Paper short abstract:

At Tanzania’s first uranium mine, local claim-making efforts highlight African vernacular struggles to reimagine extractive economies. Recovering stories of African uranium mining outside other than the infamous and illicit can contribute to reconceptualizing Africa’s relation to the nuclear world.

Paper long abstract:

Recovering stories of African uranium mining outside the cases of the infamous, imagined, and illicit can contribute to reconceptualizing Africa’s relation to the nuclear world. At Tanzania’s first uranium mine, persistent delays leave the project and its neighbours in limbo. This paper examines Tanzania’s uranium mining industry, based on 15 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. From the archives of colonial and post-independence Tanzania, the Selous Sedimentary Basin materializes as a target of mineral exploration. Oral histories of those whose ancestors were evicted from what would become the mining concession link geological exploration and global commodity markets with local histories. This geological and colonial history is the context for two contemporary claims on mining company resources: of unlawful dispossession and of environmental pollution. This paper considers these local efforts to make financial claims on the mining company. Rather than examine these deployments of the past and present through the frame of dependency, this paper considers how this extraversion enacts new kinds of politics. Amidst the opacity of contemporary delays in commercial extraction, the ubiquitous and extraordinary mineral emerges from rural Tanzania, bringing with it a possibility to reorganize, or reappropriate an economically unfair world. While Tanzania waits for the development of this large-scale extraction project, speculation and suspicion define local understandings of the role of the mine in the country’s ecology and economy. Examining local claim-making efforts invites us to move beyond critiques of ongoing (neo)colonial encounters with global commodities, to consider African vernacular struggles to reinvent the nuclear world.