Introduction1
Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), generally defined as ‘labour-intensive, low-tech mineral exploration and processing activities’ (Hilson 2011, 1032), has grown into a critical source of livelihood for millions of people across the African continent. In Katanga,2 the southeast province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the artisanal mining sector has witnessed a dramatic expansion since the late 1990s. Faced with the decline of the state mining company Gécamines and struggling to keep afloat in a context of political instability and economic crisis, tens of thousands of people have moved to the mining areas in the hope of finding new sources of income. Artisanal miners (called creuseurs in French) work either legally, in concessions earmarked for ASM by the Congolese government,3 or illegally, in concessions belonging to Gécamines or to private mining companies, where they constantly face the risk of forced eviction (Cuvelier 2011a). They use shovels, pickaxes and other rudimentary tools to excavate copper and cobalt ores. These minerals find their way to the international market through the mediation of local mineral buyers (French: négociants) who buy them from miners and sell them to authorised trading houses (French: maisons) in big cities such as Lubumbashi, Likasi and Kolwezi.4 According to Congolese mining laws, only these trading houses are allowed to export artisanal mining products outside the country.
In this article, I will show that the world of Katanga’s artisanal miners provides a fertile ground for the study of the relationship between money, migration and masculinity. Before I explore in depth the contemporary realities of Katangese ASM, it is important to note some of the continuities and changes with the colonial-era system of mine migrant labour in southern and central Africa. It is striking that migrant labour has remained a predominantly male affair: the vast majority of people working in the mines are men. It is true that the mining areas are populated by considerable numbers of women and children, who try to earn a living by sorting out and cleaning minerals, running shops and restaurants, trading consumer goods and clothing, or selling sexual services. Yet, men are the only ones digging mineshafts, excavating mineral ores and transporting heavy bags with copper or cobalt.
As in the past, there is a strong connection between mining and the making of masculine identities. As I have argued elsewhere (Cuvelier 2014), working in the mines continues to be a popular strategy to prove one’s manhood. Many Katangese men still believe that, thanks to their work in the mines, they will be able to develop typically masculine qualities such as physical strength, bravery and technical knowledge. Another continuity with the past is the persistence of a remittance economy. Artisanal miners continue to send part of their mining revenues to their household members back home, albeit on a much more limited scale than before.
There are also significant changes. As I will show in this article, the growth of ASM in Katanga has gone hand in hand with the emergence of a mining subculture which has its own moral economy (see also De Boeck 2001; Walsh 2003). Katangese artisanal miners have developed their own monetary ideas and practices which are in many ways different from those of earlier generations of migrant workers in the area. Spending money in a wasteful fashion is an important aspect of kivoyou,5 a lifestyle of excess characteristic of the Katangese mining subculture.
Another change concerns mobility patterns, which have become much more complex. During the colonial era, migrant workers used to work in a limited number of places for relatively long periods of time, and had the habit of moving back and forth between the mines and their areas of origin at fixed intervals. Today artisanal miners enjoy the reputation of being an army of fortune-seekers, living on the margins of society, having few personal belongings and regularly moving from one place to another in the hope of striking it rich. However, their movements are not random. There are certain patterns in their mobility, and their decisions to move or to stay where they are, are usually based on careful considerations of the advantages and disadvantages involved.
The relationship between migrant workers and their families has also undergone significant transformations. The engine of the Katangese economy has been sputtering since the beginning of the 1970s6 (see also Rubbers forthcoming). Important for my argument here is that this chronic economic crisis has led to the gradual erosion of kinship ties and solidarity in Katangese society (Petit and Mutambwa 2005). Previously, miners considered it an honour to act as reliable male breadwinners. Nowadays, many creuseurs tend to avoid contacts with relatives and other dependants, because they are unable or unwilling to offer them material support.
In what follows, I will present a detailed case study of a money dispute that occurred in March 2006 in the mine of Kalabi. I was a privileged witness to this dispute: through my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the area, I already knew all the people involved before they got into an argument with each other. For several months, they had been working in the same team until one day one of the diggers took off, moved to the Mbola mine and left his workmates in Kalabi with a large amount of unpaid debts. Keeping in touch with both the ‘deserter’ and his duped colleagues, as well as with their respective relatives and friends, I was able to follow in great detail how each of the parties involved coped with the financial consequences of the interrupted cooperation agreement. Through this case study, I will provide a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of daily life in Katanga’s artisanal mining areas. I will focus my attention on the significance of monetary ideas and practices in the construction of masculine identities among migrant workers living and working in a context of economic crisis, changing gender relations and eroding kinship ties.
