Mining and Protestation in Africa

Mining and protestation in Africa

Mining industries are wide spreading in Africa: South Africa but also in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinée, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo. The governments, which rely more and more on these industries for public resources, largely support this mining economy. However, opinion at a grass roots level is quite different. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming the stage of numerous contentious actions against mining industry. Marikana is one of the most well known recent mining protest but it could be seen as a “tree hiding the forest”. For example, peasants are protesting in Burkina Faso because they have been expelled from their lands without any gratification to enable mining industries to prospect. Workers from Mali are protesting due to very bad work conditions they have to experiment in mines. Inhabitants in Zambia have set up a judicial action against an international company because of harsh pollution and polluted water.

The mining issue is of high relevance in Africa today. It is related to work, land issues, environment, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, transnational economy and strength of national state. This issue is producing new social movements, is fostering spontaneous collective actions and nourishing contentious politics and popular unrest of first interest.

This paper intends to focus on mining and popular unrest in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on a field work in Burkina Faso it will also used broad screening of African unrest related to mining. This communication will test the possibility of a typology, but moreover it will analyze the nature of this unrest. What does it say on the path and ways undertaken by protestation throughout the continent today? Are we facing a new way to mobilise the "weapons of the weak" (J. Scott) or is it a mighty movement of contestation of a political and economic order?