Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, CÔte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology.
Acknowledgments ix
Orthographic Notes xv
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction. Geology and West African History 1
1. A Tale of Two Miners in Tinkoto, Senegal, 2014 29
2. West Africa’s Ritual Geology, 800–1900 58
3.Making Customary Mining in French West Africa 86
4. Colonial Geology and African Gold Discoveries 108
5. Mineral Mapping and the Global Cold War in SÉnÉgal Oriental 129
6. A West African Language of Subterranean Rights 153
7. Race, Islam, and Ethnicity in the Pits 177
Conclusion. Subterranean Granaries 201
Glossary 207
Notes 211
Bibliography 259
Index 295