On a methodological note, I follow the principles of the extended case method (Van Velsen 1967), which was developed by anthropologists of the Manchester School and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, working in southern and central Africa during the 1950s and 1960s (Werbner 1984). The method consists of producing a detailed account of the genesis, course, resolution and implications of a particular dispute, and has the advantage of allowing ethnographers to combine a small-scale focus with a thorough understanding of more general political, economic and social processes. The extended case method turns out to be particularly well suited for the description and analysis of unstable and non-homogeneous societies such as the ones found in mining areas. I will follow the structure of Max Gluckman’s (1940) classic article on the opening of a bridge in what is now KwaZulu-Natal – a precursor of the extended case method (Werbner 1984, 162). I will first present the events as I recorded them in my notebooks before moving on to a more general discussion of the social processes and dynamics at play.
A deal gone wrong7
Between February 2005 and December 2007, I spent 15 months living in Lwambo, a small town situated 20 kilometres north of Likasi. During colonial times, this place used to be a ‘rural quarter’ (French: quartier rural), created by the Belgian administration with the aim of regrouping and resettling African labour recruits who had left employment in the city but refused to go back to their areas of origin because they did not want to be under customary rule again. Colonial authorities wanted to avoid a scenario in which these ‘uprooted’ Africans (French: déracinés) would start occupying land allocated to white settler farmers. They decided to bring them together in ‘rural quarters’ such as Lwambo, where they constituted a labour reserve for companies in the city and settler farms in the urban periphery (Grévisse 1951, 151–166). Ironically, Lwambo became the place of residence of Pande Kyala, the paramount chief of the Sanga ethnic group, who turned it into the administrative capital of the Sanga chieftaincy in the early 1970s.
In the four decades that followed, Lwambo witnessed a spectacular growth with a population rising from 1378 in 1971 (Munanga 1986, 51) to approximately 25,000 in 2006. This was in large part due to a long-term trend of reverse migration that started from the second half of the 1970s onwards. Many people who lost their jobs in the city and could no longer afford the high living costs moved to the countryside in the hope of meeting their subsistence needs through agriculture. In 2005 the opening of three artisanal mines near Lwambo attracted a new wave of emigrants from the city who decided to try their luck as creuseurs, working shoulder to shoulder with local diggers.
In February 2005 I arrived in Lwambo with my fieldwork assistant, Santa Katwe-Teba, a former mineral buyer. The local authorities advised us to move into Hotel Kyandimuna, situated in the commercial part of town. The hotel turned out to be an excellent operating base for my doctoral research on the lives and practices of artisanal miners. Most of the other hotel rooms were occupied by mineral buyers, and diggers regularly dropped by to show samples of their mineral ores. In 2006 I befriended a mining team working in Kalabi copper mine, about a half-hour walk from our hotel. The team was composed of three people. Jean was a 43-year-old qualified mechanic of Luvale origin. He had started working as an artisanal miner to support his wife and three children in Likasi. René was a 52-year-old polygamous peasant of Lunda-Ndembu origin and lived in the centre of Lwambo. He had once worked as the bodyguard of the Sanga paramount chief and now spent most of the dry season working as an artisanal miner to supplement his meagre farming income. Finally, Robert was a childless 40-year-old man of Lunda origin, who grew up in Lubumbashi. In Lwambo he worked full-time as an artisanal miner while his wife tried to make ends meet through agriculture.
