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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the everyday vernacular knowledges produced by artisanal miners as they navigate mining toxicities and accidents in Zimbabwe.

Paper long abstract:

The mining economy of Zimbabwe depends on gold outputs from Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining, but beyond this Panglossian upbeat picture, there is a darker story of extractivism. Gold mining has resulted in the extensive use of cyanide, mercury and arsenic acid and these chemicals have affected the health and everyday life of artisanal miners. This paper seeks to explore the environmental history of mining pollution in three localities of resource extraction in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland province. While there a copious scholarship on mining pollution, there is limited literature that engages with the ingenuity of miners in navigating radioactive toxic waste and their everyday environmental intellectual consciousness. Drawing from engaged ethnographic fieldwork with interlocutors, this paper demonstrates that while miners negotiate chemical exposure in mining, they also learn about the nature of chemicals, its emotive behaviours and as a result they develop idiographic language on how they think and reimagine toxicities. This paper argues that while miners work and adapt to the toxic circumstances, they create knowledge and develop vernacular ideas on pristine landscapes, dust behaviour in underground tunnels mines as ways of navigating toxic exposure. Using toxic tales from children, the paper reimagines toxicity as both destructive but also inseparable from capital accumulation and livelihoods in mining frontiers. The paper joins the growing conversation on environmental transformation in southern Africa and expands the complicated historiographies of resource extraction, toxicology, socio-environmental knowledge ,capital accumulation and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa.