The Rise and Demise of Gold: Mapping Technological Change and Creativity on a Cameroonian Resource Frontier

This project examines the emergence and closure of a resource frontier in Cameroon, showing how it has constituted a colonial and post-colonial 'technological interface' generative of forms of sociotechnical change and creativity, brought about through the extraction and depletion of gold. I bring these insights into dialogue with the burgeoning anthropological study of resources, technology, and the growing role of China in Africa.

This project builds on my PhD's ethnographic research in the East Region of Cameroon, where Gbaya communities practice artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) to extract gold since its discovery by French colonial mining companies (1930s) until the recent arrival of Chinese companies that are radically depleting local gold deposits. I explored the changing material processes of extraction through which local inhabitants carved out a livelihood in this new situation of scarcity.

I show how practices and concepts of 'generativity' arise from and inform processes of sociomaterial transformation relating to the production of resources at two interconnected scales. In the first, I examine material transformations within mining, through which Gbaya produce, conceptualise and value gold. In the second, I explore the transformations of Gbaya extractive practices at a broader scale, as and through sociotechnical change.

This project seeks to consolidate and develop my PhD research, with a focus on this second research strand, to explore the generation and transformation of techniques themselves. By studying the technological longue durée, this project aims to elucidate how the East Region of Cameroon and the lives of its Gbaya inhabitants have been structured by a historically doubled resource frontier, opened by the French and closed by the Chinese.

Considering the beginning and end of gold alongside each other, I show how encounters between Gbaya and French colonial and Chinese mining companies give rise to generative processes within the technological realm. I conceptualise ASM in this context as a 'technological interface', a productive site of interaction where vernacular Gbaya and incoming (French/Chinese) ideas, practices and objects are interwoven, resulting in instances of technological creativity, experimentation and change that, I argue, materialise and constitute 'frontier' dynamics (Kopytoff 1987, Tsing 2003).

Concretely, this considers how Gbaya miners materially, ritually and conceptually appropriate and redeploy French colonial and Chinese mining techniques into their own pre-existing sociotechnical repertoire to overcome the dispossession caused by the French and Chinese. More broadly, this project will shed light on processes of resource extraction, foreign-led land grabs and rural transformation that are intensifying throughout Africa.

My articles examine two iterations of this 'interface': how Gbaya ritually appropriated mining techniques and innovatively redeployed excavators in the aftermath of the French and Chinese, respectively. My interdisciplinary workshop will enable a comparative, empirical and theoretical, exploration of this underexamined question of technological change and innovation in Africa, to inform my own conceptual approach and widen my academic networks.

My new research will complement my PhD findings, providing crucial data on the Franco-Gbaya and Sino-Gbaya technological encounters around mining. Archival research enables me to further compare colonial French and contemporary Gbaya mining techniques to identify sociotechnical innovation. Interview data on current extractive dynamics in Cameroon will focus on the ongoing Chinese impact on this resource frontier.

My report will communicate my PhD findings for NGOs to create social impact and engagement, highlighting the neglected technological aspect of ASM to shed light on the creative and destructive effects of mining and the full impact of the Chinese on these communities.