A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa by Robyn D'Avignon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa by Robyn D'Avignon
• Lorena Campuzano Duque (bio)

A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa By Robyn D'Avignon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. 328.

International organizations and most studies analyzing the historical, political, economic, scientific, and technological aspects of gold mining tend to use a dichotomy between industrialized and artisanal mining that regards artisanal mining as exclusively characterized by nonmechanized manual methods, individual work, and limited gold output for subsistence, while industrial mining is recognized as a fully fledged extractive industry. Robyn D'Avignon's A Ritual Geology challenges this dichotomy through a long-term historical and anthropological study that encompasses the history of gold mining and exploration in West Africa's Birimian Green-stone Belt, which crosses parts of present-day Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and southern Senegal, from 800 to the present.

Drawing on more than 150 interviews, archeological studies, and transnational historical sources, D'Avignon's book is one of the first accounts of how Africans contributed not only their strength but also their brains to the mining industry, joining a new but still inchoate literature that highlights the key role of Africans in the production of agricultural, pastoralist, and botanical knowledge. D'Avignon examines both European geological surveys and African engagement with gold deposits, showing the dialectical relationships between the two, which explains why orpaillage, the practice of West African alluvial and vein mining, was quintessential to colonial and independent political, industrial, and social life in the Birimian Greenstone Belt. Moving beyond the conventional narrative of capitalist expansion and [End Page 718] labor exploitation, D'Avignon contends that orpaillage developed in conjunction with industrial mining, arguing that African miners in West Africa contributed significantly to the scientific knowledge used by industrial mines. The book successfully shows that rural citizens from French West Africa, who had a deep knowledge of and had been engaged in gold mining for at least the last millennium, played a significant role in the identification of gold deposits and the valorization of minerals for geological missions, first during the colonial period and later, during the Cold War, amid the African decolonization process.

To make her case, D'Avignon first redefines African engagements with gold mining as a form of ritual geology. She posits that ritual geology comprises "a set of practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements with the earth that are widely shared and cultivated across a regional geological formation" (p. 5). Orpaillage's ritual geologies enable her to analyze African mining traditions on the same footing as European scientific traditions, as unique ritual and cognitive engagements with the physical world (p. 9). Additionally, she models a novel regional approach to African history, following geology instead of national borders. This may be of interest to environmental and science historians who aim to investigate the impact of geology on politics, law, economy, and culture. Furthermore, the account transitions back and forth between contemporary disputes concerning corporate mining enclosures in African mining economies and the history of orpaillage and geological explorations in the region. These narrative transitions uncover the elimination of African contributions to geology and mining in the latter half of the twentieth century and scrutinize the fluctuating justifications employed by West African states, during both colonial rule and postindependence, in recognizing, dismissing, or asserting the African miners' right to mine gold deposits.

A Ritual Geology is a substantial contribution to the expanding fields of the history of science and technology, environmental history, and decolonization studies in twentieth-century Africa and the Global South. Although she stresses that her story cannot be generalized to other regions of the Global South where so-called artisanal mining is prominent, her notion of ritual geology, the study of how African miners asserted their rights to gold as a common resource, and the challenge of telling the story of mining industry and science beyond the industrial-artisanal dichotomy will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, or public policymakers in the Global South who wish to understand the industry as a multidimensional process with deep historical roots. It may also be of interest to scholars who are investigating...