Colonial Extractions: Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa 9781442619951

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COLONIAL EXTRACTIONS Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa

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PAULA BUTLER

Colonial Extractions Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2015

Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4932-3

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Butler, Paula, 1960–, author Colonial extractions : race and Canadian mining in contemporary Africa / Paula Butler. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4932-3 (bound) 1.  Mineral industries – Social aspects – Africa.  2.  Mineral industries – Economic aspects – Africa.  3.  Mining corporations – Africa.  4.  Mining corporations – Canada.  5.  Miners – Africa – Social conditions.  6.  Africa – Race relations.  I.  Title. HD9506.A372B88 2015  338.2096  C2015-900426-8 ____________________________________________________________________________

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Acronyms  xi 1 Contemporary Canadian Mining: Colonial Continuities  3 The Canadian Global Mining Industry: A Profile  8 Methodology for Critical Social Research  14 Research Design and Ethics  15 The Scope of the Book  19 2 Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  21 Racism, Colonialism, Capitalism  22 Race in Contemporary Neoliberal Capitalism  29 The Colonial Imaginary, Colonial Subjectivities, and Narratives of Nationhood  35 The Modern State: White Supremacist, Fascist, Neoliberal  39 Canada as a Colonialist White Supremacist State  48 Lastly … Why “Colonialist” versus “Imperialist”?  57 3 “I Hear the Rustling of Gold under My Feet”: Mining, Race, and the Making of Canada  60 Colonial Law and Mineral Appropriation  63 The Colonial Contact Zone: Power, Treaty Negotiation, and Resource Access  65 Settler Mining and Its Socio-legal Infrastructure  72

vi Contents

Resistance to Settler Mining  75 Mining Labour and the Production of the White Nation  78 Race, Resistance, and Mining in Contemporary Canada  80 Conclusions  83 4 “Something from Nothing”: Generating Wealth in the Racialized Mining Economy  85 Tracking Structural Violence  86 Mineral Wealth, Inequality, and Underdevelopment: “Resource Curse”  87 Localized Experiences of Mining-Related Structural Violence  91 How Is Mining-Related Structural Violence in Africa Explained?  101 Does Canadian Mining Presence Develop or Underdevelop African Countries?  107 Quantifying the Benefits: What African Mining Contributes to Canada  113 Economic Contribution and Tax Revenues  114 Summary: How Does Canada Benefit from Canadian Mining in African Countries?  121 Conclusion  123 5 Racial Rule: Resource Appropriation and the Rule of Law  126 Law in Critical Social Theory  127 Tracking Racially Coded Repertoires in Mining Reform Texts and Talk  131 Reforming Mining Laws in African States  138 Bulyanhulu and the Rule of Law  146 Conclusion  159 6 Who Do We Say We Are? Narratives of Canadian Mining Professionals in African States  162 Introduction  162 Tracing the Genealogy of the Canadian Mining Professional as a White Neoliberal Subject  163 Canadian Mining Professionals Operating in African Countries: A Profile  169 Introducing the Research Participants  172 Risk-Taking Explorers in Wild Lands  179

Contents vii

Good Guys, Inside a Fortress, Besieged  182 “Just Rock-Jocks”  187 Virtuous Subjects: “Doing Good Wherever We Are”  189 Canadians as “Quite Sensitive People”  191 Canadians as Culturally Sensitive  194 Canadians as Environmentally Responsible  195 Canadians Do Not Participate in Bribery or Corruption  196 Canadians as Philanthropists  199 The Callous Capitalist: Psychic Dimensions of Whiteness  202 The Stories Told: “Capital Pouring into the Country”  205 Conclusion: Performing Twenty-First-Century Whiteness  208 7 “I Wouldn’t Glorify Them as Prospectors”: Colonial Contact Zones and the Eradication of African “Artisanal” Miners  211 What Are “African Citizen-Miners”?  212 Why Focus on Canadian Miners’ Relationships with African Citizen-Miners?  215 Producing the Artisanal Miner as a Subject  217 Artisanal Miner as Savage Subject  217 Eradication by Assimilation  225 Alternative Livelihoods: Refashioning African Citizen-Miners as Poor People Requiring Development Assistance  229 Erasing the Other: Canadian Miners Encountering Autonomous Miners in African Countries  234 The White-Out of African Miners  236 Colonization = “Thingification”  238 When Contact Becomes Confrontation  240 Distancing the Other  242 Non-Recognition: The Other as a Different Kind of Human  245 Conclusion  247 8 Refusing the “White Man’s Burden”: Investing in Colour-Blind Mining in Post-Apartheid South Africa  250 Theorizing Racial Equality in South African Mining  251 Drafting the New South African Mining Law  253 What Was So Unusual about the South African Mining Law?  255 Anti-Racist Mining Law versus “Colour-Blind” Mining Law  259

viii Contents

Installing Colour-Blind Governance of South Africa’s Mining Sector: Discursive Strategies Introduced  260 PDAC: Refusing the Burden of Responsibility and Redress  266 Effrontery: “You can’t just grab it from people”  268 Redeploying Colonial Binaries in the Defence of White Property Rights  271 Canadian Miners: Guiding South Africa’s Future  279 Conclusion  281 9 Conclusion: Imagining Decolonized Relations  286 Notes  295 Bibliography  335 Index  365

Acknowledgments

This book has been a ten-year project that began as doctoral research at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. I wish to acknowledge with gratitude profound insights from faculty in what was the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, with very special thanks to Dr Sherene Razack, who consistently supported the value of my work, and to Dr George Dei, in whose courses I took early steps in understanding the systemic character of racism in Canada. I also acknowledge the seminal work of Dr Bonnie Campbell of Université du Québec à Montréal, whose writing catalysed my thinking about the Canadian global mining industry. I wish to thank those who agreed to be interviewed for this book; all were generous with their time and thoughts. Thanks are due to Kiri Staples and Jonathan Alphonsus for research assistance, and to the supportive colleagues at Trent University. Many thanks to staff at University of Toronto Press, the late Virgil Duff, Doug Hildebrand, and Anne Laughlin, as well as to Matthew Kudelka and Ruth Pincoe for their roles in the production of the book. Very special thanks are expressed to three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. The questions raised in this book are grounded in my lengthy experience working in the field of “international cooperation.” Among a wide circle of valued professional colleagues, I wish to acknowledge a number who played key roles in enhancing my appreciation of the African continent and of relations between Canada and Africa: Kimpianga Mahaniah, Makaniah Bita, Julia Mulaha, Louise Tappa, Omega Bula, Jonah Katoneene, Christine Mtango, Nzeba Kalombo, Tundu Lissu, Jim Kirkwood, Lee Holland, John Mihevc, Gary Kenny, and Denis Tougas.

x Acknowledgments

Writing is always a time-consuming endeavour. I gratefully acknowledge the women who provided excellent care for my children while I conducted research and wrote: Karen Kiddell, Janice Parsons, Karen Emerson, and Diane Spears. Warm thanks are extended to the close personal friends who encouraged me along the way. I was anchored throughout by family members – parents Lois and Karl; children Evelyn, Shannon, and Ravi – whose love, support and patience meant everything and to whom I offer inestimable thanks.

Acronyms

AU African Union Bill C-300 “An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries” CAMESE Canadian Association of Mining Equipment and Services for Export CIDA Canadian International Development Agency CSR corporate social responsibility DFAIT Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo EDC Export Development Canada EITI Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative ILO International Labour Organization MAC Mining Association of Canada MEG Metals Economics Group MIGA Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency NRC Natural Resources Canada PDAC Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada SCFAIT Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade TSE Toronto Stock Exchange UNECA United Nations Economic Commission on Africa

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COLONIAL EXTRACTIONS Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa

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1 Contemporary Canadian Mining: Colonial Continuities

We do not wish to sell our land or our water; let your friends stay in their own country … We do not want the white man. He steals what we have. We wish to live as we are. (Nootka chief, Vancouver Island, 1868)1 We are not going to leave this place at all. Nobody is going to leave this place for the white man. (Buchwadi Mbelwa, miner, Bulyanhulu, Tanzania, 2002)2 Why are we hearing these stories? Why is it that companies are engaged in this kind of terrible behaviour? We need to understand that in order to build the proper tool kit to deal with it. (Marketa Evans, Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor for the ­Extractive Sector Overseas; testimony to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT), House of Commons, Canada, 24 November 2009)

On 16 May 2011, five Tanzanians aged twenty-five to thirty-five were among a large crowd of people alleged to be illegally hunting for goldbearing ore inside the perimeter of a Canadian-financed and majorityowned gold mine in northern Tanzania. A confrontation with mine security or police occurred, and these men were shot dead.3 On 8 June 2011, a two-page Globe and Mail article reported that the mining company planned to erect, at a cost of $14 million, a 12-kilometre long, 3-metre-high concrete fence topped with electrified razor wire around the site as a strategy to keep out, once and for all, those described as “illegals.”4

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Confrontations between Indigenous populations and “settler” populations over resource extraction have a long history in Canada too. Several recent cases serve as examples. In 2007–8, opposition to mining exploration on the territories of several Indigenous nations in Ontario led to confrontations, court battles, fines, and prison sentences. Faced with uranium exploration initiated on their territory without consultation, three Ardoch Algonquin First Nations community leaders who had acted in line with their Algonquin cultural duty to protect and preserve this land were ordered by the Ontario Superior Court to cease their protest and cease blocking access to the site. One leader was arrested and sentenced to six months in jail.5 Farther north, six leaders of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation (colloquially known as “KI”) were sentenced to six months in jail for actions they had taken while protesting the terms of platinum exploration that had commenced on part of their traditional territory.6 In 2011, KI launched another round of protests against the province’s granting of a gold exploration licence to another company operating on their traditional territory.7 In British Columbia, the Tsilhqot’in Nation has long been attempting to prevent the development of a major gold/copper mine whose construction, it asserts, will cause severe ecological damage in a pristine wilderness over which it has territorial and political jurisdiction.8 Not only are mining and mining exploration contested, but so also are the interpretations and narratives woven around both. The Canadian mining industry is an intensely storied site, and the ideological debate that swirls around it has been shaped by and is dependent on highly resonant mythologies. What kinds of stories are being told about Canadian mining in the twenty-first century, from whose perspectives, and for what ends? As Bose and Lyons (2010) note in their study of the cultural narratives of US corporations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, “companies are always engaged in a kind of storytelling aimed at improving their public image and justifying their actions … These stories play a role in suturing or resolving contradictions and in rationalizing seemingly arbitrary and brutal decisions.”9 Asserting that the materiality of mining cannot be separated from the cultural and discursive processes that surround it, this book introduces a socio-cultural analysis, informed mainly by post-colonial and critical race theory, of the Canadian mining industry, its domestic history – including its relationship with the Canadian state – and its contemporary operations in African countries. It presents sobering conclusions about Canada’s mining presence in African jurisdictions.

Contemporary Canadian Mining Colonial Continuities  5

Over the years, I have been asked how I came to be researching and writing such a book. This is the story I usually tell: I grew up in an Ontario town whose major industry was an underground mine; several generations of male family members had been employed, directly or indirectly, in the mining sector and steel industry in parts of Canada, ranging from Cape Breton to British Columbia. This remained an unexamined backdrop to my life until, as an adult engaged in human rights and “economic justice” work focused on what was then Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, I learned of Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth and began to ask basic questions about mining, poverty, and wealth. As I continued learning, gained access to the ground-breaking work of Canadian political economists studying the Canadian global mining industry,10 and ultimately entered into doctoral studies in the field of critical race theory,11 the question I began to ask was: Is Canada engaged in a contemporary colonialist process of resource appropriation? If so, what makes this possible? Daniel Coleman (2006) writes wryly of “white civility” as the central mythology of a dominant Canadian identity, while Sunera Thobani (2007) identifies an “exalted” or noble spirit as characterizing the imagined white Canadian national subject. As a phenotypically “white,” non-Indigenous author, I embody this hypocrisy: presenting a critical analysis of Canada’s globalized mining sector even while acknowledging the comprehensive livelihood benefits and comforts that have accrued to myself and to other bodies and communities of “settlers” – or squatters – via the Canadian mining economy. The act of producing a critique of Canada’s global mining can be simultaneously a means of securing an exalted identity and a way of acknowledging positioning as a racially dominant (illegitimately privileged) subject in a racialized domestic and global society. I am unquestionably implicated in the story of Canadian colonialism. This book is an attempt at accountability for racist economic domination via mining and its inequitable local and global distribution of harms and benefits. Such analysis holds integrity only to the extent that it fosters deep national and personal self-interrogation, which might then generate energy and impetus for cultural, political, and economic transformation: conceivably, a politics of relinquishment and refashioned relationships. This book’s analysis identifies the need for an alternative national political trajectory of cessation, respect, restoration, just relations, and redress.

6  Colonial Extractions

Raised or socialized in a settler society still characterized by a predominant Eurocentricity and “everyday whiteness,” many Canadians are taught to think of Canada as a country characterized by innocence and fairness, meritocracy, exemplary ethical standards, inclusivity, and humanitarianism. It is sometimes asserted publicly, as a matter of fact, in what constitutes an act of erasure of theft, deception, violence, and other colonial atrocities, that Canada “was never a colonial power.”12 This false history as a “non-colonizing state” – in tandem with false depictions of Canada as a land where slavery and other forms of racial violence did not exist – is then deployed with powerful simplicity to produce an idea of Canadians as moral giants: Canadians are not people who colonize or enslave others; Canadians are not racist; Canadians are good. Against this pristine and culturally persuasive national mythology, the research question I posed – “Is Canada engaged today in colonialist resource appropriation?” – risked being dismissed as too extreme, even preposterous. However, the ethnographic research I conducted on the mining industry – interviewing Canadian mining industry personnel,13 attending industry events in Toronto, Ottawa, and Whitehorse, examining a multitude of industry and government documents – g ­ enerated data that slowly but surely supported a far less benign representation of Canada and its contemporary global activities. Moreover, my research was informed by the work of many Indigenous scholars – ­Harold Cardinal (1969), Taiaiake Alfred (1999), John Borrows (2002), Bonita Lawrence (2002, 2012), Patricia Monture (2006), Paula Sherman (2008), Leanne Simpson (2008), and others – who had clearly identified and analysed Canada as a colonizer state. It was also supported by recent scholarship that conceptualized Canada as a globalizing imperialist power (Razack, 2004; Gordon, 2010), as a “warrior state” (McKay and Swift, 2012), as a country with a hidden history of self-serving and sometimes unscrupulous foreign policy (Engler, 2009), and as associated with a range of mining-related social and environmental harms on the African continent (Deneault, Abadie, and Sacher, 2008). My analysis builds on, amplifies, and extends such work, with a specific focus on Canada’s contemporary mining presence in African countries. Importantly, my study is rooted in a cognizance of the historical processes of mineral resource appropriation within the territory called Canada; the notion that there is a culturally logical connection between past and present, domestic and international resource appropriation, is a central theme.

Contemporary Canadian Mining Colonial Continuities  7

Canadian society is theorized in this book as strongly shaped by the structures and cultures of white supremacy and capitalism. Such a theorization enables me to explore questions such as these: How is it that racialized structural violence, manifested as resource appropriation, becomes routinized and legitimized? And how is the popular imaginary pertaining to mining shaped, and by what social actors and processes? While the CSR counsellor’s comment, cited earlier, refers to the “terrible behaviour” of particular mining companies, the terrain explored in this book does not focus solely or even mainly on the behaviour of individual companies. Ultimately, it casts a much broader gaze across Canadian society. In this regard, the Canadian federal government – and the twenty-first-century neoliberal state more generally – comes under particular scrutiny at various points in this book, as does the ostensibly banal socio-legal and institutional infrastructure of the mining industry. Indeed, the contemporary colonialist global expansion of the Canadian resource extraction sector is not characterized only by horrific, media-garnering events like the ones that opened this chapter; that expansion also reflects less sensational forms of routine symbolic, discursive, and structural violence woven deeply into Canada’s racialized white settler cultural fabric. To the growing literature on global mining, this book contributes a socio-cultural analysis of the Canadian mining industry as part of a racially structured global political economy, with the starting point being Canada’s own colonial history. The Canadian mining sector is presented as having played a significant role in the past and continuing development of a white settler capitalist nation whose history has always featured aggressive geographical expansion and racially inflected confrontations with Indigenous (and other non-white) inhabitants. Canada’s contemporary global mining involvements cannot be fully understood if they are regarded merely as an economic phenomenon of post–Cold War “globalization”; rather, they must be conceptualized as manifesting a much longer historical trajectory of European and Euro-American imperialism that is now being reconfigured in more complex terms. While the twenty-first century is often deemed to be a formally postracial era, the analysis presented here draws on scholarship by Bhattacharyya et al. (2002), Giroux (2004), Goldberg (2002; 2009), Arat-Koç (2010), Amin (2010), Roberts and Mahtani (2010), and many others, to identify race as a core component of globalized neoliberal institutions, policies, and practices. As Amin (2010) observes, “vernacular” race

8  Colonial Extractions

categorizations and racialized systems and practices of governmentality continue to shape the twenty-first-century social order in Western states in ways that productively coexist with liberal-democratic human rights regimes, formal equality rights, and multiculturalism. Through an analysis of how the Canadian mining sector operates in African states, I show that such manifestations and technologies of racialization remain centrally constitutive of the mesmerizing logic, operations, and effects of contemporary capitalist-imperialist power. The Canadian Global Mining Industry: A Profile The mining economy has been a cornerstone of Canadian settler society since the mid-1800s, associated with the founding of some one hundred communities and ports and with the building of road and rail networks throughout the country. The industry is thus deemed to have made important contributions to Canada’s economic growth for more than a century. In recent decades, that same industry has developed an extensive and indeed dominant global presence. In a report produced in March 2009 on the “corporate social responsibility” of the resource extraction sector, the federal government profiled Canada’s mining sector in these glowing terms: Canadian financial markets in Toronto and Vancouver are the world’s largest source of equity capital for mining companies undertaking exploration and development. Mining and exploration companies based in Canada account for 43 percent of global exploration expenditures. In 2008, over 75 percent of the world’s exploration and mining companies were headquartered in Canada. These 1293 companies had an interest in some 7809 properties in Canada and in over 100 countries around the world.14

The Canadian state, in conjunction with the industry, has vigorously promoted Canada’s role as a global leader in the mining sector. Perhaps even more significantly, it has positioned the mining sector as key to this country’s new global identity. At the October 2011 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the creation of the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development; in late 2012, the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and École Polytechnique de Montréal were awarded a $25 million grant from CIDA to establish that institute. In January 2013, the prime minister announced a contribution

Contemporary Canadian Mining Colonial Continuities  9

of US$15.3 million to help found an African Minerals Development Centre in Mozambique; those funds positioned Canada as the largest financial contributor to that centre, which was created under the auspices of the African Union, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank, and the UN Development Programme– Africa. Among other objectives, the institute aims to “promote mining policy harmonization among Member States.” Canada’s expanding twenty-first-century role in global mining, and specifically African mining, is thus of considerable public interest. Along with Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa, Canada is among the leading global mining countries, and in some aspects of the industry, it is now the global front-runner. The Toronto and Vancouver Stock Exchanges are routinely identified as the leading sources of investment capital for the global mining industry, particularly in the area of exploration. Canada’s prominence in mining is commonly attributed to its long history and familiarity with the industry, its geological expertise (especially in exploration), its ability to raise risk capital for the sector, its favourable tax regime, and its experienced financial and legal services sector (B. Campbell, 1999; Canel, Idemudia, and North: 2010). Canada is also seen as a country whose federal and provincial governments strongly support mining. At the federal level, the Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD) – formerly the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) – provide technical and political services to the private sector, with Export Development Canada serving a role as a leading source of credit and risk insurance for international mining ventures. Two major industry associations, the Mining Association of Canada (MAC), based in Ottawa, and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), with offices in Toronto, develop policy positions on a range of issues and represent the industry’s interests in domestic and international settings. Each year, the PDAC hosts a huge international four-day gathering of mining and mining services companies, investors, and government officials; in 2013, this event attracted more than 30,000 participants from around the world. Although ownership in the mining sector is in constant flux, currently some 70 per cent of the domestic Canadian mining industry is owned by Canadian companies.15 The foreign acquisition in 2007 of three of Canada’s biggest and oldest companies – Inco, Alcan, and Falconbridge – raised some concerns, largely unsubstantiated, about

10  Colonial Extractions

creeping foreign ownership in the Canadian mining sector.16 At the same time, approximately two-thirds of the value of Canadian-owned mining assets are assets held outside Canada.17 The Canadian mining industry is dominant domestically and internationally; moreover, it maintains a strong ideological and political commitment to liberalized foreign investment. Currently, the three leading recipients of Canadian mining investment, in terms of value and number of companies, are Mexico, Chile, and the United States. Of Canada’s total offshore mining investments, in 2009, 51 per cent were in Latin America, 18.4 per cent in African countries, and the balance in the United States, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia.18 In recent years, there has been a further increase in Canadian mining investments in Latin America and a slight drop on the African continent. Between 2001 and 2010, Canadian mining investment in African countries rose more than tenfold, from C$2.87 billion to over C$23.6 billion; as of 2012, Canadian mining companies listed on the TSE and the Toronto Venture Exchange held assets in African countries with a book value of $27 billion.19 This positions Canada as the largest source of non-African investment in that continent’s mining sector.20 At present, those investments are concentrated in South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Democratic Republic of Congo. As of December 2010, mining companies listed on the TSE held 709 properties in African countries.21 Indeed, the TSE boasted that 2010 was a record-breaking year in terms of new mining listings. It is widely agreed that the expansion of Canadian mining companies into other regions of the world beginning in the late 1980s was a response to the “Washington Consensus,” that is, the global shift towards neoliberal policies – more specifically, towards World Bank– led structural adjustment programs in resource-rich “developing” countries. These programs often included multiyear loans for mining sector reforms specifically aimed at creating an attractive (“predictable, rules-based, transferable”) investment climate for foreign investors. In some cases, Canadian lawyers were retained as expert consultants in World Bank–funded projects to help African governments draft “modern” mining laws; this at times included analysing the compatibility of, and “harmonizing,” legislation in other areas affecting the mining sector – such as the environment, labour, and taxation. Canada is also host to centres of academic research on social, environmental, and developmental aspects of global mining and to

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not-for-profit organizations that monitor the activities of Canadian mining companies, foster public interest in and pressure for responsible mining practices, and advocate with and on behalf of mining-affected communities around the world. Various First Nations in Canada have at times confronted – or collaborated with – the mining industry. This concentration of mining investment, expertise, and knowledge across the state, the private sector, the academic and not-for-profit sectors, and social movements (including Indigenous movements) has manifested itself in recent years in intense consultations and negotiations over the terms of domestic and global mining. Complaints documented by social movements, some Indigenous groups, and various academic researchers22 typically include the following: • Local communities are inadequately consulted before foreign mining companies arrive and begin exploration, and do not have, or are unable to exercise, a “right of refusal.” • Indigenous nations’ rights to “free, prior and informed consent” vis-à-vis exploration and mining operations on their territories are not adequately respected. • Social tensions develop within communities when some members are prepared to collaborate with or welcome foreign companies and others want to prevent foreign presence or set strict terms for it. • Host country regulatory authorities are underresourced and thus unable to adequately enforce health, safety, and environmental standards. • Host countries fail to negotiate mining contracts most favourable to national interests and lack the capacity to ensure full tax collection from foreign companies. • Various ill health effects are experienced by miners and by residents of communities located near mines. • Local rivers, water sources, and habitat are damaged. • Labour rights and labour standards are violated. • Residents are forcibly removed or compelled to move from areas that have been licensed to mining companies. • Residents receive inadequate compensation following forced or negotiated relocations. • Traditional or customary property rights to land are not respected or recognized. • Increased levels of sexual violence occur in the vicinity of large mines.

12  Colonial Extractions

• Anti-mining organizers and activists are harassed, threatened, and in some cases killed. • Liberalized trade and investment treaties may prevent states from prioritizing certain national development goals (e.g., employment creation) and in some cases restrict the exercise of state sovereignty over national resources. • There is inadequate investment in host country “downstream” and “upstream” value-added (“beneficiation”) and in services/supplies industries for minerals and metals processing. • An inadequate or disproportionately low portion of the value of the resource remains in the local community or country, while a large portion of the value of the resource accrues to foreign investors and shareholders, thus trickling into the foreign country’s economy. Internationally, the often-impassioned debates and protests that arose regarding such comprehensive and serious concerns gave rise to the World Bank–led Extractive Industries Review (EIR), carried out during 2003–4. This review involved extensive international consultation and research and culminated in some policy changes at the World Bank. Possibly the most lasting impact of the EIR was that it “woke up” the global mining industry. Recognizing that it was facing a credibility crisis, and aware of the growing capacity of social movements to rapidly disseminate information and analysis on mining, it established a range of procedures and industry standards to improve social and environmental practices. The industry worked hard to rebrand itself as a human-rights-respecting engine of sustainable development for lowincome countries. The MMSD (Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development) initiative led this effort at the international level; a host of other banking and insurance industry “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) standards also emerged in response to the public pressure epitomized by the EIR process.23 In Canada, the PDAC developed a voluntary code, “Environmental Excellence in Exploration” or “E3,” which established best practice guidelines for its member companies. Many large companies established CSR departments and began articulating and institutionalizing their commitments to “the triple bottom line”: measuring success in financial, social, and environmental terms. While there has been an evident shift in public discourse, assessments of the on-the-ground impact of corporate commitment to “social responsibility” remain at best mixed.24

Contemporary Canadian Mining Colonial Continuities  13

As various analysts have pointed out, these standards were largely voluntary. Complaints persisted in many communities around the world with respect to environmental damage and violations of human rights. Efforts to legislate regulatory oversight of mining industry practices failed in Canada, although not elsewhere.25 In 2005, after lengthy hearings, the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT) issued a report titled “Mining in Developing Countries and Corporate Social Responsibility.” This report called on the Canadian government to take steps to ensure that Canadian companies operating in developing countries acted in a socially and environmentally responsible manner in conformity with international human rights standards.26 The government responded by setting up a series of “multi-stakeholder” round table consultations in several cities across Canada. These National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Canadian Extractive Industry in Developing Countries generated a set of compromise recommendations endorsed by NGO, industry, and government participants. It was more than two years before a formal government response was produced; titled “Building the Canadian Advantage: A Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy for the Canadian International Extractive Sector,” this response omitted the establishment of an independent ombudsperson and maintained that the existing voluntary measures were sufficient. Its stated primary objective was to “improve the competitive advantage of Canadian international extractive sector companies by enhancing their ability to manage social and environmental risks.”27 While this response was being awaited, a private member’s bill, C-300, “An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries,” was introduced to parliament by Liberal MP John McKay in an effort to create a legislated regulatory regime with penalties for companies that failed to meet standards. After presentations to SCFAIT by civil society groups, legal and human rights scholars, and mining industry and business groups during 2009–10, the bill was narrowly defeated on its third reading in Parliament. In the meantime, Canada’s long-delayed decision to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and various Supreme Court of Canada decisions, brought to the fore the issue of “free, prior, and informed consent” as a right of Indigenous peoples confronted with mining and exploration companies that wanted access to their territories. The struggle for more robust protections for communities around the world faced with mining exploration and operations was set to carry on.

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After 2008, owing to modest output, increased global economic instability, and the strong, sustained demand for metals, gold values shot up, as did values of silver, copper, iron, and other metals and minerals. During 2010–11, gold hovered at or just below US$2,000 per ounce – an increase of more than 500 per cent since 2001. Since this peak, it has dropped back to trade in the range of US$1,200–$1,300 per ounce. In this climate, African countries have renewed their efforts to keep a greater proportion of the profits inside their countries to finance national development. Significantly, Canadian miners identify this phenomenon, dubbed “resource nationalism,” as a new risk facing the industry, and have begun developing strategies to mitigate this risk.28 This issue draws attention back to the more fundamental questions this book pursues. Who is to have authority over, access to, and use of lands and mineral resources? Who is to benefit, and how? If Canada is engaged in colonialist practices of resource appropriation, how can this be explained, how is it sustained, and how might it change? Methodology for Critical Social Research Critical research methodologies assert that knowledge – what counts as “true” or valid – is always “situated” and thus subjective. Knowledge is limited or shaped by the social identity and prior conceptual and cultural frameworks of the “knower” (or researcher), as well as by the societal relations of power that establish the conditions in which knowledge is produced. There is no purely objective, universal, apolitical, or disinterested “gaze” from which truth can be established. Critical research chooses to examine the world from the social position, life experience, and knowledge of more marginalized, exploited, and disempowered populations. The gathering of empirical data and evidence is crucial to this process. However, identification of what counts as data, access to the means to obtain data, and interpretation of data are recognized as being shaped by social relations of power, dominant/ subordinate epistemologies, and the researcher’s location with respect to these politically inflected contexts. Critical social researchers regard the work of producing knowledge about the contemporary social order as being affected by the nature of power in a racialized, capitalist society. Public dissemination of knowledge- or truth-claims pertaining to powerful private actors can be subject to punitive legal scrutiny and discipline; in this way, neoliberal society is characterized by technologies of silencing that engender

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zones of unspeakability.29 Intuition or knowledge of injustice becomes “unspeakable” and is thus eroded, subjugated, or obliterated.30 The production of knowledge about race, whiteness, and white domination is fraught with a further set of challenges and risks. As critical race scholar Martina Tifsberger, notes: The dominant conception of racism in Germany hence covers only obvert and blatant racism whereas more subtle or subvert forms are rarely recognized as racism … Such a definition leads to a collective immunization against the knowledge that the history of whiteness is really about the history of seizure. Accordingly, research on racism, which focuses on whiteness rather than on the neoNazis who exercise violent racism, opens up uncertainty, fear and defensiveness within the white community.31

This sort of psychological response to the production of knowledge about covert forms of racism – including racialized structural ­violence – characterizes all sectors of a society in which whiteness is not recognized as a form, and position, of domination embedded in a colonial history of appropriation and seizure. Such a society depends, in effect, on the unspeakability and unthinkability of a persistent, diffuse mode of white supremacy. White subjects (i.e., subjects produced and positioned as white) are to be psychologically inoculated against the traumatic knowledge of whiteness as domination, seizure, and illegitimate privilege. This book will proceed into that taboo zone. In staking out an expressly political orientation in favour of justice, self-determination, and human dignity, I place myself in the company of other critical scholars who engage in knowledge production as a liberatory act. As Weis and Fine (2004) state: “Critical researchers have an obligation not simply to dislodge the dominant discourse, but to help readers and audiences imagine where the spaces for resistance, agency, and possibility lie. We craft research that aims toward Lather’s ‘catalytic validity’: research to provoke action” (xxi). Research Design and Ethics When I began my research, “sustainable development” was a term widely popularized and deployed by government agencies and international mining companies. Wondering initially how the rank-and-file members of the Canadian industry worked with that concept, I designed research that involved extensive interviews with Canadian mining

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industry professionals who had worked for major and mid-size mining companies and junior exploration companies with projects in African countries. (A profile of and introduction to these professional subjects is provided in chapter 6.) Without minimizing the material and economic dimensions of mining, I wanted to find out what kinds of stories or narratives Canadian mining professionals produced to convey the substance of their presence in contemporary African states. These interview data were then supplemented by data gleaned from attendance at various industry conferences and events; and by an examination of company literature and Web pages, of industry media such as The Northern Miner, of mining association policy statements and speeches, of Government of Canada mining-related policies and reports, and of government diplomatic correspondence pertaining to specific country situations obtained through Access to Information legislation. I also held off-the-record conversations with government officials.32 In the later stages, I augmented all of this with a review of the public transcripts of the testimonies gathered by the federal government’s SCFAIT hearings on C-300. Collectively, these sources provided rich ethnographic data, from which, in this book, I theorize socio-­cultural aspects of the Canadian mining industry and its relationship with the Canadian government. While this study mainly examines Canadian mining in African countries, those familiar with Canada’s mining presence elsewhere in the world may find that the analysis is applicable to other regions as well. It could be argued that Latin America would have been a more appropriate focus, given that it is by far the largest non-domestic recipient of Canadian mining investment. The focus on Africa was initially due to my personal interest in and connection to the continent: during an era when NGOs, much of whose funding came from the Canadian government, were sending many Canadian teachers to countries of the “Global South,” I signed on as a secondary school English teacher assigned to teach in West Africa. This experience is not incidental to the claims I am making in this work; the production of an imagined white, honourable, national subject – “the Canadian development worker” – has done much to simultaneously obscure and facilitate the contemporary colonial relationship.33 “Africa” continues to appear in the dominant Canadian imaginary as a region of poverty and need, quite contrary to the perception held today among Canadian mining companies, which is, that it is a region of untapped resource wealth – thus the new “scramble for Africa.” Despite the economic and market realities, Africa remains

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the global region in relation to which Canadians are most commonly taught to think of themselves as helpers and rescuers. This book challenges that perception. It could be argued that the Canadian media fascination with “Africa” as a region of need operates in the Canadian public imaginary to render invisible the colonial relations and racialized social inequalities that continue within Canada. I have committed myself to avoid reproducing that erasure, even though resource extraction in Canada is not the primary focus of this work. Nevertheless, I draw throughout on both theoretical and historical literature to identify Canada as a contemporary colonizer state vis-à-vis Indigenous populations within what is now called Canada, and to indicate the cultural continuities between Canada’s domestic and international mining practices and the processes of legitimation that make these possible. While the examples drawn on in this book are from Canadian mining in African countries, this book is principally about the Canadian settler-state, settler-Canadians, and Canadian settler-internationalism. To maintain this emphasis, and because I already possessed extensive travel/work experience throughout the African continent, I chose not to travel to Canadian mining sites in African countries to conduct research, but rather to interview mining professionals in their head offices in Canada’s major cities. This may leave an impression that I have neglected or marginalized African voices. In response to this concern, I have drawn as much as possible on critical analyses of neo-colonialism by African scholars and activists. While wary of “recentring” white subjects, the field of critical race studies asserts the importance of denaturalizing and diminishing white supremacy through a critical interrogation of the sites of power and social technologies that resecure and strengthen whiteness. By analysing the everyday forms of thought and power that shape Canadian global mining – by conducting “field research” in mining companies’ head offices – I am pursuing such a goal. Interrogating and seeking to decentre whiteness is always risky. What became apparent to me early in the interview process was the effect of my own phenotypical whiteness in producing, with “white” interviewees, a sense of safety, a shared “white space.” One distressing realization in the course of the research concerned my own adeptness at co-constituting white space – a space where everyday racism could be expressed and go unchallenged. Through decades of socialization as “a white person,” I knew almost subconsciously how to create what Melissa Steyn calls “the shared social space in which …

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this privileged positionality [is] normalized and rendered unremarkable.”34 As I became more aware of this in the context of listening to taped interviews, I made conscious decisions to eliminate certain kinds of comments and anecdotes from my own white discursive repertoire. This catalysed an ongoing conscious effort to identify and analyse my own discursive practices of whiteness, hold them at a distance, examine them, minimize them, and try to refuse them – even while acknowledging that structural anti-racist change includes, but requires more than, individual actions. I also became more critically cognizant of the tangible nature of “white space.”35 For the interview participants, however, in addition to the creation of comfortable “white space” and the guarantees of confidentiality, what allowed them to speak as freely as they did seemed to be their sense that what they were doing was entirely legitimate. What emerged from these conversations with far more potency than I had anticipated was what could aptly be called vintage colonial discourse characterized by a racialized world view. At one level, the narrative was cruder and starker than I had expected it to be. “Africa” was still literally described as “the Dark Continent” full of risk and danger, yet a mining bonanza; and Africans were, in the imaginaries of many interviewees, still beings who lacked the means or know-how to develop their own resources. Canadian risk capital, geological expertise, and “good governance” templates were thus the “white man’s burden” being carried gallantly into twenty-first-century African polities by Canadian mining professionals and their government counterparts. Percolating through these narratives were frank admissions and pleased reports of the strong profits that were being generated. But this vintage colonial discourse, while dominant, was not the only one to emerge from the interviews and other data sources. The institutional and ideological expressions of neoliberalism-as-imperialism in the twenty-first century are unique, complex, and often deliberately ambiguous. In the chapters that follow, I explore the various discourses and personae deployed by the Canadian state and mining industry in the global mining sector. These narratives engage with, and at times work through, the dominant depiction of Canada as a humane, rightsrespecting, globally responsible state and of Canadians as altruistic and idealistic “global citizens.” This exposes a continual turning about among stories of altruism, of profit and risk in lawless lands, and of rational free market investment. From these stories emerges an agile

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subject for whom dissembling and performing reversals has become a way of being and of maintaining whiteness – and wealth. Finally, the insights I draw from the data are aimed not at vilifying Canadian mining industry professionals, but rather at identifying how their narratives draw on and refashion culturally dominant racialized discourses in Canadian society in ways that collectively enable a colonial form of resource theft – with its attendant structural violence – that is widely and tacitly endorsed. Indeed, mining professionals are revealed in this book as, for the most part, innocuous settler-Canadians who express common attitudes and offer a mode of “commonsense” rationalization that allows other settler-Canadians to participate comfortably in a colonialist process. To the extent this is a national, governmental project, with strong and direct state involvement, all Canadians are potentially drawn into these practices and identifications. The Scope of the Book Colonialist projects are concerned with acquiring and controlling resources and profiting from them, with deploying cultural scripts of legitimization, and with producing, regulating, and disciplining subjects who will not undermine the colonial system. These are the issues I attempt to cover in this study of Canadian neo-colonial involvement in mining in formally post-colonial African countries. Given the complexity of colonial domination, and thus of my analysis in this book, I devote chapter 2 to establishing the conceptual framework for that analysis as it applies to Canada in the twenty-first century. Particular attention is given to theorizing the racialized nature of neoliberalism as the contemporary form of capitalism that has fostered a global expansion of Canadian mining. Because the book seeks to demonstrate a common cultural and appropriative logic between settler mining in Canada and contemporary Canadian mining in African states, chapter 3 presents a partial history of settler mining in Canada – a form of economic development that Indigenous communities often resisted. Chapter 4 introduces the notion of structural violence to sketch some of the economic and material dimensions of the Canadian mining presence in African countries. To whom does African resource wealth accrue, and how is that wealth (i.e., profit) allocated among Canadian actors and African states and their citizens? In chapter 5, I continue to identify the banal and ostensibly non-violent means of securing colonialist resource access; to that end, I identify the rule of law and legal discourses as

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crucial technologies of racialized domination in contemporary global resource extraction. This chapter thus investigates how mining law and rule of law operate as regulatory discourses and as socio-legal technologies that enact and enable particular forms of colonialist violence. The case of Bulyanhulu in Tanzania is referenced to illustrate the themes in this chapter. Chapter 6 returns to this question: What kind of subjectivity is required to operate and sustain the system as I have described it? This chapter introduces the interview subjects and analyses their narratives of goodness and benevolence, revealing them to be subjects invested in a cultural process of mesmerization. Returning to the notion of a “colonial contact zone” and the view of colonialist domination as always ­relational – not merely economic – chapter 7 probes the ontological character of the “self–other” relation, with specific reference to the treatment of so-called “artisanal miners.” Why are these subjects constructed in such a manner, what happens when Canadian miners meet up with African citizen-miners, and how is such an encounter managed? Chapter 8 turns to post-apartheid South Africa as a country case study to draw together the various themes that have been explored thus far. What role did Canadian actors play during South Africa’s efforts to develop a post-apartheid mining code aimed at racially diversifying the sector so that resource wealth could be used to foster broad-based sustainable development? This case study illustrates how the production of white neoliberal subjects, the dissemination of particular narratives, state–corporate collaboration, and the deployment of neoliberal law operate in a coherent manner to block the emergence of a substantively anti-racist democratic economy. The concluding chapter identifies several new practices and social technologies that show every sign of operating to preserve long-existing patterns of colonial domination in the resource extraction sector. These emerging developments further support the conclusion that Canada is an aggressive colonialist nation – albeit one with a mesmerizingly humanitarian appearance.

