In 2012, surface mining was suddenly booming
across Mande as new technology was introduced, namely gold prospecting metal detectors. Men
bought, or rented, a masin (machine) and walked through the bush around all major mining
areas, digging for the larger nuggets that their detectors found at up to half a meter depth.
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Because of the large investment and use of new technology (commonly associated with men),
this type of surface mining became a typical male activity.
The gendered identification of work is also ambiguous in its definition of men’s work.
While libations were defined as being a job for men, leading the women of Selofara to invite
three men to perform the libations at Musodugu, women were not excluded from the activity. At
Maribayasa, where men are forbidden from taking part in the libations, Nassu Keita herself did
the divination and libations even though she would later say that men generally do this “because
they know the words well” (Nassu Keita, April 2 2011, Selofara). Gender role ideology was
commonly naturalized through reference to women’s inability to do what was identified as men’s
work. However, any pressure from practical circumstances made the seemingly solid boundaries
between men’s and women’s work fluid as we can see when observing Nassu Keita’s libations at
Maribayasa, but also when taking to urban women in Bamako who invest more than ‘surplus
time’ in work in market trade when their husbands are unemployed (Diallo 1999; Vaa et al. 1989)
and men who will cook a guest’s meal when their wives are incapacitated.
Though the naturalization of male dominance through reference to women’s weakness
mostly led to a lack of power for women, Bakama women also gained in support from men who
considered their work to be essential to the – precarious – existence of themselves and their
families in this subsistence agriculture and mining based society. In the Bakama, for example,
the men of a compound were expected to harvest the peanuts of their women. Fully aware of the
fact that elsewhere in Mande the harvesting of their main crop was done by women themselves,
men in the Bakama nonetheless explained this practice by referring to the strenuousness of the
work which they said women would not be able to do. Men engaged in the harvesting of their
wives’ peanuts looked down on neighbouring compounds who were ‘too disorganized’ to
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support their women this way. Women from these compounds would have to harvest themselves,
leaving less time and energy to take care of the household. According to these men’s analysis,
this was a form of neglect of women and of their children by extension.
On the compounds of Selofara, care of children, cooking and cleaning were typical
women’s tasks. Women were responsible for the expenses related to this in addition to farming
(or paying for) condiments. The most important expenses in a woman’s life were the trousseaus
(minanw) she collected over the years to give to her daughters when they married. The money
that women earned through gold mining was mostly used for these trousseaus in addition to
common expenses like clothes and extra food for the children. Women requesting gold from
jinew at Maribayasa became very emotional. As the main caretakers of their households, the gold
women found was used for the social reproduction of that household and so it touched directly at
kinship relations.
Conclusion
When one of them was selected as the new female chief of mines of Selofara, a core group of
women in Selofara reinvigorated the sacrifices at Musodugu, Dugunba and Maribayasa. They
explained their reintroduction of sacrifices to jinew by referring to their need for money and for
contact with their travelling children. Not isolation from a modern world in which these practices
have been abondoned, but an increasing dependence on money caused by an expanding medical
system, taxes, and (international) travel have made women in Selofara feel a strong dependence
on finding gold and hence on the generosity of jinew. In an era of rising gold prices and few
opportunities for diversification of income-earning activities in a poor subsistence agriculture
and artisanal gold mining based economy with clearly circumscribed gender roles, they sensed
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that they could only live up to their gendered responsibilities if they could convince jinew to give
them enough gold.
Within worldwide artisanal gold mining, Mande takes a special place because of the large
involvement of women and long historical roots of mining practices. The women of Selofara,
Djelibani and Namakana, and possibly a number of villages in Guinea in the home area of the
late Kolanyinin, are unique within that situation in that they own and govern their own mines.
Mining the world over is identified as a male endeavor and leaders of mining sites (and industrial
mining corporations for that matter) are invariably male and often governed by ‘big men’ (eg.
Werthmann 2003). The women of Selofara navigated a fractured religious landscape to govern
their mining site according to values that were important to them namely obtaining the resources
to care for their children, keeping their families together and seeing their families and village
flourish through the inclusion of new wives.
Decades ago, the men of Selofara and other villages in the Bakama redirected their yearly
sacrifice at the placer mines towards Allah (see chapter 5). This new construction of the
sacrifices left enough ambiguity to include most miners from the communities concerned;
according to some, the sacrifice would persuade Allah to instruct jinew to unveil gold, others
who denied the power of jinew maintained that the sacrifice will persuade Allah to aid miners in
their work directly. This is important because the ritual claimed to aid all villagers, who all
worked at the mine. At the same time other religious rituals in Mande were being abandoned (eg.
Nyamatintin) following criticism from those who identified with the Islamic reform movements
that have had profound influence in urban and rural Mali. These national and international
debates on what it means to be Muslim in a changing world strongly influenced religious
experiences in the Bakama.
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5. Positions of Authority in Artisanal Gold Mining
In the Balan-Bakama, sacrifices on artisanal mining sites are the responsibility of chiefs of mines
(damantigiw, lit. the ones responsible for the mine). Each of the seven villages had such a chief
(some had two) who was also responsible for other aspects of the governance of mining sites like
setting rules, fines and the selection of a mining site. The chief of mines was aided by a group of
assistants (tonbolomaw, lit. hands of the association), many of whom were present on the mining
sites more regularly than the chief who was often elderly. This chapter will analyze the
governance of mining sites by village authorities through an explanation of the roles and
selection procedures of chiefs of mines and their assistants in the different villages of the Balan-
Bakama. Though a small and close-knit region, there were significant differences between the
villages; differences that related to the settlement histories of the villages and the histories of the
first gold find in each territory.
Being Responsible for the Mines of the Village
Each village of the Balan-Bakama had at least one male chief of mines. Three villages also had a
female chief of mines (Djelibani, Selofara and Namakana), and Balan-Komana had two male
chiefs, responsible for mines in different parts of the village’s territory (see below). The
responsibility of a chief of mines can most succinctly be described as ‘assuring the flourishing of
artisanal gold mining in their territory’. Lamine Keita, the male chief of mines of Namakana
described his responsibilities: “My tasks as a chief of mines start when the time of the year has
come, once the rainy season is over, that is when the mining starts. So, when that time arrives, I
get people together, these are my assistants. We discuss gold mining issues. Afterwards, we send
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people to a diviner. Then I work on the organization of the sacrifice.” (Namakana, December 17
2010).
In the Balan-Bakama I interviewed all chiefs of mines but one on their tasks, position and
the mines they governed.168
Most of them referred primarily to the organization of the yearly
sacrifice when asked to describe the work they did in their capacity as damantigi. This task
figured prominently because it concerned a big event requiring planning in a meeting with the
tonbolomaw and consultation of a diviner, also the animal needed to be bought – oftentimes with
the chief’s own money – and the chief had to preside over the proceedings at the site the diviner
had selected. Only if the year’s mining campaign was relatively successful, would the other tasks
of the chief of mines become more prominent, eg. the settlement of disputes, the selection of new
tonbolomaw from among migrants and the organization of meetings with village leaders to
mitigate the impact on the village of the influx of migrants.
Though the ultimate goal of the sacrifice and the work of each chief of mines and their
assistants was to have a successful mining campaign, leading to wealth for villagers and the
arrival of migrant miners, few of them succeed in this. Most chiefs of mines in the Balan-
Bakama organized the sacrifice in the manner described by Lamine Keita after which they were
not much involved in the mining process because the only people working in the mines in the
village’s territory were local villagers who knew each other and the mining rules well. The male
chiefs of mines of Djelibani and Komana-Kuta, whose mines were doing well enough in the
2011 placer mining season to attract miners from neighbouring villages, worked on their own
mines where they joined their assistants in the supervision of the mine (these damantigiw were
168
Namori Camara of Balan-Komana was not available. Since Balan-Komana has two male chiefs of mines (see below) I interviewed his colleague Musa Bagayogo on all mines belonging to the village.
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quite young compared to their colleagues in other villages). Once their mining funds had
collected enough tax money, they both organized new sacrifices, meant to maintain the
benevolent mood of the local bush spirits.
Each chief of mines had such a mining fund, which played an important role in Balan-
Bakama villagers’ support for artisanal mining in their region (see chapter 6). When explaining
the importance of artisanal mining, Balan-Bakama inhabitants would point to Balan-Mansala
which in the early 2000’s had experienced a regional gold rush lasting several years. In this
largest village of the Balan-Bakama, the taxes paid to the fund by artisanal miners and traders
had paid for a number of village projects, the most prominent of which was the solar-powered
water tower standing at the entrance to the village (see figure 5.1).
Mining funds received money from taxes and fines. The most prominent among the taxes
was the 3000 FCFA (5.46 CAD) paid by teams of shaft-miners for the right to dig a shaft.169
For
most mining funds in the Balan-Bakama this was the only source of income because aside from
the shaft tax, local miners resisted paying more tax when they did not find much gold. The placer
mines of the Balan-Bakama were all very similar – and thus in competition – and were visited by
few migrants. When in a particular season more gold was found at a site and more migrants
travelled to it, the chief of mines had more opportunities for levying taxes for the mining fund.
For example, on May 8 2011 the tonbolomaw of Komana-Kuta, which had experienced an influx
of regional miners, blocked all paths to the popular Worofe mining site with rope. All miners,
locals and migrants, had to pay 500 FCFA to get on the site. Miners received a ticket as proof of
payment (see figure 1.2) which they could be asked to show. I had first heard about the
169
In Balan-Komana, the tax was 1000 FCFA per pit, and each gallery miner (kalajantigi) paid 1000 FCFA for the right to work on the site.
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unannounced tax day from miners in Selofara who had heard the news and decided not to go to
the mine that day to avoid losing money. At the time, Worofe had about 60-80 active mining pits
and was popular among miners in the region. Some miners from elsewhere in the Balan-Bakama
may have stayed with relatives or friends in Komana-Kuta to avoid traveling back and forth to
their village every day but otherwise there were no migrant miners. The Balan-Bakama miners
were served by three to four local women selling food and a few itinerant traders. Because there
were so few traders, all of whom were local, and they did not make large profits the tonbolomaw
were unable to tax traders on the mining site or in the village.170
At Dagala which experienced a
true ‘gold rush’ there were dozens of traders with large operations and hundreds of migrant
miners living in a designated field outside the village. In that situation a village can levy taxes on
many more people and activities like taxes on market space, crushing machines and living space.
Because there are many more people at gold rush sites, there are also more opportunities to
impose fines on miners and traders.
Most villages in the Balan-Bakama did not have the opportunity to tax beyond pit-taxes.
In villages that attracted few outside miners like Selofara and Namakana, the fund was empty. In
these places the chief of mines would pay for the sacrificial animal and the costs of divination
himself. Chiefs of mines explained that if the sacrifices they organized were successful and many
miners came to work in the mines in their territory, the resulting taxes would be used to pay them
back for their expenses. However, in villages where gold rushes were uncommon, male chiefs of
mines were realistic and did not expect to be reimbursed.
170
On some hard rock sites in western Mali, villages have changed their approach to taxation of shafts. According to miners who had worked there, the chiefs or their assistants had seen the large profits that were made in hard rock mining and found that the 3000 FCFA tax stood in no relation to the gains; they wanted a bigger share. On many sites the Guinean system is now used in which each mining team has to admit a tonboloma as a non-active member of its team. This way the tonboloma receives a share of the profits without doing the actual work.
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The yearly sacrifices at the three women’s mines of Djelibani, Selofara and Namakana
(see chapter 4) were funded differently. The women’s mining fund could not expect to receive
tax money since miners did not pay taxes for the right to engage in surface mining, which is the
most common type of mining on women’s sites. Instead, women of a village collectively paid for
the sacrifice of their mine. In Selofara, each adult woman was required to pay a pre-determined
amount (100 FCFA) into the fund to pay for the sacrifice. The money the women collected was
used to pay for the sacrificial animal, kola nuts and other costs (unlike women of other villages
and men, they did not seek advice from a diviner but sacrificed the same type of animal every
year).
The collection of these fees was the main task of female assistants to their chief of mines.
The selection of assistants was based on this task; each compound had one assistant tonboloma
who collected the fees of women on her compound and gave them to the chief of mines. The
assistants therefore did not necessarily have to be regular miners, able to govern the women’s
mining site (Musodugu); most of them were elderly women who were respected in their families
and were oftentimes the formal women’s leaders of their compound. The task of the female chief
of mines was to collect contributions, decide on a date for the sacrifice with the village’s
women’s leader and organize the event.