At the time of my first encounter with Jean, René and Robert, the Kalabi copper mine witnessed a massive influx of new artisanal miners and mineral buyers. This was the result of the closure of several major mining concessions (where industrial mining projects were about to begin),8 the spectacular rise of copper prices on the international market and the inaccessibility of other artisanal mines during the rainy season. One of the newcomers was 34-year-old Eugène from the Ruashi neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, a mineral buyer who was accustomed to living in the seclusion of remote mining camps. Like other négociants, Eugène financially supported a few diggers in exchange for their production and a share of the revenues. He spent his days at his mine pit seated on a wooden armchair, supervising his diggers. From this position, he had made a habit of listening in to the conversations of people passing by. One day he heard Jean’s mining team complaining about problems with rising groundwater. Eugène knew that they could not afford a water pump and took advantage of the situation. He promised to help them if they were prepared to conclude a mineral purchasing agreement with him. As part of the deal, they would physically connect their pit with his and join hands with the diggers he had already recruited. Once Jean and his teammates had given their go-ahead, Eugène gave each of them 15,000 Congolese francs so that they could buy food rations while connecting the two pits.
In accordance with a well-established mining custom, the members of the digging team used a substantial part of the money to organise a joint pub-crawl. The only one absent was Jean. While his teammates spent the whole night drinking artisanal whisky, he stayed behind in the Kalabi mining camp.
Bailing out
Hardly two days later, Jean left Kalabi like a thief in the night. He had just received worrying news from his elder brother. Jean’s wife, Cathy, was not able to pay that month’s rent for their house in Likasi. To make things worse, the landlord, the pastor of the local Pentecostal church they regularly attended, had made an indecent proposal to Cathy, telling her he would forget about the rent if she agreed to have sex with him.
The deposit for a rented house in Likasi working-class neighbourhoods was around US$100–150, and Jean did not have that kind of money at hand. His income from the Kalabi mine was too low to save towards new accommodation for his wife and children. Following the advice of his brother, in April 2006 he moved to the Mbola mine, which was situated in Kipushi Territory, approximately 90 kilometres from Lubumbashi and 9.5 kilometres from Luishia. Mbola attracted large crowds of copper diggers, while the nearby Hewa Bora mine was known for cobalt production. Whereas Kalabi had only 500 diggers, the Mbola mining camp boasted a population of several thousands, with a wide range of hotels, restaurants, infirmaries, small shops, cinemas and even three or four parabolic antennas. Jean was confident that this was the right place to save the money he needed for the deposit on a new house. Adapting to the new environment would not be a problem, as he would be working with his brother’s team. To avoid further trouble with the Pentecostal landlord, he also asked his parents-in-law in Likasi if Cathy and the children could stay in their compound for a while. This decision was not an easy one, as it violated the Luvale rule of virilocal residence.
Jean’s experiences in the Mbola mine
Jean settled in a noisy and crowded section of the mining camp, and did his best to integrate with diggers and residents. He regularly went out drinking with his new teammates and helped them to pay off a debt they had incurred in another mine. His efforts were rewarded with the guarantee of a daily meal and the opportunity to work with a well-functioning team of miners – he was not asked to make a financial contribution to join.
Despite these promising beginnings, Jean’s confidence took a terrible blow when, hardly one month after his arrival, the mine was closed down, following orders from Mwamba Kabasele, a Lubumbashi-based businessman. Kabasele wanted to start up a large-scale mining project and had acquired the official rights to the concession from the National Mining Registry in Kinshasa. He did not forcefully evict artisanal miners, although he was legally entitled to do so. Instead, he tried to negotiate a settlement with them. They would be allowed to work on his concession on condition they sold all their minerals to him. However, Kabasele’s price was far below market level, and his proposal was rejected. All mining and trading activities in Mbola came to a complete standstill. It looked as if the mine was going to close.
Playing with the idea of moving to yet another mine, Jean transferred a large amount of cash to his wife. For her part, Cathy was happy to give a new boost to her trading activities. Temporarily relieved from the burden of childcare thanks to the help of her mother and sisters, she now had the money to start selling fish in the Mbola mining camp and visit her husband more frequently.
Fortunately for Jean, living conditions in Mbola took a turn for the better a few days after the Kabasele incident. In large part, this was due to the intervention of prominent politician Moïse Katumbi – then still in the ranks of President Kabila’s PPRD party.9 Katumbi was in the middle of his campaign for the July 2006 elections, in which he was running for a position as national member of parliament. Attending a public meeting in the mining camp, Katumbi encouraged the population ‘to recover their goods’, a call that led to the looting of Kabasele’s warehouse in Mbola (see also Cuvelier 2011a). A lot of money started circulating after that, and Jean moved quickly to complete several personal projects. First, he bought Cathy a cell phone, told her to stop selling fish in the mining camp and promised to meet her regularly near Likasi to give her money for the household. When he arrived in Mbola, Jean had borrowed money to rent a new house for his family in Likasi. He was now able to settle the debts and buy a freezer, instructing Cathy to install it in their living room. She could start selling soft drinks from home while looking after the children.