2 Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project

Colonialism … a relation of power based on violence. (Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 113)

This chapter establishes a comprehensive theoretical framework for analysing Canadian involvement in global mining as a colonialist project. Critical race theory and much post-colonial theory offer perspectives sensitized to the importance of colonial-imperial legacies and the persistent and multifaceted routine violence of white supremacy. This facilitates the investigation of a range of complex, interconnected social phenomena: macro-structural (capitalist) forces; the powers and effects of discourse and social imaginaries; the nature of modernity and the neoliberal racial state; violence as physical, psychological, structural, and symbolic; the production of subjects and subjectivity as a mode of rule and an exercise of power; and the intersections of systems of power through race, class, and gender. This multidimensional framework is necessary in order to do justice to the complexity of a contemporary colonialist project. In building this framework, I start by drawing on the insights of scholars who have explored how racism – more precisely, white supremacy – articulates or interlocks with capitalism; I then extend these insights to theorize neoliberalism as an opaque system of white supremacy. This chapter then reviews scholarship that takes seriously the function of the socio-cultural imaginary – at both the level of individual subjects and the level of nations – as a central dimension of continuing practices of colonialist domination in the context of neoliberalism. In the chapter’s final section, I build a case for identifying Canada as not only a

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“white settler state” and a “racial state” (adopting Goldberg’s schema) but also as a contemporary colonizer-nation. Racism, Colonialism, Capitalism In Blackness Visible: Essays on Race and Philosophy (1998), Charles Mills makes a case for bringing an analysis of race into “mainstream First World political philosophy.” A persistent feature of much political economy scholarship on global capitalism, globalization, and imperialism is its failure to adequately acknowledge and analyse the role of racism or white supremacy in continuing global patterns of labour exploitation, land and resource appropriation, and political and cultural domination. Mills expresses exasperation with “a kind of economism that never does justice to race.”1 Martina Tifsberger (2005) draws attention to the difference between understanding racism as the overt actions of “neo-Nazis” and understanding racism as covert, systemic, and implicit in cultural and economic dimensions of modern life in “Western” society. For similar reasons – that is, to catalyse a much broader historical understanding of racism – Mills prefers to use the term “white supremacy.” He defines white supremacy as a system of institutionalized white power that is organized to reward practices and embodiments of whiteness – that is, a system whose benefits most commonly accrue to those deemed to be “white people” and to Euro-American cultures and countries. White supremacy thus “refers more broadly to the European domination of the planet that has left us with the racialized distributions of economic, political, and cultural power that we have today.”2 Mills asserts that white supremacy cannot be reduced to an effect or instrument of capitalism, but must rather be regarded as a semi-autonomous system that, contingently and contextually, articulates with or interlocks with patriarchy and capitalism. Moreover, he suggests that sociopolitical analyses that disregard the operations and techniques of white supremacy miss out on significant aspects of social reality and thus are flawed and incomplete. In addition, Mills emphasizes the centrality – and the central horror – of white supremacy’s production of a hierarchy of ­subjects – that is, the division of the world, as he expresses it starkly, into white persons with political and economic rights and privileges, and non-white “subpersons” whose existence lacks guarantees of any sort. Mills explains the implications in these terms: “If paradigmatically in the Kantian normative framework, persons are not

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  23

to be treated merely instrumentally, as means to others’ ends, then subpersons (Native Americans, Blacks) can be regarded as precisely those for whom such treatment is morally appropriate.”3 This provocatively troubling statement provides a key to understanding the structural violence that characterizes neoliberalism. Finally, Mills suggests that an analysis of white supremacy as a semi-autonomous system leaves open the possibility that “a convincing historical materialist account of the creation of global white supremacy can be developed.”4 Mills’s concept of “global white supremacy” facilitates an analysis of capitalism as raced. To call capitalism a racialized phenomenon is to assert that, as a matrix of relations and structures that have shaped and been shaped by modernity, capitalism bears all the constitutive raciality of modernity: it has made use of and further reified ideas of biological race difference; it uses the notion of “inferior” racial identities to naturalize and legitimize the extraction of labour’s absolute and relative surplus value, as well as land and resource theft; it uses the notion of “superior” racial identities and cultural practices to naturalize and legitimize the authoritarian political domination that creates the conditions for the accumulation and hoarding of resources; it exploits the structural inequalities and political vulnerabilities that result from these cumulative processes over time; and it draws on and disseminates new modes of “cultural racism” or “coded racism” to distinguish “inferior” from “superior” racial groups and practices, even while vulgar expressions of older “biological racism” remain viscerally salient. An analysis of “primitive accumulation” as foundational to the emergence of capitalism provides a strong starting place for investigating how capitalism is raced. Primitive accumulation is the means by which, stated simply, land, raw materials, and human labour are acquired for free or at minimal cost and often through the use of force; such resources are then used to generate and accumulate capital. In his foundational treatise on capitalism, Karl Marx used the term “primitive accumulation,” adapted from Adam Smith, to explain how capitalism emerged and differed from other relations of production and trade.5 Marx regarded these processes – for instance, the violent seizures of lands from English peasants and the plunder of silver mined by forced labour in South America – as forming the origin, or foundational condition, for concentrations of wealth and transformed relations of production. The significance of “primitive accumulation” to the emergence of capitalism has been documented by much subsequent scholarship and is reconfirmed by Heller in The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First

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Century Perspective (2011): “Looking back, it is important to reiterate that primitive accumulation and the extraction of absolute surplus value were intrinsic to the early development of capitalism.”6 Rosa Luxemburg and, more recently, David Harvey have demonstrated that primitive accumulation is not only a characteristic of the origins of capitalism but is inherent in the operations of capitalism on a continuing basis.7 As Henry Heller observes, Luxemburg emphasized the central role of force and violence in these processes, as well as the significant role of the state and the use of state force – military, police, and legal systems – in ensuring the conditions for primitive accumulation.8 Marx himself was well aware of the brutality involved in these processes. He noted that “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part,”9 and that “the extirpation, the enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of blackskins signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production,” and he concluded with bitter sarcasm: “These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”10 This appropriation occurred both within European societies – for example, through the violent land enclosures and forced displacements of peasants that were carried out in England and Scotland from the late 1400s to the early 1800s – and in the context of Europe’s relations with other regions of the world. Luxemburg identified colonialism and the violence of colonial power as central to the consolidation of European capitalism;11 subsequent scholarship has argued that European colonialism was what enabled Europe – whose economy was on par with that of Asia through the 1700s – to “take off,” creating the “great divergence.”12 European military and commercial domination of other regions of the world, coalescing in widespread formal colonialism by the late nineteenth century, created optimal conditions for primitive accumulation – conditions that allowed appropriation of land (often involving the eradication of local populations), seizure of resources, appropriation of human labour through slavery or coercion, and the transformation of autonomous peasant populations into proletariats through mechanisms such as displacement from land, imposition of taxes, legalized exclusion from commerce and trade, and so on. The acquisition of silver from South America, the Africa slave trade, and the three-way export trade involving Asia and the Caribbean, are widely recognized as having generated profits that to a significant degree

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  25

fuelled the Industrial Revolution in England.13 Colonialism and slavery were crucial to the accelerated economic development of Europe in the late eighteenth century. If imperialism and colonialism were central to the emergence of European capitalism and global economic domination, racism was central to colonialist/imperialist relations of power. Indeed, one could say that the act of racializing was constitutive of the changed social relations that gave birth to capitalism: the European bourgeois subject had learned to reduce another person, on the basis of certain visual traits and cultural habits, to the status of an “other” who was not a “self,” to a figure more like an animal than a human being, and correspondingly, had learned to imagine the bourgeois self as an authentic civil person. For surely capitalism, despite its claims, was fundamentally a system that valued and generated concentrations of wealth, inequality of social condition (albeit according to a new logic), and social exclusion.14 Revealing its essential ontological violence, white supremacy draws a line between personhood and subpersonhood, creating a distinction that defines and makes possible the colonial encounter and that hints at the logic that drives to this day new modes of primitive accumulation. In a comprehensive review of scholarship that attempts to theorize the links among racism, colonialism, class, and capitalism, Ania Loomba (1998) observes that “a Manichean dichotomy between coloniser and colonised is what really structures colonial relations.”15 In his classic text The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi similarly asserts: “Racism appears then, not as an incidental detail, but as a consubstantial part of colonialism. It is the highest expression of the colonial system and one of the most significant features of the colonialist. Not only does it establish a fundamental discrimination between colonizer and colonized, a sine qua non of colonial life, but it also lays the foundation for the immutability of this life.”16 Racist perceptions of others were, Loomba suggests, derived from Greek and Roman ideas of “outsiders” and strangers as “barbarians.” In the cultural imaginary of Europe, difference came to be apprehended through a fluid play of notions of otherness that at various moments featured childlikeness, primitiveness, a state of nature, noble savage, savagery, monstrosity, insanity, evil, paganism, bestiality, sexual promiscuity, hypersexuality, cannibalism, laziness, stupidity, and so on. As European imperial expansion occurred, bringing European “explorers” into contact with diverse peoples, these potent stereotypes tended to predetermine European perceptions of, representations of, and

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interactions with non-European peoples. In turn, these perceptions of the “Other,” counterbalanced by a glorified sense of the European Self, rendered thinkable, doable, and legitimate violent colonial conquest and domination. In this regard, Aimé Césaire’s (1955) scathing critique of European humanism as an idea that was used to legitimize colonial domination is worth highlighting. Césaire provocatively asserted that Hitler exemplified the quintessential European subject and that racist violence lay at the heart of the European social order: [What Europeans] cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. And that is the great thing that I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been – and still is – narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.17

Césaire proceeds to cite respected European philosophers to demonstrate how commonplace and deeply normalized within European epistemologies were racist beliefs about non-European peoples. In Césaire’s view, this inferiorization of racially inscribed peoples facilitated the violence and harm done to them as a constitutive aspect of colonial domination. A theoretical question this raises is whether imperialist/colonialist domination took place or was made possible because of racist ideologies, or whether racism was an ideological product of the capitalist drive to obtain raw resources and maximize the appropriation of surplus value and thus profits. Surely it was not coincidental that the timing of the emergence of “scientific racism,” the emergence of a new phase of capitalism (i.e., the domination of finance capital, often in the form of monopolies and cartels), and the rapid colonization of the planet by a few European countries, all occurred simultaneously and most intensively from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s.18 In light of these confluences, some Marxist scholars regard racism as having emerged in its full-fledged modern form because it was ideologically useful for capitalism. In other words, racism both facilitated the expansion of capitalism through colonialism and facilitated the intensive

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  27

appropriation of the labour of colonized and dominated peoples. For instance, Heller states: “Political and economic colonialism in Ireland, it should be noted, worked through what has been described as a classic form of racial oppression – the precursor of the racial oppression inflicted on African slaves in the New World. Viewed from this perspective, racism was a form of ideological control that was born in the early modern period and was designed to reinforce colonial domination and exploitative relations of production.”19 Heller thus implies that modern European racism emerged as an ideological product of the needs of expansionary capital. For their part, Stuart Hall (1980), Miles and Brown (1989, 2003), Mills (1998), and Bhattacharyya and colleagues (2002) posit racism as a system that possesses a certain ontological and historical autonomy that cannot be reduced to a class relation or to the emergence of capitalism; they suggest instead that the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism should be understood as “articulating,” “interlocking,” or “mutually parasitic”20 and can best be analysed as it took shape under specific historical conditions and in specific contexts. Miles and Brown proceed to analyse slavery as a general case, and the British colonization of Kenya as a more specific case. These examples show how white supremacy operates simultaneously as a practice of assigning human worth on the arbitrary basis of phenotype, as a discourse, and as an economic or structural relation within capitalism. While slavery has existed in many societies and in eras far pre-dating capitalist modernity, and without necessarily being organized in terms of ideas of biological racial difference, its massive use on slave plantations in the Americas during the 1700s and 1800s – which constituted a significant form of primitive accumulation for the expanding capitalist system – was explicitly legitimized on the basis of racist ideology.21 White supremacist ideology and violence made possible the intense and brutal appropriation of slave labour, and this generated lavish profits for a group of elite whites. Miles and Brown draw on Marxist concepts to emphasize the relation between production and the commodification of human labour as key for identifying how racism articulates with capitalist social and economic practices. When British settlers arrived in Kenya, it was their racist perception of “the Africans” as backward, inferior, savage, indolent, and so on that rendered thinkable the process whereby these populations were ruthlessly removed from the most fertile agricultural lands; many were killed, and others were settled on reserves and forced, through a range of coercive measures,

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to work on white settler farms for a pittance. The sense of superiority and entitlement on the part of the British and other white settlers was fundamentally racist. Racialized identities were further reified in law, as they were throughout the British Empire (for instance, in Canada, in the Indian Act). These racially discriminatory laws22 forbade Black and Asian Kenyans from living in certain areas, required them to carry pass cards, and prohibited them from transporting and marketing agricultural produce. All of this naturalized the idea of biological racial difference, casting those differences as legitimate reasons for differential (exploitative, unjust) treatment. As Miles and Brown summarize: “The people who were identified as the source of exploitable labour power were ideologically constructed as an inferior ‘race.’ … Economic and political relations were thereby socially constructed in accordance with the ideology of racism …Once more, racism as ideology and racism as a relation of production were complementary and inseparable.”23 Racism enabled colonization, which in turn enabled a much harsher and intensified mode of capitalist resource appropriation or primitive accumulation. Loomba refers, for example, to Rex’s study of capitalism in apartheid South Africa. Rather than capitalism’s ideal “free labour,” with wages determined by supply of and demand for labour, South Africa offered captive labour – that is, labour whose wages were driven down through apartheid laws backed by armed force (so that a greater portion of the value of labour’s productivity could then be appropriated by the white men who owned the companies). Rex concluded that capitalism worked differently in colonial contexts; rather than functioning according to the mechanisms of a market rationalism that could claim to be colour-blind, capitalism used and intensified racism. Indeed, the social and ideological structures of white supremacy enabled highly profitable capitalist production.24 And lest South Africa be deemed a unique case, Mahmood Mamdani (1996) shows how the apartheid system was actually representative of the treatment of African colonial subjects and societies in many other countries during European colonization. To summarize, racism – more precisely, white supremacy – has been a constitutive element of colonialism and the establishment and expansion of capitalism in the modern era, from the fifteenth century to the present. As Bhattacharyya and colleagues (2002) assert, “capitalist expansion has depended so heavily on mythologies of race and their attendant violences that the double project of racial and economic subjugation is a constitutive aspect of this expansion.”25

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Race in Contemporary Neoliberal Capitalism If Canada’s global mining expansion since 1990 is largely a response to post–Cold War economic liberalization or “globalization,” how does racism function and operate in the contemporary global economy? In an essay that offers an exploratory approach to this question, Roberts and Mahtani (2010) observe the importance of not only identifying the racialized effects of neoliberal capitalism but also identifying neoliberalism and racism as co-productive and mutually constitutive. They advocate “a move from analyses of race and neoliberalism towards analyses that race neoliberalism. This kind of analysis more clearly delineates how race and racism are deeply embedded in the neoliberal project.”26 To capture some of the features of this analysis, I turn to several scholars whose insights enable a discussion of the interlocking logic of neoliberalism and white supremacy, the racialization of economic processes, and the racially coded discourses that characterize neoliberalism. It is important to note that these dimensions of neoliberalism operate symbiotically and are not separate in practice. In its most common economic usage, neoliberalism refers to the following features: a privileging or fetishization of “free market” forces; withdrawal of the state from intervening in the economy and in social policy, especially policy with a redistributive thrust; prioritization of the function of states to regulate the economic/financial terrain in the interests of private capital; a shift or diffusion of sovereignty from nation-states to international/transnational institutions and transnational corporations; the subjectification of persons as individuals, taxpayers, consumers, entrepreneurs, investors, and shareholders; and the expanded mobility and dominance of financial capital facilitated by the rise of institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the GATT institutions, the World Bank, and so on. To these features, Bhattacharyya and colleagues add the fragmentation and disbursement of globalized production – for example, through contracting out and just-in-time production; the feminization and racialization of parttime, temporary, low-paid, non-unionized employment; the expansion of migrant labour with greatly reduced labour rights; the expanded numbers of people effectively abandoned as “disposable” or “surplus”; the fact that around half the countries in the world rely on the export of one or two commodities or raw materials (such as metals and minerals); and, above all, the “continuing inequalities that arise from the concentration of wealth in two dozen or so nations and two

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hundred or so multinationals.”27 Citing Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Giroux further observes that neoliberalism has a depoliticizing thrust, is anti-­democratic, and, in Giroux’s words, “reproduces the conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism and accentuating the central elements of proto-fascism.”28 As an ideology that strategically recognizes only individual effort, neoliberalism denies the existence of structural historical inequalities (such as racism) and perpetuates a meritocratic mythology of “level playing fields” for all who work hard. Neoliberalism is thus hostile to movements that seek to install greater social justice and substantive democracy. While some aspects of neoliberalism are new and unprecedented – for instance, the dominance and volume of financial capital being invested globally – many contemporary features of neoliberal globalization are strikingly reminiscent of earlier colonial conditions. Global labour patterns show that racialized bodies are still found doing the most dangerous, tedious, health-threatening, insecure, and poorest paid work, whether as migrant agricultural labourers, construction workers, underground miners, sex workers (who include sex slaves), factory workers in free trade zones or sweatshops, domestic servants, elder caregivers, or child caregivers. Forced displacements and removals of populations still occur – for example, when Western companies obtain mining licences for large tracts of mineral-rich land in countries of the “global South,” and local people are displaced with minimal compensation paid; or in the context of corporate “land grabs” in countries like Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the purposes of commercial agribusiness.29 Acquisition of land also occurs increasingly through privatization and changes in land laws and land tenure systems so that access to land on the basis of community, clan, or tribal membership or identity is replaced by access to freehold land and title by private purchase. These displacements and these transformations in land tenure are legitimized by resort to coded racisms that cast all forms of communal or cooperative land access or use – anything other than private freehold tenure – as “traditional,” non-modern, inefficient, irrational, and essentially “backward.” In carrying out these various forms of land appropriation and dispossession of peasants or Indigenous peoples, thus forcing them into waged work or the informal economy, there is a general attempt to avoid the use of direct force (although this is used when necessary) in favour of other tactics. The use of law and legal measures to compel compliance is a preferred approach. The aim is to avoid the charge that practices

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of dispossession are brutal, exploitative, or racist; the old colonialist, unabashedly racist rationales for dispossessing and eradicating certain groups give at least partial way to racially coded discourses that claim legitimacy through appeals to economic rationalism or market efficiency and that justify racialized exclusions on the grounds that certain populations lack the cultural practices and orientations that best cohere with market logics. To a significant degree, dispossessed populations are criminalized; in this way, accusations of racism are avoided entirely and the exclusion is deemed a matter of having violated the law. The twenty-first century thus remains an era in which racialized and “Southern” or “Third World” bodies, in ever-increasing numbers, are materially deprived, denied rights, security, and dignity, and shut out of the apparent benefits of capitalist modernity (Shachar, 2010). Having been subjected to gross structural violence (absence or unaffordability of health care, insufficient food/nutrition, lack of adequate housing, chronic unemployment, destitution, chronic insecurity, etc.), they are disposable, “rubbish people.”30 Escobar (2004) calls these horrific global realities “social fascism,”31 while Banerjee (2006), adapting Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” (literally, death-politics), coins the term “necrocapitalism,” or death-capitalism. When offering a lengthy list of examples of social atrocities occurring as the effects of neoliberalism, Banerjee deploys this term to capture the ideological and material context of unfettered market forces in which capital’s right to profit legally and legitimately eradicates livelihoods and subjugates life, thus producing death. As Bhattacharyya and colleagues sharply express it, “the power of whiteness lies in its capacity to impoverish, starve, contaminate and murder, all seemingly within the bounds of legality.”32 Such a statement captures what is new, and most insidious, about racialized neoliberalism in relation to colonial racism. Neoliberalism has exacerbated “uneven development,” with large numbers of people experiencing harsh lives of bare survival, and paradoxically, it denies the existence of racialized inequalities, racialized power relations, histories, categories, and effects; in short, neoliberalism refuses to acknowledge the continuing structural power and relevance of race in the global political economy. As forms of harm requiring social redress, racism and white supremacy become effectively unspeakable. This unspeakability is achieved through discourses and practices of “colour-blindness” or “racelessness” that allow white racial power to be sustained in the guise of neutral, non-racial, economically rational practices. This public denial effectively eliminates the discursive and institutional space within

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which claims for racial justice could be advanced.33 Yet at the same time, a renewed “Orientalism” – familiar binaries and stereotypes that position the Western white subject as the universal civilized subject facing down a line-up of racialized “others” (“Muslim terrorists,” “illegal (artisanal) miners,” “bogus refugees,” “drug gangs,” etc.) – ­normalizes new acts of war (e.g., in Iraq and Afghanistan), including “the war against the (racialized) poor” via the criminal justice and prison industry. And that Orientalism remains ubiquitous in the dominant culture – in mainstream Western movies, advertising, television, print media, and public education. Such representations in turn naturalize discourses of white righteousness (help to needy others) and lend support to the discourse and practice of philanthropy with its dehistoricized, simplified, and romanticized narratives functioning as the cultural lubricant for capitalist social policy. In the same vein, within corporations, banks, and many other major institutions, “diversity” becomes the operative pseudonym for modes of racial inclusivity that require heterogeneous participants to “act white” by performing themselves according to the cultural prescriptions of cosmopolitan neoliberalism – even while, in Canada, the wealthiest and most influential owners and senior managers remain almost exclusively phenotypically white – and male. There is a constant sleight of hand by which white supremacist practices are recast in glossy terms of welcome and inclusivity, or are deceptively deemed meritocratic, even while the economic gulf – the accelerated process of “uneven development” – between differently racialized bodies within nations, and globally, widens even more.34 To catch this sleight of hand in the act of deception requires decoding new forms of racial mesmerization, such as risk management techniques and discourses, the legal concept of reputation, and the association of whiteness with futurism.35 Such encoding operates subversively in domestic and international institutional settings in a variety of seemingly neutral discourses and practices; through these practices, white racial power continues to structure the global political economy. Bhattacharyya and colleagues thus conclude that white racial power is not diminishing in the era of globalization but only being reconfigured and reconstituted. However, as Ash Amin notes, there is almost always a lurking “race vernacular” – older ideas of biological race – in contemporary North American society. Indeed, Mbembe points sharply to the persistent imagery – like a recurring nightmare – of the Other as animal.36 These mesmerizing discourses of white supremacy – meritocracy, denial of racism, economic rationalism, and so on – combine with

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  33

certain shifts in the class identity of some racialized bodies and countries in a manner that appears to indicate a post-racial era. In fact, the “colour line” that W.E.B. Du Bois identified as defining the twentieth century is not as watertight in the twenty-first century. India, Brazil, and China have emerged as ascending economies on the world stage; a Black South African elite social class has come into existence; the United States has elected a Black president; and white women in Eastern European, former Soviet Bloc states live in abject poverty or are drawn into sex slavery. Yet as Arat-Koç (2010) asserts, Despite the fact that a few non-white people are able to cross boundaries of white privilege, we live in a world where racism along the colour line continues full force in ways that are socially, culturally, politically, economically, and ecologically consequential. In addition, “race,” as defined along or beyond the colour line, is increasingly relevant as a logic and technology of power which separates forms of humanity and treats them differently.37

It is important to recall that racial identities and categories have always been fluid and arbitrary (Dyer, 1997); a classic strategy of white supremacy has been to “allow in” certain individuals or entire groups at the borders of race designations – examples are the “whitening” of the Irish (Ignatiev 1995) or, in Canada, Italians or Portuguese by the 1960s, and more recently (but only partially) certain “model minorities.” Such gestures of inclusion divide and weaken anti-racism collective energy; they also confuse the issue in the public mind by appearing egalitarian, meritocratic, and non-racial. In addition, such reconfigurations suggest an emerging post-racial society by covertly reproducing the scientifically debunked idea of race as biological. Through these kinds of confusing tactics, and despite so much evidence of racialized exclusion, hierarchies, and atrocities to which I have referred so far, white supremacy masks itself with an air of banality, rationality, and harmlessness. As Eric Lott (1993) showed in his study of blackface minstrelsy in the antebellum United States, appropriation of the Black man’s body and identity could be insidiously represented as an act of love. Yet as bell hooks (1992) and Andrea Smith (2005) assert, racialized people have historically experienced terror at the hands of whites. White supremacy operates as a global system of power that advantages and enriches those socially identified and/or positioned as white, that dehumanizes non-whites on a daily basis through the need to constantly assert personhood and the struggle to survive, yet

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renders invisible its own structural and ideological power through acts of denial and erasure. Throughout this book I use two metaphors to express the nature of the operations of white supremacy in neoliberal global society: a kaleidoscope, and a gleaming white hotel. A kaleidoscope is a trivial invention, used to amuse and entertain; with mirrors and coloured bits, it presents a shifting array of interesting, striking, and pretty designs. But its images are in a sense virtual. They are illusions; they mesmerize. Moreover, the sparkling play of colours via opaque white light suggests something of the nature of whiteness as it operates in neoliberal culture generally and specifically in the globalized mining industry. That is, whiteness purports to embrace colour (i.e., egalitarian racial diversity) even while white power remains operative, dominant, and unacknowledged. The metaphor of a kaleidoscope thus allows me to organize and theorize the range of shifting representations and narratives that were expressed in the course of the interviews I conducted and that collectively stake out the terrain of contemporary colonialist discourse. The second metaphor comes from Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Known during the British colonial era as “the Gold Coast,” Ghana today has one of Africa’s most established mining industries. Canadian mining companies currently operate several of the largest gold mines in the country, and many Canadian junior exploration firms are actively searching for new metal discoveries. The passage I cite here, which describes a “white elephant project,” a newly built but not completed five-star hotel in a capital city, expresses confusion and angst over the failures of the post-colonial era. At the time this novel was published, Ghana had experienced a decade of political independence: On the top of the hill, commanding it just as it commanded the scene below, its sheer, flat, multi-storied side an insulting white in the concentrated gleam of the hotel’s spotlights, towered the useless structure of the Atlantic Caprice. Sometimes it seemed as if the huge building had been put there for a purpose, like that of attracting to itself all the massive anger of a people in pain. But then, if there were any angry ones at all these days, they were most certainly feeling the loneliness of mourners at a festival of crazy joy. Perhaps then the purpose of this white thing was to draw onto itself the love of a people hungry for just something such as this. The gleam, in moments of honesty, had a power to produce a disturbing ambiguity within. It would be good to say that the gleam never did attract. It

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  35 would be good, but it would be far from the truth. And something terrible was happening as time went on. It was getting harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it attracted, attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustingly confused feeling all the time these heavy days.38

This passage pre-dates Washington Consensus policies by at least fifteen years, yet Armah anticipates what is coming. The passage succinctly expresses key aspects of white supremacy in this era of neoliberal capitalism. White supremacist neoliberalism has an imposing, material, structural presence; it represents, one could say, an appropriation, concentration, and misuse of resources – that is, structural ­violence – aimed at servicing an affluent elite at the expense of, or through the dispossession of, those who are not or are no longer affluent; and it holds a confusing degree of psychological power over ordinary people, who recognize yet also refuse to recognize what it represents. What it represents is, moreover, opaque, deceptive, duplicitous, mesmerizing, confusing, and thus disturbingly seductive. Yet simultaneously, it is entirely ordinary, banal: just a hotel, a building – seemingly not violent or destructive. Extrapolating from Armah’s gleaming white hotel, we can observe that neoliberalism as white supremacy manifests itself in both extreme and banal ways; it encompasses racial terror, force, murder, and blatant attitudes of superiority, arrogant assertions of the right to rule over others, and racial hatred of the Other, as well as a host of routine, seemingly neutral, non-racial practices and expressions of coded “everyday racism.” The draw and power of whiteness, moreover, rests not only in the material rewards it proffers but also in its seductive philanthropic promise – a promise that obtains through the capacity of whiteness to mesmerize and to dissemble. Whiteness performs a lie; it purports to be what it is not. At times, it both is and is not. Notably, this capacity is simultaneously banal, ruthless, and calculating. The Colonial Imaginary, Colonial Subjectivities, and Narratives of Nationhood This excerpt from Armah’s novel provides a segue into a discussion of the central significance of the cultural imaginary in colonialist projects. A primary focus of this book is the racialized socio-cultural imaginary that characterizes the Canadian mining industry. In this regard,

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Edward Said’s seminal Culture and Imperialism (1993) was a prime inspiration for the inquiry that culminated in this book. Imperialism and the ­operation of colonies is always about material and economic ­matters – in particular, it is about access to, control of, and profit from the land, resources, and labour of dominated peoples. However, in Culture and Imperialism, Said identified the crucial role of cultural production in shaping the attitudes and “habits of feeling” that caused a colonizing/imperialist society to regard imperialism as normal and good. As he famously states: The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future – these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic said, nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.39

Said then draws attention to the ways in which nineteenth- and t­wentieth-century European novels, through routine, cursory references to and depictions of Europe’s colonies and the colonized, shaped the public imagination of ordinary people in England and France. By constructing the colonized Other (and its society/culture) as backward, childlike, warring, insane, or hypersexualized, and therefore as an entity that required removal, assimilation, or assistance to grow, mature, reform, and modernize, discourses of popular culture enabled imperial domination to be normatively regarded as good and legitimate. For public consumption, colonial domination was “rebranded” as “the white man’s burden” – an act of sacrificial benevolence. National colonialist projects required not only the political, legal, and military architecture of the state but also resilient and widely disseminated cultural narratives that fashioned consent and compliance from citizens in part by capturing their imaginations in appealing ways, or by offering certain kinds of psychological reassurance and comfort. Achille Mbembe (2001) conceives of such processes as the immense cultural and ideological work required to sustain colonialist relations of domination.40 Analysing colonialism as a fundamentally violent project, Mbembe identifies the production and dissemination of “legitimizing discourses” as a central dimension of colonial violence that “ended

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  37

up constituting the central cultural imaginary that the state shared with society, and [which] thus had an authenticating and reiterating function.”41 The colonizer state (and its business/merchant allies and representatives) brutally arrogates rights over lands and bodies and then legitimizes its presence through paternalistic claims of kindness. In this way, it establishes “its moral superiority, the force for good that it brings as a gift.”42 Mbembe emphasizes the power and tenacity of this notion of goodness and benevolence at the heart of the popular colonial imagination. Colonizing countries can thus be cast as good nations of good people. Throughout this book, the idea of settler-colonialism-as-goodness is posited as a foundational lie at the heart of the contemporary Canadian social imaginary. This culturally entrenched lie has the capacity to hook people across the political, class, and racial spectrum.43 The colonizer-state fashions a particular national imaginary or mythol­ ogy with which citizens are invited to self-identify; this consolidates and anchors colonial domination. As several scholars have noted, the production of the “moral subject”44 or “civilizing subject” becomes a central cultural obsession of colonizer-nations. Indeed, citizens are subjectified in the terms of this national mythology – that is, invited into psycho-social understandings of themselves as particular kinds of persons. These cultural processes come to operate as part of the commonsense backdrop of the society, generating ways of thinking – for example, Canadians as peacekeepers and humanitarians; Canada as a nation that values multiculturalism – that are largely unquestioned yet give rise to and make possible certain social policies and institutional formations. In myriad ways and at myriad sites – through government, schooling, the media – citizens are vigorously summoned to identify themselves as moral subjects, as philanthropists or “global citizens.” These identifications serve to erase and hide the history and continuing exercise of colonial force, racism, and plunder. Members of the society draw on these ubiquitous, glossy cultural images to produce an individual sense of moral selfhood; in so doing, they stabilize and legitimize the (neo)colonial project. A novel contribution of this book to the critical literature on global mining is that it gives attention to the subjectivities produced by, and required by, this field of work. While it is difficult to synthesize the literature on the complex idea of subjectivity,45 a few key aspects can be identified. Louis Althusser conceptualized subjectivity as emerging in the context of experiences of “interpellation”: becoming conscious

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of oneself as a social subject through being recognized and named (“hailed”) as a subject by others. To a significant degree, this interpellation is generated from within the parameters of social institutions’ dominant ideologies.46 As Michèle Barrett notes, “ideology works by making the subject recognize itself in a certain specific way, and simultaneously to construe that specificity as the obvious or natural one for itself.”47 In modern societies characterized by hierarchies of power and inequalities in resource distribution, dominant or privileged subjects become invested in the maintenance of a social order that benefits them materially and offers them a seemingly “natural” sense of identity. In this manner, “the subject which power has constituted becomes part of the mechanisms of power.”48 In the modern neoliberal state, these mechanisms of power are embedded in influential institutional discourses that express certain political values and that structure social relations of power. Paradoxically, subjects formed in such contexts are both socially constituted or determined – what could be called “scripted” – and made agentive, empowered as social subjects who can act/dominate, but only within prescribed ideological parameters. Dominant subjects thus participate in their own subjection – a limitation of autonomy and agency – as they simultaneously act to reproduce the discursive and material terms of the subjection/colonization of others. Moreover, this process of subjectification entails a denial of their/our own subjection to the operations of authoritarian power. This suggests that the internalization and repression of the knowledge of what colonial rule entails (land theft, plunder, genocide, displacement, destruction of languages and knowledges, eradication of heterogeneity, denial of mutual interdependence, loss of freedom and self-determination) becomes foundational to the twin processes of self-subjection (the subordination of the self to colonialist biopower) and self-making (agency) of dominant subjects. Indeed, Renée Bergland asserts that “modern subjectivity must be understood as an internalization of the colonial relation.”49 To add another dimension, if both modernity and colonialism, as the terrain of modern capitalist power, are racially structured in the logic and material interests of white supremacy, and if whiteness is, in Tifsberger’s formulation, “a history of seizure,”50 then the racial state, or white settler state, requires citizen-subjects who can psychologically manage the historical facts of a subject location of domination and seizure. This entails an ongoing process of denial that takes

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  39

shape through the recasting of seizure and domination as charity/­ philanthropy – as acts of love and care. But this is a precarious process, for certain troubling facts continue to be exposed and displayed. Those facts have the power to disturb the conscience and sense of identity of the racially dominant colonizer-subject. The foundational lies of racial states and settler-states – the lies of colonization as goodness, of sei­ hilanthropy – so significantly structure and interpellate the zure as p subjectivity of privileged citizens that considerable anxiety and defensiveness is generated when these lies are threatened or challenged – that is, when the foundational lies are unmasked or named. Dominant subjects in racial/colonizer states thus can be theorized as psychologically insecure/defensive subjects who resist unmasking (“truth telling”) and who compulsively rearticulate national scripts of goodness in order to alleviate or anesthetize their vaguely felt and successfully suppressed “cognitive dissonance”51 and discomfort associated with the knowledge of injustice. In some cases, the psychological process of suppression and denial – refusing to know or to come to terms with complicity in colonial-racial violence and seizure – produces a zombified, callous subject without affect, incapable of empathy. For the sake of protecting such subjects, racialized structural violence as manifested in the political economy of global mining requires (and gives rise to) a mesmerizing cultural logic: shifting, chameleonic, glossy images and notions that are appealing and compelling, that entice people into performances of, and identifications with, white supremacy yet are latently threatening and ultimately hostile (as is colonial power) to substantively democratic politics. The a/moral subjects fashioned in this neoliberal, neo-colonialist context become adept at a generalized cultural process of dissembling and come to perform an internalized duplicity and disavowal. The Modern State: White Supremacist, Proto-Fascist, Neoliberal This leads to the question of the role of the state. To analyse and represent the Canadian global mining industry as a colonialist project requires a theorization of the state and state power in neoliberal society. During the course of my research, I was repeatedly startled by the role played by various federal government actors and departments vis-à-vis the Canadian mining industry; indeed, it was their actions that perhaps most convinced me that I was analysing a colonialist project. In this section, I therefore draw together various strands of thought that enable a

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theorization of the modern liberal-democratic capitalist state as a racial state, and of Canada as a white supremacist colonizer-state. A point of departure is the debate about the alleged erosion of the power and significance of the nation-state in the context of ­globalization – or, as it has been dramatically dubbed, “the end of the nation.” Some Marxist scholars have long theorized the state as an institution that is subordinate to bourgeois capitalist economic power; that is, they have posited the modern state as an instrument of capital, operating principally to protect capitalist class interests such as access to markets and resources, property rights, and rights to profit.52 From this perspective, the state is a hollow institution subordinate to the “real” power of economic forces. Since the end of the Cold War and the advent of market-led globalization, new questions about the nature, power, and role of the nationstate have emerged. As Susan Strange succinctly states, “where states were once the masters of markets, now it is the markets which, on many crucial issues, are the masters over the governments of states. And the declining authority of states is reflected in a growing diffusion of authority to other institutions and associations.”53 The increased political weight of regional and bilateral trade agreements and the World Trade Organization lends credence to the view that there has been some erosion of individual nation-states’ abilities to determine their own policies and national visions, or to prioritize Indigenous/domestic needs and values above those of global market forces and the demands of a transnational capitalist class with no compelling national ties or allegiances. Undeniably, has been a global convergence of economic and social policies, with many states reducing investments in the social sector while liberalizing their trade and investment regimes.54 The speed and freedom of speculative financial capital is unprecedented, and so is its influence, especially on weaker states. Moreover, as Campbell and colleagues (2004) point out in their study of the impact on African states of neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs, the decapacitation and redefinition of the role of African states has been profound, as the discipline of foreign investment regimes and multilateral agencies and elite interests of donor states prevent these states from prioritizing domestic markets, using tariffs to protect new industries, placing performance requirements on foreign investment, and so on. In his study of the resource extraction sector in Peru, Szablowski (2007) examines the constraints on sovereign agency of the Peruvian state vis-à-vis foreign corporate institutions; he concludes that “host states” manage

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  41

restricted sovereignty through practices of “selective absence,” that is, by choosing not to act or intervene on behalf of Peruvian communities vis-à-vis foreign capitalist forces.55 Certainly, many low-income countries sense that external market forces, especially in the form of bilateral and multilateral investment and trade agreements, now overrule their national or autonomous visions and policies. Probably the most influential contribution to the “end of the nation-state” argument has been Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), in which the authors assert, exhaustively, that nation-state sovereignty has given way to an emerging new mode of sovereignty, that of “empire,” which operates globally, erasing territorial borders and implementing a complex mode of domination that operates through forms of power that are simultaneously monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic. My ethnographic research left me unconvinced of the demise of the power and sovereignty of the Western capitalist nation-state. Indeed, a growing body of literature counters or at least nuances the thesis of the disappearing nation-state. Some neo-Marxist scholarship identifies and acknowledges the historical importance of state interventions and the role of state-backed force in creating the conditions for capitalist economic relations to emerge.56 This is perhaps easiest to see in the case of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism, but it can also be traced to the early “enclosures” of lands through acts of appropriation and sometimes violence authorized by the state’s legislative, court, and policing systems. The modern Western state has not been merely instrumental in this; indeed, it has actively led various phases of capitalism, including the most recent round of “free market” liberalization. This analysis suggests that while the role of the nation-state in neoliberal globalization has changed and is continuing to change, this does not signify that the nation-state has lost its power or relevance; rather, it appears that the neoliberal state is taking on a particularly forceful role at the present time. Sethi (2011) cites Meiskins Wood’s observation that “the essence of globalization is not the declining capacity but the unique ability of nation-states to organize the world for global capital.”57 It is not that the state has lost relevance or power, but that the neoliberal state is abandoning its relatively short-lived historical function as guardian of both the interests of capital and the welfare and rights of the people. The neoliberal state thus emerges as a vigorous and powerful ally of corporate capital; the state’s role vis-à-vis the people is correspondingly one of control, discipline, and containment. The word “ally” does not quite capture what is occurring; better to speak of

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an erasure of the distinction between the private corporate sector and the state such that the two operate in concert. This theorization renders comprehensible, for example, why various Canadian federal agencies and departments presented their own cases against Bill C-300, using arguments that paralleled point by point those made by the mining and financial sector during the parliamentary hearings.58 Linda Weiss (1997) argues that the notion of the general erosion of nation-state sovereignty is too homogenizing and pays inadequate attention to the historical and cultural differences among states that lead to different responses to globalizing pressures. She also shows that the empirical evidence for the globalization of governance functions away from nation-states, and even for economic globalization, is weak. Kiely (2010) asserts that the demise of the nation-state sovereignty thesis “exaggerates the independence of transnational capital from national state, and … downplays the crucial role that some states played in deepening global integration. In particular, it underestimates the role of the US state in taking the lead in the promotion of neoliberal policies” (144). Wealthy nation-states continue to actively shape the global policy environment; Rumina Sethi (2011) asserts, however, that nation-states – especially in the global South – remain the only institutions with the power to resist the demands of foreign capital. She presents strong evidence corroborating the existence of weakened and complicit “comprador states” in the global South – noting that “globalization is not just an inexorable, irresistible current of capitalism but, more than that, the consequences of choices made by heads of state who seem untroubled by the ruin of local economies by global ­business”59 – but she also points to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Malaysia as examples of nation-states that, reflecting a broad-based democratic consensus, prioritized autochthonous interests and values above those of a capitalist, transnational, corporate elite. As Sethi asserts, “the state remains equally significant for both the proponents and the enemies of neoliberalism.”60 If the neoliberal state remains a locus of power and authority in the world today, what is the nature of that power and authority? The term “liberal” in “neoliberal state” situates the modern Western democratic state in the genealogical tradition of the Enlightenment, which witnessed the French and American Revolutions and their championing of individual liberty, representative government, human rights, rule of law, and property rights – that is, protection from the arbitrary seizure of one’s possessions and assets. At the heart of this historical

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  43

development can be found a remarkable paradox: the simultaneous expansion of European colonial rule over much of the planet. What was the nature of that colonial power, and how were two such fundamentally divergent ideologies of governance able to coexist and in fact be conducted by the same states? Achille Mbembe offers the most visceral and theoretically substantive depiction of colonial state power or what he calls “colonial rationality.” His interest is to demonstrate the flow of colonial rationality into post-colonial authoritarianism in African states. As I will show, his insights are highly relevant to theorizations of contemporary liberaldemocratic capitalist states such as Canada. Mbembe names colonial rule or rationality as “commandement,” or decree. At its root, colonial power is arbitrary, non-accountable, unregulated, and self-­referential – “the very concept of right often stood revealed as a void.”61 The colonial state alone possessed rights, specifically, the right to take commodities, resources, and human labour as it wished. Such rights were not negotiated but arrogated and did not have to be defended in law, for the colonial power was the law. In such a context, it goes without saying that the colonized populations had no rights within the colonial state. These populations “had to be enclosed in relations of subjection, initially known as ‘politique des races’ and later ‘politique indigene’”;62 these “natives” were designated as such according to (socially construed) racial criteria and were often regarded as pre-civil beings living the “natural” existence of animals. Colonial state violence could be, and was, exercised on these colonized populations with impunity. Indeed, colonial governance took the form of everyday violence, in which populations – commonly with a view to obtaining the maximum labour and productivity from their bodies, as well as obedience and submission – were subjected to elaborate systems of control and surveillance, punishments and fines, or what Mbembe calls a “miniaturization of violence” that infiltrated everyday life and thus socialized colonial power. Moreover, this manifestation of colonial state power was based on what Mbembe (pre-dating Agamben) called a “regime d’exception”: a departure from the common law. This regime was further characterized by differential rights and privileges dispensed by the ruling authorities – in terms harkening back to royal power and its prerogatives – to favoured individuals and private companies (e.g., the Hudson’s Bay Company, the East India Company, the Royal Niger Company, Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa, and Leopold II in the Belgian Congo), to whom were awarded vast privileges to govern

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territories, manage (or eliminate) populations, and acquire enormously valuable resources. Again, how can such forms and expressions of lawless-brutalityas-state-power be reconciled with the civil notion of the state as the guardian of the rule of law and the welfare of the people, their democratic rights and freedoms? To answer this question, I return to Charles Mills’s notion of white supremacy as a political system: if modernity, and the modern state as one of its principal institutions, is conceptualized as constitutively racist – as oriented towards the protection of white power and privilege – then the apparent contradiction between democratic governance and colonial governance can be understood not as incommensurable but as the expression of a sophisticated racial system. This analysis enables an understanding of Canada as simultaneously a liberal-democratic state (its dominant image) and a colonial state (a transgressive image). To explain this idea in more detail, I turn to the work of D.T. Goldberg (2002), Giorgio Agamben (2005), and Henry Giroux (2004). Goldberg approaches the task of theorizing what he calls the “racial state” initially through reference to Foucault, who schematizes a movement from juridical or sovereign power (the power of the prince/king to issue decrees and to put subjects to death, such power being discontinuous as it pertains to the ruled population) towards modern disciplinary power, governmentality, or biopower. This latter form of power governs continuously and systematically through bureaucratic processes of surveillance and regulation (such as taxation and policing) and through the production of subjects who internalize a modern capitalist subjectivity and in turn exercise self-discipline. This form of governance is highly efficient, totalizing, and productive, in that it organizes the society to function in the interests of, and according to the needs of, capitalist production. Foucault states: “This new type of power … is one of the great inventions of bourgeois society. It has been a fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism and of the type of society that is its accompaniment.”63 In this analysis, the subjects/citizens of disciplinary society are far less free and self-determining than they are trained to believe they are; as Foucault clearly states, the exercise of power in the modern liberal state is a form of domination whose nature is disguised. Like the colonial state, but using different technologies of rule and command, the modern democratic state exercises power on and through bodies (defined as workers or consumers rather than as “natives”) with a view to making them more productive.