Chiefs of mines in the Balan-Bakama did not gain any money or access to labour through
their position. Elsewhere in Mande such gains are not unheard of but large-scale gold rushes
during which the large tax gains are shared with the chief and his assistants have not taken place
in the Balan-Bakama. Candidates instead vied to become the new chief of mines because of the
status that came with the position, not because of monetary gains. This fits a more general
pattern of Mande leadership and ideology based on wealth-in-people, meaning that one’s status
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depends on the number of interpersonal dependents and therefore these (women, children,
clients, guests) are highly sought after (Guyer & Belinga 1995: 92). In a study of women’s
political associations in Segou, DeJorio finds that women do not necessarily strive to have much
money, but to organize large masses of people (1997: 229), this is what gives a person prestige:
“A person with gold is not rich, a person with money is not rich, the person who has people, this
is the rich person” (ibid.). In rural Mande these dependents include guests (lolanw) meaning
people to whom one is a host (jatigi). This concerns not merely short-term visitors but also
families who may have lived and farmed in the village for a long time but whose ancestors when
they first arrived in the village were first hosted by the ancestor of their current ‘jatigi’. One
cannot move to a Maninka village without finding a jatigi from a settled family. This host
introduces his new guests to village leaders and make sure they have land to live on and to farm.
To gain this type of wealth, people in the Balan-Bakama employed different – gendered –
strategies to gain dependents. Among these dependents I would distinguish two types of
relationships; voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary dependents are new guests like migrant
miners and political or social dependents like supporters of the new village chief or members of a
savings and credit association.171
To gain this type of dependents one needed to have access to
the resources potential dependents look for like influence, land, or other dependents in addition
to charisma. Involuntary dependents are children and ‘guests’ who are guests because they are
the children of a guest. To gain this type of dependents, most men in the Balan-Bakama did try to
171
Wives fall between the two categories. Marriages were arranged but at some point in the proceedings the girl would be asked if she accepted the match. Because work to arrange the marriage had already been done by her adult male relatives she was not free to refuse but it happened nonetheless. It also happened that a male relative refused at some point because the future husband’s situation (especially the husband’s relations with his own relatives whom the bride was supposed to live with) was deemed unsatisfying. Many women in the Balan-Bakama came from the Mande Mountains. It was a commonly accepted fact that because the living situation in the Mande Mountains was so much harsher, girls liked to marry a lowland husband. These marriages were thus easy to arrange and therefore attractive to Balan-Bakama men.
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marry several wives (two or three was most common) and men and women valued having many
children (and did not use birth control besides extended breastfeeding). A title like village or
mining chief gave someone more influence over a large group of people. Once a lineage owned
such a title, all members had an interest, especially those of the same gender as the office holder,
since they were all normally able to influence this person more than others and because many of
them too, had the chance of holding the office one day.
The village societies of the Balan-Bakama, like the rest of Mande, were hierarchical.
Youth generally had very little power over major aspects of their own lives, like whether they
stayed in school and who and when they married. As people aged, their position in different
hierarchies rose; in their households, compounds, village political systems (male and female) and
member organizations. Though most people did not become much more autonomous with
regards to their own lives172
, they did get more influence over other people’s lives; men and
women decided much for their children, gained seniority on their compounds, and became more
influential in their respective systems of village politics. Most people however, never had the
opportunity to be at the top of a hierarchy; men only became heads of their compounds when
they were the oldest man of the oldest generations and positions like village chief and chief of
mines were owned by specific lineages. As a result those few positions with high status were
jealously guarded by the families that held them.
Individuals in Balan-Bakama were never autonomous agents and this also applied to
people who seemed to be at the top of a hierarchy, like the chiefs of mines. Though the English
term ‘chief’ may hint otherwise, in Maninka they were primarily ‘responsible for the mines’ and
172
The main exceptions were men who moved away from their natal compounds, the desire to gain more autonomy was often exactly the reason they moved.
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thus had much responsibility, more than authority. Like other Mande leaders, chiefs of mines
were obliged to pay close attention to popular opinion of the people they represented, in this case
all villagers. Decisions on changes in rules were often a result of simmering tensions in the
community or strong opinions on new developments. Like the chiefs of compounds (lutigiw)
who may have been chiefs but also depended on the young men and women to work on the
compound’s fields to provide the whole compound with meals, chiefs of mines depended on the
continued trust and acceptance of their instructions by villagers. Were a chief of mine to impose
too strictly an impopular ruling, villagers could go to mines of neighbouring villages, they could
ignore the chief and his assistants altogether, or the assistants themselves could cease to impose
the rule. After all, the chief of mines as well as their assistants were themselves also villagers and
member of village compounds. Therefore, when I discuss for example villagers’ desire to
welcome more migrants and willingness to act on this by developing inviting mining rules, this
popular opinion was shared by the chief of mines and tonbolomaw who were responsible to act
to make the desires of their relatives and neighbours in the village a reality.
Though it is a general thesis of this dissertation, it is important to stress here that Mande
chiefs of mines, their tonbolomaw and the villages had a close relation to ‘their’ mines, which is
not the case for artisanal mines everywhere in the world. Migrant miners in Mande were guests
of the village, not unknown beings who set up camp somewhere in the bush, even when Mande
miners were somtimes forced to make a camp just outside the village. There was thus no real
sense of a clash between mining communities and villagers since the mine was part of the village
and villagers themselves were also miners; in their own villages’ mines and those of other
villages far away. Bryceson and Fisher (2014: 184) discuss the Tanzanian conflicts over
environmental destruction between miners and villages in a situation of contrasting
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organizational structures and lifestyles (op.cit: 180). This conflict is a symptom of the absence of
an organizational link between miners and village leaders and lack of buy-in from villagers who
are not themselves miners. As the Mande case shows, such conflict is not a given for both
smaller-scale artisanal mining and gold rushes (and Mande is not a small exceptional region; it
covers several gold fields and countries). As a result of the close supervisory relation between
village and miners, migrant miners do not form an autonomous community in whose
organizational structures one could discern signs of democratizing tendencies as Bryceson et al.
observe in Tanzania (2014). Their hope that “artisanal miners may be injecting a new sense of
distributive justice and democracy…[that has] the potential to uplift their local communities and
stimulate democratic principles” (Bryceson & Fisher 2014: 179) – unfortunately – does not apply
to the Mande case.
The Chief of Mines and the Village Chief in the Balan-Bakama
One to two generations ago, in the early to mid-20th
century people in the Balan-Bakama became
convinced that gold mining had to be governed through an authority separate from the village
chief. This institution would ideally be held by a lineage other than that of the village chief. The
resulting division of responsibility is comparable to the situation of villages in the Mande
Heartland, which have a village chief and a land chief (see above). It is possible that this idea
became popular when Bakama miners travelled more than before to a region with such a division
of governing labour and came to expect this at home.173
It may also, in some way, have been
influenced by the colonial situation. I do not have sufficient information to explain why all seven
villages of the Balan-Bakama decided they needed a chief of mines and proceeded to appoint
173
In Park’s description of artisanal gold mining in Kamalen in 1798, the work is governed by the village chief (2000[1799]).
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one, following different selection strategies. Here I will discuss the division of labor between the
chief of mines and the village chief and the selection histories of the different chiefs of mines of
the Balan-Bakama
The male chief of mines was solely responsible for the artisanal mines in the territory of
the village (with the possible exception of the women’s mining site174
); other decisions regarding
the village were the responsibility of the village chief. This division of tasks is not necessarily
standard in Mande, as regional differences exist. Studying in Kela, a village just south of
Kangaba, near the Niger river, Jansen notes that its division of authority between a village chief
and a land chief (dugukolotigi) is “typically West-African” (1996: 76). The land chief of Kela
was the oldest man of the oldest generation of the lineage that founded the village, the village
chief the oldest man of a ruling family that had arrived (and conquered) more recently. In Kela,
the land chief was only involved in the division of land for farming and housing and his role in
local politics was therefore limited (ibid.).
In the Balan-Bakama, the position of land chief did not exist; here the village chief was
responsible for the land issues that in Kela were the responsibility of the land chief. A reason for
this may be the stability of leadership in this isolated and peripheral zone whose villages have
not been invaded by outsiders who then became its leaders (leaving the initial founding family
with only the land chief title). The foundation histories of Balan-Bakama villages aimed to show
that descendants of the first man (or men) to establish a village had the right and responsibility to
appoint a village chief who was usually the oldest man of the oldest generation of the
descendants’ compound. Though these foundation histories do not necessarily aim to report
174
The women’s chiefs of mines of Djelibani and Namakana, both installed in 2011 (see below), only governed one surface mining site each, all other mines were governed by the male chief of mines. Only the female chief of mines of Selofara governed three sites, only one of which was being used at the time of fieldwork.
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factual historical information (Jansen 2000), they do present a discursive and ideological link
between the position of village chief and a lineage’s status as founding family.
Tonbolomaw
In the Balan-Bakama, tonbolomaw are assistants to the chief of mines (the damantigi175
). Their
title suggests they are representatives (bolo: hand) of an association (ton). The ton that is referred
to in this case is the age group (kari) that unites men who were circumcised at the same time.
Each kari unites men born within a timespan of about three years. These groups did not usually
play a large role in the lives of Balan-Bakama men, except when they and the other members of
their kari were asked to become tonbolomaw. Outside of mining management, grins (fr.), multi-
generational social clubs were much more important in men’s social lives. The selection of a kari
as tonbolomaw was common and unquestioned in the Balan-Bakama and it matches the literal
meaning of the word tonboloma (member – lit. hand – of the association) and ton history
(Leynaud & Cissé 1978: 319). In many other villages with artisanal gold mines in Mande
however, tonbolomaw are not actually members of an association but merely chosen from among
the young men of the village (Grätz 2007: 77; Panella 2010: 9).
In Selofara, each kari was appointed for about three years. The tonbolomaw active in
2011 were in their early 50’s. In Balan-Mansala which hosted many mining migrants (see below)
most of whom had not become a member of a local kari, members of two kariw functioned as
tonbolomaw at the same time, serving for about six years each.
175
This is the damantigi who was responsible for the governance of the mines in their village’s territory. Owners of a particular mining shaft are also known as damantigiw (since the mining shafts and the whole mine are both called damanw) but the tonbolomaw did not work for them, instead they policed these damantigiw (cf. Maconachie & Hilson 2011: 300).
217
In a sociological study of the Mande heartland just before Malian independence Leynaud
and Cissé show how the tonw of this era were also based on age groups (Leynaud & Cissé 1978:
319).176
Like the tonbolomaw of the Balan-Bakama in 2011 who were asked to police the gold
mining sites for a few years, one age group received the privilege to act “as a kind of police that
assures order and social safety in the village” (Diarra 1965: 133). However, associations of the
kariw of the mid-20th
century were enduring social organizations whose members labored
together on people’s fields and used this money to throw parties and lend money to group
members in need (Leynaud & Cissé 1978: 319) while men in the modern-day Balan-Bakama
turn to voluntary associations for this purpose. Unlike the kariw who united in tonw in the 1950’s
(Leynaud 1966: 61, 62), the tonbolomaw of villages with small mining operations, like Selofara,
were egalitarian groups that did not have a strong internal structure; they did not have griots or
other office holders besides a – not prominent – president.
The authority of tonbolomaw, as assistants to the chief of mines of a particular village,
was bound by the same geographical boundaries as that of the chief. The tonbolomaw of
Selofara, which experienced an unsuccessful placer-mining season in 2011, were urged to work
on their village’s mining site of choice, in order to support the village (see chapter 6). However,
many of them decided to work in Djelibani or Komana-Kuta. When working there, outside the
territory of their own village, they had no particular formal or informal authority as tonbolomaw
of another village.
Within the territory of their village, tonbolomaw had the following tasks: setting rules of
mining sites, conflict resolution in above and underground conflicts, spatial organization of
176
At this time, the gold price was very low. With few people involved in gold mining, Leynaud and Cisse devote little attention to it.
218
mining sites, tax-collection, and preparing and executing sacrifices. In villages with few mining
activities, like Selofara, tonbolomaw did not differentiate their roles; all tonbolomaw present on
the mining site were responsible for all tasks. In Balan-Mansala however, the thirty members of
the age-groups in charge of the large scale operations at Balanko designated members for many
different tasks: conflict resolution underground, conflict resolution above ground, organization of
washing pit areas, etc.
When the age-group of tailor Falaye Keita became tonbolomaw of Balan-Mansala in
2011 they were eager to prove themselves serious and trustworthy. After the sacrifice of a brown
and a black rooster (as indicated by the dream of an elderly man on the Mande Plateau) and
planning over a hundred new mining shafts (see figure 5.1), they went over the rules for that
year: “Generally speaking, the rules have not changed, only the people have…but we discussed
how to control the masses, how to communicate together. We are going to send someone to the
village chief to explain to him that we would like to do our own sacrifice, as indicated by a
dream of a young man from the village, whose deceased father told him to give the shafts of the
damanbe for free [and forego the 3000 FCFA per shaft tax, EK]. Also, all the tonbolomaw who
do not work in the village will meet each day at 9.30am, except for Monday’s and Friday’s
which are days off. We are also urging people who use drugs or alcohol, to do that at home, or
elsewhere that is not on the mining site… People are also not allowed to bring loaded shotguns,
they should remove the lead so that when children accidentally play with the gun, they will not
cause an accident [as happened in Komana-Kuta recently, EK]. We will also have to start
planning the sacrifice for the mining site villagers use during the rainy season. The elderly man
from Nyumala dreamed that we should sacrifice again two roosters and sprinkle pulverized old
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ore from here, mixed with blood from the roosters, over that area, and it is a large site so we need
an enormous quantity of ore” (Falaye Keita, March 20 2011, Balan-Mansala).
