Paper short abstract:

Focusing on a delayed industrial resource extraction project in Tanzania, this paper considers the stories that emerge to explain this not-yet project and commodities in-the-making. How can taking these stories seriously reveal the multiple meanings being made in these transitional times and spaces?

Paper long abstract:

Extractive industries appear to be deploying new technologies of resource exploitation at breakneck pace to meet energy demands by accessing previously excluded areas and financially unviable deposits. At the same time, delays, pauses, and slowdowns in mines continue to be a function of these ventures within the capitalist economy. Social scientists telling the stories of these not-yet projects, communities in limbo, and resources in-the-making document the multiple meanings being made in these transitional times and spaces. This paper focuses on rural southern Tanzania, where the country's first uranium mine is quiet as it completes its eighth year of delays. Based on 15 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, this paper examines the (hi)stories of how Tanzanian uranium came to be and the stories explaining why the project is on hold. While geological and colonial archival material illustrate the ways in which the subterranean sedimentation of the Karoo formation repeatedly became the site of mineral exploration in the twentieth century, oral histories contextualize Tanzania's recent process of permitting uranium mining within a longer history of interest in this radiant mineral. People living in the area make sense of delays and uncertainty regarding the development of the project by weaving stories of ongoing political intrigue. These stories of encountering Tanzanian uranium (past, present, and future) invite us to theorize the ways in which resources materialize through the narratives we (re)tell, revealing languages for, and possibilities of, contestation and resistance to efforts to incorporate radioactive soils into global nuclear commodity chains.