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With regard to Foucault’s analysis of modern disciplinary power, Goldberg highlights and clarifies the role and function of ideologies of race and the development of racialized technologies of rule. Foucault identified biopower as a technique of modern forms of rule and governance; Goldberg specifies that such power operates by assigning “race” to bodies so that bodies are governed, managed, or ordered/ commanded/dominated through being raced; moreover, the death or life of the body is a racialized determination, occurring with reference to a racist logic. Goldberg argues that the binaries that infused Enlightenment thought – reason versus emotion, mind versus body, and so on – acquired a racial inflection over time and in symbiotic relation to material practices of imperialism; these inflections functioned to categorize human beings into hierarchically ordered racial groups. Modern states ruled not just through the production of subjects but through the production of racialized (and racially gendered) subjects who could accordingly be differently privileged, differently exploited or punished, and positioned in different spaces. The routine racialization of the population occurred in all key sites through which the modern state exercised power: immigration or border policing; the criminal justice system; policies to manage and reproduce a labour force in response to needs of the capitalist economy; regulation of marriage and families; the legal order; and production of consent to the existing power configuration through media, public education, cultural production, and the like. In attempting to explain what is “normal” about modern racialized societies, Goldberg distinguishes “racist states” such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi-governed Germany, where there were legally defined citizenship and rights differences based on race, from “racial states,” which he identifies as modern, liberal, multicultural states with de jure legal equality of citizens but persistent structural and cultural racial stratifications. In other words, de jure racial equality is asserted, whereas de facto racial inequality is routinely experienced.64 The persistence of this racial ordering of society is presented not as a perplexing anomaly of modernity but as a sign of the extent to which modernity is inscribed with racial-colonial epistemologies and modalities of power. Thus, Goldberg asserts that “the racially conceived and reproducing state is characteristic of, not exceptional to, modernity … So while racist states may seem exceptional, their very possibility is underpinned by the normalcy of the racial state.”65 Racial governmentalities “regulate social, political, economic, legal and cultural relations between

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those racially defined … Racial states govern populations identified in explicitly racial terms; racial states manage economically [intervening] to secure the conditions for the reproduction of capital.” To state it succinctly, “the racial state is a peculiar sort of totalitarianism, seeking to pervade all social forms, institutions and expressions.”66 Goldberg further asserts that the racialized imaginary at the core of the racial state – at the core of modernity itself – was what made possible the conceivability of the colonial state. Conceptually, the racial state encompasses the forms of power of the democratic state and the colonial state and subtends the coexistence of democracy and fascism. What this analysis brings into clear view is that the fascist-colonial state is not an anomaly or aberration; in fact, it is located as firmly within the political genealogy that gives rise to the contemporary neoliberal capitalist state as the imagined Enlightenment state of civil and democratic rights and freedoms. Indeed, Agamben (2005) identifies the “state of exception” (in which rule of law is suspended or temporarily disregarded) not as an anomaly or an exception but rather as a recurring phenomenon in Western political history. Recent examples of this include the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the suspension of their rights to due process, the use of torture by the US military, the handing over by Canadian military authorities of Afghani prisoners to Afghan prison authorities who were known to practise torture, the use of “security certificates” in Canada to detain persons suspected of “terrorist” associations or activities, and the suspension of civil rights during the G20 summit in Toronto in June 2010. What Agamben brings into view are moments and eras when “rule of law” is suspended; the resulting state of exception – often implemented or justified as an appropriate response to a state of emergency – is “a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal ­determinations – and above all the very distinction between public and private – are deactivated.”67 The state of exception erases the very political framework that authorizes exceptions; it institutes a zone of unbridled power, power that can rule by decree – or, as Mbembe called it, by “commandement.” Colonial rule can thus be readily grasped as a state of exception. But Agamben demonstrates that such modes of governance have consistently occurred within modern democratic Western states almost without interruption from World War One, through fascism and National Socialism, and up to our own time. Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  47 aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.68

This notion of suspending the law while claiming to still be applying the law is particularly striking and lends weight to my analysis of neoliberalism as a mode of racist power built on the act of lying, dissembling, and covering up. As Agamben points out, in both Italy under Mussolini and Germany under Hitler, the existing constitution was allowed to exist even while it was ignored: “they placed beside the legal constitution a second structure, often not legally formalized, that could exist alongside the other because of the state of exception.”69 It is precisely this duality – the coexistence of non-formally authorized power and technologies of rule alongside the formally existing rule of law – that renders forms of proto-fascist power so difficult to prove, identify, and address in modern Western states. In this regard, Giroux offers some additional insights, with which I will conclude this section. He analyses the erosion of democracy and rise of “proto-fascist tendencies” in the United States, citing, for example, the corporate control of mainstream media, the corporatization of civil society, the erosion of public space, nationalistic jingoism combined with a sense of threat, fear and insecurity from vague enemies, increased surveillance and erosion of civil liberties, the militarization of society, the “dumbing down” of society through simplistic and propagandist language that does not foster critical thinking, and the collapse of the separation of religion and state.70 He observes that while neoliberalism is not essential for the rise of fascism, in the current context, neoliberal policies and ideology foster proto-fascist tendencies through the cutting back of public expenditures in the public/social sector. This exacerbates economic inequality, which contributes in turn to a sense of insecurity; it also fosters individualism and erodes the notion of collectivities as the site of politics, while giving free reign to corporate interests and power. Correspondingly, racism is reduced to an individual problem, one that is experienced and caused by individuals; and meanwhile, the political democratic space to advocate for racial justice is sharply reduced and demands for justice are silenced through threats and intimidation. Neoliberalism fosters a form of proto-fascism that refuses to apprehend or redress systemic historical inequalities and racial injustices. In this way, democracy, equity, racial justice, and

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social justice are pushed off the public agenda and rendered unthinkable; indeed, especially as they constitute demands on the authoritarian state for transformative policies, they are positioned as a threat, as an enemy, as treason. When the racist past is made unspeakable, a racist future for whiteness is guaranteed. Canada as a Colonialist White Supremacist State Through this theorization of the state in Western modernity, whereby the fascist colonial state functions as the unacknowledged twin of the Enlightenment state of democratic rights and freedoms, it becomes evident that the Canadian state can be conceived as a site of colonialist/ fascist power from a number of angles: as a white settler state, as a racialcapitalist state, and as an imperialist-colonialist state. The theorization of modern state power as colonialist has particular resonance for white settler states such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and South Africa. All of these (and others) were established through colonial invasion:71 a foreign population invaded and settled, which involved displacing the Indigenous inhabitants, killing them off or causing the deaths of many, assimilating the survivors, and imposing a new political and cultural system. These practices exemplify colonial power as a “state of exception” in a legal-political sense – that is, as a form of arbitrary, unaccountable, despotic power. In the next chapter, I examine that power in relation to the historical occupation of the territory now called Canada. A white settler state can be understood more precisely as a heterogeneous settler state in which whiteness is dominant and privileged. The dominating population differentiates itself from the Indigenous one and from other “non-white” settlers on arbitrary phenotypical grounds – that is, by fashioning a (superior) identity as “white” and thereby justifying laws and other institutional practices that economically and politically advantage those deemed white. In Canada, an explicit “White Canada” immigration policy prevailed from the late 1800s until its formal demise in 1962.72 Given that race is a social construct, who “counted” as white was somewhat fluid, changing over time. With the advent of the post–Second World War era of human rights and formal racial equality and the termination of Canada’s explicitly racist immigration policy, race was not supposed to be noticed or to count at all. Thus the term “white settler state” has a counter-hegemonic thrust that challenges the dominant notion that race is no longer relevant in contemporary Canada.

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For white settler states, the tensions between the methods used to acquire physical territory and establish the political state (force, coercion, trickery, manipulation of law, erection of buildings and structures, land appropriation, genocide, racist exclusion of non-white settlers, etc.) and national self-representation are particularly acute. Having emerged from relatively recent colonial conquests of Indigenous lands and populations, settler-states are characterized by a preoccupation with nation building and national identity, often expressed through strategic forgetting and controlled remembering.73 Settler-states are often haunted – literally, discursively, metaphorically – by those who were killed or removed but who cannot be officially acknowledged out of fear of delegitimizing the contemporary state and its economic base.74 For these states, as with classic European colonizer-states, public discourses and narratives that erase, “whitewash,” or mythologize colonial/settler violence and resource theft are crucial.75 Binaries of whiteness/Blackness, civility/savagery, developed/underdeveloped, rule-of-law/lawlessness, and so on, are central features of these discourses. In Canada and the United States, mythologies of the frontier and the fort and the construction of cowboy-hero masculinity have been especially potent in processes of reimagining settler histories.76 As Mackey (2002), Coleman (2006), and Thobani (2007) have demonstrated, a persistent feature of the Canadian white-settler colonial imaginary has been the need to rescript and “whitewash” the nation’s founding history and identity – to render it, as Coleman calls it, a story of white civility. Part of what needs to be whitewashed, or hidden from historical view, is the manner in which European imperialist nations – with England as the prime example – treated their colonies differently on racial grounds. That is, the “white settler” or “self-governing” colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa – were offered much more advantageous economic institutions and policies by their imperial masters. The fact that most white colonies became self-governing earlier was not coincidental; rather, it reflected different perceptions of the colonial governance capabilities on the part of the imperial state. Accominotti and colleagues analyse the imperial state’s underwriting of colonial debt and the credit risk “hazards” posed by colonies to show two strikingly different sets of practices that emerged. In their study, they “report empirical evidence that the surplus from British Empire subjection depended critically on the type of colony one is looking at. Our results suggest that white-peopled ‘self-governing’ colonies derived some gains, while

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for black ‘dependent’ colonies where natives predominated, the surplus was negative. The British Empire was a black man’s burden.”77 Colonies without significant white settlement (India, Ceylon, Jamaica, etc.) were ruled with an iron fist; democratic institutions were not supported and indeed were ruthlessly repressed by force; financial decisions were made in London; and bond issues by colonial governments were strictly limited in order to protect the imperial home state from the risk of default. As a consequence, such colonies were starved of investment resources for national development, while private British capitalists continued to enjoy low competition in these settings as well as exceptionally high rates of return on local investments. With the white settler colonies, the imperial state, rather than limiting borrowing by the colony, imposed a contractually junior legal status, making debts incurred by these colonial governments subject to imperial judicial authority. Investors could, if necessary, sue these colonial governments in court. Private investors thus felt adequately protected from risk of loss to lend money to colonial governments in the “white colonies.” According to Accominotti and colleagues, these differential arrangements made possible debt-financed economic development in the white settler colonies – a strategy that was not available to the “dependent” colonies. This difference in treatment offers some explanation for the strikingly uneven developmental outcomes among various parts of the British Empire. The non-white “dependent” colonies faced a far more challenging economic and social development position as they gained independence than did the white settler colonies. Accominotti and colleagues directly identify racism as the root cause of those differences: Last but not least, we found that racism was instrumental in determining development outcomes within the British colonial Empire, through the impact it had on institutional frameworks. The widely accepted view, in the developed world of the time, that violence against native people was a legitimate policy played a crucial role in endowing dependent colonies with bad institutions. Had the white people of the time (British, French, or Americans) believed that the life of black people was worth as much as theirs, the growth prospects of the world would have been very different.78

Emerging from that history, the white settler state of the twentieth century reimagines, refigures, and rebrands itself as a liberal-democratic capitalist state, but without acknowledging the multiple ways in which it has benefited economically from racism and without transforming

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its deeply racist structure. The white settler state is thus simultaneously Goldberg’s “racial state,” in which domination operates in the form of racialized governmentality or biopower. Whatever the liberal claims to meritocracy, and whatever the promises of multiculturalism, an intersecting class–race economic stratification – de facto if not je jure racism – persists in Canada. The country is characterized by the overrepresentation of racialized and Indigenous people when it comes to poverty, unemployment, precarious employment, and thus lowincome brackets, and by the overrepresentation of “white people” in the higher and highest economic brackets, which offer the greatest job security, income, assets, and benefits.79 Moreover, racialized and Indigenous people have been disproportionately criminalized and are more susceptible to physical and mental illness. There is a similar correlation in terms of political representation, the courts, education, and so on – white people dominate out of proportion to their numbers. The dominance of white men in the upper tiers of the Canadian mining sector (see chapter 6) is entirely consistent with patterns in most other sectors of Canadian society. Canada remains a society in which political and economic privilege and power is racially organized in favour of white people. In this book, I argue that the Canadian mining industry’s policies and practices (with state support) are contributing to a local continuation and a global extension of this pattern of racial stratification, inequality, and, for the “unfortunate” groups, enhanced risk of not living, or living wretchedly. Yet despite the evidence of continuing racial stratification and discrimination in Canada and on a global scale, neoliberalism’s claims to colour blindness – its practices of “race denial”80 and “racialized power denial” – make it extremely difficult to acknowledge or redress this situation. In this context of race denial, it is not surprising that representing Canada as engaged in a contemporary colonialist project of African resource extraction runs up against resistance. As a modern liberaldemocratic state, one of whose exemplary citizens – John Humphrey – drafted the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Canada is supposed to be incapable of colonialist or imperialist force on the international stage. This is the third dimension to be addressed in positing Canada as a site of fascist-colonialist power. Abele and Stasiulis (1989) and Dua (1999) have accused Canadian political economists of failing to adequately theorize racism as a structuring factor in the evolution of Canada’s political economy and of underemphasizing Canada’s role in facilitating “imperialist and

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neo-imperialist expansion.”81 As if anticipating Charles Mills’s similar critique, Abele and Stasiulis state: We find that political economy, like mainstream history and social science, has often comprehended incompletely or inadequately two uncomfortable facts about Canada: the lands and resources were taken and continue to be taken from Native societies, at great cost to the members of those societies; and these lands and resources were integrated into a system of capitalist development that exploited and continues to exploit some immigrant groups more than others. Too much of the political economy tradition is colour-blind and amnesiac … Our argument is that engaging with a specific history of Native peoples and immigrant groups in a manner that recognizes the centrality and significance of race, ethnicity and culture can say much about the nature of the Canadian social formation and its incorporation into the international political economy.82

As they and others have noted, Harold Innis’s early influential theorizations of Canada as a “staples economy” fostered the idea of Canada as a dependent, “Third World”–like economy based on the export of unprocessed primary commodities (furs, minerals, timber, wheat, etc.). Analyses of the mining industry, as a major example of the “staples” characteristic of Canada’s economy, became central to these constructions. Some Canadian political economists have equated Innis’s seminal work on Canada as a “staples-producing” state with that of the Latin American “dependencia” theorists and with Samir Amin’s “development of underdevelopment” theories.83 James Laxer has described Canada as a “resource-extractive country dependent on outside imperial powers”84 (emphasis added); another political economist, Ian Parker, “contended that Innis analysed ‘more deeply than Marx had the forms of dependency which characterize colonial relations, from the standpoint of colonial margins’”85 (emphasis added). Kari Levitt, writing in 1970, argued that Canada had been turned into a “colonial economy” and was “the world’s richest underdeveloped country.”86 Such representations and theorizations secured a victim stance (i.e., Canada as an exploited rather than exploiting country) and thus a kind of innocence for Canada as a nation. But even Innis was able to anticipate a different role and identity for Canada: “Having exhausted our more available resources, we may continue to thrive by sharing in the exhaustion of the resources of less industrialized parts of the Empire and the world. Our mild, imperialistic policy will look for new territory.”87

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Well into the twentieth century, Canada continued to be regarded as a “branch plant economy,” a dependent satellite of US capital.88 There was some basis for this view; for instance, Jorge Niosi documented a high level of US ownership of the Canadian mining sector from 1870 to 1970 – a situation that only began to change after 1970: “By 1970, 58 per cent of the assets in the mining industry were under American control, while as of 1980, this proportion had fallen to 40 per cent … Foreign control over the Canadian mining industry has undoubtedly been further reduced since 1980.”89 One legacy of almost a century of high levels of US investment was nationalist anxiety about Canadian sovereignty and the importance of domestic ownership of the Canadian economy.90 That anxiety rendered untenable the notion that Canada was an imperialist state in its own right. These conceptions of Canada as economically dependent did not go unchallenged. As Glen Williams has pointed out, “the contradiction at the heart of the ‘rich, industrialized, underdeveloped’ formula always left it exposed to attack: how to account for all the other, obvious socioeconomic indicators of Canada’s high wage location within the international hierarchy?”91 While many Canadian political economists of the “dependency” school seemed unable to perceive race as an explanatory element or an independent but intersecting structural factor in the development of the Canadian economy, Williams began to consider some of the implications of what he called “white settler colonization” and “the role of Canada’s internal social formation”: “The ‘rich’ basis to Canada’s social formation … was the direct result of Canada being developed historically as an extension of the centre: Canada and the other white Dominions stood in sharp contrast to the colonies of conquest and impoverishment. The colonies of settlement were developed as overseas extensions, miniature replicas, of British society, complete with a large measure of local political autonomy.”92 Williams obliquely alludes to but does not further develop an argument pertaining to the function of white racial privilege as both ideology and materiality. He does, however, argue convincingly that the Canadian dependency theorists’ readings of Innis were misreadings. He goes on to cite other scholarship that depicts Canada’s position in the contemporary international economy as either that of a “sub-imperial power” comparable to Israel, Iran, and South Africa,93 or that of an advanced imperialist nation in its own right alongside Britain, France, Japan, and West Germany.94 His basis for these assertions is the rapidly increasing Canadian investment in formerly colonized countries of the global South.”95

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As the twentieth century progressed, Canada established itself as a “mature” capitalist state and as one of the world’s senior industrialized nations – thus, its membership in the UN Security Council (occasionally), the G7, the G8, and so on. Even so, its identity was largely that of a modest, humanitarian middle power exercising moral rather than economic or military authority in the global arena. Canada’s much-touted but greatly exaggerated involvement (at least from 1995 to the present) in international peacekeeping was central to this modest, “good guy” portrayal. Less publicly visible were Canadian banks’ domination, since the 1950s, of several Caribbean islands’ banking sectors and – especially after the early 1980s – an increasingly vigorous program of Canadian foreign direct investment in other countries around the world, especially in mining and oil and gas.96 Until the Oka Crisis of 1990, there was arguably little awareness in non-Indigenous society of Canada’s own colonial realities vis-à-vis Indigenous populations. Thus, Canada’s modest, good-guy image persisted in the public imaginary – indeed, it was actively disseminated. But since the 1990s, and increasingly in the twenty-first century, there have been clear signs of a Canadian national and international identity characterized more and more by an aggressive military and economic stance.97 A number of Marxist scholars have argued that Canada can no longer in any sense be conceptualized as a “dependency” (i.e., of American capital); today, it has all the hallmarks of an aspiring imperialist nation in its own right. Jerome Klassen (2009) argues that Canada participates actively as a secondary power among the top tier of states engaged in “collective imperialism.” Klassen shows that while Canada has a highly liberalized foreign investment regime (facilitated by the dismantling of the Foreign Investment Review Agency in the mid-1980s), Canadian outward foreign direct investment routinely surpasses inward flows; besides retaining primary ownership and control of the Canadian economy, Canadian companies are acquiring more and more valuable offshore assets. Canada’s foreign investments continue to be largely in other wealthy and middle-income countries; that said, Canadian multinationals are now wielding strong influence in a number of low-income African and Caribbean countries. In Imperialist Canada, one of the most comprehensive treatments to date, Todd Gordon provides extensive case study detail of Canada’s imperialist practices domestically and globally; he also documents strong community-based resistance in countries around the world to Canadian imperialism and to the Canadian state’s imperialist role in shaping

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foreign policy, military policy, and aid policy. Furthermore, drawing on research by Carroll (1986) and Burgess (2008) on corporate networks in Canada, both Klassen and Gordon associate Canada’s imperialist aspirations and capabilities with the existence of a highly interconnected elite capitalist class in Canada that controls a relatively small number of large Canadian multinational corporations with extensive offshore operations. Both associate neoliberal economic policy since the early 1980s with a strengthening concentration of corporate ownership sectorally within Canada and with a high level of interlocking directorships. Gordon observes that “corporate power in Canada is strongly concentrated among a fairly small number of Canadians”;98 and Klassen similarly identifies this as the class foundation for Canada’s participation in “the new imperialism.”99 This “new imperialism” functions through a fluid and highly potent collaboration between national and collective transnational institutions – for example, the World Trade Organization, regional trade agreements, and international financial and investment law. In this way, Canadian white supremacist imperialism is advanced through various paths and strategies, based on the power of the nation-state or “home state” and on that of elite transnational power networks – the international capitalist class. All the while, Canada aggressively asserts its global role, stature, and authority as a nation-state in its own right. Marxist scholars have identified the emergence of a powerful and affluent national bourgeoisie in Canada, yet the fact that this group is largely male and white is often ignored and, it follows, treated as irrelevant. White supremacy, in order to maintain itself, typically resorts to denial; it tries to render itself invisible and unspeakable. Analyses of Canadian global economic imperialism through the lens of critical race theory assign considerable importance to the fact that those with the wealth and economic and political power to direct national and international policy are phenotypically white: they are people who experience white privilege on a daily basis and whose world views, life experiences, and social networks are shaped by a social location of racial dominance. However, an analysis of the racist dimension of Canadian imperialism must be deeper and more comprehensive than this; it must show the links among classed/raced/gendered social identities, structural/material violence, and national mythologies. For instance, Gordon’s analysis, citing Razack (2004), acknowledges the significance of overt and covert racist discourses in the legitimization of Canadian corporate plunder of resources at home and abroad,

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and as structuring the logic underpinning human rights abuses, which occur with impunity.100 Razack, in Dark Threats, White Knights, shows how fundamental the colonial imaginary is to Canadian internationalism both as it manifests itself in various programs, behaviours, and interventions “abroad” and as it shapes domestic public perceptions of Canada’s role in the world. Razack analyses the torture and murder of Shidane Arone, a Somali boy, by Canadian peacekeeping soldiers in Somalia in 1993, identifying this death as colonial violence, a violence derived from a deep-rooted sense of racial hierarchy replete with powerful binaries in which Blackness/Africanness is equated with savagery and evil and whiteness/Canadianness with reason, heroism, and civility. Peacekeepers’ violence here stands exposed as colonialist, white supremacist violence. Furthermore, Razack traces the production of the nationalist, hypermasculinized white man – the man who must dominate feminized and racialized “others” – with reference to modes of masculinity that emerge in fascist societies. In Warrior Nation, Ian McKay and Jamie Swift make a further contribution to this analysis by bringing to public attention dimensions of Canada’s hidden histories of white male colonial violence. One example is William Stairs, a much-celebrated member of the first graduating class of the Royal Military College in Kingston in 1882. Stairs was recruited to participate in the British effort to rescue Emin Pasha in southern Sudan and was subsequently made second-in-command, under the infamous Henry Morton Stanley, of an expedition commissioned by Leopold II of Belgium in 1887–8 to explore the Congo, subdue its peoples, and claim rights to that vast region. In a chillingly matter-of-fact tone, Stairs’s diaries record horrific and brutal massacres of Indigenous inhabitants, the tortures, beatings, and rapes they were made to suffer, and the vicious forced labour to which they were subjected. In effect, they were slaves. On 21 August 1888, Stairs reported in his journal: “At a signal we all three fired, reloaded, and gave them three rounds each. Like men possessed with the devil they ran, dropping bows and arrows, baskets half filled with tobacco and making for the bush like deer … This morning I cut off the heads of two men and placed them on poles one at each exit from the bush into the plantation.”101 This reads like a passage from Joseph Conrad’s fictional Heart of Darkness, yet it is an actual historical record of the actions of a celebrated Canadian hero. McKay and Swift contend that brutal racist-colonialist violence of this kind is a thread running through the history of Canada at home and

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abroad and that this violence has been suppressed by a dense national narrative in which phenotypically and/or culturally white Canadians extend the British Empire, and British order and civility, and thereby do good in the world. These authors then document this deliberate reimagining of Canada: it has shed its naivety as a country of peacekeepers and humanitarians and donned the robes of a “warrior nation,” one in which war veterans are glorified and invited into school classrooms, in which the British monarchy has been recentred as a national symbol of identity, in which “traditional religious values” have been reinserted into the national identity, overshadowing the secular-equality-championing state, and in which “war becomes the undertone of everyday life.” Most significantly, they note the increased incidence of “states of exception” on the Canadian legal landscape; as discussed earlier in this chapter, “states of exception” constitute the basic expression of power under fascist-colonialist rule: In this time of permanent war – so reminiscent of the Cold War – we have entered an institutionalized “state of exception,” in which incarceration without trial has become a new court-sanctioned normality. In such a neo-liberal order, Nikhail Singh remarks, “Crime and war blur in a zone of indistinction.” We learn to apply to troubled neighbourhoods and racialized minorities at home the same absolute dichotomies we apply to Afghans and the fictional Zefrans. Superprisons loom on the horizon.

As we draw from these robust scholarly insights from multiple fields of inquiry, it becomes apparent that there is a strong conceptual framework for positing Canada as a contemporary colonialist-imperialist state. I will be contributing to these insights a socio-cultural-materialist analysis of the Canadian global mining industry as an expression of Canadian colonialist domination in African states. Lastly … Why “Colonialist” versus “Imperialist”? As a final note, throughout this book I most often use the term “colonialist” to describe the contemporary presence of Canadian-owned mining and mining exploration operations in African countries. I use this term almost synonymously with “imperialist”; however, the term colonialist is deliberately selected. A brief discussion of the materialpolitical and/or connotative differences between these two terms will clarify this choice.

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As a particular mode of political domination in which a state and its population lack a formal political right to self-determination, colonialism is now recognized in international law as unjustified and illegal. Imperialism, conceived as a form of capitalist domination, is not technically illegal. All of that said, the contemporary processes and effects of colonialism and imperialism are hard to differentiate. David McNally defines contemporary imperialism as “a system of global inequalities and domination – embodied in regimes of property, military power and global institutions – through which wealth is drained from the labour and resources of people in the Global South to the systematic advantage of capital in the North.”102 This can be compared with Kwame Nkrumah’s term, “neo-colonialism,” which he coined to convey the nature of the new, opaque system of foreign domination notwithstanding formal political independence: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus political policy is directed from outside.”103 It is significant that Nkrumah’s theorization of neo-colonialism was based on an analysis of the African continental mining sector and its continuing subordination to foreign capital and political interests and control. Nkrumah’s “neo-colonialism” can be regarded as largely synonymous with “imperialism” in its contemporary usage. Robert Young (2001) notes that colonialism is sometimes defined as involving territorial domination through settlement and direct rule or governance of one state by another, and can thus be distinguished from imperialism, a form of domination that involves little or no settlement but instead direct or indirect rule by a single state or by a group of powerful states in conjunction with a set of international institutions and transnational corporations. He goes on to observe that not all colonies were heavily settled. Also, while the post-colonial era features far less permanent settlement from the former metropoles to the former colonies, there continues to be a large presence of “expatriate” business people, tourists, international development students, researchers, missionaries, and development workers in the post-colonial states. Thus, whether the nomenclature is colonialism, neo-colonialism, or imperialism, the basic features of this general form of domination can be summarized as follows: foreign political influence and control by direct or indirect means; foreign economic access to and exploitation of land, resources, and human labour; a comprador relationship between Indigenous elites and foreign powers; a short- or long-term foreign presence

Theorizing Canada’s Twenty-First-Century Colonialist Mining Project  59

in the territory of the (neo)colony; and cultural and ideological domination and assimilation, for example, through language, an imposed legal framework, imposed/recommended forms of governance, and, in all of these, enmeshed “universal” cultural values. Following Nkrumah, I suggest that in African countries – where there is still living memory of direct colonial rule – the visceral experience of foreign domination is best captured today by the language of, and references to, colonialism. I am not arguing that Canada has colonized any African country in a manner directly comparable to formal British colonization during the Victorian era; I do, however, identify actions and practices that show how, in relation to the mining sector, and as part of a diffuse system of white transnational economic, political, and legal power, Canada is exercising political and economic force in various African countries in order to obtain privileged access to lucrative minerals and metals at the expense of African populations’ selfdetermination and development opportunities. In addition, I reference colonialism in order to highlight the cultural, historical, and material coherence between Canada’s status as a colonizer-state and its current actions in African mining sectors. I use “colonialist” rather than “colonial” to contrast Canada’s continuing formal status as a colonizer-state vis-à-vis Indigenous nations in the territory called Canada, with its less direct and less formalized but still powerful role vis-à-vis African countries’ mining sectors. These are, one might say, the political reasons for referencing colonialism. Finally, there are also reasons that relate to choice of theoretical traditions. Referencing colonialism signals a primary reliance on critical race, anti-colonial, and post-colonial scholarship. While I disagree with the view that post-colonial scholarship is hostile to Marxist/materialist analysis, and while materialist insights are important to my analysis, anti-colonial and post-colonial scholarship offers a more multifaceted approach to understanding colonialism/imperialism, in that it attends not only to the operations of capital and states but also to cultural, discursive, racial, gendered, and psychological dimensions.104 With this theoretical framework in place, I now map out the role of the mining industry in the shaping of Canada as a white settler, capitalist, colonialist state.

3 “I Hear the Rustling of Gold under My Feet”: Mining, Race, and the Making of Canada

From the 1500s, but increasingly from the late 1700s, “natural ­resources” – furs, fish, timber, copper, gold – brought Europeans, and some nonEuropeans, to the territory now known as Canada. During this four-hundred-year history, these “newcomers”1 developed rationales for their presence; gradually, they developed what Mbembe calls a “central cultural imaginary” that supported their right not only to live in the land but to assume sovereignty over it as well. The specific content of this national cultural imaginary has changed over time in response to changing social and historical events. The history of appropriating resource-rich lands from Indigenous peoples, rationalizing these acts (via discursive and cultural production), and designing socio-legal technologies to consolidate and secure the resulting benefits has produced in Canada particular modes of thinking and operating – a national imaginary, as it were – that lends an aura of normality to Canada’s contemporary globalizing mining endeavours. Three themes weave through this chapter: I analyse how mining has been represented and the place it has been given in national or official storytelling; I provide a partial account of the colonial processes of acquiring or arrogating mineral assets through callous dealings and manipulation; and I explore the racialized class dynamics that developed in the Canadian mining industry. These themes allow us to assess the mining sector’s contribution to the fashioning and consolidation of a white settler state. Much of the racial, cultural, and legal logic that was established as the domestic mining industry developed will echo in later chapters with reference to contemporary Canadian mining practices and rationales in African countries.

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Owing to their positions of economic and political power, colonizers’ versions of colonial history dominate public discourse. Histories and accounts of Canadian mining, its origins and development, are more commonly told from and dominated by the perspective of European settlers. Settler societies must legitimize their existence through selective forgetting and erasure of elements of their history,2 so it is significant, and not surprising, that there are large gaps in the public (or at least published) record of Canadian mining. In addition, very little of what is published has been written from a non-settler or non-dominant perspective, although this is starting to change.3 The “story” I therefore construct in this chapter is limited by the sources that are presently available and to which I have had access. At times, a “contrapuntal” reading is employed. Given the economic and national importance of mining to Canada both historically and in the present, it is significant that, as Jeremy Mouat notes, “no thorough history of Canadian mining exists,4 nor is there an up-to-date bibliographical guide to the diverse body of literature relating to Canadian mining.”5 According to Mouat, the most recent history of Canadian mining with a national scope is LeBourdais’s Metals and Men: The Story of Canadian Mining (1957). Many of the works that attempt partial histories of Canadian mining (Longo, 1973; Hanula and Longo, 1982) exemplify the white settler imaginary. Mining activity is romanticized as an adventure story: Canada becomes a nation through the vision, risk taking, and grit of geologists and prospectors willing to venture into Canada’s unexplored frontier territories. Here is a typical example from Longo’s Historical Highlights of Canadian Mining. Notably, there are no Indigenous peoples in this dramatized landscape, nor is there any pre-existing “civilization”: “A Salute to the Canadian Mining Industry” … a fascinating part of Canadian history concerns the colourful beginnings of the mining industry – the exploits of the early prospectors, geologists and engineers who ventured into the unknown and often inhospitable territory; the stories of their courage, their good fortune and their disappointments; the contributions of the geologists, geophysicists and bushpilots; the decisions of the financiers and banking interests, Canadian and foreign, who took a chance because of their faith in this land; and finally, the evolution of the industry in a land that could provide immense possibilities of adventure, fortune and commerce.

62  Colonial Extractions … This is … the mark the mining industry has made on the nation’s development. Often the evidence is not easily discernible because its conquests take place in virgin territory away from the beaten path. But this same remoteness is itself an advantage, bringing as it does the fruits of civilization to areas previously undeveloped.6

Longo goes on to speak of “the tenacity of our early explorers and prospectors,” men who “persevered,” with the happy result that “thousands of jobs” were created, along with “new communities,” “extended transportation networks,” and “commercial development throughout the nation, thus helping Canadians attain one of the highest standards of living in the world.”7 This glowing depiction of mining, without a hint of racial-colonial violence, class exploitation, environmental degradation, or health and safety hazards, reflects a genre of mining narrative that remains predominant into the twenty-first century in Canadian mining industry and government literature depicting mining.8 As a discourse, “corporate social responsibility” is perhaps the most recent theme in this glossy genre. This narrative tradition is also deployed within the wider society – for instance, in tourism and education. As Stuart Tannock (2010) observes, the “Mining Matters” curriculum, a project initiated by the PDAC, introduces schoolchildren to all the benefits and few of the harms of the mining industry, while across Canada, a host of mine tours are available featuring underground experiences in decommissioned mines. These tours – often partly funded by grants from provincial tourism departments and donations from mining ­companies – offer a very particular narrative of mining, one that typically emphasizes the impressive engineering feats involved in constructing the mine and extracting ores from great depths; the hardship, camaraderie, and courage of the miners; and the many indispensable uses of minerals in our daily lives. Variations on the kind of discourse used by Longo in the example above can be found in all of these contemporary sites. The characteristic nation-building subject who emerges from these accounts is a virile, muscular, heterosexual/homosocial male worker who excels at technical problem solving and who heroically and benevolently pulls from the earth the metals and minerals we all (we are told) rely on.9 While the men who worked in mining hailed from a range of ethnic and social-class backgrounds, proper “mining masculinity” became

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conflated with a particular performance and subjectivity of whiteness. These romantic narratives, found in the contemporary school curriculum and in museums, science centres, and mine tourism, disseminate glamorous and depoliticized ideas about the mining industry throughout the Canadian public imagination. To counter and disrupt such representations, the rest of this chapter sketches what could be called the subjugated history of Canadian mining, an alternative “storying” or theorization. While most of the story presented here dates from the mid-1800s, it is clear that Indigenous peoples in what is now called North America mined and used various metals for household articles, hunting, and warfare long before contact with Europeans. For instance, anthropologists and archaeologists have documented extensive use of copper in the Lake Superior region as far back as 8000 BCE – that is, more than ten thousand years ago. Pre-European metal mining and use has also been documented in eastern and western Canada. Growing British settler awareness of Canada’s exceptional mineral wealth catalysed the establishment of more formalized territorial and property regimes, expressed in a flurry of treaty negotiations in central and western Canada in the second half of the nineteenth century, continuing into the early decades of the twentieth. Significantly, these actions corresponded temporally to a deepening colonial attitude of racial superiority, one that was influenced in part by the mid-­ nineteenth-century rise of “social Darwinism” and the pseudoscience of eugenics, which reached its zenith in the early decades of the twentieth century. This combination of events – the rise of “scientific racism,” the increased demand for base metals and minerals fuelled by the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, and the accelerated discovery of valuable metals through the new science of geology – goes some way towards explaining the changes that occurred in the Canadian white settler imaginary and settlers’ legal-political practices between the Royal Proclamation in 1763 and the treaties of 1850–1923. Colonial Law and Mineral Appropriation Throughout this era of expanding colonial domination, the law played a powerful role. Various scholars10 have acknowledged the illegality of the colonial invasion and the land appropriation and occupation that occurred and have attempted to explain how this was legitimized by Europeans who claimed to adhere to the rule of law.11 As Cumming and Mickenberg point out, by the early nineteenth century, the international

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legal concept of “right of discovery” governed practices among competing European imperial powers: “It was an exclusive principle, which shut out the right of competition among those who had agreed to it, not one which could annul the previous rights of those who had not agreed to it.”12 They go on, however, to show how “the rights of those already in possession” (i.e., Indigenous peoples) were limited and reduced in actual practice. They note that Indigenous nations’ full sovereignty was diminished, for they no longer had the right to dispose of or transfer land to whomever they wished, but only to the “discovering” imperial power. Cumming and Mickenberg identify the legal rationale offered for this exception as conveyed in an early landmark case (Johnson v. McIntosh, 1823) in the United States, presided over by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall. Significantly, this rationale was lodged in racist judgments concerning the supposedly pre-modern cultural practices and level of “development” of the Indigenous populations. Said the Chief Justice: Although we do not mean to engage in the defence of those principles which Europeans have applied to Indian title, they may, we think, find some excuse, if not justification, in the character and habits of the people whose rights have been wrested from them.” Marshall reasoned that to have fully respected Indian property rights would mean the country would have remained an uninhabitable wilderness.13 [emphasis added]

In other words, powerful nations that deem themselves culturally and racially superior to other nations can “legally” violate those nations’ property rights and civil and political rights. As legal scholar Cheryl Harris emphasizes, this kind of exceptionality, which was contrary to the norms of international European law at the time (i.e., to respect the rights of those in “first possession” of land), was clearly legitimized through racist ideology.14 Land could be legitimately taken – or “first possession” overlooked – because Aboriginal peoples “had never done acts on the land sufficient to establish property in it.”15 Such acts supposedly included enclosing land and allotting it to private individuals. Harris observes: “This interpretation of the rule of first possession effectively rendered the rights of first possessors contingent on the race of the possessor. Only particular forms of possession – those that were characteristic of white European cultural norms – would be recognized and legitimated.”16 This manipulation of law on racist grounds to justify an illegal take continues to haunt and limit collective life in Canadian society.