Things fall apart
Meanwhile, in Kalabi, Jean’s former teammates were struggling to stay afloat. René would not stop complaining about Jean’s unannounced departure and the huge pile of unpaid debts he had left behind. This added to René’s own debts, but did not discourage him from making a plan to settle his accounts. For this purpose, he mobilised social capital inside and outside Kalabi. He asked his second wife for some maize to sell in Lwambo. Furthermore, he borrowed some money from his second wife’s brother and used it to buy minerals in Kalabi. The intention was to hand them to creditors as payments in kind, together with products extracted from his pit. René also borrowed money from other local mineral buyers, with the promise of repaying his new debts with minerals. This cash allowed him to continue providing some financial support to his two homes during the crisis caused by Jean’s departure.
To his great frustration, however, his teammate Robert made it almost impossible to stick to this debt settlement plan. Ever since Jean had left Kalabi, Robert adopted the air of a desperado, making all sorts of promises to buyers without consulting his teammates. René was very annoyed by Robert’s behaviour and did not feel sorry for him when he was arrested after a creditor pressed charges.
René’s financial problems diminished his authority over his two households. Although, according to Lunda-Ndembu custom, he was entitled to assistance from his children and other people he had supported in the past, he was now told by one of his sons that he could no longer borrow money from them. On another occasion, when two of his other children were facing the break-up of their marriages, his relatives did not seek his advice. As a further sign of distance, his wives had stopped asking him for money to hire contract labourers to help on their fields.
Having presented the details of the money dispute and its aftermath, I will use the rest of this article to explain what this case study can tell us about the relationship between money, migration and masculinity in the Katangese world of artisanal mining.
‘Kutafuta maisha’: the search for a better life in times of instability and crisis
Lavish spending in the Katangese mining subculture
My extended case study clearly shows that Katangese creuseurs are under strong peer pressure to spend a substantial part of their revenue drinking and socialising together. It is considered an unwritten law that, on payment day, members of the same team must go out drinking together. The dust must be washed away (Swahili: kupunguza mvumbi, ‘to reduce the dust’) and the (temporary) end of suffering (Swahili: mateso inaisha, ‘misfortunes have ended’) calls for a celebration.
The lavish spending of money (Swahili: kuchoma makuta, ‘to burn money’) is one of the key characteristics of kivoyou, the lifestyle of excess that sets creuseurs apart from other men in Katangese society. Kivoyou, which can be translated more literally as ‘deviant lifestyle’, refers to an extensive register of acts and mannerisms such as swearing, wearing eccentric or expensive clothes, cross-dressing, drinking excessively, being disrespectful towards senior members of society and speaking hindubill – a kind of tongue-in-cheek, ‘underworld’ slang derived from French, English, Swahili, Lingala, Luba and other African languages.
Creuseurs who identify with kivoyou justify their own wastefulness with the saying ‘my body is my capital’ (Swahili: maungo yangu ni capital). On one level, this expression hints at the miners’ freedom to use their body to make money. It also points to their ability to use their body to project a certain image of themselves to others. From this perspective, it is important to take good care of the body and ‘make it happy’ (Swahili: kufurahisha maungo) by eating a lot, wearing expensive clothes and drinking alcohol to relax one’s muscles (Cuvelier 2014, 12–14).
While miners’ views stress the freedom to use their body as they wish and the close link between body and money, they acknowledge that money is a powerful force that can make one lose control of oneself. Money is believed to make people arrogant, boastful and proud, to the point that they can no longer watch their language and behaviour. It is believed that anyone who spends enough time with creuseurs runs the risk of falling under the dangerous spell of money. A conscientious family man can get so carried away by the party mood that he might suddenly decide to forfeit his household obligations, until he eventually abandons his wife and children. People see money as something akin to an addictive, intoxicating and personality-altering drug. It also resembles a virus in that it is contagious, aggressive and harmful. Through these two metaphors, artisanal miners express their vulnerability vis-à-vis money as an external, impersonal and irresistible force that brutally invades and radically transforms their everyday lives.