Figure 5.1 Miners line up to claim their mining shaft during the Balan-Mansala damanbe of
2011 (March 20 2011)
In the Sikasso area, a region in South-East Mali with a many migrant miners, Grätz found that
tonbolomaw were increasingly acting as ‘vigilantes’; the cases of actual vigilante justice were
few but “in many cases they have appropriated a wide range of judicial powers in their villages
and also intervene in matters that are not related to gold mining or the mining camps, such as
family affairs” (2007: 77). Grätz argues that positions of “tonboloma give youth more social
power and prestige in a region which has been marked by emigration and the loss of economic
and social options for this generation” (ibid.).
In Balan-Bakama the tonbolomaw were of an older generation, namely around the age of
50 and according to my observations they were the oldest generation of men working at the
mines (a few individuals may have been older but there were not many, women continued
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mining until a much later age). Unlike the young tonbolomaw of Sikasso, this generation was
able to make decisions for other people outside of the mining sphere as well; I saw many
tonbolomaw act as leaders of their compound’s cultivation teams, and regularly found myself
discussing the ongoing marriage procedures for their children. The tonbolomaw of Balan-
Mansala, Selofara and other villages in the Balan-Bakama worked closely with the chief of
mines. He took the main decisions, which were subsequently executed by tonbolomaw. These
members of the male age group can therefore genuinely be called his assistants.
When a mining site became successful and attracted increasing numbers of migrant
miners, tonbolomaw had to try to remain in control of an increasingly unknown population. One
of the control mechanisms they used was the cooptation of leaders of groups of migrants (groups
formed by people from a specific region or previous mine) into the team of tonbolomaw. The
appointment of additional tonbolomaw (for the duration of the season) solved two problems; the
increasing workload of the tonbolomaw was shared by more people, and the tonbolomaw
acquired access to and in-group power over migrant miners. One can imagine a loss of control
over large numbers of migrant miners to be a risk of this strategy, since people with influence
and long experience in mining are included in a local group of tonbolomaw. However, on even
the largest sites in Mande I never heard of such a problem. Through their manner of working,
their proximity to miners, their cooperation with state authorities, and because of the threat of the
loss of gold when the social order is disturbed (see chapter 3), tonbolomaw of the village
managed to remain in control.
On large artisanal gold mining sites, tonbolomaw cooperated with the state authorities to
keep order. The division of tasks was decided on an ad-hoc basis. The tonbolomaw of
Nyumumakana and the police officers who were sent there to manage the gold rush at nearby
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Dagala explained they had agreed the tonbolomaw would refer cases they could not deal with to
the police officers and manage everything else themselves. This was the same process as had
been described to me by tonbolomaw in Karan and Balan-Mansala, who had both experienced a
gold rush some years before. The police officers therefore remained in the village, waiting to be
called, while most of the tonbolomaw worked on the mining site. Camara describes how in Kola,
an old but still popular ‘couloir d’orpaillage’ south of Kangaba, this role of back-up of
tonboloma authority is played by hunter’s associations (2010: 111, 112). Also at Kola, Panella
observed that “oversight and access to the place of actual mining was organized by tonbolomaw
… [while] the attribution of space in the residential and market zone of the site and all the
taxable economic activities (transporting, crushing etc.) were the responsibility of the elected
representatives of the ‘commune de Kola’” (2010: 9). At other sites, I have not seen such a
division of labour, which may well have developed over the years as Kola receives many miners
every year who make increasing investments in machinery and the market site.
Tonbolomaw at the Damanbe
For those tonbolomaw and chiefs of mines who oversaw smaller mining campaigns, the
organization of the damanbe and especially its sacrifice formed the largest share of their work.
The damanbe was the ritual start of the yearly mining season and took place at the start of the
placer mining season. It consisted of a discussion during which the rules of the mines of the
village were confirmed and benedictions were pronounced, a sacrifice that was commonly
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followed by a public process of interpretation of the position of the sacrificed animals, and the
distribution of mining pit locations to the different teams that were planning to mine here.177
On March 7 2011, the tonbolomaw of Selofara met up for the first time that season. They
planned the preparations for the divination. In such a divination session, the diviner tests rocks
from different pre-selected mining sites to find out on which mining site jinew will give miners
the most gold this year. The tonbolomaw decided who would get rocks from three mining sites of
Selofara. The sites of choice were Dajan, Musodugu and Balanko. Considering that “the most
likely place to find a new ore-body is: next to a known body” (Gewald 2010: 21, see chapter 1)
this means they made a pre-selection of promising sites; Dajan was the location of a successful
mining campaign two years ago, at Musodugu the four hard-rock mining shafts dug by male
villagers during the rainy season had had modestly positive results and the women were finding a
fair amount of gold in the upper layer of the soil, and the banks of the Balanko were major
sources of gold all over the Balan-Bakama.
It had already been decided by Selofara’s chief of mines Bala Keita that Selofara would
use a different diviner this year. Last year’s mining campaign had not been very successful for
the village so this year they would follow a different strategy; they would visit a diviner who had
no experience with questions on gold mining. The diviner was based in the northern outskirts of
Bamako, outside of the gold mining zone, and would therefore logically have little experience
with questions on gold mining; this was seen as an asset because he would be open to new
solutions for the problem of convincing jinew to release gold to people (see chapter 3).
177
There was no distribution of mining pit locations on women’s sites because in surface mining miners can cut ore wherever they like and no one has rights to a particular source of ore, see chapter 2.
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Ten days later, in a second meeting with the chief of mines and the village chief, the
tonbolomaw who visited the diviner presented some very specific and uncommon instructions (a
result of the diviner’s limited experience with gold mining issues); the sacrifice, of a white
sheep, would have to take place at dawn and after the sacrifice the sheep’s legs would have to be
buried between the site of sacrifice, by the path, and the mining site in the bush. In addition they
would have to sacrifice a washed white chicken (even though chickens are known to be afraid of
water), fresh milk and a hundred kola nuts. Also, the chief of mines would have to sacrifice two
chickens at home and prepare them with sauce there.178
The chief of mines himself contributed 20,000 FCFA (total cost 30,000 – 35,000 FCFA),
using money given by his daughter in Bamako. The tonbolomaw contributed some as well, after
the chief of mines suggested he could get the rest of the money by asking people to pay him back
money he had lent them. The tonbolomaw were very encouraged by the words of the diviner;
they were told there was much gold at Balanko and almost as much at Musodugu. There was
some at Dajan as well, but in a much smaller area. This year they would work at Balanko, even
though the water level was very high in the designated area (the diviner told them to try
anyways).
On March 27 2011 the tonbolomaw, chief of mines, village chief, and I met up at 5:30
and drove to Balanko where they picked a clearing by the path for the sacrifice. Once everybody
had arrived, the men prayed and said benedictions while I waited farther down the path. They
kept my voice recorder with them but it was hardly necessary as I was called back within
minutes. When I listened back later, I heard the tonobolomaw suddenly realizing they left a
178
Diviners with experience in old mining, tended to recommend sacrificing a goat or chickens or both – of a specific colour – and kola nuts. These had to be consumed at the site. Oftentimes millet with milk or corn was also offered.
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woman alone in the bush, right at the moment they were communicating about jinew. I would get
to see the actual sacrifice. We chatted about mining while we waited for sunrise. Shortly after
6:30 the men decided that it was time; the chicken’s throat was slit and the animal thrown
forward. After some discussion its position was interpreted as ‘good’. The sheep was held down
while it died so there was no position to interpret. The men immediately prepared meat for the
group while the rest of the meat remained uncooked. It would be given to villagers who came to
the mine later in the day. Kola nuts and dates were distributed while two tonbolomaw took the
sheep’s legs into the bush to bury them. After a while we went into the bush. Next to old wells,
where the water stood at three meters below the surface, three tonbolomaw planned two rows of
new mining shafts. When a tonboloma mentioned he did not want to claim a shaft, everybody sat
down and they decided that all tonbolomaw from the village should start working here: if even
the tonbolomaw were unwilling to work here, who would be? For now the other mines of
Selofara would be off limits for male miners, women would be allowed to work at Musodugu for
as long as there was not enough work at Balanko.
Because of the high water level at Selofara’s Balanko site, it was soon determined that
the miners needed a diesel pump if they wanted to reach the clay layer that contains the gold
(nara). Someone from the village knew a trader in Guinea who owned pumps and soon the trader
sent a pump, manned by his son to the village. To accommodate the pump, the mining site was
moved and people started over next to an old mango orchard and an old mining site. The
agreement with the pump owner was that he would receive a third of the gold that was earned by
the mining teams (he would not get a share of the gold the women earned by washing ore). To
make this work, a local gold trader came to the mine every evening to weigh and buy the gold so
that a third of the money earned could be given to the pump owner. The miners found some gold
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but not much and even with the pump water remained a big problem, the shafts filled up almost
as quickly as the pump cleared them (the pits were of course connected – see chapter 2 – so the
pump could not dry one pit, but needed to empty a whole set of pits at once). Later in the season,
the location of Selofara’s placer mining activities shifted one more time after the owner of the
pump had consulted his own diviner in Guinea. 200 meters farther, twelve new shafts were dug.
Water kept flooding the mining shafts of Selofara’s Balanko.
Becoming Chief of Mines (damantigi)
In the Balan-Bakama the position of damantigi was owned by the descendants of a specific
individual but the ways in which these individuals had been designated differed across the region
(see below). In Selofara the male chief of mines had to be a descendant of the person who was
the first to find gold within the territory of the village. By allowing this person to find gold, jinew
had announced their wish to appoint this person as mining chief. It was therefore said that this
man or woman would have much luck, and with them everyone who mines in the territory where
they are chief of mines. A successive mining chief did not have to be the oldest man of the oldest
generation of a kinship unit of the previous mining chief, which is the common procedure in
Mande in the appointment of village chiefs and heads of households and other kinship units.
Instead, a new mining chief should a descendant of their predecessor and needs the approval of
villagers. This approval precludes conflict which would upset jinew.
There was no standard procedure in the Balan-Bakama through which a new mining chief
was confirmed by people or by jinew. Instead, the lineage that would supply the mining chief
would appoint a new chief through a method that was deemed appropriate considering the
context. For example, in Balan-Mansala the position of chief of mines was held by the same
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lineage that also held the village chieftaincy. The village chief would appoint someone that he
trusted from among his large extended family. In Namakana, the position had been assigned to
the son of the former damantigi by pulling straws. Lamine Keita, the current chief of mines had
been appointed when his father became the imam of the village. Since the positions could not be
combined – one person could not organize sacrifices at the gold mines while being imam and
leading prayer since these activities were said to contradict each other – a new chief of mines
was selected. In Mambila, Segaba Keita had inherited the position as the oldest son of his father,
the previous damantigi.
When a succession dispute occured among relatives of a late chief, it was settled by a
method that would show who would be more ‘lucky’ or appreciated by jinew; the most common
method was pulling straws, another method which could be used when there were only two
contenders was to assign to both a certain area in which miners would search for gold. The
person in whose territory the most gold was found would become the new chief of mines. If, as
happened in Selofara, the findings of gold were found to lag in comparison to other years (‘the
gold has disappeared’, see chapter 3), people may conclude that a mistake had been made in the
appointment of a chief of mines. In that case, a new chief of mines may be appointed from
among the men of the same lineage. This had happened in Selofara in the past, but even before
the unsuccessful mining season of 2011 (see below) some were already talking about appointing
a new damantigi.
The appointment of a female chief of mines (damantigimuso) followed another procedure
than that for the male chief of mines. In Selofara it was akin to the manner in which the villages’
women’s leaders (musokuntigi) are appointed. The women’s leader acts as the representative of
all women of the village and is regularly consulted by the village chief and others. In the Balan-
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Bakama the women’s leader is most often a woman married into the founding family of the
village; the family that also appoints the village chief. The position of female chief of mines also
belongs to a family unit (usually a compound) and was occupied by one of the women married
into that family. The women’s leader and the female chief of mines are not necessarily the oldest
women of the oldest generation of their lineage or of the compounds into which they have
married (since there are no clear generations of married women on a compound). Usually a
woman in either of these positions of authority appointed her successor by inviting a woman who
was also married into the same compound, like her daughter-in-law, to become her assistant.