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Indigenous legal scholar John Borrows (2002) shows that the establishment of the Canadian state fundamentally violated the otherwise sacrosanct concept of “the rule of law.” Reflecting on text of the Delgamuukw decision, he describes the unilateral assertion of Crown sovereignty over Indigenous territory as so alien to the meaning of “rule of law” as to be equated with a nonsensical and arbitrary act of sprinkling magic crystals over the land and thereby claiming ownership.17 Similarly, Michael Asch, in his inquiry into how it was that settlers came to have jurisdiction over Indigenous territory and then to imagine themselves as “chapter one” in the story of Canada, concludes that this phenomenon has to do with the persistence even into the late twentieth century of a threehundred-year fantasy of Indigenous peoples as occupying a “State of Nature” outside history and modernity. To illustrate, he points to text in the ostensibly ground-breaking 1990 Sparrow decision concerning Aboriginal fishing rights: “while British policy toward the native population was based on respect for their right to occupy their traditional lands, a proposition to which the Royal Proclamation bears witness, there was from the outset never any doubt that sovereignty and legislative power, and indeed the underlying title, to such lands was vested in the Crown.”18 Asch bluntly notes that the underlying motivation for such legal manoeuvring and skewed representations of the Indigenous population is to protect the privilege of the occupier. In effect, as Patricia Monture (2006) also observes, the colonizer’s law could not be used to render colonization illegal. In a fascist-colonial legal order, the sense of “right” has no reference outside the power of the colonial force itself. The Colonial Contact Zone: Power, Treaty Negotiation, and Resource Access If the law functions to justify a lawless appropriation of land and resources in a colonial situation, what is the nature of the relationship between the newly dominated and the dominating peoples? For Mary Louise Pratt, a “colonial contact zone” is a place where colonized and colonizer meet and interact, although not on equal or mutually agreed upon terms. It is “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”19 An examination of certain Crown texts – the “Morris texts” – documenting mid-nineteenth- to earlytwentieth-century treaty negotiations in Canada enables an exploration

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of the relationship between Indigenous populations and “newcomers” during such moments of contact. Despite the attention to detail in these texts, they cannot be treated as empirically unbiased or neutral; rather, they must be treated as accounts written in the colonizer’s language and from the colonizer’s perspective. So I read Alexander Morris’s records of the treaty processes side by side with, and in light of, more recent scholarship conveying various Indigenous perspectives on treaty making. This generates a complex reading that seeks to establish certain features of the colonial power relations that pertained and to critically examine how the negotiations were represented by the settler-colonizers. Also, I approach these treaty negotiations as the social technology of the colonial contact zone – a technology whose more recent manifestation in the resource extraction sector is that of the “community consultation,” through which are negotiated “co-­management regimes” or “benefit agreements.” 20 The accounts of the Robinson and Numbered Treaty negotiations thus help us understand the socio-­political contexts of contemporary colonial contact zones – that is, mining negotiations and confrontations involving Canadian companies in Canada (in relation to Indigenous communities today) and in African countries. Records of the negotiations of the Robinson and Numbered Treaties reveal the extent to which mineral discoveries motivated the settlers’ desire to acquire secure legal title to land in what is now Canada. Crown negotiator Alexander Morris’s account of the Robinson negotiations begins with these words: In consequence of the discovery of minerals, on the shores of Lakes Huron and Superior, the Government of the late Province of Canada deemed it desirable to extinguish the Indian title, and to that end, in the year 1850, entrusted the duty to the late Honourable William B. Robinson … A special feature of the Robinson Treaties was the adjustment of a claim made by the Indians to be paid the amount received by the Government for the sale of mining locations.21

Documents pertaining to the 1876 negotiations of the Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt treaties include correspondence from a Hudson’s Bay Company factor, W.J. Christie, who urged expedience in establishing a treaty: “Gold may be discovered in paying quantities any day on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. We have … a large mixed frontier population who are now only waiting and watching to hear of gold discoveries to rush into Saskatchewan.”22

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That the Indigenous population was well aware of the settlers’ interests is evident in the reported (in translation) comments of Fort Francis Chief Ma-we-do-pe-nais in the preamble to the Northwest Angle Treaty: “The sound of the rustling of the gold is under my feet where I stand; we have a rich country; it is the Great Spirit who gave us this; where we stand upon is the Indians’ property, and belongs to them.”23 There is a continuing debate as to just how much agency, shrewdness, and bargaining power Indigenous groups possessed and exerted when they negotiated treaties with the British Crown and later with Canadian officials (i.e., how vulnerable they were to trickery, how weak or strong their bargaining position was, and how “victimized” they were in the end). Put another way, how great was the power imbalance between Crown negotiators and Native groups? The circumstances varied from one treaty process to the next. New research continues to emerge, often drawing on oral evidence from elders and other sources (e.g., archival materials) regarding the extent to which treaty texts deliberately misrepresented or left out key aspects of the oral agreements reached over what were often days of discussion and negotiation between large groups of Indigenous peoples and a small number of Crown officials. This research also supports claims made by many Indigenous scholars and elders that their peoples were systematically tricked and deceived. Cardinal (1970), Borrows (2002), and Venne (2007) have exposed extensive deceit and coercion on the part of the Crown, indicating that Indigenous peoples were duped and cheated at the time of treaty making. However, DePasquale (2007) and Venne (2007) also insist that during the treaty processes, Indigenous negotiators exercised dignity, sovereignty, agency, numerical power, shrewdness, and mutuality. As noted above, Indigenous peoples were aware of the value of their territories and of the unjust encroachments and thefts that were occurring, and many negotiated vigorously and astutely for treaty terms that were just and that met their practical needs. However, these authors also suggest that even when treaties did represent shrewd and even respectful bargaining on both sides, the results were consistently and deliberately misrepresented or disregarded as the twentieth century proceeded. Tully (2010) suggests that while there was some sense of equal nationhood and respect for cultural difference in the eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth, this ostensibly egalitarian, nation-to-nation tone had given way to entrenched British/Canadian white settler arrogance and overt racism by the twentieth century. Indigenous populations were left with a reduced material and territorial basis of livelihood and

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identity and with dramatically reduced political power vis-à-vis the Crown or colonizer-state. How did this occur? What was it about relations within the colonial contact zone that made this change possible? To begin with, while claiming to be neutral and unbiased, the Crown shared a racial identity, cultural sensibility, and economic objectives with the colonial settlers and the private corporate sector, in particular the Hudson’s Bay Company and the recently founded mining companies. For instance, one of the 1876 treaty commissioners, Mr Christie, had been seconded from his position as Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company in much the same way that senior Canadian politicians in the present day often come from and return to senior roles in influential corporations. In addition, there is often little clear distinction to be made between government and corporate officials in terms of the physical spaces and ideological positions they occupy. For instance, the Treaty Number Four negotiations at Fort Qu’Appelle were delayed for many days due to an outstanding complaint the Indigenous groups had with the Hudson’s Bay Company. They declared their dismay that Morris himself was staying in one of the Hudson’s Bay houses. They claimed that three years earlier, that company had seized land belonging to local bands and had constructed buildings on it. Now they were being told that the Queen had given these lands to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and they wondered what right she had to do so and why she had not at least apprised her “red children” of her actions. One of the Indigenous spokespersons, “The Gambler,” is recorded as stating, “When one Indian takes anything from another we call it stealing, and when we see the present we say pay us. It is the Company I mean.” They had learned that the Hudson’s Bay Company had received a payment from the Crown of £300,000 to compensate for the termination of their monopoly, and they demanded that payment for themselves for the lands that had been taken. This Morris absolutely refused, on the grounds that the Crown had no jurisdiction over Hudson’s Bay Company matters. Nevertheless, just as today’s private mining companies operating abroad receive Canadian diplomatic assistance, export credits, and other subsidies from the state, so in the 1600s the Crown had granted a charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and later, in the 1800s, had financially compensated the company for the termination of its monopoly. By contrast, the Indigenous peoples of Canada’s mineralrich territories did not receive any comparable financial compensation for the territories appropriated from them.24 Rather, the standard treaty

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terms came to be a “gift” of $8 per person upon signing the treaty, plus $5 annually thereafter – as well as a number of agricultural tools, seeds, and oxen to be shared by the community. Indigenous bands faced a cohesive ­corporate – Crown opponent whose combined political, economic, and military power was formidable. Second, accounts of the treaty negotiations reveal that the Crown negotiators repeatedly resorted to the same rhetorical strategy when persuading Indigenous populations – and/or, perhaps, settlers – that treaties would be advantageous to them. The Morris texts depict the western First Nations as greatly weakened by the dramatic decline of the buffalo herds and consequently by starvation and illness. The Crown negotiators callously exploited this weakened position; indeed, Morris’s principal rhetorical strategy was to cast all that he and his colleagues were doing as an act of great benevolence on the part of the Queen, their “mother.” The excess is startling, even in the context of the heyday of Victorian imperialism: You are the subjects of the Queen, you are her children … She cares for you as much as she cares for her white children … The Queen always keeps her word, always protects her red men … The Queen knows that her red children often find it hard to live. She knows that her red children, their wives and children, are often hungry, and that the buffalo will not last forever, and she desires to do something for them. More than a hundred years ago, the Queen’s father said to the red men living in Quebec and Ontario, I will give you land and cattle and set apart Reserves for you, and will teach you. What has been the result? There the red men are happy; instead of getting fewer in number by sickness, they are growing in number. Their children have plenty. The Queen wishes you to enjoy the same blessings.25

Gratuitous passages of this sort recur throughout the records of the treaty negotiations. These rhetorical strategies can be viewed as means for gaining the trust of the Indigenous negotiators, discursively infantilizing them, and claiming and performing a caring motive for all of the treaty terms being presented to them. Rhetoric about the Queen wraps a blanket of legitimacy around the treaty process, although that “blanket” may be more for the comfort of the settler population than for the Indigenous people gathered. This rhetoric is effective because it is malleable, and Morris uses it skilfully to justify not granting any number of demands and requests on the part of the Indigenous chiefs

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and band spokespersons. The Queen’s logic cannot be questioned; it is beyond reproach. Significantly, this Queen is presented as unable to offer any kind of preferential treatment to the Indigenous peoples on the grounds that she must treat all her “children” equally. In today’s parlance, we can identify this as an early use of the concept of formal equality rights in a manner that refuses to consider historical injustices that give rise to structural inequalities. This wise Queen, furthermore, has one solution and prescription for the problems facing her “red children”: they must build permanent houses, settle on reserves, and become farmers. Signing the treaty will facilitate this. In the circumstances facing Indigenous people, no other solution makes good sense, so the Crown commissioners repeatedly present it to Indigenous bands and nations. In this strategy I identify a precursor to today’s supposedly apolitical prescriptions to both Indigenous nations in Canada and nations of the global South: the only viable development model is neoliberal free market economic policies along with (in the case of the latter) a single-template modern mining law. Some chiefs asked the British to create a law prohibiting random shooting of buffalo so that the herds could recover and they could retain their way of life. In response, the British agents, with profuse and patronizing references to the great love their mother, the Queen, bore for “her red children,” offered only rudimentary farming tools, insisting that Indigenous people would be much happier as settled peasant farmers. There is thus a discrepancy between Indigenous peoples’ wishes and the colonizers’ responses to them. It is not possible to tell from the records of the Numbered Treaty negotiations to what extent Indigenous peoples were genuinely persuaded to think of the Queen in the terms presented. James Scott’s (1990) work on “hidden transcripts” is potentially helpful here, offering as it does a way of considering the manner in which marginalized and relatively powerless people will participate strategically in dominant discourses while “talking another kind of talk” in private. A careful, contrapuntal reading of the proceedings suggests that some Indigenous chiefs did at times attempt to manipulate “Queen rhetoric” to their own purposes. For instance, responding to the assertion that the Queen was deeply concerned for their welfare, several chiefs wanted the Queen to be aware of the importance to them of having legislation passed to end the wanton slaughter of buffalo. This was noted by Morris and mentioned as a recommendation in his report but apparently was never taken up by any legislative body in Canada. Indeed, the collection, sale, and manufacture of

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buffalo bones for the fertilizer industry had become a thriving business for some European settlers. Crown commissioners demonstrated an inability or a refusal to respond to Indigenous nations in a manner that respected their alterity and that would have enabled them to flourish culturally and economically and to remain self-determining. Beneath the surface of the Queen rhetoric and its claims of maternalistic benevolence we encounter a harsh callousness on the part of the Crown negotiators. The discussion of the impact of the collapse of the buffalo herds is one of the more poignant aspects of these treaty transcripts. Besides having suddenly lost their economic livelihood and entire way of life, Indigenous nations were experiencing famine as well as devastation by European diseases. Some families and some communities were facing a crisis of physical survival; some chiefs spoke urgently of simply wanting the means to keep their children alive. In this context, they asked for what we might today call “food aid” until such time as they could begin harvesting crops and mastering the skills of farming.26 To paraphrase the callous response of Morris and his advisers: “we’re not in the business of charity; you’ve always taken care of yourselves and you must continue to do so; you must not become dependent on the Queen for food.” To which Mis-tah-wah-sis responds: It is well known that if we had plenty to live on from our gardens we would not still insist on getting more provision, but it is in case of any extremity, and from the ignorance of the Indian in commencing to settle that we thus speak; we are as yet in the dark; this is not a trivial matter for us. We were glad to hear what the Governor was saying to us and we understood it, but we were not understood, we do not mean to ask for food for every day but only when we commence and in case of famine or calamity. (213)

The dignity and assertiveness – and perhaps, the sense of moral entitlement – in these words seems unmistakable. What the Indigenous people desire and are requesting is not charity and dependence, but genuine assistance as they adjust to profound social, economic, and cultural change. The text reveals something of the complex dynamics between persons experiencing not only a livelihood crisis but also a growing relation of domination. Revealing in this regard is an account published in 1868 by a settler near Port Alberni, Vancouver Island, of a conversation he had with a Nootka chief. Confronted with an influx

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of white settlers who had purchased land from the Crown despite the absence of any treaty, this chief reportedly stated: “We do not wish to sell our land or our water; let your friends stay in their own country … We do not want the white man. He steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.”27 Unable to stop the influx of settlers, whose presence reduced and even destroyed the wildlife on which Indigenous peoples depended, unable to survive the new diseases those settlers had introduced, and unable to compete militarily or technologically with the newcomers, Indigenous people were forced to negotiate with those who were effectively their enemies and to enter into relationships with them. Yet the nature of colonial domination is such that this relationship of enmity must be performed by both parties as one of friendship and goodwill. “Queen rhetoric” greases the wheels of this performance – that is, it provides a discursive or imaginative terrain on which the colonial performance can be successfully staged. The colonized peoples are being humiliated but must internalize this humiliation and not express rage. For a time, internalized humiliation becomes the method and cost of survival. The colonizer – always acutely fearful of demands for justice, or worse, an explosion of rage and agentive violence from the colonized, and terrified of being found bereft of integrity and guilty of callousness and brutality – must embrace lies and rhetoric as truth and become skilled at stealing, dissembling, complicity, and tacitly or directly allowing death. The colonizer must appear at all times to believe in the truth of “civilization” (or “modernization” or “free market democracy”) and that the other is being rescued and assisted. The colonizer must not begin to identify empathically in any radical sense with the colonized person and that person’s situation (i.e., recognition of the other as a Self). Above all, the colonizer must become skilled at denying being a thief and usurper. Morris knew what he had been commissioned by the Crown to achieve, and he did what was necessary. Settler Mining and Its Socio-legal Infrastructure Soon after the treaties were concluded, Canadian settler jurisdictions passed new laws governing settler prospecting and mining. As Laforce, Lapointe, and Lebuis (2009) demonstrate, the new mining laws in Upper Canada, Quebec, and the North-West Territories installed a “free entry system” that privileged private sector interests such as mining companies and the prospectors and financiers that were linked to them.

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This placed an unusual degree of power and privilege in the hands of mining corporations while limiting the discretionary power of the state and public institutions. In this context, we must closely examine the foundations and workings of those institutions. Archived copies of the Globe and Mail from 1846 and 1847 contain letters to the editor that allege corrupt practices on the part of Family Compact legislators relating to their control of mining licences and their links to financiers (which they were themselves) and to companies such as the Montreal Mining Company, which were poised to invest in mining development. These depictions of corruption, political opportunism, and conflicts of interest foreshadow today’s “revolving door” politics, with former influential politicians being appointed to the boards of powerful mining corporations or business councils, and vice versa.28 The main features of the free entry system, which was largely based on mining laws developed in response to the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, are strikingly similar to the neoliberal mining codes that have been introduced in “developing countries” since the late 1980s. As Laforce and colleagues observe, the free entry system was characterized “[by] the right to obtain a mining lease and to extract mineral resources in the event of discovery (with few or no restrictions/conditions imposed by the state) as well as by security of tenure (i.e., the protection of acquired mining rights).” 29 This approach to mining privileged “an ethic of development [suggesting] a default judgement that mining represents the highest and best use of the lands in question.”30 In the present day, judging from the strong resistance by the mining sector and some state actors to the notion of “free prior and informed consent” of communities living near identified mineral resources, the possibility that mining might be prohibited remains largely unthinkable. It is construed as irrational and backward; indeed, it is often ridiculed. Implicit in the free entry concept for mining is a racially conceived sense of absolute geographical entitlement. For Pratt, the centurieslong culture of imperialism is characterized by what she calls “planetary entitlement.” By the early 1700s, Europeans had invented themselves as botanists, geologists, cartographers, anthropologists, and tourists – that is, as innocent and harmless subjects seemingly only interested in studying the landscape and befriending exotic local peoples, rather than in exploiting or colonizing them – an attitude that continues to this day. Shohat and Stam (1994) show how the rise of the film industry at the turn of the twentieth century popularized and

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disseminated among Euro-American audiences this sense of innocent, harmless planetary entitlement. Moviegoers were able to “visit” other regions of the world – or Hollywood’s version of them – from a comfortable chair in the local theatre. In this way, imperialism, including the free access to the planet it permitted, was inscribed in depoliticized terms within the popular imaginary. Prospectors and geologists (and the shareholders of the companies they worked for) benefited from the perception that they were well-meaning folk who were simply interested in rocks and in turn reinforced this subjectivity. The free entry licensing system, which fostered this romanticized, adventuresome, nation-building subject who was free to hunt for and dig up metals anywhere, would soon become directly associated with geographical displacement of racialized others and racially skewed access to territory and mineral-based wealth. Shaping and controlling the representation of the true agent of nation building and development – the true mining subject – was always central to the legitimization of colonial privilege. This entailed the literal and figurative erasure, removal, and/or marginalization of Indigenous peoples from the mining sector. Mining was to be the white man’s domain, the domain of the values and culture of whiteness. In typical settler accounts of mineral discoveries, “Indians” were figured as guileless children who led white men to the shining stones whose full value they seemingly did not grasp. The recurrence of this image indicates the extent of geological knowledge possessed by Indigenous people; it also suggests a psychological need on the part of the colonizers to domesticate, subordinate, or “manage” Indigenous knowledge. This “discursive managing” is explored by Julie Cruikshank in “Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and the Discovery of Gold.”31 Cruikshank provides an analysis of the Yukon gold discovery in 1896 in which she contrasts Tagish oral accounts of the discovery with settlers’ accounts. The Tagish narrative, which Cruikshank assembled from interviews with elders, emphasized the cultural and tribal duties carried out by the Tagish man Keish, to whom has been attributed the “discovery” that triggered the rush. However, white settlers’ accounts, including those provided by Pierre Berton in Klondike,32 renamed Keish as Skookum Jim and renarrated his contribution in the classic Western terms of the heroic male adventurer-entrepreneur. Cruikshank suggests that the white settlers’ need to legitimize and normalize white domination of the Klondike gold strike required a representation of Keish

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as a helpful Indian who had assimilated – and thus endorsed – EuroCanadian values and lifestyle. To demonstrate this, she quotes Berton’s Klondike: [He was] a giant of a man, supremely handsome with his high cheekbones, his eagle’s nose, and his fiery black eyes – straight as a gun barrel, powerfully built and known as the best hunter and trapper on the river … Just as Carmack wished to be an Indian, Jim longed to be a white man – in other words, a prospector. He differed from the others in his tribe in that he displayed the white man’s kind of ambition.33 (emphasis added)

This description provides an ironic and telling perspective on the PDAC’s annual Skookum Jim Award, which is given to an Indigenous person who has made outstanding contributions to mining in Canada. Cruikshank’s analysis underscores the important link between white settlers’ narratives and white settlers’ appropriation of the territory’s resources. She contrasts settlers’ accounts with those of Indigenous people, who, far from aspiring to whiteness, express their determination to survive in the shadow of colonial domination: The trenchant theme in these Western narratives about the gold rush is undeniably the struggle for hegemony – an expansionist propaganda using the myths of individualism and the good Indian to justify the destruction of native society. From the oral tradition, however, we have stories of resilience and the maintenance or reassertion of cultural autonomy … The narratives are structured to foreground resistance rather than defeat, community rather than individual circumstance, and ongoing attempts to remain autonomous in the face of economic and cultural dislocation.34

Resistance to Settler Mining Settlers’ accounts of mining suggest there was little or no resistance among Indigenous peoples to the influx of European and nonEuropean “newcomers” hunting for minerals. Actually, there were many confrontations and localized wars between Indigenous peoples and settlers pertaining to mining resources in Canada, and it is likely that the extent and number of such confrontations is not yet fully known (or “remembered”) and documented. Bonita Lawrence draws attention to the kinds of events that have been “whited out” in settler

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histories. In the mid-1800s, before the Robinson Treaty, Crown officials had begun issuing prospecting and mining licences for Northern Ontario. Indigenous leaders protested that the Crown had no authority to issue mining licences for lands belonging to the Ojibway peoples and that they were not receiving any revenue from the mining. Their complaints were treated with contempt, and it was only when they demonstrated their willingness to resort to force that officials paid attention. Lawrence recounts the events: The growing presence of mineral prospectors and mining operation[s] in northern Ontario caused a number of Ojibway leaders to travel to Toronto to register complaints and demand payment from the revenues of mining leases. When there was no response to these or other entreaties, the Ojibway took matters into their own hands and forcibly closed two mining operations in the Michipicoten area. Soon troops, which were not called in to protect the Saugeen Ojibway from violent white settlers, were on the scene to quell the “rebellion,” and government investigators began to respond to the issues that leaders were bringing to them.35

Mainly, though, these events convinced the colonial government that a treaty was needed to prevent interruptions in mining activities. This led to the Robinson-Huron and Robinson-Superior treaties, signed in 1850,36 which together ceded a vast area to the Crown and established small reserves for the Ojibway, who maintained hunting and fishing rights to the wider territory. However, the right to access mineral resources was explicitly guaranteed to the Crown. The two Robinson treaties contained annexes with this proviso: “nor will they [i.e. Aboriginal nations] at any time hinder or prevent persons from exploring or searching for minerals or other valuable productions in any part of the territory hereby ceded to Her Majesty.”37 Moreover, the Ojibway nations subject to this treaty were given a lump sum payout (£4,000) and a fixed annuity of £1,000, which was to represent and conclude all mining revenue claims into the future, or, as Morris recorded it, to avoid “any dispute that might arise as to the amounts actually received by the Government.”38 Lawrence goes on to offer some calculation of the enormous economic consequences of the treaty arrangements: It is important to understand the scale of the mineral wealth taken from the lands of the Ojibway and Cree in the past century, at great disruption to their lives and without any compensation. Since the early 1900s,

Mining, Race, and the Making of Canada  77 the Cobalt silver mines brought in more than $184 million; Kirkland Lake gold mines produced $463 million; and Larder Lake produced $390 million. Meanwhile, the Porcupine region, one of the greatest gold camps in the world, produced over $1 billion worth of gold and had the largest silver, lead, and zinc mines in the world.39

Similar conflicts over mineral-rich lands arose in other parts of the country. Daniel P. Marshall (1996) pieces together an account of the “Fraser River War” of August 1858. This war, between Indigenous nations and an influx of Euro-American gold prospectors, was recorded as having been catalysed by a dispute that culminated in the murder of two white miners by Indigenous men, followed by a massive revenge attack on Indigenous communities by “thousands” of white miners organized into five companies. Marshall documents a massacre of “as many as thirty-one Natives and six chiefs,” as well as the destruction of “five Indian rancherias [villages] along with fish and berry provisions for winter.”40 In reviewing colonialist accounts of this conflict, Marshall identifies the various racist explanations that were put forward for the Indigenous people’s hostility: intertribal warfare; incitement by a third party (allegedly in this case, Chinese miners); and alcohol. He notes sardonically that “in mining frontiers it is always assumed that if Natives clashed with Whites, then somebody must have put them up to it rather than believe that Natives were fighting for their legitimate claims to the land.”41 He counters with this revision: “Rickard’s explanations for violence have also, for over half a century, contributed to deflecting attention away from the real issue. That issue was, and still is, quite straightforward: a mass invasion of a foreign mining population that appropriated Aboriginal land and gold through use of armed force.”42 Marshall insists that Indigenous aggression arose as a means to defend Indigenous sovereignty. He also challenges the typical colonialist discursive marginalization and erasure of Aboriginal people with regard to resource discoveries and mining. He contends that Indigenous nations in British Columbia controlled gold mining prior to the gold rush; that they actively resisted foreign encroachment on their territories and appropriation of their mineral resources; that they outnumbered white miners as miners in the gold fields; that they instituted a tax on foreign miners; and that they swiftly mastered and adapted mining technologies introduced by the Euro-Americans.43 In other words, Indigenous peoples were deeply involved in gold mining prior to and

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throughout the rush. Ironically, it was their vigorous resistance to white invasion and mineral plunder that precipitated the negotiations that led to the establishment of Indian reserves in southern British Columbia. The subsequent suppression in mainstream accounts of such histories of intense conflict over mineral wealth serve to naturalize and depoliticize European settlers’ development and control of the mining industry in western Canada. Mining Labour and the Production of the White Nation With mineral-rich territories largely wrested from Aboriginal control and from small-scale independent producers,44 attention now shifted to the building of a modern industrial white nation with British ties. In On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871, Adele Perry uses frontier mining experiences to examine the complexities of class-race and gender intersections in an early, fluid period of the colonial settlement of British Columbia. She documents British metropolitan anxiety about frontier mining camps as dangerous zones of interracial contact where whiteness, as a signifier of cultural superiority and imperial civilization, seemed at risk. According to Perry, working-class whites rejected and defied Victorian bourgeois cultural norms by crossing racial boundaries in a variety of ways, although without losing their racial privileges as white men. Perry traces the efforts of colonial reformers (especially church missions) to mould itinerant miners into “proper civilized white men.” Central to this project were the eradication of white–Native marriage and miscegenation; the spatial separation of white and Aboriginal communities and bodies; and the mass “importation” of white British women to marry, domesticate, and “whiten” working-class miners. Significantly, mixed-race unions were seen not only as a threat to whiteness and Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority, but also as limiting and weakening the economic trajectory of early Canadian capitalism. White men who adopted Native lifestyles were cast as not properly committed to the discipline of capitalist development; identification with Indigenous values and lifestyles was represented as a form of moral turpitude that threatened British imperialist dominance in the colony. Underlying this anxiety was the evident insecurity of white status and power in the colony. Mining thus functioned as a site where racial and economic control over the “dominion of Canada” was asserted, resisted, and largely established.

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As Perry notes, white subjects had to achieve and maintain dominance in relation to both Indigenous peoples and immigrants of nonEuropean and non-Northern European origins. With regard to the latter, the mining industry emerged as a sector where both class and ethnic/ racial hierarchies were strongly promoted. In Dangerous Truth: Interethnic Competition in a Northern Ontario Goldmining Centre, Peter Vasiliadis provides a sociological account of the history of the Hollinger-owned Porcupine gold mine at Timmins from 1920 to the mid-1980s, taking particular interest in how race and class identities were negotiated at different times by working-class immigrant miners. Besides documenting racial hierarchies and exclusions within the fledgling unions and the labour movement as a whole, he recounts how overt violence (carried out by armed private security forces and the military) was applied by urban capitalist interests, in collaboration with the Ontario government and the provincial police force, to suppress labour unrest and to protect mine property. He documents the discriminatory treatment and discursive “othering” of various waves of French Canadian and Eastern and Southern European immigrant working-class miners (other racialized groups, such as Chinese, were prohibited from mining jobs) in a context that came to be dominated by a professional, white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, Protestant management. Vasiliadis cites a member of the prestigious Toronto-based Empire Club who, after a tour of Northern Ontario, commented: “I don’t like to use the term ‘white man,’ but it has a particular meaning in northern Ontario.’”45 White owners routinely fostered ethnic differentiation to weaken and break labour unrest. Immigrant miners who took up anti-capitalist politics were represented as “dangerous foreigners,” diseased embodiments of social anarchy. Disparate treatment was meted out to “foreign” agitators and to “foreigners” in general: they were more apt to lose their jobs for union activism, while white Anglo-Saxons were routinely favoured for job promotions, higher pay, better housing, and access to elite social clubs. Workers of Northern European ethnicity (English, Welsh, Scottish, even Irish) were enticed to take on subjectivities of whiteness, understood as qualities of responsibility (at work and in the nuclear family), industriousness, company loyalty, and patriotism (to Canada as part of the British Empire). Whiteness became deeply co-constitutive of middle-class values and lifestyle; it also functioned as a metaphor for modes of behaviour that did not substantively threaten the operations and hegemony of industrial capitalism. In Vasiliadis’s account of racialized socio-economic hierarchies fostered by the mining industry,

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it is possible to see how whiteness, heteromasculinity, the nuclear family, middle-class culture, Protestantism, patriotism, and capitalism all became enmeshed in the production of an idealized “Canadian” ­citizen-subject and the normalization of a dominant white settler social order. Mining thus contributed both economically and culturally to the development of a capitalist, white supremacist state that today, in what I argue to be a logical and consistent trajectory, has moved into and is colonizing new global spaces in the interests of profitable mineral resource extraction. Race, Resistance, and Mining in Contemporary Canada Canada has entered a new phase with regard to the domestic mining industry, one characterized by new expansion into northern regions of the country, increased foreign competition, an aging population of geological experts, consequent recruitment of “new” (i.e., racialized immigrant) Canadians and Indigenous persons to enter mining as a career, and limited efforts to operate in ways that will not jeopardize companies’ “social licence to operate.” The increased demand for all metals and minerals and rising world prices, especially for gold, have catalysed fresh exploration in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, British Columbia, and northern Ontario and Quebec. Almost overnight, Canada has become a major diamond-producing country; capitalizing on the racial associations among snow, whiteness, purity, and goodness, it has begun marketing its diamonds as “clean diamonds,” in contrast to the “blood diamonds” produced in “zones of savagery” such as Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Increased exploration in Canada’s northern regions has brought companies into contact and sometimes conflict with First Nations. In 2008, the Nishinawbe Aski Nation of Northern Ontario called for a moratorium on mining and joined other First Nations and some “settler-Canadians” in demanding a modernization of the Ontario Mining Act. Nine leaders from the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation north of Thunder Bay were jailed after blocking access to Platinex Mining’s licensed exploration area.46 Indeed, the statements of the leaders of “KI,” as reported in court proceedings, are strikingly reminiscent of the statements made by Indigenous leaders during treaty negotiations more than one hundred years ago:

Mining, Race, and the Making of Canada  81 On December 7, 2007, Chief [Danny] Morris summarized his position and that of several other contemnors when he stated in court: “I stand by the fact that the land I’m in, on now is our land. I believe God put us there. God gave us a language, the animals to live off and we just don’t want to see development on that area … As a treaty partner, I expect to be treated as a partner, not, not where one is superior than us.”47

Leaders of the Ardoch First Nation in eastern Ontario were subject to punitive legal decisions for their actions protesting the presence of Frontenac Ventures, an uranium exploration company, and the lack of consultation prior to claim staking and drilling on their territories.48 The anger of First Nations communities was directed as much at provincial and federal governments departments, particularly Natural Resources Canada, as at the mining companies. Government departments were expected to honour treaty and constitutional obligations, to relate as equals, and to uphold Indigenous rights and access to livelihoods. In British Columbia and other parts of the country, First Nations have staged similar protests and act of resistance. In 2008 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that federal and provincial governments had an obligation to consult with First Nations before granting exploration and development licences to companies. However, many First Nations were demanding not just consultation but the clear right to veto mining development on their territories. Meanwhile, some First Nations and some chiefs, such as those involved in the Canadian Aboriginal Mining Association (CAMA), have established business partnerships with settler mining and exploration companies. In 2008, the PDAC and the AFN signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a view to “advocating and facilitating substantive economic participation” by First Nations communities in the mining economy. It is important to consider whether this MOU should be interpreted as an example of comprador behaviour by a colonized elite or, alternatively, as an astute effort by Indigenous people to obtain a bigger slice of the pie, so to speak, given the high unemployment they face in their northern communities. Mack (2011) notes that contemporary treaty negotiations in British Columbia are subject to, and limited in their transformative possibilities by, the assimilative power of “postcolonial imperialism.” A similar theorization could be applied to the MOU just mentioned. As for the mining industry, faced with a slight shift in the power relations between Indigenous communities and

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mining companies brought about by domestic and international public sentiment, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Canadian Supreme Court rulings, and the growing assertiveness of Indigenous organizations, and also faced with an aging and retiring geological workforce, it is canny enough to foster, where possible, a congenial relationship of ostensibly mutual benefit with Indigenous leaders. This chapter has emphasized the power and importance of narratives in relation to access to and appropriation of mineral resources. I will conclude it, then, with an extract from a speech presented by Jon Baird, then President of the PDAC, to the Economic Club of Canada in 2009. The main purpose in that speech, titled “Corporate Social Responsibility and Canada’s Mineral Exploration Sector: Doing the Right Thing Wherever We Work,” was to convince the audience of the importance of opposing Bill C-300, the “Responsible Mining Bill,” which would have introduced state penalties for Canadian mining and oil and gas companies in the event of demonstrated human rights violations in developing countries. Significantly, the bill was not aimed at human rights violations arising from mining operations in Canada, nor were any Canadian Indigenous witnesses called to make presentations to the parliamentary committee. The PDAC’s position was that the industry could self-regulate, was committed to high human rights and environmental standards, and did not need regulation under state law. To demonstrate the industry’s goodwill, Baird opened his speech with a romantic depiction of the friendship and collaboration between settler-geologists and Indigenous peoples. We can recognize here the narrative genre of mining romanticism that characterized Longo’s Historical Highlights of Canadian Mining, and we can grasp the connection between the importance of how the story is told, and by whom, and how the resources are acquired, and by whom: Aboriginal people and Europeans have been working together on the hunt for minerals in Canada since Jacques Cartier arrived here 500 years ago looking for, he said, “gold, rubies and other gems.” The PDAC marks the industry’s long connection with Aboriginal people with the Skookum Jim Award, which is presented at our convention in Toronto every March. It recognizes Aboriginal achievement in the industry. Skookum Jim was a Tagish man who led the group that discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896 and touched off the Yukon gold rush. Those of you outside the mining community may not be aware of how closely geoscientists in this

Mining, Race, and the Making of Canada  83 country work with First Nations people. In my case, shortly after I graduated from U of T as a geophysicist, I spent a winter at an exploration site in Northern Ontario. I shared a tent – complete with spruce boughs on the floor – with an Algonquin man and his two sons. I’d been raised in the city and had never lived in the bush in the winter before. They taught me not only how to work efficiently in the woods but to survive. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like sharing a tent with three others for several months, to really get to know your roommates. It was a simple life but by the time spring arrived, I’d gained an appreciation of First Nations people that’s as fresh as it was when spruce boughs were my mattress. It was one of the richest times of my life because of the warmth and generous spirit of those Algonquins.49

This lovely story has a powerful appeal. While one can hold the view that Jon Baird’s contact with the Algonquin people of Northern Ontario was a genuinely meaningful personal experience for him, the terms in which the story of this encounter is presented (a romantic, paternalistic story of Native/settler collaboration and friendship that offers no acknowledgment of conflict or inequality) exemplify a dominant ­settler-Canadian narrative tradition. The strategic telling of such a story at a very significant time and place regenerates the normative imaginary and conceptual order required to legitimize continued colonialist relations of power, control, and resource appropriation. What appears as an innocuous anecdote is part of a narrative tradition of colonialist discourse that shapes global (and domestic) social relations of power; these in turn determine and normalize who has access to valuable mineral resources and on what terms. It was in explosive response to such narratives and such relations of power that local Tanzanian miner Buchwadi Mbelwa made his poignant and sharply confrontational statement, cited at the beginning of chapter 1 of this book: “Nobody is going to leave this place for the white man!” Such an utterance is dismissed, rendered irrational and extremist, by the force of the dominant narrative. Conclusions As I stated at the outset, this chapter was intended to sketch the place of mining in the establishment of Canada as a colonial white-settler state, in both cultural and economic terms. It was also intended to identify certain historical patterns in domestic mining – especially

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with reference to relations between the Crown/state and Indigenous ­peoples – that have parallels and resonances in the contemporary presence of Canadian mining companies in African (and other formerly colonized) countries. I have touched on four main themes that will reappear in subsequent chapters: the strategic use of law to protect the racial privilege and economic interests of the colonizer; the merging of the identities and interests of corporate and state actors vis-à-vis mining; the complex negotiation of power relations between subordinated and dominant groups in a colonialist/imperialist context; and the ubiquitous use of romanticized narratives of innocence and benevolence both in representing mining and in legitimizing actions that restrict the access of racialized others to mineral wealth and benefit, to self-­ determination and sovereignty over territory. In the next chapter, I follow this trajectory to the contemporary involvement of the Canadian mining sector in African countries and begin to explore the economic and material dimensions of that involvement.

4 “Something from Nothing”: Generating Wealth in the Racialized Mining Economy

As far as return on capital, return on investment, it’s outrageously good. I mean we paid back our initial [US$30 million] investment in eight months. (Interviewee, Canadian mining company operating in Southern Africa) “[Canadian company producing gold in West African country] announces Second Quarter Earnings of $15.2 Million.” (Mining Industry Today, 11 August 2011) Yet few of these high profits have translated into increased or commensurate benefits for African mineral nations and their local communities.” (UNECA and African Union, Minerals and Africa’s Development (2011, 92))

If domestic mining in Canada was part of the consolidation of Canada as a white-settler capitalist state, what importance do Canada’s contemporary global mining operations, and specifically those located in African countries, have for Canada’s political economy and nationhood? And what is the impact on African countries of Canada’s mining presence? As noted in chapter 1, Canada has become the leading source of nonAfrican investment in African mining: in 2005, forty-five African mines had a major Canadian interest;1 by 2012, Canadian mining companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Toronto Venture Exchange held assets in African countries with a book value of $27 billion.2 By official accounts, this Canadian presence in mining brings muchneeded foreign investment and advanced technology to African countries, increases those countries’ GDP, creates employment, generates tax revenues, introduces environmentally responsible practices, and so on.

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The counter-narrative I am presenting – that Canada is engaged in a colonialist relationship with African countries, one that entails resource plunder – implies that Canada is using its clout as a more powerful country and corporate sector to extract wealth from African mining to the benefit of Canadian shareholders and to the overall detriment of Africans. While the emphasis in this book, drawing on Edward Said’s work, is on the cultural and discursive dimensions of Canada’s mining involvements in African states, Said also acknowledges the crucial material aspect of colonialism and imperialism: the concern with controlling land, resources, and local populations in order to generate profits. In this chapter, then, I investigate the economic and material dimensions of Canada’s involvement in African mining. I suggest that the nature of the resulting harm can best be understood as “structural violence.” As suggested by the epigraphs to this chapter, Canadian involvement in African mining continues a long-established pattern in which resource wealth is extracted from the African continent to enrich corporate shareholders in foreign countries and some local African elites. Much of the current multilateral analysis of the resource-rich global South focuses on the domestic political economies of those states in an attempt to explain how and why resource wealth often seems to be a curse rather than a blessing. This chapter starts from that same consideration but then goes on to examine questions that have been inadequately addressed to date: What are the specific economic benefits for Canada of its involvement in African mining? And what enables the legitimization and continuation of colonialist patterns into the nominally post-colonial twenty-first century? Tracking Structural Violence Colonialism is inherently violent: it is psychically violent in its dehumanization of people and its destruction of Indigenous cultures and epistemes; it always involves, or threatens to involve, direct police, military, or private security forces; and besides appropriating resources, it fosters social tension, illness, and death through displacement, exploitation, and impoverishment. In particular, resource appropriation can be understood as structural violence: the violence of economic forces and institutions that chronically deprive persons and communities of the resources they need to live dignified, safe, healthy, and pleasurable lives. Bourgois (2004) defines structural violence as “chronic, historically entrenched political-economic oppression and social inequality, ranging from exploitative international terms of trade to abusive local

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working conditions and high infant mortality rates.”3 Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004) note that conceptualizing violence only in terms of direct physical force or cruelty misrecognizes the extent to which structural inequalities and power relations are naturalized by our categories and conceptions of what violence really is … Structural violence is generally invisible because it is part of the routine grounds of everyday life and transformed into expressions of moral worth … Often the most violent acts consist of conduct that is socially permitted, encouraged, or enjoined as a moral right or duty. Most violence is not deviant behaviour, not disapproved of, but to the contrary is defined as virtuous action in the service of generally applauded conventional social, economic and political norms.4

Note here that structural violence is not criminalized; rather, it is tacitly accepted. The structural violence with which Canadian policies, actors, and institutions are associated in the context of African mining is cast as unremarkable and routine. Marxist scholars of capitalism since Trotsky have described such conditions as manifestations of uneven development;5 by contrast, the term structural violence – which manifests itself as a multitude of grinding everyday stressors – conveys more viscerally the harms and even traumas that occur in people’s lives as a result of structural economic inequality. Structural violence encompasses macroeconomic processes that may be routine and systematized – such as bilateral investment agreements and quarterly stock market reports – as well as community-based and micro-personal shocks such as illness, injury or death, and environmental pollution. Direct causal links may be hard to “prove,” but the cumulative impact of the structural dimensions of resource extraction is evidenced in various quality-of-life indicators and measures of inequality. In the next two sections, I review some of the recent macroeconomic indicators. I then look more closely at several specific cases that have been publicly reported, to provide a more visceral sense of what people actually experience. Mineral Wealth, Inequality, and Underdevelopment: “Resource Curse” Structural violence is visible in the amount of wealth produced through mineral exploitation and development that leaves the African continent entirely, by both legal and illegal avenues. The analysis I produce in this section draws extensively on the Africa Progress Panel’s 2013 report,

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titled Equity in Extractives: Stewarding Africa’s Natural Resources for All. This report quantifies the value of mineral wealth illicitly leaving the continent as an astonishing average of US$63.5 billion per year between 2008 and 2010;6 of this, US$38.4 billion was lost due to misrepresentation of export and import values. The report identifies unfair pricing practices and the extensive use of tax havens by foreign mining companies operating in Africa as explanations for why African states and populations are failing to benefit from resource wealth.7 Indeed, since the wave of structural-adjustment-led privatization of state-owned mining firms in Zambia and in many other African countries dating from the early 1990s, mining activists and researchers have pointed to the “fire sale” undervaluing of state assets as a significant cause of lost public revenues in African states.8 One of the most disturbing recent cases is that of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter DRC), where between 2010 and 2012, five state-owned mining concessions were sold to offshore trading companies at one-sixth of their commercial value, producing a loss to that country of US$1.63 billion. The authors of Equity in Extractives emphasize that “the total losses estimated for the five deals is almost certainly an underestimate of the real level of losses.”9 At times, it becomes difficult to differentiate meaningfully between illegal and nominally legal practices, all of which allow a “hemorrhage” of resource value from the continent. For instance, African jurisdictions have had the lowest royalty rates for minerals of any region in the world; Tanzania is reported to have lost US$25 million between 2005 and 2010 due to artificially low royalty rates.10 In their 2008 report on gold mining and socio-economic development in Tanzania, Lissu and Curtis draw on various sources, including data from an independent audit of selected foreign mining companies operating in Tanzania (including one major Canadian company), commissioned by the Tanzanian government. Lissu and Curtis argue that the Tanzanian state should have received US$265.5 million more than it did over a fiveyear period; the shortfall is deemed to have been a result of concessionary legislation and underreporting of profits. That amount was larger than the country’s entire health budget for 2007; according to Lissu and Curtis, 44,000 secondary school classrooms could have been built with those funds.11 Again, they conclude that, given the difficulty in obtaining accurate figures from mining companies, “lost income is therefore likely to be much higher.”12 Other sources compare state revenues with reported resource profits to indicate the extent of wealth being routinely lost to the continent. In

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2011, Zambia’s copper exports were reportedly worth US$10 billion, yet the government received only US$240 million in revenues.13 In Guinea, mineral exports were valued at US$1.4 billion in 2011, but government revenues from mining were only 3.4 per cent of this amount, or US$48 million.14 In Tanzania, figures released in a 2007 report of the Ministry of Energy and Minerals cited gold exports during 2001–6 valued at US$2.6 billion; yet government tax and royalty revenues from gold were only US$78 million for the same period, or 3 per cent of the gold values. Other reports on the value of Tanzanian minerals in relation to government revenues indicate government revenues in the range of 8 to 10 per cent of mineral export values.15 According to reports by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), in DRC, tax revenues from mining and oil were only 5 per cent of GDP in 2010; in Ghana, mining brought in 11 per cent of all fiscal receipts; and in Tanzania, gas and oil contributions to state coffers were reported to be (only) US$300 million in 2009–10.16 Another way of presenting the structural violence of these conditions is by using human well-being indicators such as longevity and child mortality to compare the differences between populations in mineralresource-rich white settler nations such as Canada and Australia and populations of mineral-resource-rich African countries such as Tanzania, the Congo, and Niger. Measures of life expectancy at birth show the following:17 Canadian men can expect to live 78 years, Canadian women 83 years; Australian men 79 years, women 84 years; Congo men 46 years, women 49 years; Niger men 50 years, women 52 years; and Tanzanian men 55 years, women 56 years. These figures can be further nuanced by, for instance, isolating the average life expectancy figures for Indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia (lower than the national average) and by tracking social class inequality patterns in Africa countries. For instance, Equity in Extractives identifies Equatorial Guinea and Angola as characterized by extreme inequality such that quality-of-life indicators (e.g., longevity and child mortality) differ vastly between the wealthiest and poorest citizens.18 Partial answers to Mbembe’s questions – “To whom do a country’s riches belong? In short, who has a right to live and exist, and who has not, and why?”19 – are suggested by such measures. Other measures, such as child mortality and – less dire but still consequential – school attendance show large gaps still existing between resource-rich “white settler” countries like Canada and Australia and resource-rich African countries. With regard to “average number of years spent in school from primary through

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tertiary,” Tanzania is in second-to-last place, at five years, while DRC and Niger – two other countries with a major Canadian mining industry presence – take the bottom of the list, with only four years. Canada and Australia are at or near the top of the list with, respectively, seventeen and twenty-one years of schooling on average. While the wide gaps between white settler-colonizer states and formerly colonized African countries cannot be attributed solely to historical and contemporary resource extraction patterns, the terms under which mineral resource exploitation occurred throughout the continent during the colonial era – terms that continue into the present day – have not contributed to narrowing these gaps. Indeed, Equity in Extractives, while acknowledging the differences and variations among African countries as to the intensity of the “resource curse,” presents grim evidence that mineral resource wealth is still failing to generate developmental benefits for most citizens of resource-rich African countries. This report notes the following: • After a decade of strong growth, several of Africa’s resource-rich countries remain at the bottom of the international league table for human development. Others register some of the world’s largest inequalities in wealth, as measured by average income, and in wellbeing, as captured by indicators such as life expectancy and education. (12) • Resource-rich countries account for nine of the 12 countries at the bottom of the Human Development Index (HDI). The Democratic Republic of Congo, a mineral “superpower,” is in last place, with Chad, Mozambique and Niger also in the last five. (19) • 12 of the 25 countries in the world with highest child mortality rates are resource-rich African countries. (23) • There is evidence that economic disparities in resource-rich countries are rising with economic growth, dampening the potential for poverty reduction. (25) • In each of the four countries covered in the research [Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, and Nigeria], the wealthiest 10% captured a disproportionately large part of the increase in overall consumption generated by growth [while] the poorest 40% saw their share of income decline. (26–7) Equity in Extractives does identify some positive shifts; for instance, it is noted that in Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia, the percentage

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of children enrolled in primary school rose from approximately 50 per cent in the late 1990s to more than 90 per cent in 2013, while the rate of reduction of child mortality tripled in Tanzania and more than doubled in Zambia.20 Nevertheless, considering all the findings collectively, the study concludes that the developmental impact that could be realized from mineral wealth is not yet in sight in most African countries. Localized Experiences of Mining-Related Structural Violence This book opened with remembrance of some of the Tanzanians who were allegedly killed at the perimeter of the North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania in 2011. Such events sometimes draw the attention of the mainstream Canadian media and may be used by anti-mining or responsible-mining activist networks to generate public outrage at the harms associated with foreign-owned mining, but they are not a principal focus of this book. Rather, I draw attention to the more sustained, routine, banal, and pervasive forms of structural violence associated with resource extraction – to the things that bring about supposedly “ordinary” deaths, shortened lives, ill health, stress, and the like. To provide a more tangible sense of African people’s actual experiences, in this section I profile several cases that illustrate the harms experienced in communities in the vicinity of mines with majority Canadian ownership. These cases have already been documented and are in the public domain. To set the context, I consider what is known about the links between conflict and resource extraction. Laudati (2013) reports that while globally, “legal or illegal resource exploitation” was found to be a contributing factor to 25 per cent of wars and armed conflicts, on the African continent, resource extraction was associated with 38 per cent of conflicts.21 And while Canada has fostered an image of itself as a peacekeeper nation, mining companies are often associated with conflicts. In 2009, the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict (CCSRC) produced a report on violations of “corporate social responsibility” in the global mining sector; of 171 violations documented between 1999 and 2009, 33 per cent were found to have involved Canadian companies.22 Another CCSRC report, this one based on a survey of 202 Canadian extractive sector companies listed on the Toronto or Vancouver stock exchanges (representing 34 per cent of the sector), found a “remarkably low” adoption of voluntary CSR policies by Canadian mining and oil and gas firms with international operations. Survey results from 2009 indicated that “within the

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industry, adherence to recognized international frameworks is inordinately low, despite government efforts to promote specific CSR principles such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.”23 The types of violations most often reported in association with Canadian companies were “community conflict” and “environmental degradation.” However, as the cases below indicate, for local people, the impacts are rarely limited to one “category” of harm or another; rather, those impacts are multiple, intersecting, and fluid. Moreover, while it would be inaccurate to suggest that such harms occur at every Canadian-owned or -operated mine or exploration project on the African continent, complaints of the nature illustrated below, drawing on cases from South Africa, Ghana, and DRC, are certainly not uncommon, nor are they limited to any particular country, region of the continent, or company. Indeed, fresh complaints and problems associated with Canadian mining presence continue to erupt from many different sites and countries in Africa and elsewhere. Lastly, while none of the cases that follow illustrate large-scale population displacements and “relocations” as sometimes occur when a large foreign mining company arrives to develop an industrial mine, these “relocations” are perhaps one of the greatest causes of social disruption and even trauma. For instance, the development of one C ­ anadian-owned mine in northern Burkina Faso has involved relocating 16,000 people. Are such displacements an example of racialized power relations? Back in Canada, the historical record indicates that the displacement and relocation of entire communities has most often affected racialized groups: Indigenous nations, Black people (Africville, Priceville, and so on) or Japanese (internment during the Second World War).