The excessive behaviours and monetary practices around the kivoyou lifestyle have contributed to the emergence of a new ideal of masculinity. When a miner has a lot of money and is considered successful, he is called mubinji (which is derived from the Ciluba word mubìndì, meaning ‘a rude and vulgar person’) and expected to treat his fellow workers to drinks regularly. If he manages to meet this expectation, people will say that he is an ‘entertainer’ (French: ambianceur) and behaves like a ‘wrestler’ (French: catcheur), because he fights with open hands and does not hold a tight grip on his money. A mubinji is expected to wear nice clothes such as denim trousers, denim suits and laced boots (Ibid., 17).
It may seem paradoxical that people who start working as artisanal miners in the hope of making enough money for their survival and that of their household members eventually end up glorifying a hedonistic lifestyle. Still, this is a common trend elsewhere too. In an edited volume with case studies on marginal people from different parts of the world – including Polish peasants, Amazonian forest foragers, Greek gamblers, Japanese wage labourers and Rom horse dealers in socialist Hungary – Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart (1999) point out that living in the moment through drinking, singing, gambling and immediate consumption often serves the purpose of regaining personal autonomy in contexts of exclusion, impoverishment and oppression. These practices help people to ‘invert their marginal status and put themselves at the centre of their own moral universe’ (Ibid., 2).
Anthropologists studying artisanal mining in sub-Saharan Africa have made similar observations. In his ethnography of artisanal diamond mining on the border between the DRC and Angola, De Boeck (2001) describes how young miners often spend hundreds of dollars on alcohol and women in a bid to increase their prestige. In an article on sapphire mining in northern Madagascar, Walsh (2003) argues that artisanal miners’ focus on the present can be seen as a form of protest against marginalisation. Instead of obediently taking up the passive role assigned to them by states and markets, miners try to act upon the world that surrounds them by engaging in what Walsh calls ‘daring consumption’: the money earned from mining activities is spent in excessive displays, with no plans for long-term accumulation through investment in cattle or buildings.
In the Katangese world of artisanal mining, the practices of conspicuous consumption serve a similar purpose. The aim is to show the outside world that miners, despite their marginal status, enjoy the freedom to use their money as they wish, and are not constrained by the financial needs of others. Money is thus transformed from an impersonal force associated with the capitalist global economy which operates in ways that are difficult to understand, into a personalised tool satisfying private needs and desires (see Hart 2007 on the dialectic between personal and impersonal dimensions of money).
Credit and debt
Another social fact emerging from the case study is the haunting omnipresence of debt (Swahili: deni, plural madeni). When diggers leave the mineshaft at the end of a working day, they often say they feel ‘cured’ (Swahili: minapona, ‘I am cured’). They see the performance of harsh and dangerous mining labour as a kind of therapy that heals them from the disease of being cash-strapped. While they know the risk of work accidents is high, they draw comfort from the idea that anyone who follows the therapy stands a good chance of recovering from his illness, at least temporarily. Creuseurs who are lucky enough to leave the mineshaft alive, can make enough money to settle some of their debts, satisfy their daily needs and maybe even buy new things for themselves and their dependants.
But rewards do not come quickly. In an edited volume on gold mining in West Africa, Panella aptly describes artisanal mining sites as ‘worlds of debts’. It may take mining teams weeks or even months before they dig enough minerals for sale, leaving them with no other option but to become indebted to a large number of people (Panella 2010, 5). It is not easy to change career path. The limited availability of alternative livelihoods and credit facilities outside the ASM sector forces them to stay in order to settle their debts. As I have shown in my case study, unexpected events, such as rising groundwater, the collapse of a mineshaft, the sudden departure of a heavily indebted teammate or the closure of a mining site, all add to the pressure and can make artisanal miners’ lives extremely stressful.
