Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

Abstract

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states' urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in 'new' mining countries and the slow-down in 'old' mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide crosssection of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone).Keywords: urban, mining, Africa, growth, settlement, migrationThe upsurge of mining currently restructuring many national economies in Africa is raising important questions about priorities in natural resource utilisation and the distribution of present and future mining wealth in the countries concerned. Rarely, however, does one read or hear discussion about mining's links with urban growth and settlement patterns and the welfare and indeed rural-cum-urban lifestyle changes involved in people's migration to mining sites. This may be related to the fact that few commentators have expertise or detailed knowledge of both mining and urbanisation. So too, in the mining sites, migration and settlement patterns have a way of changing day by day so unobtrusively that residents take little cognisance of the role they are playing in urban transformation.The demographic and economic changes related to mining over the 20 th century have largely been ignored. Instead, Southern Africa's large-scale mining complexes dominated the literature, with their racially segregated housing and attempts to constrict African urbanisation through a bachelor wage and oscillating migration between miners' rural homes and mine sites. Less controlled, but subject to threats of violence and intimidation, the production of 'conflict minerals' associated with the financing of civil war over the last few decades has generally relied on both coerced and tribute labour, sometimes imported from neighbouring countries, while local people have fled, making their way to the safety of more densely settled urban areas. Racially segregated urbanisation is now history, while conflict mineral exploitation -with its attendant rural-urban displacement -has ended in Sierra Leone and Angola, though it persists in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). By the...

Mining and extractive urbanism: Postdevelopment in a Mozambican boomtown

“…4 Tete is not a historically important minerals producer and was largely unknown to global mining companies until the past decade (Bryceson and MacKinnon, 2012).…”

Urban Impacts of Resource Booms: the Emergence of Oil-Led Gentrification in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana

“…The impetus for the research stems from recognition that there has been relatively little research on the urban impacts of resource booms (Gramling and Brabant 1986;Bryceson and MacKinnon 2012), especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper begins by describing the recent history of oil discovery and exploitation in Ghana before outlining the gap in the literature to which this research responds.…”

Harnessing Mineral Resources in Gwanda District of Zimbabwe: A Myth or a Reality?

“…The development of mining settlements was more rapid in the American West, where independent miners rather than companies were involved, (Bryceson and MacKinnon, 2012). Most famously, the California gold rush of 1848-53 spurred a massive migration of some 300 000 people from the Eastern United States of America, Europe, Latin America and Asia, (Holliday, 2002).…”

“…Urban areas were in effect, conceptualised as an alien environment that would contaminate individual Africans and corrode the communal fabric of tribal Africa. Bryceson and MacKinnon, (2012), contend that the upsurge of mining currently restructuring many national economies in Africa is raising important questions about priorities in natural resource utilisation and distribution of present and future mining wealth in countries concerned. They argue that the demographic and economic changes related to mining over the 20 th century have largely been ignored; instead large scale mining complexes dominated literature with their racially segregated housing and attempts to constrict African urbanisation through a bachelor wage and oscillating migration between miners' rural homes and mine sites.…”

“…More recently, the American West experienced a resource boom in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The effects of the rapid economic and demographic changes taking place in mining towns at that time prompted the diagnosis of 'Gillette Syndrome', (Bryceson and MacKinnon, 2012).…”