South Africa Case In 2010, the International Women and Mining Network published a report titled “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out.” This report presented first-person testimonies from communities in twenty-eight countries around the world. One case presents first-person testimonies of the impacts of a Canadian-owned uranium mine in South Africa.24 Here, mine workers alleged poor working conditions that included a lack of protective clothing against radiation exposure, inadequate access to health services, lack of compensation for workrelated health problems, unfair job dismissals, diagnoses of silicosis, tuberculosis, chronic headaches, and nausea, low wages, and racism

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in the workplace (with white staff employed in the best-paid, higherlevel positions while the majority Black South African employees, and migrant workers from neighbouring African countries, carried out the most dangerous and poorly paid jobs).25 In 2005, after workers’ attempts to negotiate better working conditions did not deliver desired results, a series of protest actions began. In August 2007, concerned with the claims they were receiving regarding conditions and events at this mine, representatives from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), along with representatives from the National Union of Mineworkers, attempted to meet with the mine’s management and were reportedly rebuffed. COSATU then issued a press release condemning the attitude of those managers; this press statement also reported that eighteen workers had died at the mine since 2004.26 “Miningmx,” a South African–based mining industry news service, reported that inspectors from the Department of Minerals and Energy had visited the mine;27 civil society groups claimed that the Department of Minerals and Energy’s inspection report of 11 November 2007 had instructed the mine to halt operations until all health and safety standards had been met.28 Despite these efforts to address conditions at the mine, unresolved complaints from workers continued to arise, culminating in a strike action on 8 October 2008. Two days later, on 10 October, when striking workers had refused to return to work, the company declared the strike illegal and began issuing dismissal notices.29 The International Women and Mining Network claimed that 1,400 workers were fired without proper notice and without severance pay.30 On 22 October, less than two weeks later, the company announced that it was suspending operations and placing the mine under “care and maintenance” and that it was uncertain whether the mine would be reopened or sold. Reasons reported by the company for this decision were financial and technical in nature, “associated with the continuing decline in uranium prices during 2008 and significant inflation-related increases in project costs, together with a slower than expected ‘ramp-up’ in development and production.”31 The company’s 2008 annual report further stated that “the majority of the workforce at Dominion has been retrenched in accordance with the requirements of applicable South African legislation; a core team of employees has been retained to oversee care and maintenance activities.”32 Retrenched workers and members of surrounding communities continued to voice complaints about environmental safety and health

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matters. Wider impacts within the community were identified by community members as including dangerous terrain in the vicinity of the mine (such as open mine shafts and sinkholes), elevated levels of toxins in groundwater and surface water, deformed vegetables, and children with chronic health problems.33 One female community organizer provided the following testimony, which highlighted the impoverished conditions of the local communities: We don’t have electricity or water services, our houses are very cracked, and there are no jobs. We want to work, but we want our health also. The thing is, we are now living in poverty. After [name of Canadian company] has come here, the safety of our children, and of our community is all more at risk. In the past, we had land for our children. But now the mine has taken our land, and we don’t have anything. We are suffering and need a proper place to live that does not have radiation like here.34

Most grievously, this community reported the death of a ten-year-old child who had slipped into an unfenced sinkhole and drowned in contaminated water. According to the testimonies provided by community members, the company had offered no acknowledgment of responsibility, no apology, and no compensation to the family.35 For its part, the company stated that it had conducted all its operations in accordance with legislated health and safety standards and that “no community member has been harmed by any waterborne or airborne contamination.”36 The company was subsequently purchased by a Russian state firm;37 the mine itself was acquired by a “Black Economic Empowerment” company. According to Tshepo Mmusi, a member of the local Catholic Justice and Peace Committee of Dominionville, one of the communities neighbouring the mine, in 2011 the dismissed workers continued to suffer ill health and impoverishment: “Many are now vulnerable, unemployed and burdening their immediate families who must take care of them medically and struggle to make ends meet.”38

Ghana Cases A second set of examples is drawn from Ghana. In 2004, a Ghanaian researcher associated with a highly respected civil society organization, Third World Network–Africa, reported a case concerning a Canadian gold mining company that, after fifteen years of operations, abruptly liquidated and closed, leaving four hundred employees suddenly out

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of work – reportedly without honouring their contractual right to three months’ severance notice and with $18 million in outstanding debts to state and private entities. The company was reported to have left the site unrecommissioned; the area was littered with gravel, stockpiles, and unfilled pits and thus unsuitable for farming, besides posing health and safety dangers. (The company allegedly had not paid the required $2 million bond for mine recommissioning.) Farmers who had been lobbying for years for compensation for land lost to the mine were left with little prospect of receiving such compensation. As the author notes: The workers, affected farmers, the community, and the state as a whole have received a raw deal in this liquidation. The workers need their entitlement to continue life. The farmers have waited far too long for their compensation and the sudden liquidation seems to have dashed their hope of ever receiving anything. At the same time their environment has been destroyed thereby limiting their choices of alternatives to livelihoods. The state due to its own monitoring weaknesses has helped the company to side step both its financial and environmental obligation.39

This case was followed by a leading Canadian mining industry researcher, Bonnie Campbell, who noted in a 2009 publication that two Ghanaian organizations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Minerals Commission, were forced to seek a declaration for an order of mandatory injunction … compelling the company to take all steps necessary for the rehabilitation of the environment and repair damages. These included failing to follow the due processes for mine decommissioning; failure to give notice to its workers; failure to pay to date wages to workers and compensation to farmers whose land has been acquired about fifteen years before for mining; as well as leaving a debt of about US$18 million owed to various state institutions and private companies.40

Another case pertaining to corporate–community relations in the gold mining sector in Ghana41 is based on academic research in three villages in the vicinity of a gold mine. A principal complaint was that expectations raised during initial meetings with the company were not met when mining commenced. Members of these communities reported some positive impacts from the mine – infrastructure such as roads, schools, and health facilities – but then cited a long list of negative

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impacts in the form of loss of agricultural land, loss of employment, harmful environmental impacts such as air pollution, noise, and land degradation, inadequate compensation to affected community members, increased crime, increased cost of living, and an increase in diseases “such as tuberculosis, catarrh, skin irritations, boils, eye problems, chronic coughs, and malaria.”42 The resident of one village stated: “We were subsistence farmers during pre-mining times. Land for farming was very easy to secure. Today, most of these lands have become the property of the company and so have been destroyed in the process of mining. We do not have enough land to do our farms as we did before.”43 A study of a third situation in which a Canadian company was embroiled in conflict with the local community similarly identified land access as a main source of tension – in this case primarily affecting Ghanaian “artisanal” or citizen miners (see chapter 7 for discussion of “the politics of naming”), who were pushed off lucrative lands when the concession was obtained by the Canadian company.44

Democratic Republic of the Congo Cases A third set of cases of mining-related harm is drawn from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). That country (formerly Belgian Congo, then Zaire) has a history of at least 150 years of resource exploitation accompanied by brutality against and neglect of local populations by both foreigners45 and indigenous elites – notably, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and his cronies from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. DRC probably stands as the most extreme example on the African continent of interconnected patterns of structural, state, military, and interpersonal violence. That violence has clear connections to the country’s abundant mineral resources. As noted in chapter 1, my own interest in mining and development was piqued when I travelled extensively throughout then-Zaire in the 1990s; at the time, I was struck by the contradiction between the country’s impressive resource wealth – not just minerals but also timber, hydroelectricity, and agriculture, as well as an energetic, dynamic population – and conditions of extreme poverty, deprivation, and absence of basic infrastructure and social services. As has been widely noted (Larmer, Laudati, and Clark, 2013; Matti, 2010), DRC’s extraordinary mineral wealth has not benefited the majority of Congolese citizens; indeed, it has coexisted with high rates of poverty and an absence of infrastructure and services such as roads, electricity, health care, basic education, and agricultural services.

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Incredibly, this deprivation became even worse in the late 1990s: the country suffered years of division, instability, and war following an invasion by forces led by Laurent Kabila and the fall of Mobutu’s dictatorship. Between 2001 to 2003, the UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Panel of Experts), mandated by the UN Security Council, produced a series of reports that investigated war-related mineral wealth plunder and appropriation. The first report noted that “contributing factors” included “the opportunistic behaviour of some private companies”46 as well as “direct and indirect involvement of some staff of the embassies and cooperation agencies of developed countries [who] have facilitated the purchase of illegal minerals.”47 The Panel of Experts was then tasked with taking the investigation further; its October 2002 report contained a set of annexes that further identified the companies and individuals involved in the illegal exploitation of DRC’s minerals. Annex 3 identified seven Canadian companies48 as violating the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and thus as having indirectly contributed to prolonging the war in DRC by doing business with various armed factions. These deals were made primarily between 1997 and 2001, which were years of chaos when more than 3 million Congolese people died as a direct result of militarized-resource-related conflict.49 While Kabila was invading thenZaire, some Canadian companies were obtaining mineral concessions in eastern Zaire in exchange for funds that were then allegedly used to obtain arms and finance the war. The companies “responded indignantly” to the UN report; the Panel of Experts obtained legal advice and pursued discussions with the companies named.50 In its 2003 final report, the Panel of Experts listed all but one of the previously cited Canadian companies in the category of “resolved – no further action necessary.” This designation was assigned if a company had expressed “recognition of the issues the panel has raised in its reports.”51 Mining industry watchdog groups condemned the Canadian government for its failure to investigate or take further action following the Panel of Experts’ final report. Continuing insecurity and armed conflict related to mining in eastern DRC has also been associated with high rates of sexual violence. Yet despite the political and social turmoil in DRC, the country continues to attract Canadian exploration and mining companies, many of which have generated strong financial returns from their operations there. Member of Parliament Paul Dewar made the following impassioned

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observation during the C-300 hearings on 27 October 2009: “I’ll give you the example of the Congo, from last spring. We have 75% of the population living on a dollar a day. We have Canada’s reach, through its intervention … making money off this, in other words, and that’s what companies do … I think what people are looking for is some coherence. What is our responsibility?” In a later session of the C-300 hearings, on 24 November 2009, a civil society activist and educator, Denis Tougas, provided the following testimony: On the ground in the Congo, as a result of the pervasive corruption and lack of transparency with respect to the conditions in which mining contracts are signed, the legitimacy of those contracts is still in doubt. In the current context of extreme poverty for the vast majority of the population, that could mean additional costs for the companies to increase security for their operations against the local communities that are not benefitting from the exploitation of their resources … Even more importantly, Canada is purportedly blocking settlement of the Congo’s debt to the Paris Club. That debt of approximately $4 billion or $5 billion was incurred as a result of Mobutu’s pranks. That settlement is necessary for the country to have access to the International Monetary Fund’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, which the country very much needs. And that is because one of the Canadian companies cited in the expert panel’s report is dissatisfied with the outcome of the renegotiation of one of its mining contracts. The Congolese government has decided to cancel one of those contracts. Yesterday, Canada was called neocolonial in a Kinshasa newspaper.

One case from DRC that has garnered extensive public exposure demonstrates the types of structural violence that may be associated with foreign (including Canadian) resource extraction.52 It features a Canadian–Australian company that was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, with a head office in Australia and a second office in Montreal. The company has since been acquired by a Chinese firm. From 2002 to 2008, it operated a silver–copper mine in a part of eastern DRC (bordering Zambia) known for its “world class” copper deposits. Production from the mine was shipped from the port of Kilwa, a large town some 50 kilometres from the mine. A study of child mortality conducted in Kilwa by Medecins Sans Frontières points to the socio-economic conditions in this community. That study identified a high mortality rate among children under the age of five, of 12 per cent: “not from violence

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but from illness – malaria and dysentery: conditions linked to malnutrition and the absence of medical facilities.”53 In other words, these were poverty-related deaths arising from the population’s extreme socio-economic deprivation. Yet data about the company operating the nearby copper–silver mine indicated a profit in 2004 of US$6.85 million and a gross profit margin of 22 per cent. A few terse notes in this document provide some indication of the company’s relationship with local populations: “Road base needed to start the project: dropped truck load of sledge hammers at Dikulushi village. Showed local villagers size of stone needed & they set out to work.”54 According to a company press release dated April 2005, the company enjoyed a positive and mutually beneficial relationship with the communities in the area: two hundred residents of Kilwa were employed at the mine; the mine trained local people; the company had established a trust to benefit the local community, built a new school for two hundred children, refurbished the Kilwa hospital, upgraded roads and bridges, and provided power lines to the local high school and mission.55 That press release had been issued six months after a horrific event in Kilwa that led to the deaths of at least seventy-three people. According to a UN (MONUC) investigation56 carried out within a week of the incident, the events were precipitated in the early hours of 14 October 2004 by “an insurrection movement which was badly-organized and poorlyarmed”; that insurrection, calling itself the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Katanga (translated from French), had been organized by ten persons led by “a fisherman of around 20 years of age.” This small band of “revolutionaries,” after recruiting about one hundred more local youth, attempted to occupy and control the town of Kilwa. Their actions prompted an aggressive response by the regional military (Force Armée de la République Démocratique du Congo; FARDC) that seemed greatly disproportionate to the threat posed by the ragtag youths. According to the Canadian company, FARDC ordered it to make available vehicles, air transportation, and other services (i.e., drivers for the vehicles, food for soldiers, payments to some soldiers).57 The company having provided this assistance, FARDC flew in a regiment (on company aircraft) from Lubumbashi. There, while suppressing the rebel faction in Kilwa, military personnel perpetrated gross human rights violations that included summary executions, arbitrary arrests, torture, rape, looting, and extortion. According to the MONUC report, some 90 per cent of the population of this sizeable town fled the community, fearing for their lives:

100  Colonial Extractions According to local sources, more than 100 civilians died or were summarily executed during the FARDC’s counter-attack on 15 October. The military authorities of Kilwa and the Governor of Katanga in Lubumbashi declared that 24 to 30 militiamen had been killed, while the civil authorities in Kilwa claimed that they had no information on the number of deaths. Sources at the Kilwa hospital that helped to coordinate the burial of bodies, when asked by MONUC, denied that they had any information of this subject. It should be noted that before they met the MONUC representatives, they were called by Colonel Ademars to attend a meeting. Information obtained from independent sources indicates that 73 people were killed, including 28 that were summarily executed.58

MONUC also discovered two mass graves. RAID, an Australian human rights organization, subsequently gathered and published testimonies from Kilwa community members who had been victims of the violence. The company acknowledged that it had evacuated its expatriate staff to Lubumbashi by air when these events occurred;59 it also consistently maintained that it had no knowledge of the military action that was being planned and thus that it was innocent of any complicity in the human rights atrocities that occurred. When the case was finally heard before a Congolese military tribunal, Colonel Ademars Ilunga and several subordinate officers were convicted and sentenced, but the three Canadian–Australian company employees facing charges were acquitted.60 The tribunal, however, was criticized for procedural irregularities by Louise Arbour, the esteemed Canadian judge who had served as Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and on the Supreme Court of Canada.61 Relatives of those killed at Kilwa later filed a class action suit against the Canadian company in Quebec. After a lower court agreed to hear the case, the company appealed to the Quebec Court of Appeal, which ruled, on jurisdictional grounds, that the case could not be heard in Quebec, for the company’s Montreal office had not been directly involved in the decisions taken by the company at the time.62 The Canadian Association Against Impunity, representing the Congolese relatives of the massacre victims, requested leave to appeal this jurisdictional ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada. In November 2012, that leave was denied by the Court. So the case will not be heard in any Canadian court. For the residents of Kilwa, there has been no redress for their tragic losses. In light of the horrific violence that was carried out in this community, which was the shipping point for the valuable metals being produced

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nearby, this case demonstrates how overt physical violence, often militarized violence, significantly underwrites (legal) structural economic violence. In its quarterly report to the Australian stock market for the period ending 31 December 2004, the company merely stated: “Government and military response on both provincial and national levels was rapid and supportive of the prompt resumption of operations at the [mine].”63 Following later publicity concerning the gross human rights violations in Kilwa, the company’s CEO explained the apparent contradiction between this statement and the violence that had occurred there by saying that the report was “a dry response to compulsory reporting requirements of the financial markets. It was produced prior to us [sic] having an appreciation of the seriousness of these events and in no way reflects the deep sadness we feel following the deaths that occurred.”64 From this, it becomes possible to see how routine capitalist ­technologies – stock market reports – white out the violence of a racialized global economy. These examples from South Africa, Ghana, and Democratic Republic of the Congo graphically demonstrate the localized impacts and traumas experienced in some communities in the vicinity of Canadianowned and -operated mines. Meanwhile, complaints of various kinds continue to arise. More recently, the frustrations of some three hundred laid-off workers at a Canadian-owned gold mine in Mauritania led to weeks of “bitter protests,” which were met by a “heavy-handed police crackdown,” reportedly with tear gas and batons, leading to a number of arrests and injuries. The workers’ union leaders claimed that the layoffs had not been conducted legally; the company insisted they had been completely legal and were “difficult decisions [made] in response to the recent decline in gold price.”65 Such events, these moments of overt violence and bodily pain, are characteristic of the broader system of structural violence. They flare up in response to a multitude of moments of covert, routinized, social, economic, and psychological stress, and are fuelled by a sense of injustice. How Is Mining-Related Structural Violence in Africa Explained? Since the formal end of the colonial era in Africa, many analyses have been produced to explain why mining has not benefited African populations and what policies need to be changed to address that reality. These analyses are expressed eloquently and powerfully in three classic texts: Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism

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(1965); Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1974); and Greg Lanning’s Africa Undermined (1979). The accounts these authors present of the African political economy, with mining as a central feature, are eerily familiar, describing circumstances that are not substantially different today. Rodney sets out in graphic detail how African societies’ endogenous processes of development were brought to a halt by the European colonial and early post-colonial presence. He describes how European ­entities – mining companies, shipping companies, cocao and coffee firms, and the governments and banks of the colonizer states – engaged in harsh modes of primitive accumulation, extracting extreme degrees of “surplus value” from African peoples through forced or grossly underpaid labour, including what amounted to slave labour half a century after slavery was officially abolished. This extraction of value from African lands and people was achieved through racist coercion and brutality. Most notoriously, the peoples of the Congo, an enormously wealthy territory, under the Belgian King Leopold II, suffered horrendous brutality that included torture, whippings, maimings, rapes, and indiscriminate massacres. (As noted on p. 56, a Canadian officer, William Stairs, was associated with that violence.) This surplus value generated enormous profits for companies and thus high rates of return, enriching some European investors at enormous cost to Africans. Rodney offers many examples of the extreme, race-based disparities in wages paid to African and white/European workers. Nigerian coal miners at the British-owned Enugu colliery worked six days for the same wage that a British miner earned in an hour,66 and in Zambia, European lorry drivers employed in the copper mines earned ten times what a Zambian was paid for the same job.67 Rodney asserts that there was no objective reason to grossly underpay highly productive African workers; rather, this was a case of overt racist exploitation backed up by the authoritarian clout of the colonial state – its police and its arbitrary laws – the goal of which was to ensure maximum profits for European private companies. Rodney identifies the colonial state as functioning primarily to “guarantee optimum conditions under which private companies could exploit Africans.”68 In this regard, a key role of colonial states was to seize land from Indigenous populations and sell it at nominal prices to European individuals or private companies. These various forms of coercion, exploitation, and seizure generated very high profits for European investors in Africa – returns on investments started at 15 per cent and increased from there.69

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Rodney states: “The returns on colonial investment were consistently higher than those on investments in the metropoles, so the financiers stood to benefit from sponsoring colonial enterprise.”70 The picture Rodney paints of a continent being callously drained of its resource wealth and human productivity is grim; indeed, he coins the term “underdevelopment” to counter the story of “development,” which he regards as a misnomer or lie. A decade earlier, Nkrumah had coined the term “neo-colonialism” to describe the network of EuroAmerican mining and financial corporations that continued to dominate the resource extraction sector throughout the African continent even while formal or “flag” independence was being achieved by most former colonies. He commented caustically: “The whole of the economy is geared to the interests of the foreign capital that dominates it.”71 What is particularly striking about Nkrumah’s book is the clarity with which he identifies the conditions required to harness resource extraction to beneficial development outcomes for African populations – and the extent to which these prescriptions remain relevant but unpractised almost half a century later: The African countries are faced with the need to turn subsistence economies into organisms that will generate viable and improved conditions of living for their populations. However, many African governments … are granting concessions for the working of mineral, agricultural and forestry resources whose purpose is the drawing off of output to sustain and enlarge the industries and economies of the imperialist countries. Not one of the investing syndicates has any intention of founding in any one of these countries an integrated industrial complex that would give impetus to genuine economic growth.72

Nkrumah does not object in principle to foreign investment in African resource extraction; he does object to its occurring in ways that deepen poverty and exacerbate the North–South income gap. He asserts the agency of formally independent African states, noting that “however little real power the government of a neocolonial state may possess, it must have, from the fact of its nominal independence, a certain area of [sic] manoevre.”73 Nkrumah’s book is written with a view to spurring African leaders to develop a united front for using the continent’s resources to benefit the greatest number of people. On this point, Greg Lanning points to the formidable constraints on African leaders that have thus far largely prevented them from heeding

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Nkumrah’s call. For various reasons, African governments have been compelled to support the presence of foreign investors and foreign interests. African politicians know from the experience of leaders like Julius Nyerere and Robert Mugabe that actions to prioritize national interests risk driving away Western aid, debt relief, and investment.74 Lanning examines each of the typical claims made by Western countries to justify the terms of foreign-dominated African mining; then, in measured, almost understated terms, he exposes these claims as false. Industrial mining tends to create unemployment rather than employment; it does little to increase the technological competencies of local peoples, given that foreign professionals continue to arrive to do such work; it does not create linkages with the local economy; and it generates minimal tax revenues for African host governments. The grim conclusion he reached in 1979, after a detailed study, was that the power of Western capitalist interests – both corporate and state – to determine the terms of mining in post-colonial African states is such that there is little likelihood that African states will be able to redirect mineral wealth to the benefit of their own populations. Rather, Lanning sees African industrial mining as having been developed since the late nineteenth century to serve the financial interests of foreign investors. There is little sign of any substantial change in this historical pattern. In the decades since Nkrumah, Rodney, and Lanning, many works of scholarship, policy, and activism (Yachir, 1988; Mushingwe, 1995; Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999; Akabzaa, 2004; Lissu, 2004) have reiterated that resource extraction has failed to benefit African nations and peoples. The reasons why include the high level of exportation of mineral resources from the continent, mainly in unprocessed form; the hurdles erected against establishing “value-added” industries on the continent; the Balkanization of the continent such that a united strategy on foreign investment is lacking; the highly favourable terms granted to foreign investors; a lack of transparency on the part of mining companies regarding their earnings and payments to governments; evidence of cheating on the part of some foreign companies to minimize payments to host states; the failure to integrate the mining sector with broad-based national development strategies; the failure to develop downstream and upstream economic linkages with the mining industry; the inefficiency of a “mineral rent based on taxes” for “optimizing government revenues and sustaining economic growth”;75 minimal employment creation and, arguably, employment loss; and a host of complaints related to social and environmental harms. As a

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consequence of all this, the continent’s wealth is being stolen – affluent people in other parts of the world are benefiting from the extraction of minerals from territories where African peoples live in poverty and social malaise.76 That, at least, is the persistent sense. Respected economists Mkandawire and Soludo (1999) observed with dismay that a liberalized, free-market-driven mining sector was being actively (even coercively) introduced and advanced by the leading institutions in the West such as the World Bank: Ghana is back to gold, cocoa, and timber, and Zambia is reviving its copper mining. Most of the new investment in Africa is going back into mining, not so much because of policy changes as because of the global demand for minerals … Unless policies are deliberately introduced to relax the focus on natural-resource exports and to conscientiously use mineral wealth to develop human resources and more diversified, labour-absorbing activities, African countries will be embarking on a course of structural inflexibility and vulnerability to terms-of-trade instability.77

This point was reiterated twelve years later in the UNECA 2011 report, “Minerals and Africa’s Development”: “The greater trade liberalization process has accentuated the structural vulnerabilities of ­mineral-producing developing countries … UNCTAD (2010) noted that ‘By the end of the 1990s the production structure of the [Sub-Saharan African] sub-region had become reminiscent of the colonial period, consisting overwhelmingly of agriculture and mining.’”78 This identification of what is not right with foreign-dominated mining on the African continent has been accompanied by recommendations for solving the problems. These prescriptions are by now well known, are not extreme, and are based often on how other jurisdictions have made mining work for national development. The most recent comprehensive articulation of a constructive strategy for African mining was produced by the UN Economic Commission on Africa (UNECA) and the African Union (AU) with a view to operationalizing the “African Mining Vision” developed by the AU in 2009. This 2011 report, titled Minerals and Africa’s Development: The International Study Group’s Report on Africa’s Mineral Regimes, sets out a vision that reprises that of Nkrumah’s forty-six years earlier: Africa has to shift focus from simply mineral extraction to much broader developmental imperatives in which mineral policy integrates with

106  Colonial Extractions development policy. This is the central thinking in this report – that the continent’s vast mineral resources can play a transformative role in Africa’s development only if it builds appropriate social and economic development linkages that meet national and regional developmental objectives.

The report suggests host country strategies for “capturing” and “sharing” mineral revenues. And it offers comprehensive policy recommendations, including these: that linkages be fostered with the wider economy, including the development of value-added processing; that artisanal mining be supported; that approaches to consultation with local communities be improved; and that human rights (i.e., social and environmental well-being) be protected. One question this raises is whether there should be foreign-owned mining in African countries at all, given the existing barriers to harnessing resource wealth to broad development objectives. For instance, in Canada, the Ontario Chiefs of the Nishinawbe Aski Nation called for a moratorium on mining until the provincial mining legislation could be amended. Some African communities have reportedly called for the departure of Canadian mining companies. Paul Jourdan, the former CEO of Mintek, a South African mining research organization, has insisted that until mining can be developed as part of an integrated economic plan with backward and forward linkages in the national economy, it would be preferable to leave the minerals in the ground.79 “Not mining” is the least favoured scenario for countries like Canada that are heavily invested in resource extraction. Those countries seek strategies that will cast mining in a better light by linking it to sustainable development. They challenge the notion that the mineral resource industry is necessarily a “curse.” Attempts to mitigate the resource curse have led to various policy prescriptions, although, according to Arellano-Yanguas (2008), certain prescriptions have recently predominated. This new orthodoxy features the following: “(a) decentralisation of government; (b) a greater role for direct citizen participation in deciding on how to spend mining revenue; and (c) cooperation between state agencies and commercial organisations (public–private partnerships).”80 Having conducted a detailed study of Peru, ArellanoYanguas critiques that set of prescriptions and concludes that strong regulation by the state is key: “Peru requires capable and stable public institutions in order to overcome the resource curse. Mining operations

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need robust regulation and enforcement by the state.”81 This view corroborates the analysis presented in chapter 282 regarding the potentially nationalistic, development-oriented use of state power – particularly in “global South” states – to counter free trade globalization. In his study of the Congo and of the literature on the resource curse, Matti (2010) similarly notes that countries such as Botswana, Chile, and Malaysia provide evidence that rich mineral endowments can be managed in ways that benefit the nation as a whole; like Arellano-Yanguas, he concludes there is a “political component” to the resource curse. The thesis I advance in this book is that this “political component” can be named more precisely as international neo-colonialist-neoliberal domination and control of the sector – a process in which Canada, as a country with a globally active corporate mining sector, is directly implicated. Does Canadian Mining Presence Develop or Underdevelop African Countries? If the mining sectors in African countries have historically delivered strong returns for foreign investors and only meagre returns – and considerable social and environmental harm – to African states and populations, what is the nature of the Canadian presence in contemporary African mining? In the late 1990s, political economist Bonnie Campbell began pointing out the lack of coherence between Canada’s claims to support African development and poverty reduction or “basic needs,” on the one hand, and its simultaneous support for structural adjustment programs featuring foreign-investment-favouring liberalization of African mining sectors in conjunction with various forms of public assistance to the private Canadian mining sector, on the other.83 This raises a basic question: Could Canada act in solidarity with African country citizens to support and advance the kinds of policies that have been clearly and repeatedly identified as necessary in order to harness mining to development? Or does Canada act principally in its own selfinterest, with little regard – and even contempt – for the right of Africans to life and well-being? This is an unsettling question. To begin to answer it, I turn to some of the interview data I collected from Canadian mining professionals. Contemporary Canadian mining and exploration companies have much to gain from ventures in African countries, and the people I interviewed

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spoke frankly and often enthusiastically of these benefits. Asked why they had gone to African countries, interviewees stated: It’s where the rich deposits are. Very high grade for the world. You can’t find those deposits anywhere else in the market. It’s really got some of the last places on the planet that haven’t been explored … there’s no data base … the opportunities are just huge to go in and find something. A company our size would have a very difficult time getting the projects we have now in a country that was First World. In Africa, where most people sort of fear to tread, it’s a lot easier for us, which allows us to acquire things and develop things that we normally wouldn’t be able to do. We were able to get superior projects.

Many interviewees referred to the favourable financial aspects of mining in African jurisdictions. Access to “low cost” or “cheap” labour was the most common “attraction” named:84 You’ve got a large workforce that’s cheap labour, and most of them are fairly educated. You have a lower-cost labour pool … probably the same operation in North America would not have been profitable. You know we don’t pay them much, we pay them a couple hundred bucks US a month for the low skill levels.

Such references to low-wage labour are supported by other sources on wages in African countries’ mining sectors. An ILO study observed that in countries with a “labour surplus” – which describes most African countries – increased labour productivity leading to greater mining industry profits can occur without wage increases.85 The high-profile Bomani Commission86 report in Tanzania drew attention to a case in which an expatriate employee was paid 6 million Tanzanian shillings (Tsh) while a Tanzanian worker was paid only 800,000 Tsh for the same work. The Tanzanian Mines and Construction Workers Union cited

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wages of Tanzanian mine employees as ranging from US$200 to $4,000 per month, compared to expatriate monthly salaries of US$6,000 to $20,000.87 Even more strikingly, Curtis and Lissu, while noting that the average monthly wage for Tanzanian mine workers, US$128 to $240, was a good salary in the Tanzanian context, conclude with the following sardonic observation: “However, by contrast, Barrick’s chief executive, Greg Wilkins, received US$9.4m in 2006, including basic salary, bonus and stock options. It would take an average Tanzanian miner over 500 years to make this amount of money.”88 In Botswana, statistics gathered on the diamond mining sector showed that 210 expatriate employees earned a total annual income in 2010 of US$14,700,000 (i.e., $70,000 per person on average), while the 2,790 local employees earned collectively just under US$8,000,00089 (i.e., $2,867 per person on average). Such figures are strikingly reminiscent of Walter Rodney’s identification of a common tenfold difference in race-based wages; indeed, at the present time, the disparity is far greater. In the case just cited, the expatriates were earning on average twenty-three times more than Botswana employees. From a classical economist’s perspective, low wages give countries a competitive advantage that they would not otherwise have. However, feminist and critical race scholars have analysed gendered and raced wage inequities as techniques of subordination and exploitation. As Mohanty (2003) and Galabuzi (2006) suggest, such inequities are more readily explained as the effects of social power relations – sexism and racism – that categorize and rank the value of some bodies differently than others, than as a function of different capabilities or needs.90 Moreover, capitalism has thrived in part through its ability to appropriate the value of human labour by casting some bodies as less entitled to the value of their labour than others. While David Harvey (2001) analysed capitalism’s propensity to survive its inherent contradictions through geographical expansion (what he calls the “spatial fix”), I suggest the term “racial fix” to describe capitalism’s expansion into the polities of racially inferiorized bodies (“cheap labour”), some of which have been made more vulnerable, and thus more readily exploitable, through being territorially displaced and dispossessed of land. In this way, discriminatory wages are normalized by an everyday assumption of white supremacist societies: that “Third World” others do not need the same lifestyle (housing, health, public infrastructure, post-­secondary education, vacations, etc.) as First World selves. These stereotypes of the “African Other” who can live on less, who needs less, and who

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is implicitly worth less, then reproduce and resecure the structural dimension of white supremacy. However, African mine workers are vigorously contesting their “lower cost” or “worth less” status. In recent years, employees at many Canadian-owned mines in African countries have gone on strike or engaged in work stoppages or public demonstrations to demand higher wages and/or a reduced wage gap between local and expatriate employees. As one Canadian mining professional among those I interviewed stated: You can’t be paying people a dollar a day and then flying in your executives three at a time in three different chartered planes, three different people arriving at three different times and the plane is costing US$1,000 an hour, you know people are looking. How come they can’t afford to give me this? So when they quickly start to say, “pay me what you pay your workers in other countries,” it causes problems for companies.

Interviewees referred to the benefits of mining in African countries as having a great deal to do with the investment incentives provided by host governments. The generous incentives for foreign investment in mining that were introduced in the context of World Bank–led economic liberalization policy advice to African countries have been extensively documented.91 Interviewees’ comments simply confirmed what has already been identified in the literature: There are no import restrictions. We don’t pay any TV tax for ten years. We get a special rate for the railway transportation, we also have a special rate for the electrical power.

Many similar comments were made. Such advantages were then associated with very favourable outcomes that kept company shareholders and institutional investors happy. Among those I interviewed, only one reported having lost investors’ money. All the others reported financial success: Our money goes a lot farther there. The operations were lower-cost there and the chances for profit were much greater in terms of the lower operating costs.

Generating Wealth in the Racialized Mining Economy  111 As far as return on capital, return on investment, it’s outrageously good. I mean we paid back our initial investment in eight months. You’ve got this great thing going on in Africa and the reason it’s good is because it’s in Africa and you don’t pay as much money, and things like that, because of the nature of the country.

Such statements are consistent with the attractive profits and high rates of return reported by Canadian banks’ and investment houses’ precious metals funds, as will be discussed in more detail shortly. When I inquired about the possibility of African secondary or “valueadded” industries becoming established, interviewees acknowledged there was little sign of this happening in any significant manner and that the mining industry supplies and services business was dominated by Western countries. One interviewee referred to mining contractors and heavy equipment companies coming from “Europe and Australia.” In fact, the Canadian state and its mining industry actively promote exports of Canadian mining services, equipment, and technology. One interviewee painted a vivid picture of the dearth of spin-off economic opportunities for local African ore-sampling laboratories: The labs in the area where we are, are more or less, they’re struggling for business. They were doing just fine before when they were dealing with a lot of small companies like ours, junior exploration companies, and as soon as the big companies were established – [name of three major companies], these guys are large enough that they have their own labs. So suddenly the labs – I mean I used to go there and they couldn’t promise you anything for three weeks. Now you come in with 14 samples and it’s like Christmas. And you’re the only customer around. So it’s not really – these big companies are becoming self-sufficient – which is having the opposite effect on secondary industry. But once you get going, there are things you can do locally, but a lot of it would be pretty elementary I would think – you know, get some basic hand tools locally made, which we do, but it’s not a big-ticket item. We have to get all these trays made for our logs, for the diamond drill core logs, so we’re going to generate some work for some carpenter in [district] or some carpenters in [district] because we need hundreds and hundreds of these things, so we’ll generate some work there, but again it’s not high-tech stuff.

It has been well documented that in the mining industry, there is more money to be made in processing than in extraction. In Canada, for instance, the $32 billion contribution from mining to the Canadian

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GDP in 2009 was composed of $7 billion from production (getting the resource out of the ground) and $25 billion from mineral manufacturing.92 The AU’s “African Mining Vision” (2009) emphasizes the need for “downstream value-addition” (i.e., the establishment of mineralprocessing industries, or “beneficiation”); “upstream value-addition” (i.e., the manufacture and provision of goods and services required by the mining sector, such as are currently being offered by Canada’s secondary mining industry); and “sideways value-addition” (i.e., training, human resource development, and knowledge acquisition). The 2011 UNECA report on African mining asserts that the mining sector must “build appropriate social and economic development linkages that meet national and regional developmental objectives.”93 In light of the value of such processes in relation to broader development goals, it is significant that there has been so little prioritization given to these directions by donor governments and multilateral agencies. Many ordinary African people have expressed their frustration at this. Rayford Mbulu, president of the Mineworkers Union of Zambia, complained publicly in 2010 about the lack of a “trickle down effect” on the economy and the people; he raised the question of “how far the mines and their operators are adding value for the national economy despite them exploiting our natural resources.”94 In a recent manifesto, the African National Congress Youth Wing’s demands for greater national control over the mining sector and its wealth called for: • Local beneficiation and industrialization of a minimum of 60% of the minerals extracted from beneath South Africa’s soil. The beneficiation should happen in the communities where mining happens. • Provision of education, skills and expertise to South African youth in order to capacitate them to play a meaningful role in the entire mining value-chain.95

Although the ANC Youth Wing has been cast as “militant,” such “demands” are in fact hardly extreme. They are, rather, exactly what most “developed country” jurisdictions have done in order to benefit from resource endowments. Demands for the construction of local processing facilities and thus employment and skills acquisition opportunities were exactly what was negotiated by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Innu with regard to the development of nickel at Voisey’s Bay. When diamonds were discovered

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in the Northwest Territories, it was deemed important to establish a diamond cutting and polishing industry in Yellowknife where one had never existed. Another such industry was established in Sudbury after diamonds began to be mined at the Victor mine in Northern Ontario.96 Within a few years of the discovery of lucrative new metals and gemstones, Canadian jurisdictions had successfully demanded and obtained value-added industries. Yet for African countries, with the possible exceptions of Botswana and South Africa, despite the clear value of beneficiation and other value-added processes, and the clear demands for such secondary industries from within Africa, influential donor agencies and states have placed little priority on such objectives.97 Quantifying the Benefits: What African Mining Contributes to Canada The mining industry professionals I interviewed told me frankly what enabled attractive profits from African minerals. The next question is, where do those profits end up? In what ways does Canada benefit from African mining? It is difficult to say,98 partly because the data are hard to come by. Natural Resources Canada’s “Canadian Minerals Yearbook,” which had been a source of reliable data, was last released in 2009 and has since been discontinued. That discontinuation has contributed to a shift in the location of mining sector data from public to private sources. Detailed company-specific information can be obtained from private research companies, but the costs are prohibitive. Up until 2012, when it was acquired by an American firm, Virginia-based SNL, the Halifaxbased Metals Economics Group advertised itself as the premier source of global mining data. Corporate subscriptions at that time to various portions of the MEG database cost between $30,000 and $50,000 annually for a larger company, or $10,000 to $20,000 for a smaller company, while full access to all MEG data had an annual subscription cost of over $100,000.99 MEG’s clients were mostly companies, but they also included governments of countries with major mining industries (such as Canada). MEG did not sell database services to the tertiary education sector, although some reports could be purchased online by any member of the public. For instance, one twelve-page report titled “Western Africa Gold Pipeline 2011,” produced by MEG, could be purchased for $425.100 I was unable to obtain current subscription rates for access to SNL’s database for “Metals and Mining.” Another private company, Infomine, offers various categories of data access to

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individuals and institutions, with a research subscription running in the range of C$3,600 annually.101 Infomine also sells individual reports; for instance, its “2014 Canadian Mine Salaries, Wages and Benefits Report” can be purchased for US$945.102 These are examples of the financial barriers to obtaining the empirical data that would strengthen democratic oversight of the Canadian mining industry both by ordinary Canadians and by citizens of African and other countries where Canadian companies operate. Despite these challenges, it is possible to gather enough information that a general financial picture emerges. Economic Contributions and Tax Revenues According to the Mining Association of Canada, a private sector organization, the contribution of mining to the Canadian gross domestic product (GDP) was $35.7 billion or 2.9 per cent of total GDP in 2010, while it averaged 3.3 per cent of GDP between 2005 and 2010.103 In the latter decades of the twentieth century, it hovered in the 3 to 4 per cent range, while in the early 1900s, it contributed around 10 per cent to Canada’s GDP. Thus it has been slowly declining. But these figures refer only to production and value-added within Canada; they tell us relatively little about the economic value of Canadian mining companies’ production outside Canada, even though some of the financial benefit of that production accrues to Canadians – that is, to Canadian firms, shareholders, and expatriate employees. An author of the MAC’s “Facts + Figures 2011” report observed that the contribution of Canada’s global mining operations to Canada’s GDP would be relatively small.104 A quantification of Canadian mining operations as a percentage of GNP – a measure of the productivity of all Canadian companies and citizens, wherever they are – would provide a clearer indication of the economic value of Canadian global mining. However, such figures are difficult to find. The widespread use of GDP rather than GNP to measure national economies minimizes or underrepresents intercountry economic disparities. A country with net outward foreign direct investment and that is home to many multinational firms will have a larger GNP than GDP; the reverse is true for low-income countries “hosting” foreign firms. The MAC report indicates that total tax payments from the Canadian mining industry to Canadian governments, federal and provincial, averaged C$7.5 billion annually between 2004 and 2009105 and stood at $8.4 billion in 2010.106 Again, we cannot determine from this figure what proportion derived from offshore locations, but it is clear

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that the portion of taxes paid to Canadian governments that derives from non-domestic mining operations is relatively small.107 Some tax revenues may come in the form of income taxes and corporate taxes on Canadian-based firms – such as law firms and mining services companies – that provide services and equipment to Canadian mining companies with African operations. In theory, the fiscal benefits of Canadian mining in African countries accrue not to the Canadian state and its people but primarily to the African host countries through various taxes and royalties.108 However, due to the concessionary terms that African governments have been encouraged to offer to attract foreign investment, host states receive a very small portion of the value of the wealth produced. Provisionally at this point, it could be suggested that most of the profits from mining stay in a limited number of private hands rather than entering public coffers.

