Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Gbaya artisanal mining practices at the interface with French colonial and Chinese extractive encounters. It considers ‘extraversion’ as a specifically ‘technical’ mode of action, through which Gbaya miners have creatively appropriated both gold and its modes of extraction.

Paper long abstract:

In the East Region of Cameroon, gold was first ‘discovered’ in the 1930s through French colonial extraction. It has since been mined artisanally by local Gbaya communities until the recent arrival of Chinese private mining companies who have radically depleted local gold stocks through land grabs and mechanized extraction since the 2010s.

These two periods constitute a historical doubling that structures the political economy of this region and the lives of its inhabitants, that are bracketed by two, temporal, resource frontiers and moments of dispossession within which processes of generativity and creativity have germinated. This paper explores the dynamics of ‘extraversion’ in these Gbaya extractive encounters with the French and Chinese, and the ways in which they are constituted in the technological realm.

As already marginalized communities grapple with the scarcity and aftermath of this resource, proclaiming that ‘the gold is gone’, they nevertheless continue to practice artisanal mining, innovating and experimenting with extractive techniques to sustain a livelihood. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces the sociomaterial transformations of mining and the forms of Gbaya technical and ritual innovation and creation arising out of the encounters with the French and Chinese.

In doing so, it considers ‘extraversion’ in this instance as a specifically ‘technical’ or technological mode of action, through which Gbaya miners have appropriated both gold and its modes of extraction.