Though the final appointment of a new female chief of mines was made through debate among
the women (and possibly also men) of a village who aim for consensus, they tended to select the
assistant of the former leader (see chapter 4). The position of female chief of mines therefore
does not often stay within the same generation or follow a clear pattern within a family; it is
based more on merit and trust, as judged by the previous female chief of mines, than the position
of her male counterpart.
Namakana had only installed Numusira Keita as chief of mines this year. She was the
first chief of the new women’s site of Kuruninda, where she had often found gold in her peanut
field. To confirm her installation, the women of Namakana had each paid 500 FCFA for a
sacrifice. Through the position of the sacrifice, jinew had confirmed the choice of Numusira
Keita, who was also her village’s women’s leader (a combination that is not possible for male
chiefs).
The first female chief of mines of Djelibani, Jogoro Coulibaly, had also been installed the
previous year, though she had been selected many years ago:
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“When we started, we were with two or three women. We would often go wash ore over
there, behind the village. I found the first bit of gold by the path to Ganou. We continued
looking at that spot and we all found some gold but I had the most; 1.7 gram of powder
and a nugget of one gram. When we came back to the village we did not dare say
anything to our husbands, like all women at the time we were ashamed, but the next
morning I had the courage to show him. Because I was the first to find gold, the women
had a meeting, and later the men as well, and they decided they would give me ownership
of the mine. I said I could not accept if my husband did not agree, but he agreed and I
accepted. So for the first sacrifice the women of our village bought a red goat and a
hundred red kola nuts.
“At the time, the village chief was called Bala, and he asked us to send him meat from the
goat, because he was old and could not come himself. But the sacrifice decided against it.
It would not allow the meat to leave the site to be brought to the village [it is common
that the whole sacrifice has to be consumed at the mining site, EK]. In order to give him
something, we decided to buy a chicken and give this to him. He accepted the chicken but
he was not happy. He said “Why did you choose her as chief of mines?” He insulted me
and I was very shocked, he said I did not have rights to be chief of mines. I said “Ok, if I
do not have the rights. I said, if it is true that I was the first to discover gold at the mine, if
that is true, and if we choose someone else as chief of mines, then the gold will never be
seen anymore, even if you are a jine and you go work there, you will not see gold.” So I
said that and people were not happy. One cannot disobey the village chief, but people
knew I was right. A brother of mine wanted to solve the situation but sadly he died early.
“Just this year, the chief of mines Banjugu [Keita, the Djelibani male chief of mines,
EK], held a meeting with all women; he said I was right and that we should work
together. He said he would pay for a sacrifice at our site. At this moment the women of
the village are collecting money to complete the sacrifice” (Jogoro Coulibaly, January 25
2011, Djelibani).
Finding the First Gold Nugget
Numusira Keita and Jogoro Coulibaly were both the first female chiefs of mines of their villages.
They were appointed to the position because they were pioneering miners. Likewise, several
male chiefs of mines had been appointed because their ancestor was the first to find gold through
placer mining. In the Balan-Bakama it is believed jinew show their favor for a person by
allowing them to find this gold. Subsequently jinew will accept an orderly transfer of the position
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to one of his descendants, or, in case of a women’s site, to a woman married into the same
family.
Banjugu Keita of Djelibani is a chief of mines (damantigi) who was appointed because
his ancestor, his father, found the first gold nugget: “Well, my father and Famorijan’s father and
Kenibala’s father stayed with their fathers during the dry season when all others left the village
to go to the mines in Guinea. Because they had nothing to do, they dug a mining pit near the
village where they found some gold but there were too many rocks which made the work very
hard. Then they dug a pit at Sojanfe, and they found more gold there. They dug a second pit (“to
allow the gas to escape”, adds Madi Kama Keita) and they found gold again. The oldest of the
three men became the chief of mines. When he died, it was given to the second oldest, Bala, who
has also been village chief. The third man, my father, was the youngest and he never got to be
damantigi because he died too early. Then there were only sons left.
“The elders decided the next chief of mines would be Djankine, but it was a mistake
because his father was not one of the three men who found the first gold. He was of the family,
because in Djelibani everybody has one common ancestor but he was not a son of one of the
three first miners. So during his time, we did not find much and that showed people a mistake
had been made. So three years ago the children of the three brothers came together and chose me
as the new chief of mines.” (Banjugu Keita, November 22 2010, Djelibani). Madi Kama Keita:
“It’s better! The last two years, while he was chief of mines, Djelibani found a fair amount of
gold, so it is going quite well.”
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People in Djelibani and Selofara claimed it was a general rule that the chief of mines of
any village is the descendant of the first person to find gold in that village’s territory. This was
how they had selected their damantigi, but this is certainly not always the case.
Fadamagan Keita of Komana-Kuta explained: “You want to know about before? A very,
very, very long time ago, it happened this way … our father had nothing except for only one red
bull. That bull became the sacrifice for the gold mines. That is why he was installed as
damantigi. Then villagers tricked him to take it from him. Afterwards people went to dig for gold
but they did not find anything. Well, they went to a diviner, he told them that because of the way
they had acted, if they did not give the position of chief of mines back they would never see
gold. Then the people of the village decided to give it back. My father had already died by then
but my older brother Namori, the one who was in the village, it was given to him. He was not in
good health but they gave it to him anyways. It was given to him and people started finding a lot
of gold, the mine became very good… He left from here, now I am the oldest son. The village,
after the trickery that was done, the villagers got up that time to give it to my older brother, to
give it to us. That was very good. But because of that I do not give them a part of the sacrifice at
the mine, you understand?” (Fadamagan Keita, December 13 2010, Komana-Kuta).
Table 5.1 shows an overview of all Balan-Bakama villages and the manner in which they
selected their chief of mines.
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Table 5.1: Balan-Bakama Villages’ Chief of Mines in 2010-11
Village (E-W) Current chief of
mines
How was the position of
chief of mines first
assigned
How did the current chief of
mines get the position
Balan-Komana 1 Namori Camara Received from village
chief who convinced
him to migrate to village
Oldest descendant of
previous chief of mines
Balan-Komana 2
(West)
Musa Bagayogo Requested part of
territory from chief of
mines (friend)
Oldest descendant of first
chief of mines
Balan-Mansala Wura Keita Village has one
autochthonous family, it
holds the chieftaincy
Appointed by head of
family, who is the village
chief
Djelibani (m) Banjugu Keita Three men found first
gold together
Son of one of the three men;
the two others had already
occupied the position
Djelibani (f) Jogoro Coulibaly Found first gold through
surface mining,
appointed by
Kolanyinin
First chief of mines
Selofara (m) Bala Keita Found first gold in
termite hill
Oldest descendant of first
chief of mines
Selofara (f) Kariya Keita Elderly woman in
lineage of village chief,
who appointed her
Former assistant and
daughter-in-law of
predecessor
Namakana (m) Lamine Keita Sacrificed himself so
village could find gold
Descendants of first chief of
mines pulled straws
Namakana (f) Numusira Keita Found much surface
gold in her peanut field
First chief of mines
Mambila Segaba Keita Found first gold in
mining shaft
Oldest descendant of first
chief of mines
Komana-Kuta Fadamagan Keita Offered his only bull for
a mining sacrifice
Oldest descendant of first
chief of mines
Village and Mining Histories
The Balan-Bakama is a small tight-knit region where people claim they ‘are all the same’. There
were however subtle differences in the histories of the different villages that allowed for the
emergence of different political pathways concerning the selection of the chiefs of mines.
Important factors leading to these differences are the time the village was established, the time
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people started mining in a village’s territory, and the kinship structure of the village (if it has one
main lineage or several).
Elderly people in Selofara recounted how they would leave their village to go mine in
Balan-Komana and Balan-Mansala and never mined around their own village. This confirms the
maps of Mande artisanal gold mining activities drawn by French colonial administrators, which
are blank behind those two villages.179
Though both are marked on these 1935 maps as rather
small mining centres, their mining histories go back a long way. People from Narena are said to
have mined here before the villages themselves were even established. Therefore, the ‘first gold
nugget’ had already been found before the village could appoint a chief of mines. The chiefs of
mines of Balan-Komana and Balan-Mansala were selected on other grounds.
Namakana and Komana-Kuta also did not select the men who found the first gold nugget
as their damantigiw (though Mambila did) but for different reasons; they are old villages whose
own populations are likely to have engaged in gold mining since long before they appointed the
fathers of the current chiefs of mines as first chief of mines. Both villages are close to the
location of Kamalen – located a little to the east of the line Namakana-Mambila – where Park
describes intensive mining activity with miners employing different techniques. In Kamalen,
Park observed how gold mining was governed by the village chief (2000[1799]: 447) who set the
date for the start of the mining season. The villages were clearly already heavily involved in
artisanal mining when they appointed their first chiefs of mines. They both selected men who
were instrumental in the revival of artisanal mining in their territories.
179
Malian National Archives at ACI2000 (MNAA) Tome I.3Q1508 (1935).
233
Oftentimes the chief of mines was a member of another lineage than the village chief
though this was not a general rule (see Komana-Kuta). The populations of Balan-Mansala and
Djelibani however both belonged to one lineage (plus small, mostly single-household,
compounds of recent migrants). In these villages, the village chief was also the head of the
family of the damantigi and had a stronger influence on his work than in other villages. In
Djelibani, the village chief directed the selection of the new damantigi though he ultimately had
to follow the logic of selecting a son of one of the men (cousins) who had found the first gold
nugget. In Balan-Mansala, where there were no such restrictions because there was no such first
find (people had already been mining here before the village was established), the village chief
was free to appoint a protégé as damantigi.
Kolanyinin: The Power of an Individual
Three out of the seven Balan-Bakama villages had a female chief of mines (damantigimuso) who
governed one or more surface mining sites; Djelibani, Selofara and Namakana. Other villages
also had surface mining sites that were mostly used by women, but these sites fell under the
jurisdiction of the male chief of mines and his male tonbolomaw. Within Mande mining, female
chiefs of mines are very rare. I did not encounter any outside the Balan-Bakama and none are
described in the academic literature. The villages that appointed a damantigimuso did not see this
as exceptional; they would point to villages in Guinea, just over the border to the south, that also
split the labour of mining governance by gender.
One individual who has been instrumental for the introduction of this system is
Kolanyinin. He was a diviner from Guinea who travelled through the region. He specialized in
gold mining divination and used a name that literally means ‘searching for places of trouble’.
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Djelibani and Namakana installed their first damantigimusow in early 2011. They followed the
directions Kolanyinin had given them years ago, before he passed away. Selofara had reacted to
his instructions much earlier recalled Kariya Keita: “Whenever Kolanyinin came here, he called
all women; there were over a hundred women from the village together. At the time, my mother-
in-law could still travel but she wanted to have me as her assistant so I could replace her later. I
would call the women for meetings, find the sacrifice and go to the mine. We did the sacrifice, of
a red goat” (Kariya Keita, October 25 2010, Selofara). Since then, the women of Selofara had
done the same sacrifice each year. Women of Selofara referred to Kolanyinin as an authority
who had not only told the women and men of Selofara how they should organize the work at the
site but they had continued returning to him for advice and confirmation of their decisions.
Conclusion
In Mande, gold may be located in the bush and controlled by bush spirits, but mines as sites of
social and economic activity are products of the human imagination and belong to the village.
Gold miners did not experience their work environment as a frontier locality or a community
without place where they may develop their own governance systems. Instead they were required
to submit to the authority of leadership appointed and sanctioned by a nearby village.
Artisanal gold mines all over Mande were governed by a damantigi and their
tonbolomaw who structured a mine spatially above and underground, to whom taxes were paid
and who resolved conflicts. Each village of the Balan-Bakama selected their chief(s) of mines in
ways that were deemed appropriate considering the history of the village and its large settled
lineages. Within the Mande sphere and even within the Balan-Bakama there were many different
ways of organizing artisanal gold mining which were all based on a set of basic principles but
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which were also dynamic. Mining practices, both governance and mining techniques, were
constantly changing through individual and collective innovation and changing circumstances.
To a village in the Balan-Bakama, the different governance structures from different
places in Mande were all options because of a shared Mande identity sourced from extensive
travel of many (especially male) villagers to mines elsewhere in the region. Because of the
enormous seasonal and long-term migration in the region these different techniques of
organizing the mining process were well-known in a region that was seemingly isolated. When a
village found its chief of mines unsuccessful or conditions changed this knowledge of different
methods of governance was applied. Changing conditions could be a change in approach of the
state, new knowledge gained about the wishes of jinew, a rising or falling gold price or an influx
of migrant miners as a result of the discovery of larger quantities of gold. New techniques were
sourced from tonbolomaw or other local mining specialists and introduced to react to and control
the new challenges that resulted from these changes.