Tax-Funded Subsidies to the Canadian Mining Sector with African Operations The sources consulted so far suggest that Canadians in general may not receive very significant fiscal benefits – monies flowing into public coffers – from Canadian mining operations in African countries. Yet those public coffers provide considerable subsidies to the private global mining industry. Those subsidies were first identified and analysed by Bonnie Campbell (1999) with regard to the Export Development Canada, CIDA, and DFAIT, all of which, by the mid-1990s, were providing various direct and indirect supports to the private Canadian mining sector in African countries. Citing examples109 of government support that benefited Canadian mining, exploration, and mining services companies in relation to projects in Ghana, Zimbabwe, and the Congo, Campbell concludes: “The mission110 illustrates what appears to be a growing and pro-active involvement of the Canadian government in the creation of conditions favourable to the promotion of Canadian mining and financial interests in Africa. This trend raises pressing issues concerning the social responsibility of the Canadian government and consequently of the Canadian people.” These subsidies and other forms of publicly funded assistance, as they apply to the globalized Canadian mining sector more generally, were further identified in a 2007 report by the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability.111 While the report does not quantify the total value of the subsidies, they are listed as including the following:

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Export Development Canada financing and insurance; insurance provided indirectly through Canada’s membership in the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency; political and financial support through Canadian diplomatic services and embassies;112 official involvement in and support for mining law reform; development of investment protection agreements; trade promotion missions; official state-to-state development assistance to African countries to develop, for instance, geological mapping and other infrastructural services that benefit foreign mining firms; and, most recently, a multimillion-dollar funding announcement for NGO partnerships with mining companies to provide community development programs in the vicinity of Canadianowned mines. To the extent that World Bank loans to African and other “developing countries” for mining sector reform benefit private Canadian mining companies, Canada’s financial contributions to the World Bank can be identified as in part a subsidy to the mining sector. To this can be added tax loopholes such as the “flow through/super flow through shares” mechanism for investments in mining exploration, a mechanism that the PDAC has negotiated successfully for more than a decade.113 And while not directly related to Canadian mining in African countries, it is noteworthy as part of the overall pattern that in recent years the Province of Ontario has paid two mining companies a total of $8.5 million out of public coffers simply to release exploration licences, obtained from the Provincial Ministry of Mines, in areas contested and claimed by Indigenous groups. Although we have not quantified the total value of these kinds of tax-funded subsidies of, and payouts to, the private Canadian mining sector operating in African countries, we can begin to see that there is little evidence of such public subsidies catalysing significant fiscal or employment benefits that are then passed on to the majority of Canadians or that benefit the nation as a whole. If, however, the expenditure of Canadian tax resources in support of private Canadian mining firms could be seen to benefit people in African countries, some Canadians would regard this as a reasonable contribution from a relatively wealthy country to low-income ones. But this is not what is happening.

Philanthropic Contributions of the Mining Sector within Canada Tannock (2010) draws attention to “the massive expansion of mining philanthropy that began in the mid-1990s and took off during the first decade of the twenty-first century.”114 His work refers to the millions

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of dollars donated by Canadian mining magnates and mining companies to Canadian hospitals, universities, and cultural institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum, the Mining Hall of Fame in Toronto, and Science North in Sudbury. The donations to universities, mainly in Ontario but also in British Columbia, are of particular interest, in that corporate donations from the mining sector have gone not only to departments of mining, geology, and engineering but also to faculties of education, international development, environmental studies, and medicine. Donations to hospitals have included funds to train surgeons and nurses from low-income countries. More modest corporate donations from mining companies go to a range of Canadian community events and organizations such as the United Way. Certainly, these donations are important for the recipient organizations. Considered in their totality, these donations are significant not only for their financial value but also for how they mark the landscape with visible signs of corporate benevolence, thus generating positive public opinion and garnering widespread tacit consent from Canadians for the activities that make such donations possible. Also, these activities help entrench “philanthropy as goodness” in the contemporary Canadian social imaginary. With regard solely to the financial dimension, the public value of philanthropic donations from the mining sector – specifically, from those companies drawing profits from African operations – has to be quantified in relation to the public revenues that subsidize global and African-related mining operations, the losses in public revenues from mining-related tax havens and lowered corporate taxes, and the tax write-offs corporations enjoy when they make charitable donations.115 It seems reasonable to suspect that the largely invisible public subsidies to the mining sector exceed that sector’s ostentatious philanthropic contributions to society. While some Canadians benefit from philanthropic corporate donations, all tax-paying citizens contribute to subsidizing Canada’s global mining operations. All Canadians, moreover, are invited to identify with the colonialist vistas of Canadian philanthropy.

Mining Sector Employment If employment is another indicator of the significance of various economic sectors, how important is African mining for Canadian employment? The MAC’s “Facts and Figures 2011” report puts Canadian employment in mineral extraction at 53,000 people; when mineral

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processing is included, total mining sector employment jumps to 308,000. In 2010, this figure represented 1.8 per cent of total employment in Canada,116 down from 2.1 per cent in 2009.117 It has been suggested that fewer than 10 per cent of mineral extraction jobs are based outside Canada,118 although statistics have not been collected that would allow this to be documented more precisely. Based on my analysis of selected companies’ staffing, I suggest that it is much less than 10 per cent at any given time. Some industry employees based in Canada make periodic trips to offshore mining sites, remaining there for days, weeks, or months at a time. So it is difficult to quantify the employment benefits to Canadians of global mining, although generally those benefits appear to be low. As discussed in the previous chapter, senior management and technical positions at Canadian-owned mines and exploration companies with African interests are still overwhelmingly held by Canadians or by expatriates from countries like the United States, South Africa, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The actual numbers of Canadians in these jobs are relatively low as a percentage of the Canadian workforce. There is, however, an additional category of mining-related ­employment – mining services and related industries. The employment figures cited above do not include the thousands of people employed in the more than three thousand companies (most of these relatively small firms with fewer than ten employees) that in 2010 provided a wide range of services, such as geoscientific consulting, legal services, securities regulation, stock brokering, software development, explosives and drilling, engineering, manufacturing of mining equipment, air and road transportation, communications and public relations, and mining training and education.119 A study carried out in 2000 found that seventy Canadian law firms had specialized departments for the mining sector. Given the increase in Canadian global mining since that time, it is reasonable to assume that this number is now higher.120 These sectors may well be generating the most employment from Canadian global mining operations generally and African-related projects specifically. An urgent challenge currently facing Canadian mining is its aging and retiring workforce. Shortages of skilled mining professionals are immanent now that the baby boomers are retiring, so the industry is attempting to recruit new mining professionals through “diversification” strategies focused on women, Indigenous people, “new Canadians,” and “visible minorities.” The industry claims to be the largest private sector employer of Aboriginal Canadians, yet the 4,515

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Indigenous people employed by the industry in 2006 represented only 1.2 per cent of the total Canadian mining industry workforce.121 Around 14 per cent of the industry’s workforce are women, but those women are disproportionately located at the lower end of the salary scale.122 Thus, the industry – and its secondary services and supplies sector – continues to be dominated by white male professionals, who make a very good living at it. According to the MAC, salaries in the Canadian mining industry are higher than for comparable professional jobs in industry, with workers earning an average weekly amount of $1,632 (annual income of $84,864) in 2010.123 To summarize: The mining industry as a whole employs a mere 2 per cent of Canadian workers; African-based mining employment for Canadians is a very small portion of this number. (In addition, industrial mining in African countries is associated with the loss of African jobs, because artisanal miners are displaced when industrial mining introduces a capital-intensive versus labour-intensive model.) However, in Canada, those who are employed by the sector earn higher-than-average incomes, and the upper echelons of management – and here we include the stock analysts, lawyers, engineers, and consultants who service the industry – represent an important dimension of Canada’s male, white-collar, affluent elite. Indeed, several mining company owners and executives rank among the richest Canadians.

Mining Sector Exports As noted above, some three thousand firms provide a range of services to mining companies. Some of these firms follow Canadian mining companies outside Canada; that is, their goods and services follow those companies to their foreign locations. Exports of “mining and oil and gas machinery” and “other support activities for mining” to South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso totalled $71 million in 2010, with a high of $86 million in 2008.124 The Canadian global mining presence stimulates a significant degree of spin-off economic activity in Canada and is, I would suggest, one of the most valuable aspects of global mining to the Canadian economy. A government report issued in 2000 characterized this sector of the Canadian economy as a source of good jobs and potentially expanded economic opportunity for Canadians. CAMESE, the Canadian Association of Mining Equipment and Services, actively promotes these export opportunities, as does Export Development Canada. Yet as we have seen, this is

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precisely the area of economic activity that has been identified in the UNECA/AU “Mining Vision,” as well as by a host of scholars, as needing to be rooted in African economies employing African people and using locally owned technologies. Canadian companies providing such services – with various supports from the Canadian state – may be displacing local African businesses that are attempting to develop downstream and upstream economic opportunities in relation to the expanding mining sector.

Corporate Profits Next I consider the profits made by Canadian companies with African mining operations and returns to individual and institutional investors. This is where we begin to see most clearly the financial value to (some) Canadians of African country mining operations. Chief executive officers and other senior employees of the largest mining companies receive lavish salaries and benefits packages. Also, shareholders receive attractive returns on investment. Since 2010, Canadian banks have been offering less than 2 per cent interest rates on short-term guaranteed investments, while individual mining companies with African mining projects commonly report internal rates of return in the range of 15 to 30 per cent. Returns on leading mining indexes for the period 1 March 2010 to 28 February 2011 were 41.15 per cent for the S&P/TSX Capped Diversified Metals & Mining Index and 33.67 per cent for the S&P/TSX Global Mining Index.125 A review of several of the largest precious metals mutual funds available in Canada showed ten-year annual compound returns ranging from 14.61 to 28.5 per cent as of 30 September 2011, with an average annual return of 21 per cent among seven funds.126 Canadian mining and exploration companies comprise on average 90 to 95 per cent of the holdings in these high-yielding funds. Six Canadian companies that have a major presence in African countries regularly appear among these funds.127 For individual and institutional investors, these are very attractive returns. Indeed, at the highest-performing end of the precious metals mutual funds, an investment of $10,000 would have grown to $164,390 over the ten years ending 30 September 2011.128 The benefits from such returns accrue not only to individual shareholders but also to a number of large institutions such as Canadian chartered banks and insurance companies. Canadians with mutual fund investments or company pension plans directly or indirectly benefit. Mutual funds with lower-risk

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and mid-range growth potential maintain some portion of investments in Canadian equities, which typically include mining stocks. This expands the number of Canadians who benefit to some degree from Canada’s domestic and global mining operations. This number increases further when public and private pension funds are considered. As of 31 March 2011, the Canada Pension Plan held $8,765 million in Canadian public equities, of which $691 million, or 7.9 per cent, was invested in resource companies whose mining and exploration operations were entirely or partly located in African countries.129 In 2008, it was reported that the CPP held shares worth $297 million in six of the companies named in the UN report on illegal exploitation of resources in the Congo.130 Many private pension funds make similar choices. Because pension fund managers have a legally defined fiduciary duty to maximize returns for all plan members, they have a compelling reason to hold shares in mining companies with attractive assets and a history of stability and profitability. Clearly, Canadian mining investments in African countries make a modest but important contribution to ensuring financial security and financial comfort for Canadians with government or private pensions and/or enough “disposable income” to invest in stocks, mutual funds, and other savings products. In addition, as mentioned earlier, Canadians with excess money can use “flowthrough shares” to reduce tax payments and, with luck, receive good returns. Summary: How Does Canada Benefit from Canadian Mining in African Countries? The above information allows us to estimate the importance of the African mining industry to Canada. The mining sector accounts for around 3 per cent of Canada’s GDP and 2 per cent of employment; these figures are not insignificant, but they would seem to place that sector some way down the list of those of greatest importance to Canada’s national well-being. The percentages relating to Canada’s presence in the African mining sector would of course be even smaller, even though that presence has increased dramatically since the mid-1990s. This suggests that the Canadians as a whole would not be greatly affected by a withdrawal of Canadian mining companies from African countries. But at the same time, some individual Canadians benefit enormously from Canada’s presence in African mining, and particular, class-privileged segments of the Canadian population – especially those with investment

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portfolios and/or pensions – benefit somewhere between moderately and handsomely. Moreover, when we apply a race- and gender-cognizant lens to class stratification in Canada,131 we can conclude that Indigenous peoples, racialized minorities, and low-income women receive the least benefit, if any at all, from contemporary Canadian mining ventures in African countries. These are the least likely groups to own mining or mining services companies, to be employed in the sector, to be enrolled in company pension plans, and to hold investment portfolios. With their relatively low lifelong earnings, they will receive minimal amounts from the CPP. This analysis might seem to discredit the notion that Canada is engaged in a colonialist project of resource appropriation in African states. There is, however, considerable empirical evidence that colonialism did not necessarily function as an economic windfall for the benefit of all citizens of European colonizer-nations. Instead, a handful of wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations benefited enormously from access to colonial lands and resources; the working class and middle class in the home states and colonial subjects in the colonized states effectively subsidized these private profits, to the degree that tax revenues (often associated with dispossession from livelihoods) were used to finance or underwrite colonial administrations, policing and justice systems, marketing boards, railways, and so on. In the colonizer-nations, there was a clear class differentiation in terms of who benefited from business in the colonies – a wealthy, elite, professional class – and who did not benefit and even lost out – middle-income and working-class folk. A case study will help illustrate these claims. In Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860– 1912 (1986), Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback attempt to calculate the benefits and costs of the British Empire to British citizens over a fifty-year period. Did Britain make money off the empire, in the manner that Jean-Paul Sartre suggests in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth? Did ordinary British people enjoy more affluent lives as a result of imperial profits? And did some British subjects benefit more than others from British imperialism? Davis and Hutternback examined a massive number of documents and conducted extensive multicountry research.132 They document the nuances of the British colonial economy in extensive detail. Their conclusions confirm the story that has come into view in the estimates and data I have presented in this chapter. They state succinctly: “The British as a whole certainly did not benefit

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economically from the Empire. On the other hand, certain individual investors did.”133 They point to “strong evidence for the belief that government was attuned to the interest of business and willing to divert resources to ends that the business community would have found profitable.”134 Those who held investments in Empire were “businesspeople from London, and other elites.”135 Furthermore, “the middle class paid far more than its share of the imperial subsidy, and given the evidence on the composition of stockholders, it should be apparent that they did not receive an equal share of its benefits.”136 Indeed, the value of the “Imperial subsidy” for the elite class, who held most of the company shares, “exceeded their total tax bill by an excess of between £2.1 and £7.3 million. Thus the elites were net winners.” Davis and Huttenback also found that the mining sectors in the British colonies generated the highest returns among all sectors of the imperial economy and that this was notably attributable to the establishment of strong legal property rights. The era of classic British colonialism differs in important ways from Canada’s twenty-first-century relations with low-income, mineral-rich, formally independent African states, yet many of the structural patterns are strikingly similar. In both cases, a metropolitan government intervenes in support of a private globalizing mining industry, ostensibly on the grounds that both foreign and domestic popular interests will be served if that industry flourishes. While some value accrues to ordinary citizens, the bulk of the value accrues to the white elites of the colonizer-state; a relatively small portion goes to government coffers and to co-opted elites in the colonized, or neo-colonized, country. Conclusion In this chapter, I have sketched how the contemporary colonialist mining economy is structured: who makes money, who gets work, of what sort, and so on. There is growing empirical evidence, as well as a widespread sense among citizens, civil society groups, parliamentarians, and some scholars in many African countries, that benefits are accruing disproportionately to foreign corporations from non-renewable mineral resources at the expense of local people and communities and, indeed, all Africans.137 UNECA and the AU acknowledge this much in their recent policy proposal for development-oriented African mining. Many Canadians bolster their financial security and well-being with strong and stable returns from investments in Canadian mining

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companies (often indirectly through RRSPs or the CPP), unaware – ­perhaps deliberately so – of the physical, bodily violence borne by African peoples whose mineral resources are being exploited by Canadian companies. The examples from the DRC – one of the most mineralrich countries in the world – exemplify the contemporary colonialist character of foreign-dominated resource extraction on the continent. Consistent with a colonial history in which, by conservative estimates, ten million Congolese died as a direct result of foreigners plundering their natural resources (ivory and rubber),138 or simply because they impeded European colonial profiteers, as documented by McKay and Swift (2012) with reference to the career of William Stairs,139 Congolese people – constructed and positioned in the colonial imaginary as “Others” – appear to still be “disposable” – still, as noted earlier in this chapter, “worth less.” Bodies constructed and positioned as white (company directors, shareholders, managers, expatriates employed at the mine) are not directly involved in violence and thus maintain a non-violent aura even while actual military and physical violence has the effect of protecting white capitalist interests (i.e., the security and viability of mining operations). In the neoliberal global order, Black bodies aligned with whiteness/capitalism/law, in conjunction with other power-related agendas, violate and discipline other Black bodies whose actions may jeopardize foreign presence and neo-colonial resource theft. In surreal contrast, the social technology of stock market reporting is construed as a moral, civilized space – a space of order and rationality – that smooths over and “disappears” the raw ugliness and violence required to extract profits from resources. The “stock market” as a colour-blind, rational, “virtual reality” offers the white colonizercapitalist one more screen on which to turn the kaleidoscope by which structural violence is reconfigured as goodness and economic benefit. On the Canadian side, I have suggested that the benefits of the Canadian mining industry are structured as an upside-down pyramid, with the greatest wealth accruing to a relatively small number of mining industry executives, shareholders, professional employees, lawyers, and consultants. Key financial institutions benefit handsomely. A swathe of middle-class Canadians benefit moderately through pension holdings and investment portfolios. The poorest segment of Canadian society, in which Indigenous people, racialized minorities, and single women are overrepresented, receives little to no benefit at all. Indeed, Canadians in general may well pay out more in public financial support

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to the mining sector than they receive in fiscal revenues that can be traced to mining in African countries. Stated bluntly, my analysis suggests that poorer Canadians and most citizens of resource-rich African countries are subsidizing the enrichment of a segment of Canadian society. Yet Canadians as a whole have been drawn into supporting these colonialist processes. Canadians are educated to identify themselves in the appealing terms of a popularized philanthropic-colonial imaginary; they are taught to view themselves as helpers and rescuers, not as citizens of a callous colonialist state. Socialized into a white supremacist settler-state, many Canadians have come to be psychologically responsive to the seductive gleam of the lie of colonialism-as-goodness; after all, it delivers material benefits to those with a foothold in whiteness. Law operates to protect and rationalize these benefits. It is to this topic that I now turn.

5 Racial Rule: Resource Appropriation and the Rule of Law

We are trying to ensure Tanzanian government respects rule of law without any exceptions in mining sector and assures security of title to mining properties. (Canadian diplomatic correspondence, 24 August 1995, obtained through Access to Information Request A-1997-3632, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade) … modern law has been invoked as a technology of racial rule. (D.T. Goldberg, The Racial State, 142)

In earlier chapters, I alluded extensively to the significance of institutional and ideological uses of law in manifesting colonial power and organizing colonialist access to mineral resources. In this chapter, I show how certain types of law operate in support of colonialist structural violence. This form of violence, seemingly so different from the visceral and direct brutality experienced, for instance, by Congolese villagers under Leopold II’s rule, typically occurs with impunity. It is now widely acknowledged that the strong Canadian presence in African mining is a direct result of the liberalization of African country mining codes, a process that was fully under way by the early 1990s.1 Over the same period – the past twenty years – the Canadian government has identified for itself an international leadership role in fostering “good governance, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”2 In this chapter, I explore “rule of law” as encompassing three elements: a rhetorical practice that generates racialized notions of lawful and lawless subjects and nations, thereby “refreshing” a white colonial imaginary; an ideological mechanism that narrows the concern of

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law to capitalist property law; and authorization of force to secure “law and order” for the smooth functioning of a market economy. These elements operate simultaneously in complex ways to advance a form of white supremacist domination that has material effects. The deployment of “rule of law,” in both its structural/institutional and ideological/discursive aspects, is presented as a central enabling feature of Canada’s contemporary colonialist presence in resource extraction. The discursive repetition of “rule of law” is a classic instance of the mesmerization required to sustain this presence. This chapter examines the role and nature of the Canadian state in these processes, and describes how Canadian mining professionals allow themselves to be subjectified as twenty-first-century colonizers by performing themselves as “men of the rule of law.” Law in Critical Social Theory The confusion over the nature of law in contemporary Canadian society emerges from its multiple functions and representations. A number of historians and social theorists identify law as having played a key role in shaping Canada as a capitalist white settler state.3 Historically, Canadian law has privileged some groups and disadvantaged, marginalized, or excluded others. Law has also ameliorated extreme inequality (for instance, through social security legislation, labour law, and family law)4 and has been used by marginalized and mistreated groups to gain rights, recognition, and justice (via human rights laws and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). However, rather than being recognized as an institutional site of struggle for rights and resources among competing groups in an unequal society, law has come to be imagined and represented mainly as a source and guarantor of order and justice. This lofty image of law overstates the extent to which law functions to these ends, as well as the extent to which law acts impartially on behalf of all citizens. Australian scholar Ngaire Naffine uses the term “the official version of law” to identify how law has come to be (mis)represented and widely understood in most Western nations; in her view, “what the legal world would have us believe about itself is that it is an impartial, neutral and objective system for resolving social conflict.”5 A national imaginary is established in which “the law” is commonly accepted as good and rational, as a sign of civility and modernity. Called “the justice system,” it is thus depicted as inherently justice-oriented.6 It is with reference to this popularized (mis)conception of law that the Canadian

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federal government routinely uses the term “rule of law” and identifies one of Canada’s primary international roles as to protect and advocate for the rule of law – a point to which I return later. In counterpoint to this popular conception of “the law” and “rule of law” as bearing some fundamental relation to justice or fairness, critical social theorists have produced an extensive literature that identifies Western legal systems with persistent forms of class, gender, and racial privilege, as well as with forms of violence. Law has sometimes been implicated in the production and maintenance of long-standing social inequalities and forms of structural violence. While Jim Crow laws in the United States, apartheid laws in South Africa, and the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany are well-known examples, some scholars identify a far more extensive and routinized history of law’s complicity with social injustice. This is sometimes a matter of identifying the absence of law: For whom, and in relation to what kind of grievances, is law’s protection not offered?7 That English common law developed in a highly stratified society in response to the needs and interests of specific privileged groups – belying its claims to a universalist ­character – can be used to illustrate this point. According to Mattei and Nader (2008), the popularization of the concept of rule of law – and its central tenet that all persons, including monarchs, are to be equally subject to the law – emerged in the context of a power struggle in seventeenthcentury England between the egalitarian-minded Tudor monarchs and the propertied lords and barons, who saw an independent judiciary as a means to protect their property and wealth from confiscation and redistribution by the Crown. As Mattei and Nader argue, “modernization was a threat to the privileges of the landed aristocracy, and the alliance with common law courts successfully protected the Englishman’s long-established right to property.”8 That the monarch should not hold absolute power but should be subject to an independent judicial system is a principle that takes on a rather different character when presented in its historical context as the outcome of a power struggle between monarchical authority and the authority of landed wealth.9 An independent judiciary to which all are subject appears in this analysis as a social mechanism that emerged historically to represent and protect the interests of an emerging class, that is, bourgeois men of property. The ideal of a judicial system to which all persons are equally subject and to whom all have equal access overlooks the absence of socio-­ economic equality. In Canada today, there is much evidence of unequal

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class-based access to and use of the justice system, as well as systemic racism and continuing experiences of sexism. This view of law as an expression of parochial rather than universal interests suggests how law was used to “legalize” colonial occupation. Historians of colonialism point to the central role of law both in institutionalizing colonial dominance – for instance, by designating racebased citizenship status,10 which was then used to curtail the economic, political, and social rights of the colonized peoples – and in legitimizing that domination. Peter Fitzpatrick asserts that “the supreme justification of imperial rule was that it brought order to chaos, reined in ‘archaic instincts,’ and all this aptly enough through subjection to ‘laws.’ Looked at another way, the violence of imperialism was legitimated in its being exercised through law.”11 As I noted in chapter 3, when French and British authorities arrived in North America and began to claim “underlying title” to the land – a legal fiction12 that remains foundational to Canadian statehood to this day – legal jurisprudence of the day creatively reinterpreted and manipulated legal concepts to legitimize those claims. The fact that colonialism fashions its own legality is perhaps the clearest evidence of the deeply political, arbitrary, and violent nature of the Western legal tradition as it has actually functioned. Here we can recall Agamben’s point that zones of exception – political spaces within which power is its own self-referential and thus unaccountable law – have existed throughout modern Western political history. Contemporary forms of imperialism continue to make extensive use of legal technologies, procedures, and ideologies. Indeed, law can be identified as the quintessential tool of contemporary imperialism. In Plunder: When the Rule of Law Is Illegal, Ugo Mattei and Laura Nader identify law’s installation of – and protection of – private property rights as central to historical and contemporary forms of capitalist imperialism. In the present era, law functions increasingly to protect the rights of capital and to legally organize “accumulation by dispossession.” By way of examples from Argentina and Iraq, and an analysis of how intellectual property rights and the general liberalization of law accompanied the Washington Consensus (laws pertaining to trade, investment, mining, land, etc.), Mattei and Nader argue that modern liberal law has structured the conditions for material plunder on a global scale. Thus, there are direct continuities between the function of law during the classic colonial era and in the contemporary global economy. Mattei and Nader conclude that we live in an era in which “the rule of law

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abandons its aspect of shield for the weak and is transformed into a sword for the strong.”13 In popular Western culture, this aggressive role for law has been routinized and rendered acceptable through a reanimation of the racialcolonial imaginary. Once again, racialized Others are characterized by “lack”14 – that is, by the lack of a proper, modern legal and governance system, one that is transparent, rules-based, and objective, and in more general terms by a cultural or civilizational lack. The installation in non-Western countries of liberal law – a package that typically features multiparty democracy, an independent judiciary, more robust property and contract rights, and so on – can thus be depicted as a benevolent form of assistance. Nicholas Blomley develops this view, arguing that modern liberal law acquires its status in the context of North–South relations by being set in contrast to an imagined violent world of nonlaw, a metaphorical and literal geographical space exterior to the law where chaos, anarchy, and violence supposedly prevail. In the contemporary context, ordered or civilized space is where the rational technologies of capitalism (harbingers of economic growth and progress) can flourish. As Blomley notes: Inside the frontier lie secure tenure, fee-simple ownership, and stateguaranteed rights to property. Outside lie uncertain and undeveloped entitlements, communal claims, and the absence of state guarantees to property … Western notions of property are deeply invested in a colonial geography, a white mythology, in which the racialized figure of the savage plays a central role … The construction of a constitutive outside to property and its violences has not disappeared; the trope of the “frontier” that separates the West from the “savage” is still powerfully operative.15

Indeed, as Timothy Mitchell (2002) suggests in his detailed study of Egypt’s colonial past and present, modern Western law establishes its authority and superiority by differentiating itself from these imagined features of non-Western, “Oriental” states, whose laws are deemed to be arbitrary, not subject to regulation or systematization, and biased in favour of the despot, who can invent or alter laws at whim. Through these comparisons, fraught as they are with error and misrepresentation, the specificity, arbitrariness, and class/race/gender bias of Western law is erased and disavowed. In this manner, the concept of “rule of law,” applied so often by the Canadian government with reference to

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the values Canada brings to the international arena, is able to convey an aura of exemplary goodness, rationality, and universalism. As will be evident in the data presented in this chapter and the next, the racialized conceptions of law to which Mitchell and Blomley draw our attention can be detected in the discursive repertoire of Canadian mining professionals and Canadian government officials. This conceptual order explains and justifies the imposition of Canadian legal and institutional models for mining sectors in various African countries; it also offers a familiar colonialist mythology – of pioneers bringing order, civility, and development – in terms of which Canadians can represent themselves in positive ways. This chapter develops this analysis in three sections. The first examines the content of “proper” mining law as set out in influential documents and as then expressed and deployed by government officials in the context of the SCFAIT hearings on Bill C-300, the Responsible Mining Act. The second section provides examples, drawing from interviewees’ accounts, of direct Canadian involvement in shaping the terms of the new, liberalized African mining codes. The final section draws examples from the “Bulyanhulu files,” culled from Canadian diplomatic correspondence between 1994 and 1997, to show how “rule of law” emerges as a technology of contemporary colonialist-racial rule. Tracking Racially Coded Repertoires in Mining Reform Texts and Talk One purpose of this book is to demonstrate how narratives have the power to bring about institutional policies and practices that have structural or material effects vis-à-vis resource extraction. This section begins with an analysis of two influential research studies on global mining law, treating them as narratives, or stories. I identify the terms of the discursive terrain on which mining law reform is cast in these documents; I then draw on the SCFAIT transcripts for Bill C-300 to show how these narrative terms have been taken up and deployed strategically by Canadian government officials. In 2001, two major reports were commissioned and published by the World Bank Group and the Metal Mining Agency of Japan: Review of Legal and Fiscal Regulatory Frameworks for Exploration and Mining, and Mining Sector Reform and Investment; Results of a Global Survey. These texts, while not policy statements as such, nevertheless established, promoted, and disseminated the key tenets of what could be called the

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“official ideology” pertaining to global reform of mining laws. Indeed, their authority derives from their very status as – or appearance of being – dry, objective, technical reports. Mining company executives and government officials could peruse the country listings at the end of the Frameworks report and find country-specific details of royalty rates, tax regimes, environmental regulations, licensing procedures, security of tenure provisions, and the like. This is an example of the banal manner in which policies whose effects produce structural violence in the society subjected to them go unrecognized as coded violence. Replete with positivist data collected and collated with regard to the specific content of mining codes in more than thirty countries – data that are then organized, analysed, and synthesized into detailed policy agendas for correct mining sector reform – these texts function hegemonically as tools of racial and cultural assimilation. Significantly, although these were supposedly “global surveys,” the contents of mining laws in “developed” countries (Canada, Australia, USA, England, Russia, etc.) are not included in these reports; only “Southern” countries – African, South American, and Asian – are featured. Clearly, the data gathered through this ambitious research project are being used to support a neoliberal foreign investment agenda – that is, both to offer foreign actors pertinent information as to where conditions “overseas” are most favourable and to signal to competing “developing” countries which models of mining laws are most likely to attract foreign interest. Disregarding entirely the specific histories, cultures, and economic situations of vastly different countries, not to mention processes of democratic debate and parliamentary input into law-making within individual countries, these documents recommend a one-size-fits-all template for mining law based on what was known at the time as the “Chilean/Peruvian” model. This ideal mining law has a number of key elements: • No-questions-asked “first-come-first-served” licensing arrangements (rather than companies having to meet certain prior qualifying requirements). • Transparent (i.e., automated) licence-granting procedures as opposed to the exercise of discretionary powers by Ministers of Mines. • Security of tenure, that is, “transferability” and “mortgageability” of mineral licences as forms of property.

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• No entitlement of host states to hold equity in private mining ­ventures. • Minimal royalty rates. These elements – which we will encounter again in more detail in chapter 8 – are conveyed in the Executive Summary of one of these reports as simple common sense: This review of the legal framework for mining indicates that the successful countries regulate mineral operations with simple and clear mining laws that provide private investors with greater access to mineral resources, through clear and transparent processes, security of tenure, the freedom to transfer their rights, and freedom to operate and market their output on commercial terms. These laws are complemented with provisions, sometimes in investment or tax laws, that provide reasonable freedom to dispose of foreign exchange earnings, primarily profit-based taxation on international competitive terms, and stability of those terms by contract for a reasonable period of time.16

It might be hard to find a drier, more seemingly innocuous piece of text. Yet by counting how many times the word “freedom” appears – as a first step – one begins to develop a sense of the denseness of the ideological cocoon in which the prescribed ideal mining law is wrapped. I suggest that this excerpt is a classic example of the “discourses of whiteness” that give discursive authority to twenty-first-century global capitalism,17 with powerful material effects. The systematic use of racial/ colonialist binaries is not blatant; it is coded, almost subliminal. For instance, these documents repeatedly make use of statements such as the following: “Successful mining laws have been designed to minimize corruption and the processing time of requests for mineral rights by eliminating discretion in the implementation of the law.”18 Although this sounds benign, “successful,” as it is used here, connotes reason/ modernity/whiteness, while terms like “corruption” and “discretion” encode arbitrariness/backwardness/savagery – that is, the terrain of lawlessness. Throughout both texts, terms like “efficient,” “stable,” “successful,” “modern,” “transparent,” “reasonable,” “clear,” “proper,” and “freedom” are used relentlessly as codes of whiteness to characterize the mining laws and practices of disciplined, foreign-investment-friendly countries like Canada, Australia, Chile, Peru, and Tanzania, as opposed

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to unruly renegade states such as Columbia and Eritrea. Countries that are in the process of shifting from the renegade category towards the disciplined category are praised. The rhetorical strategy of dogged repetition and the reiteration of key words and concepts (such as “security of tenure” and “stable fiscal and legal regulatory framework”) throughout these lengthy documents produces a mesmerizing, numbing effect in which dissident concepts become unspeakable. The discourse is effective and potent because it seems to contain no real grounds for objection; furthermore, to object is to be (cast as) unreasonable. Just as physical territories – lands – are occupied by settlers, their militaries, and their physical infrastructure, so pseudo-rationalist discourses of whiteness relentlessly, with an air of innocence and common sense, occupy and dominate the terrain of the official, international public imaginary. There is in fact considerable negotiation, tension, and conflict over the content of mining laws in different African countries. Actual differences in social visions, conflicts of interest, and power contests among the various actors are cast in the texts reviewed here as irrational. In a section of the Framework titled “Granting Rights According to Objective Criteria and Efficient Procedures,” the authors argue against the practice of requiring prospective exploration companies to demonstrate their “financial and technical abilities” and call instead for a streamlined, automated, “first come, first served” mineral-rights-granting procedure. They reject the former on the grounds that it may introduce the exercise of discretionary judgment by host state authorities, something that is “needlessly time-consuming at best and corrupt at worst.” Once again, the terms “needlessly time-consuming” and “corrupt” function subliminally to disparage and delegitimize efforts by “developing country” governments to exert authority over foreign investors and to align governance of the mining sector with national development priorities. A simple, “efficient” first-come-first-served system dilutes the regulatory power of the host government vis-à-vis foreign companies and places foreign companies on stronger footing. What is presented rhetorically in these texts as a benign concern for openness, fairness, and efficiency – business values as well as “Canadian values” – comes to be seen, on close reading, as a calculated means of ensuring secure access for private foreign companies. The association of these concepts with whiteness, reason, and modernity corresponds to the material benefits that are disproportionately acquired by those in possession of white social identities. These texts enable us to see how both race and racial hierarchy are surreptitiously written into “global”

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mining law reform and how, in turn, these ostensibly non-racial technical discourses provide Canadian mining professionals with a particular way of viewing and narrating their involvements – and their own subjectivities. This use of racially coded discourses to describe “sensible” approaches to governance is ubiquitous within the mining industry. Turning now to a more recent event and set of texts, I want to briefly demonstrate the use of such discourses by Canadian government officials (from DFAIT, CIDA, NRC, and EDC) who made presentations to the SCFAIT hearings on Bill C-300. The persons invited to testify by SCFAIT included representatives from government, the mining industry, other business associations and law firms, civil society, and academia. All of the civil society and academic participants spoke in favour of the bill, while all of the others – government, mining, business, and (corporate) law firms – were opposed. In light of the general notion that democratically elected governments should strive to represent and respond to the diverse interests of the whole citizenry, it seems striking that the departmental officials at these hearings were closely aligned with the mining industry and the business sector, even to the point of making identical arguments using identical phrasing.19 Government officials repeatedly identified a “lack of governance capacity” as the main problem that needed to be addressed with regard to matters of human rights and environmental standards in the context of international mining operations. So in their view, there was no need for further Canadian government regulation, through legislation, of Canadian mining and oil and gas companies operating internationally; rather, what was needed was foreign-aid-funded support for “host country capacity-building.” The term “host country capacity-building” is another racially coded term, one that clearly implies the incapacity of Southern countries – that is, an ahistorical, cultural, developmental, and civilizational lack. After numerous repetitions of this mesmerizing phrase by officials from different departments,20 a senior CIDA official offered a more expansive version of it: The government’s CSR strategy and the policy foundation for it is a proactive approach of continuous improvement of industry performance, of measures to address disputes and undertake fact-finding and, as well, of  fundamental improvement of the governance and institutional capacity of developing countries so they can implement and enforce the laws in their country to benefit from sustainable development of their resource wealth.

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We now learn that “capacity building” refers more specifically to improvements to the “governance and institutional capacity” of resource-rich poor countries so that they can “implement and enforce the laws in their country.” These, however, are not laws in general, but laws that will enable them to “benefit from sustainable development of their resource wealth.” As these terms are still somewhat opaque, he offers additional detail: The common conclusion at which the various studies have arrived is that the most important single factor is the transparency and effectiveness of host countries’ resource governance and management regimes. This includes the establishment of stable legal and fiscal regulatory frameworks to ensure sustainable resource management and development, and regulatory institutions and agencies responsible for regulating and overseeing sector activities. We strengthen their ability to put in place, for example, transparent legislative and regulatory frameworks in order to establish mechanisms for dialogue between governments, companies and communities and to create tax systems that make it possible to collect revenue from those companies for social programs. That is our mandate.

Once again, the tone of reasonableness and common sense in these statements masks their racialized socio-economic implications. It is necessary to further decode the terms and phrases to deduce the real goal of CIDA’s “host-country capacity building.” I suggest that that goal turns out to be, mainly, the reduction of political and financial risk for the benefit of private Canadian extraction companies. If one accepts that investing in the mining industry entails some degree of risk, especially during the exploration phase, then responsible companies (and here, “responsible” signifies whiteness aligned with neoliberalism) will do whatever they can to minimize other types of investment risk. Ensuring the existence of favourable mining laws, investment laws, land tenure systems, and taxation policies reduces “political” risk by a considerable degree. One might imagine “host country capacity building” to entail support to vulnerable citizens of the host country, local development of geological expertise, or the enhancement of local civil society’s capacity for democratic oversight of the mining industry. Indeed, it could conceivably entail the development of capacity for imagining and designing economic alternatives to mining or to foreign-investmentdependent mining. But the discourse of neoliberal whiteness precludes

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such possibilities; it succeeds in doing so through the mechanism of repetitive encoded racial binaries. Expressions of self-determination and of Africans’ power to set the terms of mining investment – or to opt for no mining at all – are construed in racist terms as threats – as the stereotypical drumming in the night, the impenetrable jungle, the undecipherable “dialects.” African alterity, power, and self-determination, recast as something ominous, must be strategically contained, repackaged for the tourists and for viewers of blockbuster movies, where, in this distorted form, it can function psychically to engender fear and legitimize suppression. This is some of what is involved in establishing the institutions required by foreign capital to minimize risk and maximize efficient and profitable operations in African countries. The kaleidoscope metaphorically depicts the shifting, dissembling logics of whiteness. In this regard, it is worth noting that Bill C-300’s corporate opponents warned that it would have violated host country sovereignty. Indeed, some suggested it amounted to neo-colonialism, for it would have imposed on “host countries” Canadian ethical and human rights standards that exceeded the host countries’ laws. This, even though the extent to which Canadian mining companies, their lawyers, and their counterparts in the Canadian government work hard to promote specific mining laws in “developing” countries is increasingly known – and will be further documented in this chapter and the next. Corporate actors are being strikingly disingenuous when they claim to be reluctant to impose “our” laws and legal precepts on “them.” One Latin American civil society witness stated during the hearings: When you define “colonialism,” it’s to override the jurisdiction and maybe take over the resources of a country, and this is not what the law is about, as I understand it. I think this law is about controlling how and in which companies the government invests and ensuring that these companies behave according to international standards. We’re talking about international standards, so I would not see this law as a colonialist law. I think what is happening right now and the consequences of not controlling, of not abiding by international standards, is colonialism, but not the application of this bill. (24 November 2009)

The Canadian government’s failure to pass Bill C-300 into law, while government officials advocated for African countries to adopt foreign-investor-friendly mining laws, raises important questions ­ about the Canadian state’s shifting role. Civil society witnesses in the

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C-300 hearings asserted the Canadian government’s responsibility to uphold international human rights law and to hold Canadian companies accountable in this area, yet government officials barely acknowledged that responsibility. If Bill C-300 would have very modestly shifted the structure of power in favour of relatively poor and disadvantaged persons in “developing” countries who had complaints against Canadian companies, the demise of this law would seem to support Mattei and Nader’s assertion that, in the context of white supremacist capitalist globalization, “the rule of law abandons its aspect of shield for the weak and is transformed into a sword for the strong.” What seems to emerge here is a state that governs not for public purposes but for private interests. Public needs and purposes come to stand outside the realm of law and of government. The people – the citizens, the public – are effectively abandoned and rendered exceedingly vulnerable. Reforming Mining Laws in African States It is a classic activity of colonizers to introduce new legal regimes in the foreign territories they have occupied. Establishing laws creates a semblance of legality for what can alternatively be recognized as a fundamentally illegal form of domination and resource appropriation. Canadian involvements in African mining law reform exemplify colonialist behaviour. In the 1980s and 1990s, thirty-five African countries revised their mining laws.21 The significance and effects of these new “generations” of mining laws as features of the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s have been documented extensively. By the late 1990s, liberalized mining laws were being roundly criticized for offering exceedingly generous concessions to foreign investors and for fostering a “race to the bottom” as countries competed to offer the most attractive deals. But with rising metals prices since 2005, and with growing demands from citizens of many African countries for greater host-country returns, some African countries have been revising their laws to capture a greater portion of mineral profits. The terms of foreign private investment in African mining are being actively contested throughout the continent. As became apparent from interviewees’ anecdotes, Canadian state and private actors acted in conjunction with multilateral financial institutions and other foreign countries to influence various African countries’ mining laws. The influence over policy enjoyed by Canadian

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companies and diplomats – especially compared to ordinary citizens of African countries – lends credibility to the notion that a neo-colonialist power dynamic exists. In this formally post-colonial context, sovereign authority is held and exercised by African governments, which do have some room to manoeuvre. That said, scholars such as Bonnie Campbell and Rita Abrahamsen have identified disturbing changes in the role of the state in African countries as well as in the authority of their governments. As Abrahamsen and Williams wryly observe, “the core feature of sovereignty for many weakened African states is not the actual control of their territories or the monopoly of the means of violence, but instead the ability to provide contractual legal authority that can legitimate the extractive work of transnational firms.”22 In the interviews I conducted, the interviewees often referred to their involvement in the development of African mining codes. One interviewee stated openly that his mining company had offered to redraft the mining legislation for its host African state and had paid for a Canadian lawyer to do so. Indeed, at least one major Canadian law firm has posted information on its Web page concerning legal services it has provided to certain African governments to revise their mining and investment laws. These contractual arrangements are not treated as unusual or remarkable or as a conflict of interest; in fact, some Canadian firms with expertise in mining law have found it lucrative to provide such services to foreign governments and companies. So it is not surprising that various African countries have used Canadian mining laws as a template for their own. To quote one of my interviewees: Tanzania and Zimbabwe, they were both done, they were modelled after the Ontario and Canadian laws, so we understand those quite clearly. And Ghana is just redoing theirs I think also with a Canadian slant to it. Who would put a penny in Tanzania when Julius Nyerere was running it, you know? Nobody. Now they’ve set up – the mining code was written by Canadians and now the investment, the foreign direct investment in Tanzania is huge and they’re now getting infrastructure developed – roads, rail, ports. As is turns out, [Mali] has a modern mining act, which is drafted on a Canadian sort of template, by Canadians working for the World Bank, so the Mining Act in Mali really looks like a Canadian jurisdiction mining act.