In order to reduce risks for the different parties involved, relations of credit and debt in Katanga’s artisanal mines are governed by a series of informal, unwritten rules. Négociants interested in owning a mining pit have a choice between requesting a virgin piece of land from the public mining authorities, or taking over an existing pit from someone else. In the latter case they usually have to pay the owner a substantial amount of money. Most of the times, diggers and négociants conclude a type of agreement known as ‘divided-by-two’ (French: divisé-par-deux): each party is entitled to half the revenue every time a load of minerals is sold to a trading house. The diggers promise to hand over all their minerals to the pit owner or to his supervisor (French: superviseur), and the pit owner agrees to provide them with various forms of material assistance. These include cash advances for preparatory excavation works (French: découverture), regular food rations, and the provision of tools and clothing on loan.
When diggers own the pit in which they work, they call themselves ‘independents’ (French: indépendants). Independents are not bound by an agreement with a négociant and are not supervised. Usually, they prefer to sell their minerals to a ‘passer-by’ (French: trotteur). Lacking funds of his own, a trotteur works for a trading house that gives him money to buy a certain quantity of minerals. He walks around the pits of independent miners and asks them if they have bags of minerals for sale. When diggers working for a négociant are unable to get by with the money and the food rations received, they also attempt to strike a deal with a trotteur: if he agrees to lend them some money, they promise to pay him back later in minerals, with interest.
Although every digger is free to handle his personal money as he pleases, contracting a loan on behalf of the team without informing one’s teammates is definitely not allowed. As a rule, members of a digging team consult about which négociant or trotteur they will approach to obtain a loan and how many bags of minerals they will offer as repayment. When a digger joins a team that has already contracted loans before his arrival, part of his labour in the pit goes towards paying off previous team loans. A digger who wants to leave a team is expected to announce his departure and make arrangements with his teammates about settling his remaining debts.
Jean’s and Robert’s actions indicate that these rules are not always respected. My case study shows that the Katangese world of artisanal mining is marked by nerve-racking ambivalence. People constantly walk a thin line between loyalty and betrayal, honesty and deceit. This moral ambiguity is reflected in creuseurs’ appreciation for both altruistic generosity and selfish craftiness. As I explained earlier, it is a positive assertion of masculinity to treat one’s fellow workers to drinks. Creuseurs also have great admiration for what they call a ‘meza moto’ or ‘heat-swallower’ (Swahili: kumeza moto, ‘to swallow heat’). A meza moto is a reckless adventurer, fond of dangerous situations and careless of the consequences. He borrows money from a large number of négociants and trotteurs at the same time, even if he knows perfectly well that he will be unable to repay his debts. Each time he arrives at a new mine, he follows the same pattern. First, he wins the confidence of the people he wants to collaborate with, then he pockets their money. When he is about to be cornered by his creditors, he moves to another mine and starts all over again (Cuvelier 2014, 15–16).
People on the move, households under stress
A final theme emerging from the case study is the tension between living for the moment and the obligations towards dependants back home. As Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart rightly remark, ‘few people manage to live wholly within the present and, for the majority, some aspect of the long term is reincorporated through the back door’ (1999, 14). In this respect, Katangese creuseurs are not so dissimilar to gulfans, young men from Kerala in South India who migrate to Persian Gulf states to find temporary jobs to save money before they start their households back home. Osella and Osella (2000) point out that gulfans are forced to find a balance between two conflicting sets of expectations. As migrants with access to ‘easy money’, they are under pressure to portray themselves as leading a life of luxury, ease and unlimited spending. Yet, at the same time, as young adults growing into maturity, they feel the need to contribute to the well-being of relatives and friends, and save enough money to build a family when they return home.
People such as Jean and René are referred to as ‘responsible persons’ (French: responsables, singular responsable): they try to fulfil their family obligations despite the pressure of fellow miners embracing the kivoyou lifestyle. A responsable – the exact opposite of a mubinji – typically tries to cut back on personal expenses so that he can send money to his wife and children. He does not squander money and budgets for future expenses. When people criticise him for his lack of generosity, they call him a ‘boxer’ (French: boxeur): unlike a wrestler, he fights with his hands closed, and does not let go of his money. Two terms are used to highlight the intransigence of a responsable: mubéton and mucraquant. The first evokes the image of something made of concrete, impervious to external pressure. The second word refers to the sound of handcuffs: the responsable is chained to his household obligations and therefore unable to pay attention to his colleagues’ need for comradeship and solidarity (Cuvelier 2014, 18).