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6. The Making of a Gold Rush: Artisanal and Industrial Gold Mining as
Trajectories to Modernity
As the global metropoles muddled through a string of financial and economic crises
characterized by the popping of so-called market ‘bubbles’, Mande gold miners attempted to
generate gold rushes (bubbles, so to speak) in the territories of their villages. Aided by a high
gold price – in itself a result of the metropoles’ crises (set off by the American housing and
financial crises of 2007) – and the recent discovery of the hard-rock mining technique (see
chapter 2), they tried to entice regional artisanal miners and industrial mining companies to
invest their time and money in their mining sites.
The ultimate goal of villagers’ attempts to attract migrants was the improvement of
services and thereby well-being in their village by increasing the population. In this chapter I will
focus on mobility of miners and the processes of gold booms and busts in the Balan-Bakama and
elsewhere in Mande. I will show how Balan-Bakama villagers attempted to attract artisanal and
industrial miners to the mining sites in their communities, the future changes they envisioned as
a result of a gold rush in their territory, and the experience of long term social change that
occurred in Balan-Mansala which was able to welcome hundreds of miners in a series of gold-
rush years between 2002 and 2004. This gold rush led to the growth of the town of Balan-
Mansala and had become an example for other villages in the region.
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Excerpt from a pre-interview conversation with Musa Bagayogo (chief of mines of Balan-
Komana West), Madi Kama Keita (research assistant), and myself:
MB: “So you have all these questions for us, when we respond, what do we get in
return?”
EK: “Well, I do this for my studies, because my university has sent me here to study how
villagers manage their mines. I am grateful to people here for helping me out so I brought
you tea and sugar, no matter your answers, but otherwise there is nothing you get in
return, sorry.”
MB: “Ok, that is not a problem. What is your first question?”
MK: “Well, Saran is here as a student, so indeed she does not have much to offer right
now. But we do not know what she will do later. Maybe one day she will be able to bring
us a project of some sorts, like a mining company”.
MB: “You are right, that would be great, and we should indeed have patience”.
EK: “You talk about the establishment of a mining company, why is that such a good
thing?”
MB: “Because there are no jobs here. Our young men can’t find jobs in their villages,
they are not doing anything”.
EK: “Are you not concerned about such a mine taking up much of your farm land?”
MB: “No, we have plenty of land here. We can always give people other land, on the
other side of the village for example”.
Musa Bagayogo, Balan-Komana, May 27 2011
Inhabitants of the Balan-Bakama identified strongly with the Mande Heartland and with the
country of Mali. Many people frequently travelled through the Mande Heartland on their way to
Bamako, worked in Mande Heartland mines, participated in the Malian school system, were
grouped together with this area politically in the ‘cercle de Kangaba’, and Balan-Komana was a
part of the ‘commune rurale’ of Narena. This strong identification should be traced primarily to
the immediate post-independence era when Mali chose its name – after the Mali Empire, the
historical empire of Maninka, the largest ethnic group of the Balan-Bakama – and when nation
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building was taken up as a major cause of the African Socialist government of Modibo Keita
(Hopkins 1969). The imagined community remained strong even though the majority of adults
and children was illiterate, the Malian state was weak, and national media were mostly absent
(cf. Anderson: 2006).180
The border with Guinea had in some ways cut off Balan-Bakama identification from their
neighbours to the South and West. Marriage exchanges with Guinean villages were common,
and people travelled to Guinea to mine at its large artisanal mines but the national identity was
very strong and in some ways oppositional to Guinea. Conversations about these journeys were
rife with stereotypes of Guineans, who were said to be untrustworthy.181
Because I was not
working in Guinea I was not often warned, but many Guineans who passed through Selofara on
their way to Bamako were indicated as being “untrustworthy, just like all Guineans”.
Identifying as citizens of Mali, inhabitants of the Balan-Bakaman nonetheless felt
isolated within their country. This was in many ways a result of their location on the natural and
political map of Mali. The Balan-Bakama consists of a string of villages, lodged between the
Mande Mountains and the border with Guinea. Because it is located behind the Mande
Mountains, which is a plateau that rises very suddenly, many communication services that were
common in the Mande Heartland were absent here: cellphone towers (on many but not all days,
one could walk up a hill beside the village to catch cellphone reception from Kouremale),
national television station ORTM and FM radio stations (except for the local radio station
broadcasting from Kenieba near Narena).
180
A few villagers ran ‘cinemas’ and could receive the national television station ORTM on their satellite TV but they rarely broadcast anything besides Champions League football. 181
A less commonly brought up stereotype said that, because of their long-lasting dictatorship, Guineans were easier to govern with force than Malians (who were said to be too used to democracy to be dictated by a gun).
239
The lack of these services that were taken for granted in the Mande Heartland was partly
due to the Balan-Bakama’s shape and location; the region is such a thin, bent sliver of habitation
on the edge of the country that country-bound services that work in a circle around a tower are
inefficient to install. The second reason was the manner in which many government and some
private enterprise services were allocated; they were based on the number of inhabitants of a
village or zone. The distribution of centrally planned public and private services like schools of
different levels, health-clinics and cell-phone towers depended on the number of people they
would be able to reach. The same logic was used during the decentralization process that took
place in 1995 and 1996 when the Malian government wanted rural villages to cooperate in
‘communes rurales’ which each had to have a minimum population of 3000 (initially 10,000:
Zobel 2004: 254). Therefore, the more inhabitants each village had, the smaller the number of
villages that would have to agree to unite in a political unit. In Mande it is hard for villages to
cooperate in this manner because they often have longstanding rivalries with neighbouring
villages. The seat of the ‘commune rurale’ is most often the village with the largest population in
the commune.182
A higher population therefore implied the availability of more services and purchasing
options at markets as private sellers of goods and services (like transportation), and NGO’s
tended to settle in towns or regions with larger populations. These services and options would,
according to the people of the Balan-Bakama who did not have them, allow for a stronger
infrastructural connection to centers like Bamako and Kangaba, and a stronger connection to the
life-style of people residing in those centers.
182
In the Balan-Bakama for example, the town hall is located in Balan-Mansala, which has the largest population of all six villages, but is on the far east end of the zone.
240
People from the Balan-Bakama were thus actively seeking strategies to attract these kinds
of services, which would not only make life easier but were also seen as desirable connections to
modernity, as interpreted in Mali (see below). Because all villages were following the same
strategy, this contributed to inter-village rivalry that is common in Mande.183
Villagers tried to
attract these services in two ways: they invited potentially influential people to visit their
community or install services in their community outright, and they tried to increase the
population to become more attractive to service providers.184
So people from the villages would
try to convince NGO workers, company representatives – and anthropologists – to visit and settle
in their region or refer others to it. They also tried to attract migrants.
The Balan-Bakama, like practically all Malian rural zones, is subject to enormous out-
migration. This primarily but not exclusively concerns young men and to a lesser extent young
women between 16 and 30 years of age who leave to continue their schooling and to find formal
or informal work. Other women leave to get married. Fecundity in the Balan-Bakama is very
high and polygamy common185
, but several men would talk about their ten or so brothers who
lived elsewhere while they were the only ones in the village, taking care of their mothers. On
average I would estimate only 25 percent of men ended up spending their adult life in their
village of origin. Organizationally more successful compounds would retain slightly more men
than others (see chapter 1)186
but this was never expressed as a strategy on the level of village
population and services. Instead, people tried to bring back sons with the expressed aim of
183
This type of rivalry primarily expressed itself in villages vying for outsiders. At the same time people in the Balan-Bakama felt like they belonged to one regional unit (see introduction). 184
In this model, a trader who sells products is also a service provider as he provides people the opportunity to buy these products. This elevates the status of the village and removes the necessity for people to travel to larger centres to procure these items. 185
Most established married men in the Balan-Bakama had two or three wives. Four wives is the maximum according to Islamic law and this number was not unheard of. A few men had one wife out of principle. 186
This generally means that these men would come back after a period of travelling in their early 20’s.
241
having them take care of elderly parents or of working on the compound’s fields. However, all
compounds had many more brothers (and patrilateral cousins) elsewhere than lived on the family
compound.
Notwithstanding the enormous migration out of the Balan-Bakama, immigration was also
an important phenomenon. Besides women who married into the Balan-Bakama, there was
significant rural-rural migration of single men and of households. In Selofara alone, at least three
younger men who were principally farmers had moved there with their wives in the last decade.
They came from other villages in Mande and had settled in Selofara where they found a host
who had welcomed them to the village and had made sure they had a place to settle in the village
and fields to farm. This form of rural to rural migration is common in Mali (eg. Nijenhuis 2005:
190). Globally and locally, the impact of rural to urban migration is much stronger and much
publicized (eg. Cobbinah et al. 2015; ESA 2014; cf. Beauchemin 2011), but in Selofara rural to
rural migration was also very important, not only because it added to its numbers but also
because seeing outsiders opt to build their lives in their village gave villagers a great sense of
pride. Besides agriculture, the possibility of artisanal mining close to home was also an important
reason for rural to rural migration, and especially so in Balan-Mansala (see below).
To convince migrants to move to their villages, individual villagers and the village chief
and his advisers mainly employed hospitality, including offering migrants the opportunity to
clear and thus own land, and the sacrifices and regulation of their mines so that their profitable
mine would entice migrants. Balan-Komana had once enticed the ancestor of Namori Camara to
move there by offering him the position of chief of mines (see table 5.1), but this was an
exceptional strategy.
242
Industrial Gold Mining for the Future
In ‘Nostalgia for the Future’, Piot writes about “Togolese longing for a future that replaces
untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End
Times narratives and the universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand
development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind… But such desires for a different
future and a new political, as with all nostalgic longing, are already elusive before they can be
attained” (2010: 20).
Piot uses several thematic examples to show how Togolese, in their time of post-Cold-
War crisis, long for a future and “new horizons of global citizenship” (op.cit.: 170). They are
reaching towards an unknown future, “tired of being incarcerated by local categories and
cultures” (ibid.). Piot incites anthropology to jump into the unknown like Togolese. He points
out that the colonial and Cold War periods during which anthropologists celebrated the local
have passed as has the theoretical moment of “postcolonial studies, valorizing the local’s
encounter with its others” (op.cit.: 169).
Villagers of the Balan-Bakama also avoided celebrating the localist past, instead seeking
connection to a national version of modernity. This is not a recent development; during the
immediate post-colonial period, in the optimistic early 1960’s when the African Socialist
government of Modibo Keita built the nation people started to imagine themselves as citizens of
the new state of Mali. Already in 1961 the state built the first school in the region, in Selofara.187
In 1962, the Malian franc was introduced. The national currency is now fondly remembered, but
187
According to Nambala Keita in Selofara, Modibo Keita’s first advisor hailed from Komana-Kuta and wanted his region to develop. Selofara, at the time the largest and most central village in the region, was chosen as the site for the school. The Middle School that was added more recently continued to serve students from Djelibani to Mambila (Namakana and Mambila both had dorms for Middle School students in Selofara where women from the home villages would care and cook in rotation).
243
in its early years it went through two major devaluations (compared to the FCFA) in 1963 and
1967. This period laid the groundwork for the current form of the imagined future. It connected
people to the nation and their future to the future of that nation and to the services provided by its
government.
Before this period Balan-Bakama villages had long been implicated in large-scale slave-
and gold-trading networks (eg. Park 2000[1799]) and they had been part of the Mali Empire.
Throughout known history their young men had travelled through the region to gain experience
and make a name for themselves. As a result of this history of political, economic and social
connections, people in the Balan-Bakama felt that they were part of this wider interconnected
region (Guyer 1995) and of the country. Their expectations of the future have been informed by
these connections. The immediate post-colonial era when “everyone knew Africa was
‘emerging’” (Ferguson 1999: 1), was remembered in the Balan-Bakama as an exciting time of
great hope for the future. This future was lost soon thereafter.
Piot suggests that after the end of the Cold-War, with its violently secured certainties,
northern Togolese individuals have quite suddenly embraced a new and uncertain future which
they try to attain through various endeavors. In the Balan-Bakama in 2010/11 people were also
grasping for a future, but this future was not particularly individualized or detached from the
future of their village or country. As in the sacrifice women made to jinew to provide women
with gold and bring back their children (see chapter 4), villagers’ individual futures – if there
indeed is such a thing – were intricately intertwined with the future of their communities.
Ferguson (1999) describes how industrial mining workers of the Zambian Copperbelt lost
their hold on modernity after they had already attained it. They had worked in what had seemed
244
to be solid industry jobs that gave them access to company services and that paid a salary that
could pay for an urban lifestyle. Though they only made up a small share of their city’s and
country’s population, their success seemed to confirm the story of African emergence (op.cit.:
35) and was easily interpreted as the take-off stage in Rostow’s model of development (1960).