Other interviewees described extensive Canadian involvement in the institutional development of Zimbabwe’s mining industry, contrasting

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the good laws and regulations the Canadians had helped put in place with the chaos of the “arbitrary” governance in the sector in recent years. (Zimbabwe had decreed that all mining ventures would be 50 per cent owned by the state):23 Canada put a lot of money into Zimbabwe on the geological side, putting together the exploration laws and regulations and flying over the country with an aero-mag, which is basically an exploration tool, providing all that data to the Zimbabwean Geological Survey, and then attracting Canadian mining companies into the country and then subsequently the fiscal regime has just gone into the toilet, for want of a better word, you can’t operate there any more.

Besides recounting direct Canadian involvement in the development of African mining laws, interviewees generally acknowledged that the content of those laws was very important to Canadian investors because they will tell you how much of your money you can keep and how much they get in royalties and more or less define what at the end of the day you can have and in some, what you want to check is whether the country has restrictive currency controls that may stop you from taking the profit out of there. So you want to make sure that it’s open and you can take your money out and there aren’t any requirements about local partners, some countries just dictate you have to have a local partner, you look for those kinds of things.

Clearly, concerns like these were driving efforts to influence mining laws. Yet the interviewees depicted their involvement as a form of benevolence and “goodness” – as friendly assistance offered paternalistically to African host governments. Some interviewees claimed they had merely made “suggestions,” that they were being “supportive” or acting as “helpers.” The fact that they were explicitly promoting Canadian models and representing them as advanced and superior was framed as a friendly, collegial sharing of Canada’s special cultural, legal, and business competencies. Some interviewees’ anecdotes revealed considerable disagreement, struggle, and conflict between foreign interests and African governments. This made it harder to maintain a story of friendly helpfulness. One interviewee described a long effort to convince a particular African government to adopt properly attractive laws:

Resource Appropriation and the Rule of Law  141 We’ve got a great deal of knowledge about that [i.e., new mining code of African country]. We’ve been involved indirectly in that process for four years now and we’ve been supportive – it was really led by the World Bank, and we’ve been very supportive of it – we’ve spent a lot of money sending lawyers and experts to meetings, to help with – to the extent that the World Bank and the [African country] let industry help, we’ve been one of the bigger helpers. … We and a whole bunch of other mining companies, probably about eight mining companies, four or five of them Canadian, tried to get involved in the code, and I think the first draft that went to parliament wasn’t too bad … But parliament [i.e., of the African country] rammed through a whole bunch of changes at the eleventh hour, added new taxes, added new royalties, changed how some things were calculated so the end result has been a mining code which is maybe not even in the top 40 of mining nations of the world. So, and in fact, some big companies left immediately after that was passed into law because they took a look at where else they could spend their money, and said this is shitty, we’re going to leave. … When the parliament and the politicians rammed these final bad changes through, the World Bank was really pissed off, but recognized that it was better to have a new signed law than no law at all or the old one, with the hopes that as soon as the political regime becomes a bit more stable, the World Bank and the IMF can pressure them – and industry can pressure them – to have an amendment that corrects some of the – what they rammed through, so you know, we’ve lobbied for these certain types of changes already.

This interviewee went on to identify the specific changes that were “rammed through.” While the changes that aggravated him could have been understood as functioning to keep more mineral wealth in the host nation, the interviewee derided such policy decisions as politically motivated, opportunistic, and potentially harmful to the mining sector: What the politicians will do is always take the high road when passing a new law or something, especially if there’s pressure on them maybe losing their jobs because of a political change, they’ll take the nationalistic approach because that’s always the politically correct one to take, even though it might not be good for the country or good for business. So what they did was they rammed through additional taxes, and originally the

142  Colonial Extractions mining code was going to be based on 100 per cent private ownership, and the state only got their value from their deposits through taxes, royalties … um … taxes and royalties. And then what they did was at the eleventh hour they rammed through a 5 per cent mandatory shareholding for the government, which is abnormal for nations that have a good, healthy mining environment. You know, the more government involvement you have with, you know, large private industry, you know, the more cumbersome it becomes. History has shown that. So, you know, they rammed through a 5 per cent mandatory shareholding, they rammed through – they doubled the tax on fuel, they increased the basic royalty on, like, the profits royalty on metal sales, and a few other things.

This interviewee claimed that “history has shown” that state equity in mining operations will be disastrous. So it is significant that one of the few African countries to have raised itself to middle-income status, Botswana, has done so by negotiating with De Beers, the diamond magnate, a 50 per cent state equity in the diamond mining industry.24 I have quoted at length from this interviewee because this account reveals so clearly the considerable involvement in sovereign states’ legislative processes by foreign governmental and private actors, some of whom resort to threatening tactics (e.g., companies will leave). This interviewee negotiated a fine line between depicting himself as an open-minded “good guy” and as a private entrepreneur trying to get a project off the ground in what he sees as a frustratingly unpredictable and obstreperous African policy environment. Recalling the normalizing repetitions within the Frameworks and Global Survey documents discussed earlier, it becomes possible to see the utility of these racially coded narratives for individual mining subjects. Instead of confronting the self- and company interest underlying his disgust at seeing a 5 per cent state ownership clause “rammed through at the 11th hour,” this interviewee was able to draw from a dense body of racially coded commonsense “truths” wherein “history has shown” that state involvement in mining is incompatible with a “healthy” mining sector. The ideological terrain on which Canadian mining professionals operate made it possible for this interviewee to construe the occasional use of strong pressure, threats, and coercion to rewrite and properly liberalize the mining laws of a sovereign African state as fully reasonable and justified. It was a matter of bringing order to chaos. The subject who might otherwise be compelled to be recognized (and to recognize himself) as a neo-colonizer could thus be seen as civilized, reasonable, firm, practical, and productive. Such attributes defined proper neoliberal masculinity.

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Another interviewee provided an even more striking example of this kind of intervention. Earlier in the interview, he had portrayed himself as a culturally sensitive person who enjoyed trying to understand the culture of the African country where he was working; he was someone who “liked to learn about the people” and enjoyed “helping people better themselves.” He was, in short, a decent person. Yet he participated in lobbying an African government to change not only its mining act but its land tenure regime as well. This interviewee did not seem to experience any tension between his claim to be “culturally sensitive” and his interventions in modifying local socio-cultural institutions such as land tenure: Well we certainly lobbied the government very strongly for additional changes and a lot of these changes had to do with land tenure and the whole land tenure system. The requirements at the time were that you had an exploration permit, and after a certain period of time you dropped half of your permit, and after another period of time you dropped another part of your permit, and the – sometimes you needed to get the, your – what’s the word – authorization to do certain types of work, and it was quite common that the whole authorization process could take up to a year, a year and a half, and if you had a two-year permit and your authorization period was used up in bureaucratic delays, you had very little time to work on the permit. So those were the kind of changes we were trying to address and push. Just to make it a little bit easier to work and to sort of make suggestions certainly based along Canadian mining codes to try and get them more into that sense because (a) we were more familiar with them and (b) we felt them to be more transparent.

Here was the familiar recourse to a racially coded discourse of rationality, efficiency, and transparency: the features of the superior Canadian mining law, which sensible African states would have to adopt. Resistance to such a superior law was depicted, in the classic terms of the colonialist imaginary, as evidence of backwardness: This falls back to what we started the whole discussion with, is that the leadership, the government in a lot of these countries has stemmed from the village system of upbringing, whereby the village chief is the benefactor for the whole village and, uh, that has certainly found its ways into the governments of the countries and as such the president or the minister of a certain part of the government then feels he has the same kind of power and authority, and as being the benefactor you reap the benefits and then

144  Colonial Extractions you distribute as you see fit. And in our sense of public government that doesn’t fit. Our sense of government has a public purse, and there’s a committee that oversees the disbursing of this purse sort of on an equitable basis, whereas in that type of system you have a benefactor who collects from everybody and then distributes to who he sees fit, but each one considers himself to be autonomous … So for instance the minister of mines would then feel that he had a right to any benefits or taxes that came from any mining projects, that flowed directly through him.

He concluded this explanation – which could be dubbed an Orientalist narrative of the African despot – by reiterating that his company simply wanted “to make that a more transparent process and shift it more towards what we see in North America.” This interviewee expressed a sense of entitlement not just to be present in the Other’s land but to establish there his own cultural, political, and legal system. He went on to speak of the continued resistance on the part of the African country political leaders to the Canadians’ (and other foreigners’) recommended changes: Well, they weren’t open. I guess because the whole objective here is for each minister to maintain as much control as he can over what’s going on in his jurisdiction, and therefore to reap as many benefits as possible. So there would be open resistance in the sense of anything that would reduce the amount of power and influence. [But] if for instance a number of companies got together and said, no we’re not going to do this until this changes and then there would be enough pressure, political pressure put on both from above and below that hey, we want to get the economy going, the economy is not going, why is it not going, well because you as Minister of Mines for instance are putting up roadblocks which are unacceptable to companies coming in and working here, so therefore change your roadblocks or lose your position as minister. So until those kind of pressures get put on, things wouldn’t happen.

When I asked who the key players were in this process of ganging up to press for change, the interviewee stated frankly: Primarily foreign companies, and people in the development industries … Yes, World Bank, certainly we worked very closely with the World Bank and whenever there were any issues that came up we were asked in discussions with the World Bank to provide documentation of the issues that

Resource Appropriation and the Rule of Law  145 we felt were obstructive to an orderly business environment and to provide these to the World Bank so that the World Bank would have enough ammunition from various sources to make representations. And the same thing with the Canadian embassy, they worked on our behalf as well. We had close ties with those groups.

This passage describes an aggressive intervention in an African country’s mineral sector policy framework that jars with Canada’s national self-image as an unassuming and helping nation. That intervention operates through veiled threats (e.g., perhaps the Minister of Mines ought to be replaced) and other tactics (ganging up, refusing to proceed with work) aimed at obtaining reforms that will satisfy foreign investors. It also draws on and makes strategic use of constructions of “human nature” as inherently or essentially self-interested, as well as on stereotypes of African political culture as despotic and corrupt. Recalling Timothy Mitchell’s identification of how modern Western property law constructs itself as universal and civilized by construing itself as non-violent and non-arbitrary in contrast to the laws and governance systems of the erratic, despotic Other, it is apparent that, in this account, it is access to and redeployment of a commonplace racist narrative of the uncivilized Other that made it possible for the Canadian mining professional to justify his involvement in reforming African mining laws; this was the narrative that made the white Canadian subject able to appear non-objectionable and civilized. If neo-colonizers know at some level what they are part of, how does this particular interviewee manage, resolve, narrate, and perform the contradictions and aggression of colonialist intervention? In this interviewee’s anecdotes, it is possible to see how his self-identification as a reasonable, unbiased, moral person – as someone who merely wants more transparent laws that will benefit everyone – secures the viability of the colonialist-capitalist project itself. A system of domination that hypocritically requires the Other (African states) to be transparent, but not the Self (Canada), needs a dominant subject who is prepared to perform his self in a shifting array of contradictions such that it is never quite clear who or what he is or what he believes himself to be. This kaleidoscopic multiplicity – the presentation of multiple faces that encompass ­aggressive/ callous and kindly/benevolent traits – appears to be precisely how neocolonialist violence is made possible, and how it continues. In this interviewee’s rendition – which becomes part of Canada’s national narrative – this story is not about colonialist intervention but

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about concerned friends of Africa patiently helping install legal order and economic progress in the face of “roadblocks” raised by a corrupt (juvenile) African political elite. If the colonizer knows what he or she is part of, then Canada, as a settler-colonizer nation, must be troubled by knowledge of its own colonizing actions both domestically and internationally. To protect the psychological stability of the colonialist subject and the racially structured global order, Canadian subjects, and Canada as a state, must astutely and boldly narrate (and perform) a project of resource plunder as a project of law, order, and civility. This becomes particularly evident in the story of Bulyanhulu, to which I now turn. Bulyanhulu and the Rule of Law Bulyanhulu is one of the largest gold mines in Tanzania and the name of a Tanzanian community. But due to a much-publicized, extended confrontation between local miners and a Canadian company in the mid-1990s, Bulyanhulu is now also a story and a place in Canadian history. Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD), funded by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, described the case in these terms in a 2002 report: Moreover, some of the worst cases of human rights abuse have allegedly occurred when security forces have helped secure land for future mineral operations. It is often extremely difficult to find out how accurate such allegations are, in part because small-scale miners generally lack formal representation. One of the most controversial and as yet unresolved cases involves the alleged killing of small-scale miners in the Bulyanhulu mining area in Tanzania. In 1995 Sutton Resources of Canada took over the Kahama gold fields in Tanzania. These were then being worked by local small-scale miners. It is alleged that despite the issuance of a court injunction against the immediate take-over of the land, Sutton and its partner, the Tanzanian State Mining Company, backed by paramilitary police units, moved into the area. Amnesty International’s 1997 Human Rights Report recorded that more than 50 gold miners were killed during the evictions from the disputed land. The claim is controversial and has yet to be substantiated or repudiated, and there have been recent calls for an independent investigation into the case.25

While Amnesty International later acknowledged that it could not substantiate these very serious allegations,26 there were periodic

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attempts on the part of other civil society organizations to gain an understanding of what may have happened at Bulyanhulu. To this end, Probe International, a Canadian NGO, used federal Access to Information legislation to obtain transcripts covering three years of diplomatic correspondence (1995–8) between the Canadian High Commission in Dar es Salaam and the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa.27 These transcripts constitute a primary data source for the final section of this chapter. I conduct a discourse analysis of these texts, reading these diplomatic files as examples of contemporary colonial discourse. Bulyanhulu is selected as a case study to trace the multiple faces of law in neocolonial processes. I do so through examining the Canadian government’s own commentary in the period leading up to and following the removals, or evictions, of the artisanal miners. As the period 1995–7 was also a time when Tanzania was developing a new mining code, which became law in 1998, the diplomatic correspondence provides insights concerning the roles played by Canadians in that process too. The content of these files provides concrete examples of how “rule of law” functions in the three ways identified at the outset of this chapter: by giving renewed content to a colonial imaginary that produces lawful and lawless subjects; by installing a legal framework to protect private property rights; and by legitimizing the use of force in the interests of securing “law and order.” There is an additional impetus for including the “Bulyanhulu files” in this chapter. Colonial power silences “subaltern voices”28 in many ways. Official histories typically do not include the perspectives of the colonized. Archival records are characterized by silences and gaps – documents are destroyed,29 or are never collected or obtained, or their details are deleted by censors. In this manner, colonialist history remains in some sense “haunted” by voices that are absent and by events that are unrecorded, hidden, or denied. As Daniel Coleman comments in leading his readers through an analysis of the ambiguous and deceptive yet resilient character of Canadian “civility”: “The losses within Canada’s civil ideal, the ruptures of racial and other forms of internal violence that deny the nation’s aspirations to become the peaceable kingdom, make up the constitutive losses which settler-­ citizens are constantly reminded to forget in order to aspire to and belong within White Canadian settler civility”30 (emphasis added). When the allegations of harm at Bulyanhulu resurfaced in 2001, a Canadian government official, in casual conversation, expressed astonishment that anyone could imagine Canadian involvement in such events. Perhaps

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that official had forgotten the destruction of Africville in Halifax or the shooting of Dudley George at Ipperwash. Coleman suggests that Canada is a nation haunted by “traumatic, spectral events” that lodge in the national psyche as unthinkable. For the Canadian national identity, what is it about Bulyanhulu that is unthinkable? Before taking a detailed look at the diplomatic files, it is important that I sketch the recent history of small-scale or citizen mining in the Bulyanhulu area.31 The 1979 Mining Act encouraged Tanzanian citizens to obtain mining licences, to engage in legal small-scale mining, and to sell gold at a set rate to the government. To this end, certain areas of the country were designated for small-scale mining; in 1984, Bulyanhulu was designated as such. Thousands of people responded positively to this policy; indeed, the USAID-funded study by Phillips and colleagues (2007) found that by 1995, some 550,000 Tanzanians were making some of their living from small-scale mining.32 This study also noted, with surprise, the extremely positive impact on the Tanzanian economy, nationally as well as locally, from small-scale mining. Indeed, they deduced that revenues from small-scale gold production had buffered Tanzania from the most severe effects of structural adjustment policies.33 They documented a 46 per cent increase in middle-income jobs, improved housing, roads, and schools in small-scale mining areas, accumulation by some individuals of significant investment capital, and orderly local governance that maintained “law and order” (as opposed to the stereotypical “Wild West” image of mining communities). They concluded that “no other sector or job-creation program has injected dispersed incomes into rural areas, stimulated cash flow and reduced rural poverty on such a scale.”34 In light of these findings, it is not hard to imagine the anger and resentment that would have been felt by local people as they were forcibly displaced and lost their lucrative livelihoods when a large foreign company appeared on the scene – which is what happened at Bulyanhulu. Even the CAO Assessment Report of 2002 notes that some of the Bulyanhulu families who were displaced for the Canadian mine to begin production were “living in poor conditions” and that “the relative wealth of the town [Kakola] is changing from the days of small-scale mining activity.”35 The classic colonial imaginary operates through hierarchical binaries such as lawless subjects versus law-abiding subjects. This is always necessary for the (illegitimately) dominant actor to legitimize and “whitewash” his or her dominance and privilege. In the Bulyanhulu diplomatic file we soon encounter a classic figure in this discursive genre: the

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racialized Other who signifies threat, depravity, and disorder. Despite the evidence cited above that many of the thousands of people in the Bulyanhulu area operated legally and in an orderly fashion as small-scale miners,36 the criminalizing term “illegal miners”37 is used throughout the diplomatic correspondence. References to some 20,000 to 25,000 of these miners on and near the Canadian concession cast them as a threatening, dangerous horde. The subject line of a series of telegrams beginning in 1995 between the High Commission in Dar es Salaam and Ottawa is “Threats to Canadians and Canadian Interests.” One of these advises Ottawa: “Situ at Bulyanhulu site deteriorated somewhat 28Mar95 (afternoon) with knife attack on Kahama team Tanzanian surveyor by irate individual illegal miner.” A subsequent memo informs Ottawa: HOM emphasized to Kahama her responsibility for safety of Australians and Cdns in Ngara – where appropriate army and police protection was now/now being provided – and in Kahama where lives of Cdns and their Tanz colleagues were being imminently and repeatedly threatened, and where blatancy of threats to drive company away had increased as result of [CENSORED] comments to illegals.38

Here, in these lines, is a familiar colonial trope: the metaphorical fortress whose civilized subjects are at risk and besieged by the threatening inhabitants of a dangerous land. There is a determination to cast the local Tanzanian opposition to the Canadian mining presence as vile. A memo of 18 October 1996 speaks of “the efforts of the illegal miners’ committee to rewrite history,” while a 26 November 1996 document identifies the leaders of the small-scale mining association as criminal elements: “there was evidence that the ‘Miners’ Association’ extorted protection money from the miners, depriving them of even the smallest wage.” The Canadians desire “peace and order” so that they can proceed with the exploration work they have been (ostensibly) legally licensed to do in order to advance economic development and bring its benefits to the Tanzanian people. According to the logic of the white settler imaginary, they are the reasonable, “civilized” subjects who will bring investment and economic opportunity to the whole country. Yet they find themselves besieged by (what are construed as) lawless, defiant, and deceitful figures who irrationally resent their presence – who would, as it were, eject them from the fort. Of course, relations of power in colonialist encounters are never equal. In the diplomatic files we find evidence of Canada’s willingness

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to use its superior economic position vis-à-vis the Tanzanian state to advance Canadian private mining interests in Tanzania. A pressing concern for the Canadian companies is the vigorous refusal of some of the small-scale miners to leave the Bulyanhulu gold reefs, to which the Canadians have been granted a licence. Tanzania’s status as a Canadian aid recipient had been suspended in 1993 in a round of federal budget cuts; it has now been reinstated. It seems that certain aid projects, such as possible support for a mining training centre, are proposed to encourage the Tanzanian government to resolve the problem of the “illegal miners” at Bulyanhulu and at other Canadian-licensed sites. A memo sent to Ottawa by the Canadian High Commissioner in Dar es Salaam on 28 March 1995 states: HOM advised Pres Mwinyi that Tanzania has been reinstated as Cdn development assistance partner, and mentioned a few projects whose further development cld now be pursued, including perhaps, development of mining training centre in mining belt in conjunction with Sutton and other mining coys, assuming current problems cld be and wld be resolved.39

“Current problems”, of course, refer to the defiant refusal of Tanzanian citizen-miners to vacate the gold reefs. As an example of a contemporary colonial contact zone, the Bulyanhulu case is instructive, for it also shows the astute use of legal avenues by subordinated ­subjects – in this case the small-scale miners’ committee at Bulyanhulu – to defend or assert their interests and rights. With this in mind, we find some puzzling comments in the diplomatic correspondence. On 20 December 1995, the Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania advises Ottawa that a Tanzanian High Court ruling pertaining to the situation at Bulyanhulu, one that is favourable to the artisanals, need not delay or derail efforts to have the artisanal miners removed. The pertinent text reads: Sutton’s Jun95 injunction against owners of equipment supplied to illegals on Bulyanhulu never was enforced. It was challenged by owners and appealed to High Court in Tabora. In Sep95, in midst of election campaign, High Court Judge ruled that issue cld involve constitutional rights and should be heard by a panel of three High Court judges. […] Sutton has appealed to High Court for panel hearing. We do not/not believe that judicial action on injunction need impede action by govt to resolve situ.40

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It is this last, quite startling sentence that I want to highlight. First, however, some further background may be in order. In June 1995, the Canadian exploration company that held the licence to Bulyanhulu initiated a lawsuit for an eviction order to remove the small-scale miners and to obtain a permanent injunction to “restrain respondents from interfering with the mining operations in the area.”41 A temporary injunction was initially granted. In the counter-motion filed in response to the legal action against them, however, the small-scale miners claimed title to the mining concession by virtue of customary law; demanded financial compensation in the event that they were removed; applied for the temporary injunction to be rescinded until the case was concluded; and applied to have the Attorney General added as co-­defendant on the grounds that the case raised issues of basic constitutional rights pertaining to land tenure.42 Perhaps the Canadian company had not expected such a vigorous and sophisticated response. Responding favourably to the local miners’ counterclaim, the Tanzanian High Court in Tabora annulled the injunction it had issued against the miners (i.e., they were allowed to continue mining pending the outcome of the case), agreed that the case involved basic constitutional rights, and ordered that it be heard before a special constitutional court with three judges. The Canadian company appealed this ruling in the appellate court but subsequently withdrew the appeal. The case should therefore have proceeded, but for reasons that have not been made public and thus remain unclear, this constitutional case was never heard.43 Returning to the last sentence in the diplomatic text above, the advice conveyed seems to express a willingness to disregard – or at the very least to minimize the importance of – a decision of the Tanzanian judiciary. The phrase “in midst of election campaign” implies that the judicial decision may have been politically motivated and not the result of legal reasoning and merit. In fact, the Tanzanian judge had ruled, at least in the interim, against the Canadian company and in favour of the company’s adversaries – that is, the local Tanzanian “small-scale” miners. The diplomat’s comments seem to contradict the Canadian state’s official support for strengthening independent judiciaries in African countries. Moreover, very fundamental issues would have been addressed in this case: questions of the terms on which a right to have access to land and its resources are to be determined. The diplomat’s advice and the fact that this case was not heard together suggest that “the rule of law” in this context has a narrow focus that does not fully

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protect the substantive democratic rights of ordinary citizens. Indeed, as a further indication of this tendency, it is startling to read the following comment in a 10 December 1996 memo from the Canadian High Commission in Dar es Salaam to External Affairs, Ottawa: There is a growing coincidence of views as among the Tanzanian leadership and officials [censored] and the private sector on current problems and potential solutions in the mining sector. Some Canadian and other companies continue to encounter difficulties in respect of conflicting legal claims by small scale miners and the illegal presence of small scale miners on their concessions. In most cases there is a will evident on the part of the Tanzanian administration to facilitate solutions notwithstanding legal or resource constraints. The revised mining legislation should deal with many of the current problems.44 (emphasis added)

Such comments raise questions concerning the role of the Canadian government with regard to the inhibition – rather than the ­strengthening – of the independence and authority of the Tanzania courts vis-à-vis the executive arm of government and vis-à-vis foreign corporate interests. This comment also implies that revised mining legislation will protect the interests of foreign investors such that they will be presented with fewer problems arising from “conflicting legal claims by small scale miners.” Imposition of a legal system that reflects the culture and economic interests of the colonizer was always a feature of classic colonial power, and this appears to remain the case in the neocolonial era. A number of other dynamics lay behind the legal dispute between the Canadian company and the Tanzanian citizen-miners. As Tanzania’s economic ideology shifted from “African socialism” to a liberalized economy in line with World Bank SAP requirements, some political leaders began to favour foreign-investment-led industrial mining, while other political leaders remained committed to ensuring opportunities in the lucrative mining sector for Tanzanian citizen-­miners. The Tanzanian state remained, in this sense, a somewhat ambiguous entity, particularly to the degree that it continued to harbour certain nationalist sentiments. As a 29 March 1995 memo in the diplomatic files observed: “The laxness of the authorities in dealing with illegal mining has emboldened the artisanal miners and aggravated the situation.”45 Indeed, there are indications, noted in the diplomatic files, of continuing high-level state and public support for the Bulyanhulu artisanal miners.46 The

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diplomatic files further note that “[t]he ministry [i.e. Tanzanian government Ministry of Mines] is also determined to see small-scale miners leave sites they have been occupying illegally; e.g. Bulyankhulu. But they are convinced it must be achieved through persuasion rather than through coercion.”47 In addition to the charged political climate surrounding the multiparty elections during the fall of 1995, it appears that there was a certain amount of internal disagreement and inconsistency within the Tanzanian government with regard to mining policy; this had created uncertainty, delays, and confusion over licensing processes. Such “inconsistency” may have been attributable to pressures from foreign donors, such as Canada, that reduced or compromised the agentive capacities of the Tanzanian state or that fostered internal disputes. In any case, the artisanal miners who initially refused to leave the Bulyanhulu concession even after the Canadian company arrived did so on the grounds that they believed they possessed a right to mine those gold reefs. From the Canadian company’s perspective, it had been granted an exploration right to the concession by the Tanzanian government and therefore believed it had clear legal rights to the area. One Tanzanian NGO – the Lawyers Environmental Action Team – continued for many years to demand an investigation into the lawfulness of the various licensing procedures that had occurred, but none was ever conducted. There is no evidence in the diplomatic files that the Canadian High Commission had any interest in, or took any initiative towards, seeing an investigation of this nature take place. Of course, large-scale, foreign-investment-led industrial mining was being actively promoted by the Canadians and the World Bank as the correct policy to foster development in Tanzania. The country’s future would be secured in part through an influx of foreign/Western/Canadian mining capital, expertise, and technology. As this moment continued to be delayed, pressure mounted on the Tanzanian government: Sutton and the High Commission have been working closely with the Government of Tanzania officials to achieve a peaceful solution. The Government has been supportive of Sutton and recognizes the importance and potential of the Ngara mine. Continued disruption at the site would have a negative impact on the image of the country for future investors. Police presence has been increased and Sutton is prepared to provide private security if necessary, but Government action is essential to alleviate what is primarily a Tanzanian problem. (Trade and Investment Brief, ­August 1995)48

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In this scenario, the possible use of force to secure the neoliberal economic model is gradually construed as justified. Legal force (policing; security guards; paramilitary) supports the rule of law – now narrowed to the rule of private property interests – and will discipline lawless subjects (i.e., persons who claim customary, traditional, or nationalist rights). The neo-colonialist project here takes a new form, one that enables a division of labour in which the Canadian authorities are associated primarily with installing “rule of law” – a liberalized mining law with an investor-friendly “fiscal and regulatory framework” to attract foreign investment to fuel economic growth – while the Tanzanian authorities are associated primarily with enforcing “rule of law”: protecting the institutions of foreign (white) capital and disciplining irrational bodies of colour, by overt force if necessary. In this colonialist theatre of power, raw force remains the domain of the savage Other in a racialized zone of violence, while Canadian-ness remains symbolic of restraint, civility, and a progressive future. Meanwhile, despite repeated expressions in the Canadian diplomatic correspondence of a desire for the problem of the presence of the “illegal miners” at Bulyanhulu to be resolved peacefully,49 there are indications of patience wearing thin50 on the part of the Canadian exploration companies51 and the Canadian High Commission in Tanzania as the situation drags on, unresolved, into the spring of 1996. A confidential memo of 28 June 1996 from the Canadian High Commission to government colleagues in Ottawa notes: We are [censored] trying to ensure Tanz govt [censored] respects rule of law without any exceptions in mining sector and assures security of title to mining properties. We have enlisted support of [censored]. The decision makers will be fully aware of how important this mining sector, Cdn participation, and rule of law is to their economy.52

In the discursive context of the diplomatic correspondence, “rule of law” as used in this passage again pertains more to protection of the property rights of investors than to, for instance, respecting the court process that had been supposed to investigate the constitutionality of licensing the Bulyanhulu concession to a Canadian company or ensuring the human rights or property rights under customary law of artisanal miners. “Rule of law” ought to encompass the right of displaced miners to be compensated for loss of property and livelihood, but this does not appear to be the meaning intended or the concern expressed.

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In this “colonial contact zone,” Tanzanian artisanal/citizen miners can now be seen as aligned against unseen, ostensibly unraced foreign investors, and it is the latter’s interests that are at stake and that must be protected by “rule of law”. The concern is for international investor confidence, international stock markets, and the security of tenure of Tanzanian properties for Canadian companies. A 20 December 1995 memo had stated that “Sutton [censored] is ready to go to stock market [censored] but cannot do so in absence of Tanz govt action to remove 7,000-10,000 illegal miners now present on both reefs 1 and 2.”53 Seven months later, “action to resolve situation” finally occurred. At the end of July 1996, the Government of Tanzania announced a process of clearance and decreed that all artisanal mining at Bulyanhulu must stop. Tanzanian state paramilitary forces, “Force Field Units,” and regional police were brought to Bulyanhulu to ensure compliance. While many of the thousands of residents began to disperse, a last-ditch attempt was made by leaders of the small-scale miners to prevent the evictions. On 2 August, they secured an ex parte court injunction for the evictions to cease, given that a decision on the court case between the small-scale miners and the Canadian company, Civil Case No. 12 of 1995, was still pending. Pleased and encouraged by this injunction in their favour, some miners allegedly returned and carried on mining. The clearance of the area nevertheless proceeded. Indeed, a Canadian diplomatic note of 26 November 1996 states: “In late July the Government of Tanzania finally acted to remove the illegal miners. It was a peaceful operation whereupon the miners left willingly once the Government announced it would no longer tolerate their presence.”54 By the end of the first week of August, the Canadian-owned company had brought a bulldozer – curiously referred to as an “earth mover” in the CAO report – onto the site and begun filling in or plugging the entrances to the artisanal mining shafts.55 When allegations of miners trapped and buried underground began to circulate, officials in the Canadian High Commission acted to refute the allegations and to limit their negative and potentially damaging publicity. A 30 August 1996 memo to other foreign missions in Tanzania, describes the sensational reports in the local Tanzanian media of the “removals” of artisanals at Bulyanhulu as “maliciously false,” “slanted,” “misleading,” and “libelous.”56 When one of the major opposition political parties announced its intention to investigate the allegations, the Canadian High Commissioner arranged a private meeting with that party’s leader to encourage what she called, in a memo to

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Ottawa, “truth or at least moderation” in his party’s report of their investigation into the alleged deaths of miners at Bulyanhulu (27 November 1996).57 While diplomats are obligated to defend their country’s reputation and interests, such a meeting could also be construed as an attempt to influence the content of an independent report by an opposition party on a controversial public issue. In fact, Tanzania had only recently “graduated” into the ranks of countries with multiparty political systems – systems that the Canadian government was actively promoting around the world. Ironically, the Canadian High Commission had produced country briefs that recommended Tanzania as an appropriate destination for foreign investment on the grounds that it has “a real multi-party democracy, with a lively press, independent judiciary and vigorous political debate” (28 August 1996).58 Still, there were evidently limits to what the Canadians appreciated with regard to the “liveliness” of the press and the “vigour” of the political debate. Nevertheless, the Canadian High Commission undertook to turn this “lively press” to its own advantage in order to impress on Tanzanian public opinion the positive contributions of Canadian mining companies. Feature articles in major Tanzania newspapers were organized, and prime time slots on Tanzanian television were purchased to advertise Canada’s positive role in Tanzania’s mining sector and the general benefits that would accrue to the entire Tanzanian economy and nation as a result of increased foreign investment in the mining sector. A confidential memo dated 28 July 1996 from the High Commissioner to Ottawa stated: Our trade officers have pulled off major coups on the publicity side: a 4/4 page Cda supplement published today in Business Times with a long interview with me, including full comment on the investment issue; similar interview with the East African to be published 08July96 (I was less explicit with this large-circ paper) and a 30/30 minute TV interview to be aired in prime time 01Jul96. Total cost to the CHC dlrs 500/500.59

Clearly, Canada was making it a priority to foster, through Tanzania’s mainstream media, an ideological climate in which foreign investment would be equated with progress and national well-being. As the public interest in what happened at Bulyanhulu in 1996 gradually subsided, the diplomats seem glad to move on to focus on the now more secure and more lucrative opportunities opened up to Canadian mining investors, including business opportunities for various

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mining equipment and services providers. With the Tanzanian citizenminers (artisanals) removed from the gold mining area, the Canadian companies could now “go to the stock markets.” In addition, the Canadian High Commission was able to direct its energies towards mining law reform. For instance, it took steps to ensure that a list of names of senior Canadian corporate executives with expertise in mining law reform were provided to the Tanzanian government so that they could be invited to attend a forum in Arusha called the “Workshop on the Legal, Regulatory and Fiscal Framework of the Tanzanian Mineral Sector.”60 Organized jointly by the Tanzanian government and the World Bank, this event was an opportunity to discuss reactions to a draft of the new mining legislation. Here we can recall the discussion earlier in this chapter of the seemingly banal content of the World Bank Group’s twin independent studies, Review of Legal and Fiscal Regulatory Frameworks for Exploration and Mining, and Mining Sector Reform and Investment: Results of a Global Survey. These documents set out the legal framework that would best attract investment by ensuring security of tenure and the treatment of mining licences as forms of private property that were mortgageable and transferable. It was precisely these tenets of the ideal mining law that ended up in Tanzania’s revised Mining Act of 1998. It appears that the foreign (i.e., Canadian) private individuals representing business interests who participated in workshops such as this now had greater access to and influence over the legislative process than did the citizens or elected representatives of the country. Under formal colonial rule, the Indigenous people of the colonized nation had been formally and explicitly disenfranchised because of the colonial authority’s power to govern and pass laws. In the mid- to late 1990s, when these reformulations of the Tanzanian mining law were occurring, many African countries were in the early stages of transition to multiparty democratic systems and were establishing new “democratic institutions.” Ten years later, Tanzanians had acquired greater experience with the new political paradigm and were more able to participate actively in law reform. But in 1995–7, major legal reforms were being undertaken without significant popular participation and with disproportionate outside influence, including that of Canadian state and private sector actors. This could be deemed an example of de facto disenfranchisement. It seems that the hegemony of neoliberal economic policy and law, imposed through a consortium of international state and private interests, constitutes a new “legal” mode of coloniallike rule.

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Elsewhere I have discussed in detail how the 1998 Mining Act differed from the 1979 Mining Act.61 Here I want to highlight a few key points. Taking a more “rules-based” approach, the 1998 Act introduced a “first come, first served” approach to the granting of mineral licences; it also placed considerable limits on the discretionary powers of the Minister of Mining, who under the previous law had enjoyed more scope to “arbitrarily” prioritize Tanzanian national interests. The new law expressly prohibited state ownership in mining ventures. At the same time, curiously, it ended the prohibition on Ministry of Mines officials holding mining licences or shares in mining companies. Given that ministry officials were now permitted to acquire shares in foreign mining companies operating in Tanzania, “this would seem to open the door to an increased potential for ministry officials to act with private, versus state or public, interests in mind.”62 But the most significant difference between the 1979 and 1998 laws was the introduction of a “loophole” provision, Section 10, “Mineral Development Agreements.” This provision authorized the state to negotiate individualized side deals with private companies whose details, in practice, need not be made public. Section 10 stipulates that a “Development Agreement” may “contain provisions binding on the United Republic of Tanzania … relating to the circumstances or the manner in which the Minister or the Commissioner will exercise any discretion conferred on them by this Act”;63 “may prevent the minister from rejecting an application for renewal of a special mining license or limit the grounds for refusal; and may limit the ability of the minister to reject an amendment submitted by a company regarding the terms of their special mining license, including terms such as the details of the environmental management plan and plans for training and employing Tanzanians.”64 In addition, companies could use the parameters of the Development Agreements to fix terms regarding tax rates (coded as “fiscal stability”), royalty rates, and other favourable conditions. Thus, while the 1998 mining law is supposedly more “rules-based” and “transparent,” Section 10 provides for individualized arrangements that are strikingly – some might say scandalously – non-transparent: they allow some rules to be suspended or modified in favour of private corporate mining interests. Moreover, the provisions established under the Development Agreements are “binding on the United Republic” (Section 10(2) of the 1998 Mining Act), clarifying that any violations (such as actions by future governments to change the rules) will be subject to litigation,

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specifically “settlement of any such dispute by international arbitration” through the International Convention for the Settlement of Investment Disputes or ICSID. Here again, the “rule of law,” in the form of expensive international arbitration, will operate to protect the interests of private white capital. As a technology of whiteness/capitalism, the rule of law operative here proclaims its objection to “arbitrary” power and its commitment to “transparency” while simultaneously legalizing its own version of non-transparent, arbitrary power in the form of Mineral Development Agreements. This is the dissembling, mesmerizing force of neo-colonial neoliberal whiteness in the twenty-first century. There is yet another epilogue to the story of Tanzanian mining law reform. In April 2010, a new mining law was passed by Tanzania’s Parliament. It reflected years of growing popular discontent with how the resource extraction sector was operating in Tanzania. The new act requires the Tanzanian state to own a stake in mining projects; it also reserves all gemstone mining (including diamonds) for Tanzanian citizens via a separate licensing procedure and increases royalty rates from 3 to 4 per cent on gold and from 6 to 7 per cent on gemstones. Royalties are now to be calculated based on the gross rather than net value of minerals. These changes are aimed at capturing more of the value of Tanzania’s mineral wealth for the Tanzanian state and citizenry; however, they do not immediately affect any of the large mines in the country. This is because the existing large-scale mines in operation today negotiated “fiscal stability” arrangements through Section 10 of the 1998 act. These arrangements are locked in over the long term, as largescale industrial mining contracts, called “special mining licences,” have twenty-five-year terms. The more nationalist-oriented provisions of the 2010 Mining Act will not apply to these companies until the existing twenty-five-year terms are completed, by which time many valuable gold deposits will have been depleted. Conclusion An esteemed Anishnaabe legal scholar, John Borrows, describes the rule of law in these terms: “According to the Supreme Court of Canada, the rule of law consists of two interrelated legal principles: it precludes arbitrary state power and requires the maintenance of a positive legal order.”65 Using this definition, Borrows shows that Canada’s existence as a settler-state is a violation of the rule of law:

160  Colonial Extractions Canada’s assumption of underlying title and sovereignty throughout its claimed territory violates both of these fundamental principles. It is an arbitrary exercise of power aimed at dismantling Indigenous systems of law and normative order. Canada substantially invalidated Aboriginal peoples’ territorial rights in the absence of informed consent, or persuasive legal arguments.66

If this is so – that is, if we accept Borrows’s argument that Canada’s legal claim to territorial sovereignty in Canada is a violation of the rule of law – then it is reasonable to consider the possibility that Canada as a state could engage in similar actions elsewhere in the world. In this sense, law – as it currently operates in the modern world – offers no guarantee to consistently protect the vulnerable from injustice. Sometimes it does, but not always. The law’s failure to protect has been illustrated in this chapter both by the failure of the Canadian government to establish legislation (i.e., the failure to pass Bill C-300) to disqualify private resource extraction companies from receiving various forms of government support in the event that they violate international human rights standards, and in the unexplained failure of the Tanzanian courts to conduct a hearing into the constitutional questions of customary land tenure raised by the artisanal miners at Bulyanhulu. Both of these, had they occurred, would certainly have gone some way towards strengthening the rights – including the right to livelihood and the right to live free from structural violence – of relatively disadvantaged groups. The fact that these “disadvantaged” groups were racialized groups reconfirms the thesis that racism is deeply inscribed in the modern legal order – including that of the Canadian state. The image of Canada that emerges in this chapter may be surprising to some. Based on a data set consisting of a few hundred pages of text from a parliamentary committee that met during 2009–10 to listen to the debate over Bill C-300, and a few hundred pages of text from diplomatic correspondence between Dar es Salaam and Ottawa during 1994– 7, what emerges is a government, led by two different political parties, that does not prioritize its use of power and resources to strengthen the legal rights of the (racially) vulnerable. On the contrary, under the cover of benevolently installing good governance, democratic development, human rights and rule of law, the legal rights and requirements of capital are prioritized, with the effect of creating an “enabling environment” for the legal establishment and profitable operation of Canadian mining companies in African jurisdictions – with all the attendant,

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consequent structural violence that was identified in chapter 4. In recent years, these processes have been further buttressed by Canada’s signing of bilateral investment agreements with African country leaders – a closely related topic that warrants detailed treatment beyond this book. There are audible echoes of Walter Rodney’s observation that the colonial state functioned primarily to “guarantee optimum conditions under which private companies could exploit Africans.” What kind of national subjects does such a neo-colonizing process then require? I address that question in the next chapter.

