A Book About the Links Between Gold and Apartheid in South Africa

What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world’s richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicit—often deadly—search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than 25 years around these mines, Unstable Ground, by Anthropology Professor Rosalind Morris, reveals the worlds that gold made possible, and gold’s profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow.

From the vantage point of the closure of South Africa’s gold mines, she reconsiders their history, beginning in the present and descending into the past. Anchored in descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold, and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half. Viewing the industry from its margins, against the backdrop of the cyanide revolution, the gold standard’s demise, and recurrent sinkholes, as well as the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue to this day, Unstable Ground recasts the history of South Africa and the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid amid the transformations of the global economy.

Morris talks about the book with Columbia News, along with books by others that she’s now immersed in, her current projects, and her ideal guest list for her next gathering.

What was the impetus for this book?

Unstable Ground grows out of more than two and a half decades of research and thinking about life in and around the gold mines of South Africa, as well as related issues: extractivism, value, media technologies, the nature of production and destruction, inequality, ruin, and survival.

I started my anthropological life working in Southeast Asia, but was transformed by a visit to South Africa in 1996, when I saw an extraordinary, creative effort at self-transformation. I wanted to learn from that. In my early apprenticeship to the country—and thinking from and about it—I wasn’t sure that I would write a book, or have something substantial to contribute. But as I returned, and returned again, to South Africa, I began to learn. The book is an effort to share that learning. But its aims and shape also changed over time.

As South Africa went through its transformations following the end of apartheid, new issues and structural problems emerged, and new political events, at local, regional, and global levels, impelled new developments. As this happened, new questions arose for me. Many people had, in 1994, assumed that one era was over and that a new one had arrived, and they pronounced on the nature of the new South Africa, as though it was already frozen in aspic, already a future foretold. Against the grain of some theory that assumes all history to be a history of the present, my book starts from the premise that history may be periodized, but is never over. History is an effort to take account of the unfolding dynamics and emergent challenges as they arose, and as they continue to arise, as a task, and not merely a set of events (I am borrowing Gayatri Spivak’s differentiation between event and task). I have tried to see these questions from the spaces where South Africans live, and in relation to transformations in the global economy.

I also work a lot with South African artists, and, across this book, my interest in aesthetics is visible because people are not simply moved by economic forces, but they are solicited through their senses. Even the most banal technological facts can become aestheticized, as I try to show with the analysis of cyanidation, which was both a technology for separating gold from pyritic rock, and also the alibi for the repression of wages on racial bases, a process that took the idiom of separation and transformed it into separatism, and, ultimately, apartheid.

Can you give some examples from the book of how gold mining in South Africa reflects the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid?

No social system that was so carefully orchestrated and so thoroughly inculcated as a set of values, and not merely as legislated principles, can be ended with the mere stroke of a pen. Beginning in 1948, apartheid was a total social, economic, and political system that radicalized the principles of racialized class differences, which were generated in the colonial and then segregationist eras. It was not just more severely racist than the segregationist era, or more violently coercive (though it was both). Apartheid organized the social field in ways that were useful for industrial and finance capitalism, by dividing people not only on racial, but also ethnolinguistic grounds, and assigning them to highly unequal and, in many cases, unlivable spaces. Black people were forced to migrate on short-term bases, especially to the mines and urban domestic spaces, but also factories and urban sites of production. Mine compounds were hinges in this process, and the communities around the gold mines—which, until the 1970s, were the major source of GDP and significant employers—were experimental scenes for the development of social and material techniques that sustained apartheid. Sex and gender differences were extremely important in this process.

As the whole apparatus of apartheid became less viable—thanks to organized resistance and pressure from labor movements, as well as international support for that resistance—and as gold began to recede as a major source of value in South Africa, many well-intentioned oppositional efforts began to resemble those of the downsizing corporations. Thus, stabilization, which for the mines meant eliminating foreign labor to reduce costs, became for the unions the right of mineworkers to live near their workplaces. But this brought with it the so-called stabilization of patriarchal family units and instrumentalization of women in the service of overcoming what was perceived as the emasculating nature of work in the mines.

In other words, women were not emancipated by this effort to overcome the effects of apartheid in the mining sector, except insofar as they too were granted rights to enter that labor field, a development that has had limited success. The deeper transformations of consciousness necessary to overcome apartheid have been unevenly achieved; and in poorer areas, the education system, driven by a conception of schooling as preparation for jobs through the cultivation of entrepreneurial skills, has not had the means to play the role it should have had.

Similarly, the intense ethnicization of the mining industry, which used a spurious anthropology to assign certain kinds of labor to particular ethnolinguistic groups, and to limit residence (whether on compounds or in townships) on the basis of ethnic identity, has its ghosts. Today, even in informal mining teams, many of which operate under the violent rule of organized criminal gangs, tasks may be assigned on ethnic bases. And perhaps more important, a deep suspicion of African foreigners has taken root in South Africa, more generally, in a manner that blames the heirs of the original migrant laborers for a loss of national value and indeed for much of the economic crisis—high unemployment and widespread violent crime—now afflicting South Africans. The state has responded to these people with increasing levels of violence, mirroring and even intensifying the practices of the apartheid state in its dealings with striking mineworkers in earlier days.