Though Zambians were very mobile, moving regularly to different villages where they had
kinship ties, academics of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute argued that a permanent African
urban class had formed (Ferguson 1999: 39). Ferguson shows how with the drop in relative
copper prices and subsequent inflation in Zambia, urban miners who retired (or had to stop
working for other reasons) were unable to afford a life in town with their pension. Those who
had expected a future as permanent urban dwellers suddenly found themselves on a path to a
rural existence, an existence for which they had not built up the necessary social and cultural
capital.
In the 1960’s, people in the Balan-Bakama were counting on progress because the
changes that were taking place – the independence of their country, the first government services
in the form of a school – fit in the then widely accepted narrative of a take-off towards modernity
and prosperity that would bring newly independent countries on a par with the industrialized
countries of the time (Rist 2002: 40, 98). In its early years, Mali tried to follow an African
Socialism model (Hopkins 1969), seemingly the antithesis of Rostow’s “Non-Communist
Manifesto” (1960), but its people had a similar hope for transformation towards relative
prosperity as did Zambians. Miners in Zambia actually seemed to have attained a next stage in
Rostow’s model; the signs of modernity were much stronger than they were in Mali: “For many
Zambians, then,…recent history has been experienced not – as the modernization plot led one to
expect – as a process of moving forward or joining up with the world but as a process that has
245
pushed them out of the place in the world that they once occupied” (Ferguson 1999: 236). The
development ideology of the independence era did not allow for a reversal of fortunes but
promised a continuously rising standard of living and increasing integration into the league of
rich, industrial countries. Though the imagination of modernity was undoubtedly different in
Zambia and Mali, inhabitants of both countries lost their sense of legitimate expectation,
hopefulness and optimism for the future (op.cit.: 12).
In addition to the seemingly permanent employment and urban lifestyle of Zambian
miners, the materiality of copper mining also gave the impression of confirming modernization
theory: “The smokestacks and smelters of the mines not only vividly evoked Britain’s own
“Industrial Revolution” … they also economically symbolized everything that was understood to
be industrial and modern. The force that was so visibly revolutionizing Africa was a cold, hard,
metallic one, driven by the “iron horses” that were the locomotives, and the “finger of steel” that
was the line of rail. And the Copperbelt’s mining industry symbolized and epitomized a metallic,
mechanical, industrial modernity as nothing else could” (Ferguson 1999: 35).
In the absence of smoke stacks, industrial gold mining does not present the same image
as copper mining but gold mines are often iconic because they are located in remote rural areas
that have no other industries. This causes a stark contrast between the mine and the surrounding
area and consequently a large impact on people’s lives and the physical environment. Many
Balan-Bakama villagers had travelled to northern Guinea and western Mali to mine using
artisanal methods. There they had observed the impact of industrial mines and concluded that
industrial mines could be a way for their young men to find jobs (industrial gold mines in Mali
do employ many local men with limited education) and for their village to get better basic
infrastructure.
246
While people in the Balan-Bakama had very positive expectations of industrial mining,
the industry is often decried by news publications, activists, NGO’s and academics. They point
out the negative consequences of industrial mining on the environment, on workers’ safety and
dignity (Taussig 1980; Nash 1979), and on national governance. Environmental hazards come in
the form of toxic spills of cyanide188
into open water, ground water or air (Bland 2014;
Nyankweli 2012: 79-93; Kjeldsen 1999), deforestation, and mountains of waste (Larmer 2009:
51). National governance is affected by corruption (Labarthe 2007; Deneault 2008), legal low tax
payments (Afrol 2010) and increasing dependence on income from one sector – gold formed
80.42% of Mali’s export value in 2009 (ibid.) – combine with other effects (eg. suppression of
protest) to what is known as the ‘resource curse’ (Filer & Macintyre 2006: 217).
Ferguson shows what individual workers lose when a large, geographically concentrated,
mining industry goes bust (1999), which it does on a fairly regular basis as copper mining has
strong boom-bust cycles (eg. Oxfam 2004: 22) just like gold.189
For people in the Balan-Bakama
however, mining was an obvious choice since the sub-soil of their region obviously contains
gold (albeit not enough at 2010-11 prices to justify the investment necessary for large scale
industrial mining), and many had encountered large-scale mines on travels in Mande. There is a
paradox at play here where industrial gold mining has a bad reputation internationally for
environmental, political, and labour-rights reasons, while people in the Balan-Bakama were very
positive toward the industry and actively tried to attract mining companies to their region.
188
Industrial mining uses cyanide to separate gold from the rest of the ore instead of mercury. Cyanide is less toxic than mercury but it is kept in large tailing ponds and spills caused by broken dams or leaks, or intentional discharges have caused environmental disasters (Kirsch 2014; Eisler & Wiemeyer 2004). 189
The boom-bust cycles of copper and gold are largely each other’s mirror images.
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Balan-Bakama villagers were so positive about industrial mining for the two reasons
mentioned earlier: because it would provide local men with salaried jobs, and because it would
directly or indirectly lead to better infrastructure (either paid by the mine or by the government
because of the higher expected population) (cf. Taussig 1980: 19). Large-scale gold mining
companies in other Malian regions did indeed hire many locals though it did also lead to some
conflict between villages (Jul-Larsen et al. 2006: 24). A report by Oxfam on the impact of the
Syama gold mine in the South of Mali notes many negative effects of the mine on neighbouring
communities – primarily linked to an influx of people looking for work and the land occupied by
the mine190
and its employee facilities (Oxfam 2004: 22; see also Nyankweli 2012: 79-93;
Schueler et al. 2011) – but also indicates a number of positive aspects concerning employment:
“As a result of this financial inflow, certain villages in Fourou moved from a subsistence
economy to a monetary one, with an improvement in the general standard of living and
an increase in family and individual incomes. Evidence of this increase in revenue was
seen in Fourou, where shopkeepers arrived en masse to open up new stores and where
mopeds, bicycles, houses with sheet-metal (and not thatch) roofs, and stereos abound.
Many families sent their children to school and paid their medical expenses with salaries
from the mine. The mine’s indirect economic contributions should also be considered,
given the spirit of solidarity in the village and the extensive structure of the traditional
family: in effect, each employee at the mine supported between 15 and 20 people”
(Oxfam 2004: 20).
Corporations running large-scale gold mines are also usually contractually obliged to pay for
projects in the region, which they tend to invest in building projects like roads and bridges,
schools and health centres, etc. (op.cit.: 20, 21).
190
This causes pressure on both agricultural land use and on artisanal mining. Especially in Ghana, artisanal mining on mechanized mine concessions has led to tensions between miners and mine or state security forces (Aubynn 2009; Hilson 2002). In 2008, I observed how artisanal miners were tolerated within the concession of Siguiri’s SAG mine (Société Aurifère de Guinée) whose concession enclosed their villages. This arrangement led to tensions of its own but involved less violence than the model in which the mechanized mine claims exclusive use of the land within its permit area or area that is being mined (see also chapter 1).
248
In the Balan-Bakama these advantages responded exactly to people’s picture of a better
future. Almost no one had ever had paid work in the village, but over the past decade the bread
winner paradigm had still been accepted as the ideal model of the household-economy. This
model became the main paradigm in Bamako, even though there too the majority of the
population is unable to achieve the ideal (Vaa et al. 1989: 242). Brand explains: “This norm is a
combination of colonial heritage (salaries based on the breadwinner principle), Islamic ideology,
and Article 34 of the Code du Mariage, which reads: ‘The husband is the head of the family.
Consequently: 1. Household expenses are principally his responsibility; 2. The choice of
residence for the family is his to make; 3. The wife is obliged to live with him and he should be
ready to receive her” (Republique du Mali in Brand 2001: 56, emphasis by Brand). This model
had not only been accepted in Bamako, but also in rural areas like the Balan-Bakama where no
one had yet been able to put it into practice.
The second main goal of village leaders was the improvement of infrastructure and
services in their region. In 2010 the Selofara community meeting room long displayed a list of
desired projects that heads of compounds had compiled; they listed a functioning mill (Selofara
had two which had both broken down, meaning women had to pound all millet by hand),
classrooms, road improvements, etc. The town hall had helped them list the items and would
now try to find money with NGO donors to do the work (its own budget was very small). None
of the projects had been started by August 2011 when I left, and this was not surprising; rural
mairies are rarely able to engage in the NGO funding world. Travelers to zones with industrial
mines could observe that there, these types of projects were paid for by the local mine.
249
Because there had never been a large-scale gold mine in the Balan-Bakama, villagers like
Musa Bagayogo (see above) did not consider the potential negative impact.191
There have been
several smaller industrial gold mining operations in different villages’ territories. One of these
was the Macomin operation that settled close to Selofara for a few months in the dry season of
2010-2011 (see also chapter 1). This small Spanish-Guinean company hired twenty local young
men as guards, among them eight from Selofara, via the town hall. A few months in, some of the
guards expressed their dissatisfaction with the salary they were receiving (about 60,000
FCFA/month; they could likely have earned more through artisanal gold mining), all of them
continued the work likely for two reasons: 1. To avoid embarrassing the people at the town hall
and 2. Because of the status of having a salaried job. Two other small industrial gold mining
operations had closed years before, but they were often the topic of conversation. The village
chief of Komana-Kuta told me he had reserved a site for a Belgian company that had said it
would be back.192
Near Balan-Komana a Libyan brother and sister had run a mining operation,
which according to local gossip had gone bankrupt because of mismanagement. Whether that is
true or not, what was most remarkable was this was still, several years after the operation closed,
a popular topic of conversation.
In a globalizing world, villagers are part of networks of different spatial scales. As Van
Binsbergen et al. (2004) note these networks “tend to concentrate power in local, regional,
national, continental and intercontinental centres”. Balan-Bakama villagers’ explanation for the
desire to attract industrial mining operations shows how they developped aspirations for different
191
Had they done so, they would still probably have been in favour of the installation of a large-scale mine as most of the time, in the perception of local communities, the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages, but in the Balan-Bakama there was no recognition of potential disadvantages. 192
Because he did not know the name of the company I was unable to find out whether it still held the formal mining permit for the site.
250
aspects of their lives in reference to those multi-centred networks. When considering their
aspirations for their communities, Balan-Bakama villagers primarily looked towards the Mande
Heartland which had a better road- and communication-infrastructure and better public services.
Within the Balan-Bakama these services acted as signals of modernity and connection to the
appropriate centre, much more than the Western consumption items that fulfill this role for those
unable to migrate to France from western Malian communities like Kouda that are “characterized
by… a ‘culture of migration’, whereby international migration, to France in particular, was
construed as the expected and desired trajectory for a young man on his path to independence
and adulthood” (Jónsson 2010: 105). In the Balan-Bakama, aspirations for school going children
were developed within the framework of the country of Mali and its government; children who
were successful in school locally would attend high school and possibly university in Bamako
(there is no high school (lycée) in the Balan-Bakama and limited opportunities in the Mande
Heartland) and were expected to attempt to find a salaried job there. Some sons who had moved
to Bamako later moved abroad within or outside West-Africa but besides the worries of their
parents (see chapter 4), their successes and difficulties had not been incorporated into villagers’
dreams for the future of their communities.
Artisanal Gold Mining for the Future
Balan-Bakama villagers viewed artisanal gold mining as a potential trajectory to a more
connected and comfortable future, as they did concerning industrial gold mining, but with a
different, less direct, trajectory in mind. Labour in artisanal gold mining had much less prestige
than in industrial gold mining because it was not salaried, but in addition to being a source of
necessary financial assets, artisanal mining was seen as a way to attract more migrants. These
251
migrants would visit the village as temporary migrants during a gold rush, stay to become
permanent inhabitants of the locality and add to its population numbers. Since the allocation of
many public and private services in Mali is based on the population of villages or regions (see
above), a greater population would lead to a greater availability of services that would connect
the isolated Balan-Bakama region to the Mande heartland and to Bamako. This connection
would take place both at the practical level of roads and communication infrastructure and on the
level of a shared lifestyle.
Like mechanized gold mining, artisanal gold mining has long had a bad reputation in
development literature and academic literature from fields like environmental studies. Criticism
focused on the environmental impacts of the use of mercury by artisanal gold miners (eg. Van
Straaten 2000; Appleton et al. 1999; Malm 1998), and to a lesser extent on child labour (Hilson
2008; Callimachi & Klapper 2008) and deforestation (Peterson & Heemskerk 2001). Recently
the view of artisanal mining has become increasingly positive with the industry being portrayed
as a ‘viable livelihood’ (Tschakert 2009) that is complementary to small-scale agriculture
(Cartier & Bürge 2011; Okoh & Hilson 2011), whose actors need to be taken seriously (Jønsson
& Fold 2011). When The Economist publishes a lengthy article called “In Praise of Small
Miners” (Angovia 2016) it indicates that artisanal mining has been promoted from a nuisance to
mechanized mining corporations (Banchirigah 2008: 33), to an accepted industry in its own
right.