Artisanal miners doing their best to behave like responsible breadwinners often use the expression kufanya maquis (literally ‘to make a bush’). The French word maquis is synonymous with the forest or the bush, a space that is opposed to the village and the city. Moving to the ‘bush’ in this case means leaving one’s family and neighbours when finances dry up at home, to make money among strangers in an environment fraught with dangers, but also pregnant with opportunities to access unimaginable riches.10 The final goal is to reinvest the raised capital back home. The expression kufanya maquis became popular in the Mobutu era, when rebels fighting the Kinshasa regime retreated to remote areas to prepare for their coup d’état. After spending several years in the bush, Kabila’s troops managed to overthrow a long-time dictator. This reinforced popular beliefs about the need for self-discipline, preparation and endurance in the pursuit of personal goals.
The resolve with which some men cling to the idea of kufanya maquis testifies to an eagerness to pursue a ‘progressive temporality’, as Smith (2011) calls it in reference to artisanal mining in eastern DRC. Responsables want to move ahead in life and build a future for themselves and their families. They are stubbornly set on their goal, in the midst of instability and unpredictability brought about by fluctuating mineral prices, the risk of forced eviction by large-scale mining companies, and short-lived cooperation agreements with fellow miners and mineral buyers.
Saving large amounts of cash is also made difficult by the lack of banking facilities and the high frequency of theft. Miners have developed alternative saving strategies, including changing Congolese francs into dollars so they can carry fewer notes wherever they go; sending money home with a messenger; buying a television screen or a stereo set that can be easily resold for cash; or leaving money with somebody they trust such as a mineral buyer or a restaurant owner. Financial reputation determines reliability in such instances: a person is deemed trustworthy if he gives the impression of being well-to-do and having sufficient resources to pay back quickly.
The difficulties that confronted Jean during his time in Kalabi are common among married migrant labourers. The meaning of their marriage changes as a result of their protracted absence from home. On one hand, they have problems proving themselves as reliable breadwinners. On the other hand, they are worried about their loss of control over their wives’ sexuality. They stay away from home for weeks on end, because they feel they have not yet earned enough money to return with pride and dignity, or they have become accustomed to spending their days without having to worry about household obligations.
The women staying behind develop their own survival strategies. They sometimes move in with their parents, an option mockingly described as a ‘strategic withdrawal’ (French: repli stratégique) because it evokes the tactical withdrawal of an army. Other strategies include organising informal saving groups with other women, generating their own revenues through small-scale trading, engaging in sex work or joining the solidarity networks of churches and non-governmental organisations. As Johnson (1992) points out, survival strategies are not only based on individual action and behaviour, but also on relationships between individuals and households, and other forms of group solidarity. These networks are very important for women because their earning power is generally lower than that of men, and they are directly responsible for childcare and household welfare (Ibid., 149–150).
Cathy’s quick reaction to the events in Mbola illustrates the entrepreneurial spirit of Katangese women, trying to make ends meet through all sorts of economic activities. As MacGaffey points out, women’s involvement in the Congolese informal economy increased dramatically from the 1970s onwards (1991, 34–35). Women such as Cathy have started to call themselves businesswomen (French: femmes d’affaires), using their trading activities to gain greater financial autonomy and a better bargaining position vis-à-vis their husbands.
Before moving on to the conclusion, it is necessary to say a few words about the relationship between artisanal mining and agriculture in Lwambo. As explained earlier in the article, Lwambo used to be a quartier rural during colonial times. This implied, among other things, that all the land was owned by the Comité Spécial du Katanga (CSK), a commercial company formed in 1900 and entrusted with administrative responsibilities in a concession area in the southern part of Katanga. The inhabitants of Lwambo were able to rent land from the CSK on an individual basis (Wilmet 1963, 2). However, when Lwambo became the administrative capital of the Sanga chieftaincy in the early 1970s, Pande Kyala, the paramount chief, started distributing land according to Sanga customary law. This customary system was inclusive: even people such as René who were not of Sanga origin were able to obtain a piece of land from the paramount chief.