Of course, there is resistance to this and creative efforts to take a different approach, but the situation is not helped by the fact that, in so many places in the world, people have come to think of democracy as “equal access to inequality.” They are quick to blame the limits of our current economic order on the foreigner, the migrant, the “intruder.” South Africa is no different in this respect, but while there are emergent tendencies toward tyranny, there is also a strong tradition of civil society and activism of the poor. That, too, is a ghost of apartheid, a more congenial specter.

What books have you read recently that you recommend, and why?

I’m always reading at least one novel and some poetry in addition to the scholarly work that I am reading for teaching and research purposes. I need this combination, and it helps me think about the craft of writing and the art of learning without knowing—something that I think is very important for an ethnographer.

Recent highlights would start with Magda Szabó’s The Door—a masterpiece of narrative compression, in which the narrator doesn’t understand the nature of someone with whom she is in daily contact. She comes to speculate about the possessions of this other woman, who won’t let anyone through her door: Were her things illegitimately got? Were they bequests? All the paranoia and absurd efforts at orderliness that are left over after a war and its atrocities are concentrated in the minute gestures of these characters. But from page to page, you really don’t know what will happen.

I’m also reading the ancient Greek philosopher and historian, Xenophon, on tyranny. I suppose anyone concerned with the politics of our contemporary scene in the U.S., and in many other places, is reading work on tyranny. Timothy Snyder’s little manifesto, On Tyranny, is making the rounds. I’m trying to write a piece on the transformations of sovereignty under new media conditions, which led me, almost inevitably, back to the great text of Xenophon and the debates it provoked in the mid-20th century, between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève.

I also recommend Paul Lynch’s novel, Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize in 2023. It’s a dystopian tale set in Ireland, after the coming to power of a brutal fascist regime. The book asks how that happens, and what it does to the intimate lives of people who find themselves thrown into a situation in which all acts are accorded political significance, and non-conformity is mercilessly punished. There are those who thought it was far-fetched to set such a thought experiment in Ireland, or any Western democratic state, but that skepticism no longer seems to apply.

What's next on your reading list?

I just ordered John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent. I used to read Grapes of Wrath in my ethnography class, because it contained such an acute description of poverty in the U.S., and because many young people have no way to access this pre-New Deal form of life, as it may have been experienced by the people who endured its privations. I’m a great admirer of early Steinbeck. But I haven’t read this late work by him, and I recently read a review that made me believe it might be the novel for now, with its stories of lost aristocratic privilege, scrabbling efforts to regain social standing, and the cruel drama of using immigration status to act out other kinds of enmity.

I’m also reading the manuscript of my friend, the great South African literary critic, Njabulo Ndebele, who has written a history of boxing and the intimate politics of life in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest regions of South Africa, from which, nonetheless, many great politicians and also many world class boxers emerged.

What are you teaching this semester?

I’m teaching two courses. The first, Accusation, looks at the history of mass movements of purgative violence, whether in the form of populist nationalism or witchcraft. The class draws heavily on anthropological, historical, and philosophical literature concerned with the force of language and the logic of the scapegoat. Each year that I’ve taught it, it has been inflected by contemporary circumstances, but the course is not a response to current issues so much as a rehearsal of the kind of analysis that can perceive the resonances between the events of 17^th-century Loudun (the time of witch hunts) or 19^th-century Paris (the Dreyfus affair), and those of this country in the 1950s and today. What were the conditions of possibility for these eruptions? What was the relationship between social transformation, epistemic transformation, migration, changes in households, and so forth, prior to the eruption of these purges? What understanding of language was in operation to make the purges take the forms that they did?

The second course, Anthropology of the Sister, grew out of my interest in the return of the figure of Antigone in recent feminist thought, and the many notions of democratic politics that depend on the notion of fraternity. Recent writing about Antigone also draws on anthropological writings on kinship, and so the course returns to that corpus to engage with these many efforts—across a variety of theatrical traditions and different epochs of social theory—to rethink the political.

What else are you working on now?

I am bringing out three books this semester, including Unstable Ground. One is a memoir by the great anthropologist and political theorist from Venezuela, Rafael Sánchez, Reconocimientos: A Memoir of Becoming. We edited it together during the last months of his life (he died in February 2024), and it is a bittersweet pleasure to see this book enter the world, but in the absence of its author, who was also a very dear friend. The other book is a volume of my own poetry, For Lack of a Dictionary. The poems are the product of long and patient research, shared thinking, and slow writing.

So I feel a little unsure about what is next. But I am working on two collections of essays: One, In Theory, Anthropology, is about the ways that social theorists outside of the discipline have taken up anthropological ideas; the other, emerging from the class I’ve just described, is called Accusation and the Academy. I like the essay form for the freedom, playfulness, and range it affords—and for the foreseeable future, I think that will be the genre in which I work.

Which three writers, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

Only three? That’s difficult. But perhaps (and without much thought about whether they’d all get along), I would invite Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (from South Africa), along with George Eliot (England), and W.E.B Du Bois (U.S./Ghana). All three of these writers were radicals and radically ahead of their time. They all read everything they could get their hands on, to understand their worlds, and they all wrote many kinds of things, which they brought to maturity, and even to crisis, in their novels.

These were in some real sense philosophical novels, and each of the three bent the genre to accommodate the most adventurous extra-disciplinary thought. There is something like a critical social experiment, a thought of transgressing the norms of the time, in the works of these writers. I would love to speak to each of them, and even more, to hear them speak to each other. Sometimes, you want to be at a dinner party as an invisible guest, even if you are the host.