In the Balan-Bakama, the environmental impact of artisanal gold mining was limited,
primarily because miners did not use mercury or other chemicals to extract the gold from the ore
(see chapter 2). The level of deforestation depends on the size of the mining site and the intensity
of mining. A major gold rush could cause a large patch of land to become completely uncovered,
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but usually the patches of land used for mining were quite small, with mining pits placed
between trees. In these cases, mining can even be said to work against deforestation, as a former
mining site with its deep pits is unlikely to be used as an agricultural field soon (see for example
figure 2.22). When mining takes place in a former millet or rice field, it allows this field time to
recover before people may use it again for cultivation (see figures 2.12 and 5.1). Moreover,
artisanal mining is a far lesser cause of deforestation than charcoal production. Some trees are
indeed cut, and they are used as firewood (the taboo mentioned in chapter 3 is against carrying
wood on one’s head, not against actually chopping it and carrying it away in one’s arms) which
people need irrespective of mining. The actual impact of artisanal gold mining on the forest
cover in the Balan-Bakama is negligible.
Children sometimes worked at artisanal gold mines but this was not very common. The
great majority of children in the region attended school (the main exception were children who
were travelling with a relative, which could last months or sometimes years).193
The International
Labour Organization definition of child labour states child labour “refers to work that: is
mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children and interferes with
their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school, obliging them to leave
school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively
long and heavy work” (ILO n.d.). In the Balan-Bakama I did not see or hear of any children that
were kept home from school so they could work, in the mines or elsewhere (cf. Callimachi &
Klapper 2008). Moreover, adults found mining to be very straining on their own bodies, so they
193
In the large village of Bancoumana in the Mande Heartland, classrooms were often exceedingly full with up to 120 children per first or second grade classroom. Schools dealt with this issue by sending some children home starting in grade three. These children, who were said to miss the talent for reading, would never attend school again. In the Balan-Bakama this practice was nonexistent in primary school because the smaller villages automatically had smaller numbers of students.
253
found children to be too weak to do this. Children were also said to be careless or wild, so
parents rarely allowed them to accompany them to placer and hard-rock mines (except for infants
who sat on their mothers’ backs or were placed with resting miners). The exceptions were the
few children I saw working in surface mining. These were mostly girls between ten and thirteen
years of age who were panning ore so they could help their mothers pay for their trousseau.194
Unless girls continued in school, they would normally marry around the age of 14. The issue of
child labour in a place where practically all families lived in deep poverty was ambiguous; it was
expected for older children to support their parents, younger children were eager to search for
gold to have some spending money and to give some to their parents or grandparents (Hilson
2012). When showing me the Dajan placer-mining site near Selofara, my host’s foster son Madu
(13-14 years old) told me proudly he had worked there the previous year, digging a pit with his
two older brothers. As gold mining goes they had not made much, about 10,000 FCFA each, but
for a young boy it had been a lot of money. He was proud to tell me he had given most of it to
his grandmother.
Balan-Bakaman villagers do not have the luxury to have an opinion about the morality or
desirability of artisanal mining in general. Elderly people recounted a time when numuw (an
occupational group whose men work as blacksmiths, women as potters) were excluded from
working in the gold mines: “In our time, we would not work at the mines, no numu would do
that. We would grow vegetables and sell them there. Now everybody works at the mines,
because people need money” (Sali Kante, April 3 2011, Selofara). Work in the mines is hard on
194
I cannot claim expertise in youth physiology but in these cases the girls’ physique seemed to me to be too fragile for the hard labour they were doing.
254
the body (see introduction) but people also looked forward to the dry gold mining season; it
involved travel and greater than usual freedom from the constraints of family and agriculture.195
Gold rushes which bring a large number of miners to a village, some of whom may stay,
did not simply happen by accident; Balan-Bakama villagers were actively working to bring them
about. Villagers had a clear idea of the process through which a gold rush develops.196
Gold
rushes developped through the interplay of a – relatively – large initial discovery of gold, rumour
among miners in the region and/or among miners already active on other large mining sites, and
new finds of gold that keep miners engaged and convince others to make the journey. In a zone
where the soil is known to contain gold, like the Balan-Bakama, the probability of miners
making new finds increases as more miners work in the area. Villages therefore depend on a
model wherein a mining site, after a discovery initially attracts miners from neighbouring
villages and in each new stage of the gold rush, increases its catchment area of travelling miners.
Recognition that the soil of their zone contains gold, combined with the impossibility of
knowing with certainty if there are high densities of gold at some sites within this zone197
opens
up the hypothetical possibility of a future gold rush in a village’s territory. Miners of the Balan-
195
Though it does not allow women the possibility to avoid marriage or agriculture as Werthmann describes for Burkina Faso (2009a). 196
I chose the Balan-Bakama as a research location because there was no gold rush going on there at the time, so that I could study the governance of mining in this situation when the governance system was not strained by a large influx of miners. I therefore was not able to make a detailed study of a series of actual gold rushes. What I observed during visits to the Dagala and Dabale rush-sites and from descriptions of the Balan-Mansala gold rushes I conclude that my informants’ view of the development of gold rushes is realistic. 197
This is unlikely as it seems the whole zone, with the exception of the Balan-Mansala Balan-site, contains only low-density placers and some low-density hard-rock (as at Musodugu in Selofara). Mining companies had not yet found reason to install a large-scale mine so the area was left to local miners. In a model describing the evolution of relations between artisanal miners, industrial miners and government Bryceson and Fisher classifiy Mali as a ‘Low-level state control’ country (which is one out of four state-mining complexes) and it is true that artisanal mining is currently more prominent and the state has a weak regulatory presence but the prominence of artisanal mining is unlikely to change in most artisanal mining zones in the country. Their fear of large scale mining following artisanal mining and eroding possibilities for economic advance for artisanal miners (Bryceson & Fisher 2014: 198) is unfounded in areas where deposits are not rich enough for capital intensive industrial mining companies.
255
Bakama worked to improve the probability of such an event while they mined it for their own
profit. You could see the zone is like an enormous field of the game of battle-ship which may or
may not contain a large ship. Each season chiefs of mines stick a pin into the field by mining a
site to see if a big ship is located underneath the surface at that location, usually finding just
some minor traces.
The main strategy used by chiefs of mines and their assistants in their attempt to start the
cascading dominoes leading to a gold rush was the damanbe, the ceremony involving sacrifice as
described in chapters 4 and 5. Each village announced its event on the local radio, inviting all
those interested. In 2011, exceptions to the rule were Mambila whose diviner had instructed to
keep strangers at bay and Selofara whose sacrifice started at sunrise (see chapter 5). The sacrifice
is immediately followed by the planning of the mining site, where all those in attendance are
invited to claim a pit. So in the damanbe-event we can see how two systems of thinking are
applied concurrently; first jinew are placated with a sacrifice and clear rules that everybody
publicly confirms so they release more gold, and with the same act chiefs of mines try to attract a
large number of miners so there is a bigger chance of making a big discovery because they can
cover more ground. The damanbe has one goal, success in gold mining for the village, but it does
so through two separate lines of reasoning.
The gold rush that Balan-Bakama villagers try to activate is analogous to an economic
bubble. 198
In economics, bubbles are defined as “a surge in the market caused by speculation
regarding a commodity which results in an explosion of activity in that market segment causing
vastly overinflated prices. The prices are not sustainable and the bubble is usually followed by
a crash in prices in the affected sector” (Business Dictionary 2016). There are a number of well-
198
I thank Jan Jansen for suggesting this idea.
256
known classic bubbles like the South Sea bubble and the Dutch tulip trade mania where people
were willing to pay increasingly high, seemingly irrational, prices because they thought the price
would continue rising. Many were ruined when the price of their purchases suddenly fell.199
In
the aftermath of the financial and housing crises of 2007 and 2008 caused by the end of the
American housing bubble, the price of gold rose even higher than it already had in previous
decades. Balan-Bakama villagers tried to use this fact to create bubbles of their own; not bubbles
of price but bubbles of migration. They tried to set in motion a sequence of events in which
rumours among migrant miners entice more and more of them to travel to a Balan-Bakama
village, which leads to the discovery of more gold because many miners can cover more ground,
causing even more migrants to travel there. Based on what the miners encounter at the gold rush
site, the gold rush may continue for several years like it did earlier in Balan-Mansala and now in
Dagala. In Karan however, the site of a 2008 gold rush was practically deserted in 2010 with just
two pits being mined. After such an event the mining site usually continues to be mined by
villagers, as they did before, but the village will not be the same again. This was the case in
Balan-Mansala which experienced a gold rush lasting three years.
199
Several economists argue that these popular trades were not actually bubbles but sound business investments until circumstances changed (Paul 2011; Garber 2010).
257
Figure 6.1 Solar-powered water tower in Balan-Mansala, paid for by the village’s mining fund
during its multi-year gold rush. Other villages in the region looked to Balan-Mansala
as an example of a village that had grown because of its gold rushes and built and
received services as a result (May 27 2011.
Mining Migrants in Balan-Mansala
Within the Balan-Bakama, the village of Balan-Mansala was held up as an example. It had
successfully harnessed a gold rush that lasted several years; a number of young men had stayed,
some of them marrying local women and contributing to the village population. They caused
Balan-Mansala to overtake Selofara as the village with the largest population in the region.
Balan-Mansala hosted a number of government and private services that served the whole
region. The size of the population was a major factor in the decisions for this location.200
Balan-
Mansala for example hosted the only weekly market, the government health clinic (CSCOM), a
200
The town hall (mairie) is also located in Balan-Mansala but not necessarily because of the size of Balan-Mansala’s population. According to Selofara politicians, Selofara and Namakana, which were the two large villages in the center of the new commune rural of Balan-Bakama, argued at length about which of them would host the town hall after decentralization. Through shrewd political maneuvering, Balan-Mansala eventually managed to pull the decision their way.
258
large school (elementary and middle school), was building a new mosque, and had a permanent
tailor and carpenter. In late 2010 I spent a week in the village interviewing male migrants who
had stayed and become permanent inhabitants of Balan-Mansala, and some of their wives.
Most of the men who had come to Balan-Mansala as miners and stayed, had not moved
over a long distance. They came from the Mande Mountains, from Kati (near Bamako), from
Guinean villages close to the border, and few from farther afield like Sikasso and Bougouni
(both in Mali). Each had different reasons for wanting to stay in the village; one man found that
his tailoring skills were in demand, another had run out of money and did not want to go home
where people keep asking you for gifts, yet another had lost his parents and was looking for new
connections, a fourth man was offered work by his host.
As they were all young men who had been free to travel to a gold rush site, most had
been unmarried when they settled in the village and several married a woman from Balan-
Mansala. In a society where patrilocality is the norm, they lived close to their in-laws (though
never on their compound). When a husband and wife in Mande have a heated argument, the wife
often goes to her parents’ (or brother’s) house (often in another village), forcing members of her
husband’s compound with whom she normally lives to send a delegation to try to convince her to
return. Sumaela Keita and his wife Aminata Keita initially had to get used to the situation in
which he had no family to support him and she did: “Before, when my wife and I had an
argument, her family and especially her mother would always support her without even knowing
what had happened. Now they have found that she may also be to blame for the argument, so
they tell her to solve the problem with me” (Sumaela Keita, December 27 2010, Balan-Mansala).
Several couples explained how the woman’s kin had come to avoid getting involved in their
arguments. Having your wife’s kin close-by can also be an advantage: “I never had difficulties
259
because I live close to my wife’s parents. It is an advantage because they can help you. If you
have a problem, like when there is work to do, your in-laws can send you their children to help
you. I help them when they have work and they help me. Also when you have a good meal, you
send them some and they do the same for me” (Tenemagan Camara, December 28 2010, Balan-
Mansala). Though it was hard to draw conclusions from the short interviews, several wives said
they were happy to live close to their families but Aminata Keita explained why she had still
been afraid on her wedding day: “I was going to live here in my village, close to my parents’
house, but you never know when your husband wants to move. I thought ‘one day he will decide
to go back to his own village and I will have to leave mine behind’, so I still cried” (Balan-
Mansala, December 27 2010).
Most of the migrants who had initially come to Balan-Mansala to mine in the dry season
gold rush had also taken up farming. By 2010, those who farmed all had their own fields which
they had cleared in the bush. All Balan-Bakama villages still had enough virgin bushland
available to provide newcomers with their own land, unlike other more densely populated zones
of Mali (Nijenhuis 2005: 206). Several migrants explained how they had asked the village
council about it and had been told they could cut the bush and then the field would be theirs.
When they had first arrived, some had received permission to work for a year at a time on fields
that local compound work teams had left fallow. They did this until they had cut a large enough
field for themselves to be able to sustain their households.