Like many other farmers in Lwambo, René and his relatives hired contract labourers to carry out part of the work. Contract labour has a long history in Katanga. According to some of my informants, contract labourers used to be paid with maize prior to the monetisation of the economy. Nowadays, payments are usually made in cash. Landowners’ need for contract labour is subject to seasonal fluctuations. It is usually hard to find contract labourers in November and December, because almost everybody is busy working his own land and does not have time to take on other activities. Some observers maintain that the current shortage of contract labourers is due to the popularity of artisanal mining. The wage difference between agriculture and mining supports these claims: one makes much more money working in a mine than as a labourer on other people’s fields.
Among the Lunda-Ndembu, René’s group, it is very common for men and women to remain distant from one another. Men do not interfere with the way women organise their time and, very often, they do not know much about their spouses’ income and expenses. It is normal for women to farm their own land, and husbands usually have no rights to their agricultural produce (Pritchett 2001, 169–204). From this perspective, the decision of René’s spouses and daughters to organise their agricultural activities without his support was not that unusual. That being said, while it is true that the Lunda-Ndembu gender configuration naturalises the economic autonomy of women and forces them to develop the ability to cope on their own, there are indications that, in the case of René and his female relatives, the ordinary division of labour was distorted. The discontinuation of René’s payments for the hiring of contract labourers brought a significant change in the financial organisation of his two households: the link between his own economic activities and those of his household members ceased to exist. The case of René highlights the growing popularity of artisanal mining as a rural livelihood strategy in Katanga and suggests that the increasing involvement of male rural dwellers in ASM is having a profound impact on the gendered division of household labour.
Conclusion
The aim of this article was to use an extended case study of a dispute among a group of artisanal miners to examine the relationship between money, migration and masculinity in contemporary Katanga. I have argued that Katangese men of different ages and backgrounds use their stay in the mining areas to carve out space for themselves, experiment with alternative ways of ‘being a man’ and regain a sense of control over their lives in a protracted economic crisis. Although the mining labour itself is hard and dangerous, the world of artisanal mining constitutes a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia (Werthmann 2010), where norms and rules differ from those in the rest of Katangese society, and where individuals appear to enjoy higher levels of personal liberty and greater room for manoeuvre. Kivoyou, the lifestyle of excess cultivated by Katangese artisanal miners, forms the core of a counter-culture aimed at expressing the desire to experience ‘moments of freedom’ (Fabian 1998) as well as feelings of anger and resistance about the precarious conditions in which they are forced to live and work. By displaying aberrant behaviour, handling their money in unconventional ways and claiming the right to move from one mine to another whenever they feel like it, creuseurs want to show that they are able to exert some degree of control over their life trajectories, even though they are condemned to live with the consequences of the slump in the Katangese economy.
Nevertheless, as Vigh (2006) points out, developing strategies to get a firmer grip on life in a context of chronic instability and crisis does not shield people from the bigger forces at work in society. In his ethnography of urban youth trying to survive through conflict and war in Guinea–Buissau at the end of the 1990s, he states that
[a]s we seek to move within a turbulent and unstable socio-political environment, we are at the same time being moved by currents, shifts and tides, requiring that we constantly have to attune our action and trajectory to the movement of the environment we move through. (Vigh 2006, 14)
The metaphor of sailors navigating across a troubled sea also applies to artisanal miners in Katanga. In order to keep afloat, creuseurs need to be able to anticipate and deal with challenges and setbacks resulting from political-economic developments at local, provincial, national, regional and global levels. As my case study has shown, one of the biggest threats to the future of artisanal mining in Katanga is the return of industrial mining companies to the region. This recent revival of large-scale industrial mining is spurred by the spectacular growth in emerging economies such as China and India, which has led to an unanticipated rise in demand for minerals such as copper and cobalt. For Katangese creuseurs, the resurrection of large-scale mining is likely to have far-reaching consequences. More and more mining concessions will become inaccessible owing to the start of industrial mining projects, and artisanal miners will experience increasing difficulties in getting access to mineral-bearing land. In the coming years, the Congolese government will have a difficult choice to make between privileging the growth of capital-intensive large-scale mining, which allegedly generates more fiscal revenue and is easier to regulate, or ensuring the continued existence of a labour-intensive artisanal and small-scale mining sector, which is of crucial importance to the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Katangese.