The underground and the disappeared: Understanding the siege on informal gold mining in South Africa
The recent siege on informal mining in South Africa’s gold sector is treated here as a reflection of changes in both the global political economy and the treatment of informality. I suggest that, as the global economy reorganises itself, and as deindustrialisation takes hold in the gold sector, centres of previously capital-intensive production do not disappear, but become at least temporarily re-manualised and labour-intensive. This takes place in contexts of long-standing international migration. The result is a set of densities and choke points at which extra-legal forces can exercise themselves, not merely through strategies of extortion but through the control of labour, via coercion and terror. While state sovereignty becomes increasingly a matter of control over mineral/sub-surface rights, a parallel and competitive relation emerges between the state and organised crime with respect to labour, which has been accompanied by scapegoating of the most marginal figures in this field. That scapegoating works through the threat of death, but it supplements this threat with one of disappearance, an even more radical exclusion from the society that encompasses both the living and the ancestral.