Tenemagan Camara (see above) was very happy about his life in Balan-Mansala; he had
become a member of his age-grade, had good relationships with his wife’s kin and farmed and
mined. His case however is quite exceptional. Most of the men did not feel as welcome in the
village. Many had built a house in the village itself after the gold rush, on sites assigned by the
260
village council, but some continued to live in the miners’ neighbourhood that was set up during
the gold rush. Dosama Coulibaly was one of the latter group: “The villagers at times make it very
clear that we are not from here. My children were born here, so in their papers it says they are
from Mansala, but they are made to feel as foreigners. For example, when they do something
wrong, people always tell them they are not from here” (Dosama Coulibaly, December 27 2010,
Balan-Mansala). Dosama Coulibaly had initially started an association of migrants who helped
each other on their fields but with only seven members, the departure of some of them had
caused the group to collapse. Other migrants reported having joined other social groups in the
village like the Jeunesse or an age-group. Others, like Pascal Diallo who was the only Christian
in the village, were happily uninvolved in village life. Remarkably, even those migrants who
were dissatisfied with their social situation in Balan-Mansala explained that it was easy to find
people to work with during the mining season. When working in the placer mine of their own
village in years with no gold rush, miners were very open to working with people they may
exclude socially during other seasons.
Regional Dynamics of Gold Mining in the Balan-Bakama
Mobility and migration are all-pervasive in the lives of people in the Sahel and Mande farmer-
miners are no exception (Hopkins 2014[1973]: 20; De Bruijn & Van Dijck 2005: 14). Though
farmers were not particularly sedentary during the rainy season when many moved to hamlets to
farm and increasingly spent part of their time on regional hard-rock mining sites, the dry season
was especially marked by mobility. During this season, adults continuously weighed their
options concerning the choice of economic activity (mining, horticulture, hunting, etc.) and when
they chose to mine, where they would do so. Among farmer-miners one can therefore not make a
261
clear distinction between those who only mined at home, and those following gold rushes. High-
mobility mining was not permanent state Mande farmer-miners were enticed into (cf. Jønsson &
Bryceson 2014: 30) but instead decisions on mobility for mining, farming, and family-related
reasons were made throughout people’s lives and especially at the beginning of each dry season.
The high gold price and lure of popular gold rush sites had attracted many to mining, including
people who hailed from outside the gold fields.
Migrating to mining sites, Mande farmer-miners habitually crossed borders (cf. Bryceson
& Fisher 2014: 187), especially into regions that were also part of the Mande cultural and
linguistic area. Mali is part of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and
thus its citizens can cross borders legally when carrying an ID card and proof of yellow fever
vaccination. Especially in their home-region where people knew the border guards or unguarded
paths many, and especially women, passed the border without these documents.
Clearly, in the Balan-Bakama, located in the Bure gold field, not all miners work on a big
gold rush site. Though some farmer-miners from the Balan-Bakama travelled to the large mines
in Guinea or to Dagala in 2011201
, many worked at smaller sites within the region. Each village
had one site where the work was concentrated. This happened because chiefs of mines forbade
men to mine sites other than the one indicated by the diviner in order to have a greater chance at
success. Even though some women expressed a preference for surface mining, all eventually
abandoned the surface mines in favor of placer mines because of a lack of water and of course
the higher earnings of the placer mines. Over the season which lasts about two months (from the
end of March till the end of May, with some miners starting earlier and/or leaving later) some
201
Because I remained in the Balan-Bakama during the height of the mining season I did not follow these migrant miners, focusing on people who remained in the Balan-Bakama or those who traveled to it.
262
sites became popular. The Selofara site never took off but some villagers, among whom some
important specialists, continued trying because as they said they wanted to support their village.
The Selofara Balanko site never had more than twelve active pits at a time, none of which were
mined by people from other villages. Miners from Selofara did travel to other Balan-Bakama
villages, Narena and Guinea. Of the people who kept their base in the village, a few travelled as
far as Balan-Komana whose site was quite popular, attracting people from Kenieba and Narena.
Balan-Mansala drew a crowd (see figure 5.1) but these were mostly miners from the large village
itself. They found some gold (primarily after the site shifted to a neighbouring field) but never
enough to entice many from neighbouring villages to travel there. Djelibani was in the same
situation. In the western half of the region, Worofe in Komana-Kuta became very popular,
pulling in practically all miners from Namakana and Mambila who had stayed in their village. At
the end of April, halfway through the mining season, several miners in Selofara went there for a
day. They would join a team of people they knew for a day, but most did not continue mining
there, concluding it was too far to make it worth their while.
Each village started the season in the same way; with a damanbe at a site indicated by a
diviner. They all had the same hopes for a gold rush, and through the season several sites became
popular or fizzled, but none received a large influx of miners that could be called a gold rush.
Though there is no Maninka word for gold rush (‘ni jama tun be’: when the masses were here,
said people in Karan), it was clear that the event people hoped for was a Dagala or a Dabale,
which each welcomed hundreds, if not thousands of miners several years in a row.
If the masses were to descend on a Balan-Bakama village again, as they had in Balan-
Mansala between 2002 and 2004, chiefs of mines and their assistants would know how to deal
with them. Gold rushes follow a familiar pattern and Mande miners and chiefs of mines have
263
developed techniques for control of these events. For example, they would coopt leaders of
groups of migrant miners by – temporarily – making them a tonboloma. These leaders would
join the team of tonbolomaw, levying taxes and policing the site. At the earlier stages of the gold
rush, miners would be housed in the village, at the homes of hosts they had often just met. There
could come a point at which villagers find that the situation gets out of control (usually after a
crime has been committed) and the village will create a miners’ neighbourhood, where migrants
can erect temporary huts:
“When we arrived here, at the time there were too many foreigners here. They came from
everywhere; Burkina, Guinea. People were scared. There were criminals, things were
stolen. The villagers decided to create a new neighbourhood and to forbid villagers to
have foreigners stay in their houses. Everybody was given a piece of land where they
would construct a temporary house. When gold gets excited, when there is a lot of gold,
there are too many foreigners. So there will be too many difficult people, so to deal with
that they tried to make the foreigners live separately” (Dosama Coulibaly, December 27,
2011, Balan-Mansala).
For over a decade, the Malian state has been involved in gold rush sites as well. When a gold
rush develops somewhere, police officers are sent to the village to keep the situation under
control. In practice they support the tonbolomaw who continue to manage security at the mine
(this includes patrolling the mine at night to make sure no one tries to work after dark). Only
when a crime or person becomes too complicated for tonbolomaw to handle will they hand over
the issue to the police who remain in the village (see also chapter 5).
Conclusion
Villagers in the Balan-Bakama desire a gold rush in their village. They long for a better
connection to the lifestyle of people in large towns in the Mande Heartland and for better
264
infrastructure. They have observed in Balan-Mansala and Kouremale202
for example, that a gold
rush, especially if sustained over several consecutive dry seasons, can bring migrants who stay.
The resulting increased population numbers can attract the public and private services people
long for. Therefore, they worked hard on choosing the right mining site and the right sacrifice for
jinew so that these would release much gold. They tried to behave in ways that pleased jinew,
namely by avoiding conflict and keeping order at the mine, through the appointment of mining
authorities and the setting of rules. This way, jinew would release much gold which would bring
wealth to the village in the form of money and of people. Villagers tried to get as many people as
possible to mine their site because if there were many miners working at a site, it was more
likely someone will find a significant amount of gold. Rumour about such a discovery would
circulate in the region immediately and would bring the village a little closer to the gold rush that
would put them on the path to connection with the capital of Mali and the Mande Heartland and
with modernity.
202
Kouremale is a border town south of Balan-Komana that used to be a small village but due to mining and the border crossing has become a large town.
265
Concluding Remarks
In 2010-11, the combination of a high gold price, villagers’ dependence on a money economy of
goods and services, and a lack of alternatives made artisanal gold mining the main dry season
activity for Maninka farmers in the Balan-Bakama. Gold mining was classified as a dry season
activity but increasingly it was becoming a year-round activity for women and men; in the rainy
season women now found the low-density surface mines worth their while and men engaged in
the recently introduced technique of hard-rock mining. A few men devoted themselves to mining
near their village year-round, while others tried to minimize labour requirements on the
compound’s fields so they could spend more time at hard-rock or placer mines. Many women,
who cultivate individual plots, searched for gold at surface mines any time they could free
themselves from domestic and agricultural work. In 2011 and again in 2016 (Tamani 2016), the
Malian government tried to force artisanal miners to leave the mines and go home to farm.
Though these directives clearly targeted miners at large scale gold rush sites, those in the Balan-
Bakama were also affected, like when the 2011 directive led to the withdrawal of the pump from
the Balanko mine of Selofara, causing the mine to close. Placer mining however, remained a
uniquely dry season activity due to the high water table and risk of mine collapse during the
rainy season. Placer mining, as well as other types of artisanal mining, is very hard work for
which people would prefer there were alternatives but because of opportunities to make money,
travel and connect with friends the season was one to look forward to.
One of the unique properties of Malian artisanal mining has long been its relative
legality; unlike their colleagues in most other countries, Malian artisanal miners can put their
farasen soli in the ground almost anywhere (excluding active industrial mining sites and private
266
property) without fear of persecution. This practice has roots in pre-colonial times when rulers
depended on the gold found in the mines of the Bure and Bambouk gold fields, and in colonial
times when the French colonizers sought to establish protected zones for artisanal mining,
levying taxes on exported gold instead of on miners. In such a legal environment, local
traditional authorities have had the opportunity to strictly organize the mining process according
to social and economic principles that are familiar to them. They have done so both in the village
and on its mining sites. Each of the three principal mining techniques – surface mining, placer
mining and hard-rock mining – has its own characteristic physical and social techniques of
extraction. The interplay between techniques derived from agriculture that are adjusted to
respond to specific geologies and Mande conventions about labour and mining lead to different
(gendered) configurations of mining teams, flows of money, spatial organization (under- and
above-ground) and conflict resolution strategies. Rendering gold mining illegal during more than
half the year will undoubtedly change the nature of these configurations and risks causing a
loosening of control of village leaders over the mining process, especially over itinerant miners
who are the specific target of these policies.
In the Balan-Bakama in 2010-11, artisanal gold mines were certainly no heterotopias.
Instead people had made sacrifices to bush spirits in so the village could extend into the bush, to
create a place where the hierarchies and social conventions of the village were still in force.
Visiting migrants were forced to adapt to the ways of their hosting village community instead of
imposing a frontier mentality even if that may ultimately have opened up possibilities for more
democratic governance of mining and miners. Because the social structure of the mine was
recognizable mines were accessible to people of different levels of social strength including
women, children and the elderly. As a result, mines also did not function as a space of refuge for
267
those wanting to escape the constraints of the village. As a result, women made up at least half
the artisanal mining work force, as they do elsewhere in Mande. The strict gendered division of
mining labour assured them of some income in an area with small, not very profitable, placer
mines as the Balan-Bakama. At large sites, especially those with primarily hard-rock mining,
women’s labour was increasingly being taken over by machines that wash and pound ore and
which were most often owned by men with more investment capital (see also Eftimie et al. 2012:
6).
In the Balan-Bakama, artisanal gold mining is not a destructive force that effaces existing
community structures, but instead is approached by the community as a trajectory towards
connection with regional centres (the Mande Heartland and Bamako) and modernization. Chiefs
of mines, their assistants, and other community leaders attempted to establish this connection and
modernity by organizing their extractive economy ‘correctly’. A ‘correct’ organization here
means one that is pleasing to people and to bush spirits who have the final decision on the
success of human extractive labour. As always, ‘modernity’ concerns a local interpretation of
what that imagined future should entail. In the the Balan-Bakama the desired modernity was
associated with the availability of specific public and private services (including transportation
and cell-phone service), wage-labour for young men (which should ideally lead to less out-
migration of this demographic) and decreased isolation from Mande and Malian socio-political
centers like Bamako and Kangaba. Like many people elsewhere, farmer-miners of Balan-
Bakama villages thus desired to be part of a globalizing (or regionalizing in their case) world on
their own terms; to avoid losing their sons to migration to which they were forced by a lack of
opportunity but to be more connected socially and experientially to the larger Mande region and
national political and economic centers.
268
Having closely observed the patterns of gold rushes, chiefs of mines along with their
assistants and villagers tried to convince bush spirits who are the owners of the gold in the bush,
to release much gold. At the same time they tried to attract many miners to their mining site;
ideally this would include miners from other villages in addition to the village owning the mine.
If someone were to find much gold, a sequence of events could be put in motion where rumour
among itinerant miners attracts more of them to this site, which leads to more miners finding
gold, again attracting more miners. Villagers have seen in places like Balan-Mansala and
Kouremale that prolonged gold rushes will lead many young men to permanently settle in the
town where the gold rush took place. As the population of a town grows, it attracts more services
from the government (schools, clinics, roads) and private service providers (cell-phone towers,
markets, transportation). While Mande miners toil in the mines to make money that can pay for
their needs, they organize their work in such a way that maybe one day they and their community
will have their lucky break.
269
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