6 Who Do We Say We Are? Narratives of Canadian Mining Professionals in African States

Mr. –, I’m not a mercenary, I’m just a rock-jock. (Interviewee, Canadian mining company operating in Southern Africa) In retrospect, colonialism did have its triumphs after all. It did make Western man definitionally non-Eastern and handed him a self-image and a worldview which were basically responses to the needs of colonialism. (Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, 71)

Introduction In considering Canada’s contemporary mining operations in African states as neo-colonialist in nature, we must pay attention to the kinds of cultural narratives and subjectivities both required and produced by those operations. My conversations with mining industry professionals showed that they have access to a shifting menu of scripts that encompass the oppositions and contradictions that Memmi (1965) captured in his comparison of the “colonizer who accepts” with the “colonizer who refuses.” What differentiates the contemporary era is the emergence of a mode of subjectivity – the racialized neoliberal subject of global capitalism – that must competently perform not simply both faces of this Janus-like opposition, but a kaleidoscopic range of variations. A fundamental feature of the neoliberal capitalist subject is its ambiguity, its capacity to dissemble. The primary data in this chapter have been drawn from interviews conducted with eighteen mining professionals. Those data are augmented – and the chapter’s findings further supported – by data

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gleaned from thirty mining company websites, the profiles of 150 Canadian Mining Hall of Fame inductees, and several book-length memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies written by mining personalities.1 These data provide insights into how individual subjects narrate themselves with reference to the dominant cultural representation of the Canadian mining industry and the dominant narrative of humane Canadian internationalism. The data suggest that these individual accounts reanimate and offer fresh content for the dominant national narratives. Furthermore, the dominant narratives are fluid and emergent rather than fixed. This chapter also explores the thorny question of the agency of mining industry professionals: Are they agentive subjects, and if so, in what form and to what end(s) is their agency exercised? Are mining professionals able to think and act outside the structural power relations and conceptual paradigms that shape their work settings and that fashion their individual identities? Raising such questions allows us to ask whether it is meaningful to speak of accountability and responsibility, as well as to ask whether change, and what sort of change, is possible. Tracing the Genealogy of the Canadian Mining Professional as a White Neoliberal Subject A particular configuration of social, economic, national, and historical processes has given rise to the contemporary Canadian global mining professional. This professional is a particular subject: a neoliberal subject of global capitalism who occupies a position of whiteness. To consider the Canadian global mining professional in such a manner is to denaturalize and historicize this figure – to suggest, in other words, that it might have been, and could be, otherwise; that it is not inevitable; and that it is in fact a socially produced subjectivity, as indicated in the chapter epigraph from Ashis Nandy. Such an approach allows some insight into the lengthy genealogy and formation of this subject, the role this figure plays in stabilizing and maintaining a new colonialist order, and the characteristics that are central to this role. The evolution of this subject can be traced with reference to a number of formative trajectories: early eras of planetary exploration and discovery from the 1500s;2 the more recent era of Victorian imperialism and colonialism, which reached its zenith in the early and mid-1900s (Memmi, 1957; Nandy, 1983); the emergence of the science of geology in the mid-1800s;

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the widespread acceptance by the late nineteenth century of the idea of race as a biological fact (Guillaumin, 1995); the appearance of the corporation as a central institution of twentieth-century capitalism; and the emergence of new modes of masculinity encompassing civic manhood (Hall, 1992), the “self-made man” (Catano, 2001), the professional man (Nelson, 1998), and the capitalist, neoliberal man (Dean, 2003; Ong, 2006). These trajectories weave together to produce a hegemonic bourgeois white male planetary subject: a type that generates, in turn, the professional global miner. This bourgeois male planetary subject encompasses a range of contradictions. As M.L. Pratt (1992) demonstrates, there was an early establishment of notions of the innocence, harmlessness, and sense of “planetary entitlement” of the European men who travelled the globe in search of adventure, scientific knowledge, and profit, even while these voyagers prepared the way for European capitalist domination. In his close study of the different types of Europeans who made up the colonial presence in African countries such as Algeria, Albert Memmi contrasts the “colonizer who agrees” – the figure who wholeheartedly embraces European colonial power and presence – with the “colonizer who refuses”: the European figure who sees the injustice of colonialism and supports the anti-colonial movement but who still harbours paternalistic views of the colonized and, ironically, benefits materially from the colonial situation. Memmi offers a harsh view of these “feeling subjects,” the “colonizers-who-refuse,” for their impotence in curtailing the force of colonial power. He also emphasizes the callousness and blatant racism of the “colonizer-who-agrees”: the powerful figure who ultimately carries the day. Caring about colonized people or having their interests at heart, while continuing to extract profit from their lands and resources, functions as a unifying, enabling, and mesmerizing strategy in contemporary neoliberalism. In White (1997), a study of the cultural production of modern white male identity, Richard Dyer shows how the very qualities associated with imperialism – a spirit of enterprise, risk-taking, self-control, authority, leadership, civic duty, the will to rule – came to define hegemonic white masculinity and naturalize the role of white men as colonial rulers and nation builders. This was a subject who could make tough decisions and always “got the job done.” However, Dyer goes on to identify complexity and fluidity as definitive of white masculinity. Analysing cinematic representation of white men, he observes that they can be strong or weak, sexually powerful or sexually restrained,

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humanitarians or rogues, successes or failures, without ever diminishing their whiteness or importance. From this, Dyer deduces that the white man’s stature as a racially dominant subject resides in his ability to embody a wide register of personal traits. In National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, Dana Nelson (1998) analyses the new forms of male subjectivity that developed – indeed, that were required – by capitalist culture as it expanded in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In her study of how the professional man came to stand as the national man – the man who made, and symbolized, the American nation – Nelson shows how white middle- and upper-class men benefited materially and socially yet were required, as individuals, to internalize and psychically manage the contradictions of a stratified white settler state that purported to value democratic equality. Segregation and discrimination aimed at Black Americans, and the forced removals of Indigenous peoples such as the Cherokee, made acute and visceral these contradictions with the claims of democratic equality. White male professionals succeeded in disavowing and managing these contradictions in part by distancing themselves from affective attachments to communities and family, especially (as Nelson posits) from their fathers; familial ties were replaced by loyalty to the corporation and its management. What Nelson calls “national manhood” thus emerges as a subjectivity that was crucial to the consolidation of a white settler capitalist state. Catano’s (2001) study of the emergence of the notion of the “self-made man” in the context of the American steel industry enriches this analysis by demonstrating how the iconic notion of self-making had a disciplinary effect on individual men, causing them to think of male success in individualized terms and as something that, subconsciously, was never entirely secure. This same concept helped stabilize a racially stratified society both by redirecting the energies of Black men towards the pursuit of successful “self-made” masculinity and by disavowing any structural explanations for race and class inequality. These analyses from Nelson and Catano suggest certain psychological effects of the production/subjection of dominant white men within the hegemony of white supremacist, colonialist capitalism; these men both benefited and paid a price – and managed this tension individually and internally. Kathryn Dean (2003) extends such analysis with reference to late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century globalization. She draws on the work of Marx, Freud, and Arendt to assert that globalized capitalism produces narcissistic individuals who are disconnected

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from communities, affectively infantilized (while expected to function as entrepreneurial self-made citizens to secure their own welfare needs in the absence of a paternalistic state or caring communities), and rendered psychologically incapable of empathic caring for the wider community of persons. Aihwa Ong (2006) theorizes an intensified suppression and erasure of the psychological impact of such processes. She identifies what she calls the “neoliberal anthropos,” the global capitalist subject who is educated and enterprising, internationally mobile, detached from any specific home place, and thus subjectified in such a manner as to be skilled at functioning efficiently and emotionlessly according to the needs of capitalist globalization. Such a theorization echoes Ashis Nandy’s observation, cited at the outset of this chapter, that colonialism produces the kind of hegemonic manliness required by the colonial-capitalist system. Occasionally, an important variation on this view of the capitalist subject appears in the construction of the “feeling man” (Hall, 1992; Pratt, 1992; Razack, 2004; Coleman, 2006). This is the manly subject who demonstrates his capacity to feel pain –others’, but also and especially his own – and to care, but invariably in a manner that reinstalls his own heroic centrality in history and that avoids recognizing and interrogating the sources of systemic social harm from which he typically benefits and acquires power: patriarchy, white supremacy, and so on. Scholars of Canadian identity and nationhood examine the production of Canadian national subjects and Canadian manhood. Thobani (2007) identifies the features of a particular racialized mythology of Canadian nationhood whose “exalted” subjects – law-abiding, tolerant, progressive, compassionate, committed to human rights and gender equality, and implicitly white – are imagined in relation to others (nominally Canadian but not fully received as such; i.e., racialized Canadians) who are frequently cast as deceitful, lawless, tradition-bound, clannish, and patriarchal.3 Daniel Coleman (2006), in his study of popular literature in Canada up to 1950, similarly identifies an idea of competent, virile, disciplined, and moral white masculinity that became central to the mythology of a white settler state whose exemplary feature was, simultaneously, economic progress and civility. An important aspect of this mythology was the idea that in Canada – unlike the United States – French and British colonizers had established a presence without armed force by developing friendly relations with the Indigenous populations. In this way, the dominant white entrepreneurial Canadian as civicminded “feeling subject” emerges as a central tenet of the narrative of

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Canada the Good. It does so in a manner that invigorates and seeks to legitimate a culture of whiteness. Sherene Razack (2004) and Barbara Heron (2007) then ask what happens when such Canadians, trained to imagine themselves in racially inflected terms as heroic white national subjects (i.e., exalted, civil, hard-working, risk-taking, friendly, and humane), travel into “developing countries” in the contemporary era. Respectively examining Canadian military “peacekeepers” in Somalia and female “development workers” in sub-Saharan Africa, Razack and Heron identify the features of a colonial imaginary in these subjects’ self-perceptions, perceptions of others, and actions in such contexts. In both instances, these Canadian persons’ presence and (sometimes violent) actions in the space of others entail a refusal to “know themselves as colonizers” – that is, a refusal to recognize their social positioning as colonizers along a historical and contemporary imperialist trajectory. Given Canada’s history as a colonizer state, such a refusal is clearly foundational to the subjectivity of the Canadian national subject. This tracing of the genealogical footings of the production of the modern white male capitalist subject offers an interpretive framework that stands in tension with, and challenges, modernity’s positing of the autonomous subject, the self-made man. It enables a particular way of reading the interview data collected from Canadian mining professionals; that is, it allows us to identify the structural project of neocolonialism, as well as the links among individual mining narratives and discourses common within the industry, and to comprehend how a particular idea of the individual self is fashioned and protected. As a further test of the validity of the research data, I compare content from the Mining Hall of Fame Inductees Web page. In the biographies of the inductees we find a set of repeated narrative tropes, constituting a discursive field, that vividly bring to life the figure theorized in the literature just reviewed. Of the 150 inductees, all but two were white or of European ancestry; all but one were men. The inductees to this prestigious Hall of Fame were mainly born in the twentieth century; a few of them lived through the early decades of Canadian nationhood in the late 1800s. Irrespective of the year of their birth, many are referred to as “pioneers” to describe their accomplishments in the field of mining. The figure of the white-man-as-pioneer is thus constructed, through repetition, as the quintessential Canadian national subject. Furthermore, these figures are described as persistent, problem-solving risk takers, as individualistic nation builders, and as patriotic nationalists – as people who “had faith” in and “believed in” their “native land.”

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Many came from rough, humble backgrounds and then rose to fame and fortune through hard work, street smarts, and determination; they learned how to prospect, find mines, strike it rich, take a gamble on a concession or penny stock, get lucky. They built mines, towns, and infrastructure, and they generated employment and wealth. Or, hailing from more sophisticated middle- or upper-class backgrounds, with access to graduate university education, they possessed unusual intelligence, geoscientific brilliance, and a talent for invention as they applied advanced scientific knowledge to challenging technical problems. They created new, world-class, leading-edge exploration and mineralprocessing technologies, and many became educators, university instructors. These were the “leading minds” in the field, and their intellectual vigour – at least in science – is emphasized. Recalling Dyer’s theorization of the complex white man, such subjects can rarely be reduced to any single attribute; they have a range of interests and talents. Many are not just smart, astute, and financially successful; they are also good managers as well as personable, humane, civic-minded souls – Thobani’s “exalted subjects” – who care about their “fellow man,” are philanthropists, and possess exemplary integrity. One inductee is described as “the quintessential gentleman geologist … with a natural ability to make enduring friendships.” Another “came to personify the industry … by the strength of his character, his integrity and his technical accomplishments.”4 Some are described as having excelled at developing improved environmental practices and improved safety systems. Lastly, some were shrewd financiers and venture capitalists – persons who excelled at making a good investment and “growing” money. To summarize, the 150 profiles of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame encompass individuals who were pioneers, risk-takers, “minefinders,” geoscientists, “gentlemen geologists,” nation builders, philanthropists, and shrewd investors. This is the virile subjectivity – with its diverse competencies – on which Canada’s contemporary global reputation as a leading mining nation rests. Yet the compelling and multifaceted figure produced by this discourse erases or obscures Canada’s “other” history – the bad-faith treaties, the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their territories and livelihoods, the violent suppression of unionism and strikes at mines, and racist labour and immigration policies. Such figures as the “quintessential gentleman geologist” are produced in such a way that they express nothing about these things. The Canadian mining subject who must remain silent about the domestic colonial capitalist history then

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generates the Canadian global mining subject who is similarly silent about global neo-colonial histories. Canadian Mining Professionals Operating in African Countries: A Profile The December 2010 issue of Canadian Mining Journal listed some thirty Canadian mining/exploration companies operating in African jurisdictions. The websites of those companies provide public data on their officials. In September 2011, when the data were examined, these companies were being governed and administered by 340 persons sitting either as company directors or as senior executives (CEOs, CFOs, chief geologists, etc.). Of these, information based on photographs and names suggests that only 27 (or 8 per cent) were women (11 directors, 16 senior staff). All of the company board chairs and all of the CEOs appeared to be male. At least 206 individuals appeared to be persons who could be identified as “white.” This is a conservative figure, for in many cases either the absence of a photo or a racially ambiguous photo precluded such identification. Twenty-one individuals (6 per cent) appeared to be Black Africans or African Canadians. As noted above, the Mining Hall of Fame is even more starkly homogeneous: among the 150 mining personalities inducted between 1989 and 2013, all but one are men and all but two are of European descent. Identifying and categorizing persons in racial terms on the basis of visible physical appearance – such as on the basis of a photograph – is fraught with ethical, political, and theoretical problems. Given that race and racial categories are social phenomena to begin with, to use such concepts would seem to risk reifying race as a bona fide biological fact; it also risks reducing complex identities to a single dimension, and risks assigning an identity that differs from a person’s self-defined social/ cultural identity. Why reference race at all if the notion of race has been definitively debunked within the fields of social and natural sciences? Colette Guillaumin (1995) observes that simply rejecting the notion of race is not enough. Denying its existence … can never … change the fact that while it may not be valid empirically, it certainly exerts an empirical effect. To claim that a notion which is present in a society’s vocabulary, i.e. in both its way of organizing the world and in its political and human history, can be negated in this way is a paradoxical position, because that which is negated has de facto existence. It is perhaps

170  Colonial Extractions also an attempt to take away the horror of that reality, its unbearable brutality: it is impossible that something of that kind should exist.5

And she continues even more acerbically: It is not possible to claim that the category which is the direct cause, the primary means, of the murder of millions of human beings does not exist … Unless anyone is prepared to claim that, since race does not exist, nobody is or can ever have been repressed or killed because of their race. And nobody can make that claim, because millions of human beings have died as a result of their race, and millions of others are now dominated, excluded and repressed for the same reason. No, race does not exist. And yet it does. Not in the way that people think; but it remains the most tangible, real and brutal of realities.6

It is for reasons similar to those Guillaumin articulates that some anti-racism scholars have advocated the collection of race-based “police profiling” statistics; they contend that doing so would explode illusions of neutral, “colour-blind” policing and show the extent to which certain people and certain neighbourhoods experience race-based discriminatory treatment.7 Refusing to “see race” in a racially stratified society – that is, refusing to acknowledge and analyse how power operates through socially constructed race categories – can operate to tacitly maintain racial distinctions and racist practices. If, drawing from Guillaumin’s insights, race as a social-historical fact organizes death for some, it organizes life for others. Understanding this life (i.e., not only physical survival but also good health and access to health care, a comfortable income, access to opportunities to learn and travel, longevity, and so on) as depending on race-based capitalist histories of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession, Martina Tifsberger (2005) identifies whiteness as a “history of seizure”: to “be white” or to “occupy a positionality of whiteness” means to benefit from, accept, participate in, organize, collude with, defend, and fail to question racially structured practices of seizure, plunder, and appropriation. Such atrocities invariably require individual and collective psychological responses and defences. South African scholar Melissa Steyn (2005) identifies whiteness, in its micro-dimensionality, as “the shared social space in which the psychological, cultural, political and economic dimensions of this privileged positionality are normalized and rendered unremarkable.”8 Rather than being understood principally as

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phenotype, whiteness is best conceptualized as a subjectivity of socially derived privilege; it is a position of dominance in a structural relation of power based on the debunked idea of race and on established socioeconomic race hierarchies arising from histories of seizure and dispossession. White phenotype is not a fixed category; it shifts and expands, sometimes contracts, and is moderated through other aspects of identity. Nor do the benefits of whiteness accrue only to those who appear phenotypically white; the benefits of whiteness can be partly extended to those who endorse and support its continuation. However, all those who access recognition as “white people” benefit to some extent from white supremacy and have been socialized to act in ways that stabilize and maintain this system of power. This includes seeing and interpreting the world from a position of whiteness. On these grounds I explain and defend the act of quantifying who appears as white within the governance and executive structures of the Canadian mining industry. Such quantification is relevant to understanding the social power of this sector. My examination of corporate website data and the Mining Hall of Fame’s index of inductees shows that the Canadian mining industry in general, and Canadian mining ventures in African countries in particular, are at the present time almost entirely controlled by white men. A further aspect of this collective identity becomes apparent when we map the mining professionals’ nationality or country of origin. In the sample of 340 directors and senior staff of Canadian mining companies with African operations, country where academic qualifications were earned was used as an indicator of nationality. The findings were as follows: 101 had obtained degrees in Canada; 41 in South Africa; 40 in the United States; 38 in the United Kingdom; 13 in Australia; and 37 in a range of other countries such as France, Russia, and New Zealand. These officials of Canadian mining companies thus appeared to be mainly Canadians, Americans, South Africans, British, French, or Australians – nationals of countries that were major colonial powers or white settler states and who are cosmopolitan white businessmen and geoscientists able to move rather freely around the globe. By comparison, of the 150 Canadian Mining Hall of Fame inductees, 112 were Canadian-born, while the remaining 38 had immigrated to Canada from the United States (14), the United Kingdom (10), South Africa, Australia, France, Norway, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. Finally, if whiteness also includes or overlaps with elite social class and political power, it is also important to point out that a number of the directors of Canadian mining companies with current African interests

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held senior positions in the Canadian government. Similarly, several of the Black African directors currently held, or had held in the past, senior government positions in their respective countries. Introducing the Research Participants The biographical data I collected from interviews supports the general profile obtained from the corporate websites. The interviews were obtained by shortlisting and systematically contacting thirty-one Canadian companies that had significant mining or mineral exploration projects in African countries. Ultimately, I conducted eighteen interviews, each of which lasted between one and two hours.9 Eight of these interviewees were employees of “majors” (companies with producing mines in more than one country and operations valued at more than $10 million); two were with “mid-tier” companies (involved in production and operations valued at between $4 and $10 million); and eight were employees of “junior” exploration companies (engaged in the exploration phase only and with assets valued between $145,000 to $4.3 million). Some of the latter companies have since been purchased by larger companies and have gone into production. Collectively, these persons had worked professionally in mining sectors in the following African countries: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter DRC), Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Many had also worked in Canada, the United States, Australia, and some South American and Asian countries as well. My letter of invitation to participate in the research specified that the research was designed to document some of the cross-cultural, day-to-day non-technical challenges and issues that Canadian mining companies encounter when working in African countries. The research seeks to understand and analyze the experiences and perspectives of Canadian mining industry professionals. Questions will be posed concerning Canadian employees’ inter-actions and experiences with host nationals and local communities. Interviewees will be invited to comment on aspects of the social context and policy framework of mining in the African countries where they have worked.

My letter of invitation to companies to participate in the research did not stipulate any gender, racial, or ethnic criteria – only that

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interviewees be Canadian citizens or landed immigrants, and mining professionals, and that they had a minimum of two years’ work-related experience in mining in an African setting. With a single exception, the interviewees turned out to be middle-aged (40 to 65 years old) white men. Significantly, the one interviewee who was not a “middle-aged white man” expressed views and opinions that largely reproduced the same themes, attitudes, and perspectives that I heard repeatedly in all the interviews. However, there was one outstanding difference in this interview: this was the only interviewee who explicitly referred to racism as a dynamic in the relations between some Canadian companies and local African communities/citizens. Apart from this significant difference in what this interviewee had observed and was prepared to name and report in the context of an interview, on the whole this person self-performed discursively in ways very similar to all of the other Canadian mining professionals. This reinforces the notion of whiteness (intersecting with class status) as a social position; it also reveals the disciplinary power of dominant institutions to “script” prescribed subjectivities. Given Canada’s century of experience in mining, I expected most of the interviewees to have grown up in Canadian mining towns and/or to have had long connections to the Canadian mining industry. As it turned out, ten out of eighteen interviewees (i.e., more than half) had immigrated to Canada, two in childhood and eight as adults, and all but one from a European country. By comparison, among the 150 Mining Hall of Fame inductees, only 25 per cent had immigrated to Canada; 75 per cent were Canadian-born. This difference may suggest that persons who have already experienced immigration from one continent to another are more likely to be, or more willing to be, globally mobile in their professional mining work; it may also indicate a weaker personal investment in, or history of connection to, Canada. Only one of the interviewees had grown up in a Canadian mining town, and only two had family members (fathers) who had worked directly in mining. In other words, most of the interviewees had entered the Canadian mining industry as adults without strong community or family traditions in mining. Most had made their own way into professional mining careers through university education in mining-related disciplines. (Similarly, few of the Mining Hall of Fame inductees had family roots in mining; most came into the business through their own interest, initiative, and/ or professional training as geologists or through other related fields, such as science or finance.) As a group, the interviewees possessed

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higher-than-average educational achievement. Two held a PhD in geoscience; ten held an MSc – in some cases, in addition to an MA or MBA; and all but one held a BSc, usually in geology. These findings are supported by the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame data: of 150 inductees, 58 possessed an MA or PhD in a mining-related field. Given that most of the inductees were born before 1940, this is quite remarkable and corroborates government and industry depictions of the mining sector as employing a greater proportion of persons with advanced degrees than other comparable industries, and of paying higher-than-average wages and salaries. The interviewees’ educational achievements seemed to validate dominant myths of meritocracy: the self-made man who gets ahead and succeeds not through inherited wealth (or other unearned or aristocratic privileges) but through education, discipline, and hard work. Several interviewees explicitly attributed their success to self-discipline and hard work (such as the ability to start work every day at 5:30 a.m.) and to acquired expert knowledge – for instance, knowing how to raise risk capital and where to deploy it. Not surprisingly, there was no indication of awareness of race, gender, or class privilege as possible factors in their success. To acquire some indication of the social-class origins of the interviewees, I asked what their parents’ occupations had been. Although I specifically asked about parents’ occupations, seven of the eighteen respondents did not mention their mothers’ occupation at all; of those who did, half described their mother as “not working” or as “housewife” (as one interviewee tersely stated: “Mother, not employed at all. Housewife.”) In many other cases, mothers worked as nurses. The father’s occupation included professional engineer, soldier, farmer, or small business owner. More elite professions included doctor, lawyer, or academic. Only two interviewees reported a “blue collar” father. Coming out of generally middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds, interviewees were now successfully established and working professionally in mining ventures in many different African countries (and often in other parts of the globe as well), where they often had a degree of access to the local political and monied elite that, as several openly acknowledged, they would not experience in Canada or in their country of birth. At this point in their adult lives, the interviewees had accumulated considerable work experience in the mining industry. Ten had between twenty-five and forty years’ experience in mining – indeed, three had work experience in African countries dating back to

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the mid-1960s. Only two interviewees had less than ten years’ experience. Ten of the eighteen held the position of president or CEO of their company; others were chief geologist, VP Finance, VP Exploration, VP Corporate Relations, or VP Public Relations. In other words, these welleducated white men from middle-class backgrounds, many of them immigrants, had acquired positions of authority, status, and considerable financial and political clout in the context of operating junior, midtier, and senior Canadian mining and mining exploration companies with global “positions.” When I was designing the research, it seemed unlikely to me that busy professionals would see the point of, or be willing to recount, personal/ private narratives. The interviews focused mainly on the social and political aspects of mining in African countries and were not designed to plumb the participants’ emotional or psychological reactions to their experiences. Even so, some of the interview data pointed to the kinds of psychological moves associated with managing the “cognitive dissonance” produced by colonialist violence and dispossession of others.10 Conclusions about psychological discomfort, harm, defensiveness, fear, or anxiety experienced, internalized, or otherwise managed by racially dominant subjects can be only provisionally drawn from the interview data. Indeed, the interviewees’ typical silence on such matters can be understood as part of the ideological system that keeps intact the personae of white male professionals as competent, psychologically stable, and invulnerable – and thus as best suited to manage the global economy. I was attuned at the outset of the interviews to discourses that would enable these mining professionals to narrate themselves in complex terms as both successful entrepreneurs and innocent, well-intentioned, “feeling men.” By the late 1990s, the sustainable development discourse and policy framework had been widely popularized and disseminated by Canadian governments’ natural resources departments and by leaders in the global mining industry. The concept of sustainable development lent itself well to dispelling or at least refiguring the tensions and contradictions within the global mining sector. So I expected to hear accounts of Canadian mining professionals as sustainable development actors. There were some references to this discourse, but not nearly as many as I had expected. What emerged far more forcefully in the interviews was a much older narrative paradigm – a form of vintage colonial discourse. This discourse encompassed overt racist commentary and a theme of capitalist success. Within each of these narrative strands, some

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interviewees were eloquent and masterful, while others spoke more bluntly and with less finesse. Canadian mining professionals can be strategically selective in their choice of narratives without fundamentally altering the terms of the project in which they are engaged. Such narratives provide insights into how mining professionals selectively identify and characterize themselves in the context of global mining operations, and, indirectly, how the wider society may be managing its knowledge of, and benefits from, lucrative mining in African countries. I turn now to present three “faces” – narrations-of-self – that emerged from the interviews: “Colonial Explorers,” “Good Canadians,” and “Callous Capitalists.” Conceiving Ourselves as Colonial Explorers

“Mud Huts” and Pigs: Inferiorizing the Racial Other This is the characteristic which completes this portrait, the colonialist resorts to racism. It is significant that racism is part of colonialism throughout the world; and it is no coincidence. Racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized.11

Albert Memmi’s key insight from his classic text The Colonizer and the Colonized provides a framework for identifying crude, overt racism in the interview data. In the first interview conducted, the interviewee produced a litany of contemptuous statements that continued almost unrelentingly. This interviewee asserted that the people of the country where his company was operating were incompetent, unskilled, ignorant, corrupt, greedy, and destructive. He made openly contemptuous statements: “If you drive through the area, you won’t even see them [local people] because they live in mud huts. … People living with pigs in mud huts is not culture.” Such cultureless, uncultured, or primitive people are implicitly unentitled and incapable of developing their land and resources; rather, the land and mineral resources must be legitimately available for proper economic development via foreign investors who have real “culture,” technology, and capital. By implication, this interviewee had what was really needed – capital and talent – to develop the resource sector in this particular African country. While this interviewee was notably extreme in his commentary, other interviewees voiced similar views only slightly less bluntly. One person, for instance, after reminiscing fondly about the “excellent

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lifestyle … Olympic-size swimming pools, cricket clubs, rugby clubs, squash clubs, eighteen-hole championship golf course” that characterized life for mining company expatriates in southern African countries in the era leading up to and following independence in the early 1960s, contrasted this with the deterioration that allegedly set in following independence and the nationalization of mining industries in many states: I: Not one coat of paint had been added, not one thing fixed for twenty

years, except a general degradation to everything, and of course you had to remember that roads were much poorer, all the infrastructure was breaking down, and that was essentially a condition of that all the expats, or let’s put it this way, a great degree of the expats had left, and things were just going to the dogs. It’s as simple as that. PB: So is that what you attribute it to? I: Oh yes. Definitely. PB: The departure of the expats. I: Sure.

Such commentary was echoed by other interviewees: People don’t think ahead – it’s the same all over Africa. We need oil and diesel for the machines to work, and then we find out we’re out of oil and diesel because no one has thought ahead. And that’s the reason why in my opinion they need us to do something. And they will admit that I’m sure. They will admit that if they want to have something working properly, on a bigger scale than just a private, small operation, they’ll need some organization from outside.

That such “old-fashioned” racist attitudes are alive, and part of a wider contemporary discursive field, is evident when we consider a few other sources. For instance, the keynote speech of the PDAC annual international convention in Toronto in 2002 – a conference attended by some seven thousand people, including the mining ministers of many African countries – included the following comments: The end of the cold war seemed to herald a whole new geography in which explorers could get busy. A decade later we are for the most part back in the old familiar places. What happened? For the most part newly emerging countries have been unable to come up with sensible mining

178  Colonial Extractions laws despite the abundant examples provided by the countries with vibrant mining industries and the attempts by all involved in exploration to provide examples. Most former communist countries just do not understand how private sector exploration works and many developing countries just cannot govern themselves.”12 (emphasis added)

To make such a statement in a keynote speech at a high-profile industry event indicates how routine and unremarkable such views must be within the global mining industry. The transcript of the Bill C-300 SCFAIT hearings held in Ottawa during 2009–10 offers further examples. For instance, there is dense repetition, primarily by witnesses representing federal departments and the mining industry, of the “lack of capacity” on the part of “developing countries” to manage and govern their mining sectors. This is why CIDA and DFAIT have identified “capacity building” as a central tenet of their engagement with developing nations’ resource sectors. One member of the parliamentary committee expressed this theme in particularly blunt terms: “It might also be said amongst ourselves that most of these states cannot manage their own resources” (emphasis added).13 The consistency of such statements with those of my interviewees, as noted above, is quite striking. Taken together, they demonstrate the existence of “everyday” or “commonsense” racism – unquestioned shared assumptions about social reality that operate to entrench hegemonic (and here, white supremacist) power relations. These examples also demonstrate the slippage between overt, crude racist statements and ostensibly “acceptable” coded forms such as were expressed by government officials during the C-300 hearings. Coded “white talk” is, it would seem, simply the visible portion of a submerged iceberg of tenacious racist attitudes. Countering the view of Canada and Canadians as multicultural, tolerant, and non-racist, such examples provide empirical evidence of a classic racist-colonialist world view in the contemporary Canadian mining industry and its governmental counterparts. Such discourses coexist with the ostensibly “colour-blind” languages of “sustainable development,” “rule of law,” and “fiscal and regulatory frameworks.” These expressions of overt racism, when they appear in the Canadian mining industry, are not aberrations – the statements of a few “bad apples” – but predictable manifestations of the submerged racialized cultural imaginary of a white settler capitalist state and one of its major institutions, the mining industry.

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Risk-Taking Explorers in Wild Lands Not all interviewees produced overtly racist commentary. Indeed, many were keen to represent themselves in more innocent terms, as operating in African countries simply for the adventure and the love of discovery. In chapter 3, I provided an example of the romanticized mining narratives that characterized early settler accounts of mining in Canada. We encountered similar narratives in the biographies of Canadian Mining Hall of Fame inductees: Canada was a pristine, remote wilderness that offered “immense possibilities of adventure, fortune and commerce.” Similar imagery was found in the interviewees’ accounts of Africa, which suggests that pioneering has been strongly mythologized in the Euro-Canadian imaginary. The African continent’s geological provenance was often described as unexplored, underexplored, unmapped – Africa, that is, was a frontier region where it was still possible for small, enterprising, risk-taking Canadian exploration companies and their investors to acquire exceptional “positions.” One interviewee expressed this in particularly vivid terms: It’s still an exotic place, it’s sort of the dark continent, it’s you know the last frontier kind of thing and it’s a great opportunity because I think there hasn’t been a lot of money spent on proper exploration there. … It’s the discovery really is what it is, I mean in a lot of places whether it’s northern Quebec or northern Ontario or even West Africa, you know, you’re going across some places where people have never looked for gold before and with the techniques these days, modern techniques, or even basic techniques that maybe people have never used before, you’re walking across a piece of ground that looks normal and then, you know, with exploration and soil sampling and geophysics or whatever, you recognize that it’s a good place and then we take some samples and we do some drilling and then you know we find something that is new and exciting, and that, the discovery is really the best part about it, that’s what I like.

The mythology of exploration and pioneering is productive and appealing because it acknowledges foreign presence in African lands while narrating that presence as a good thing – as an admirable, romantic story of discovery, development, and technical success.14 The 2002 PDAC keynote address again offers supporting evidence of the widespread appeal within the industry of the imagery of exploration:

180  Colonial Extractions It takes explorers with vision to use the limited real facts we are always faced with in geology and see opportunities where others hindered by a little learning do not. An ability to understand what we do not know and a willingness to persist … are necessary prerequisites of the successful explorer … In conclusion, for the past fifty years, confidence, vision, persistence and boldness have been the essential ingredients for successful mineral exploration, tempered by luck and enabled by bootleather, good field observation and the drill. At the start of the 21st century these remain the key elements.15

Such discourse normalizes, legitimizes, dramatizes, and romanticizes – in short, mythologizes – the role of “the white man” in present-day mining exploration and development. At the same time, it constructs a very specific type of masculinity. The contemporary mining subject is vigorously interpellated as confident, bold, astute, technologically savvy, and a man of success. Symbolically, he is someone who wears sturdy leather boots; with these he stomps persistently and masterfully over rugged landscapes. The colonial imagery of exploration makes it possible to see how the Euro-Canadian mineral explorer in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century uncharted Canadian landscape reappears as the Euro-Canadian mineral explorer in a twenty-firstcentury uncharted African landscape. Moreover, the imagery of exploration displays and disseminates a hypermasculine subject who does crazy things, takes risks, confronts danger. Given the role of guns as another symbol of hypermasculinity, it seemed noteworthy that four of my interviewees cited hunting as a favourite pastime.16 One commented: “I’m an avid hunter. That’s my sort of – release everything.” When I asked what he liked to hunt, he replied, “Anything. I’m a semicompetitive shooter I guess, which is a bit like mineral exploration, it’s like hunting.” Both hunters and mineral explorers, as frontier heroes, function within wilderness spaces, take risks, and face the unseen, the unpredictable, and the potentially dangerous. Similarly, the video accompanying international diamond discoverer Charles Fipke’s induction in 2013 to the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame emphasizes his risk-taking fearlessness: Narrator: “During his career, Chuck had many close calls, including fight-

ing cerebral malaria and surviving a helicopter crash.” Fipke: “I don’t have a lot of fear, I don’t really fear anything … it’s crazy.

I should fear more.”17

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For other interviewees, part of the appeal of geology and of “Africa” was the opportunity, or licence, to “go wild.” One interviewee stated: “I was really sort of an outdoorsy kind of person and geology is really the ultimate profession for somebody like that. Because it incorporates all of the sciences and you can get out and howl. Do crazy things. Jump out of helicopters. Stake claims. Have fun.” Significantly, however, representations of “Africa” as a frontier space are not identical to representations of Canadian frontier/wilderness space. One interviewee, in comparing his experiences mining in northern Canada with mining in West Africa, observed that “in Canada, you can drink water out of moose tracks” (i.e., that’s how pristine the Canadian North is), whereas in rural West Africa, he would fear to drink from parasite-infested streams. In short, “Africa” as a frontier space in the white imperial imaginary is ultimately more formidable, less predictable, and more dangerous. The explorer is less certain of his ability to tame and domesticate it – or it may require more violence and force to do so. From this perspective, to hunt for minerals in African settings is possibly to risk one’s life: I: The easy mineral deposits are all gone in the world so in order to find some-

thing and develop something particularly good you have to go to the tough places, and some of the best undeveloped mineral deposits are in places like [name of African country] so we need to be there. But I don’t need to be there professionally. From a personal standpoint I’d prefer not to be. PB: Personally you wouldn’t choose to be there. I: No, it’s tough on your health, tough on everything. It’s expensive. But it’s where the rich deposits are, so you have to go there.

This interviewee carried on with an account of the danger of flying into these tough regions – of how he dutifully and, as it were, sacrificially engaged in the civilizing project of economic development. This interviewee’s willingness to face life-threatening risks rendered him a hero rather than a colonizer or usurper. Many interviewees listed health hazards and safety risks – even possible death – as a prominent “white man’s burden” that had to be assumed as part of the pioneering task of developing lucrative African mineral fields. These discourses foreground the risks and dangers to the dominant subject and render invisible the risks, dangers, and threats to life borne by local or Indigenous inhabitants. By deploying these discourses in public spaces, such as a conference or an interview, Canadian mining professionals defensively

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narrate themselves as innocent subjects and their presence in African countries as innocuous. One variation on this theme features innocent subjects who experience unfair opposition and attack. Good Guys, Inside a Fortress, Besieged The prevalence of imagery of besiegement in the interview data is striking. The Canadian landscape is marked from coast to coast with forts and fortresses, some of them now museums; the iconography of walled defence against (external) threat seemingly trains the Canadian imagination. Inside the fort is European order, reason, discipline, law, and provisions; outside is non-European wildness, danger, violence, famine, and disease. This imagery of the fort is further reinforced by the everyday culture of “westerns”18 (movies and popular novels), Rambo-type films, and television crime shows. This public familiarity with the fortress as a founding myth of Canadian settler nationhood seems to provide Canadian mining professionals in twenty-first-century African contexts with a pre-scripted sense of self as civilizers and heroes – as men who will, when necessary, and speaking metaphorically, fight the bad guys outside the fort. One interviewee, who described himself as having sacrificed time and money in a particular African country, was incensed and injured by local people’s and government officials’ failure to appreciate what he was offering (economic development, jobs, etc.). He saw his company as the victim of deliberate attempts to undermine it and prevent mine development from proceeding. Posing as a harbinger of modern development bringing millions of dollars in investment, this interviewee was amazed and infuriated to find himself under what he construed as constant attack by those he perceived himself as trying to help. He particularly resented being given instructions and being subjected to critique by female government officials of the host country: “She said we are not employing enough Black nationals. I almost walked out. I’ve invested $25 million in [the country]. I don’t need this crap.” Another interviewee represented himself as a victim of discriminatory rules – once again, a moral subject besieged – because as a foreigner, he was obliged to pay higher fees than the citizens of this African country to obtain and renew exploration and mining licences. He felt entitled to a level playing field for all people, including the [citizens of the country] and the foreign investors that come in, not having the foreign investor

Narratives of Canadian Mining Professionals in African States  183 have to pay $15,000 for a concession and a [citizen] only having to pay $500. A foreign company has to pay US$7,500 to renew a concession and [citizens] fifty bucks.

In his view, everybody should pay the same for a concession. You should develop the property, you’re developing it not only on behalf of your company but on behalf of the country, because the country’s got overriding royalties, they’ve got carried interest and they’ve got taxes. So that’s how you make it beneficial for all of the [citizens], okay is to encourage people to come in without trying to rape them on up-front costs.

The (neo)colonizer uses metaphors of sexual violence to portray himself as victimized. In this interviewee’s comments, there was a striking reversal of colonialist patterns of violence. At one point he told me that the African host-government authorities defended what he perceived as discriminatory treatment on the grounds that he, and other foreign investors, were from rich countries and therefore had to pay more for their licences. This subject then attempted to distinguish between being a “rich person” from being a citizen of a “rich country.” The latter, he argued, did not imply the former. In his view, he was unfairly besieged both by the rules-making authority of the African host government and by the accusation that he was structurally (and implicitly racially) privileged. He wanted to be treated on an imagined level playing field as a generic individual, not differentiated as “an individual from a rich country,” yet he was hypocritically quick to draw on the diplomatic services of the Canadian government to advocate on his behalf: “we put some pressure on them with the Canadian High Commission and we put pressure on the [African country] High Commission here in Canada, so we’re not scared to go over people’s heads.” A sense of besiegement on the part of colonizers often leads to a display of superior force. The imagery of besiegement, with its classic reversal of victims and perpetrators, appeared in another interviewee’s description of what he regarded as escalating violence directed at white expatriates and affluent locals: I: Well people are getting murdered … It’s all happened in the last twelve to

eighteen months, it’s exploded. PB: Wow, and who is being murdered, and by whom?

184  Colonial Extractions I: Well, the expats are being murdered, and the locals of means are being

slaughtered, but by whom, when you speak to [nationals of country] it’s always the refugees, so you’ll never really find out. But there are incidents – I mean the chief of police in [ ––– ] was shot because he was carrying money, just about seven months ago.

This interviewee went on to acknowledge that armed attackers were attempting mainly to steal vehicles and money, two things that foreign mining companies happened to possess. Other interviewees expressed a sense of unjust besiegement with regard to accusations by activist groups that their companies were involved in violations of human rights or ecological devastation. Collectively, these anecdotes expressed a sense of injury – moral subjects were being unfairly targeted and attacked. The interviewees were construing themselves as vulnerably located in a position of danger and unpredictability and as obliged to be constantly on the defence against irrational objections to, and contestations of, their beneficial presence. These “besiegement” narratives can perhaps be interpreted as suggesting that Canadian mining professionals are subconsciously aware of colonialist injustices and must therefore engage in psychological gymnastics to deny, reframe, and eradicate the discomfort produced by such knowledge. It perhaps also points to the existence of an entrenched national mythology, part of the national psyche of a white settler-colonizer state as it were, in which the presence of European forts in territories of Indigenous peoples signifies a deployment of power and a complex set of relationships that remain troubling to confront and must therefore be renarrated. Another interviewee presented himself as having arrived in an African country with a dream of development, engaging in mining to bring modernizing benefits to the country and local communities. Despite these good intentions, his own employees turned against him; he too ended up in a metaphorical fortress fighting the bad guys on the outside. One year at Christmas, he – generously, in his view – distributed 50 kilogram bags of maize flour and sugar among the mine employees before leaving for his vacation. On his return, his house had been “stripped,” and he was obliged to involve the local police to retrieve his possessions from the workers’ compounds. He said he supposed the workers considered it a kind of “redistribution of wealth” – something he could laugh about now but that had “depressed” him at the time. Here, Memmi’s observations on the limits of colonizers’ benevolent paternalism are pertinent: “The most generous paternalism revolts

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as soon as the colonized demands his union rights, for example. If he increases his wages, if his wife looks after the colonized, these are gifts and never duties. If he recognized duties, he would have to admit that the colonized have rights.”19 This interviewee’s besiegement anecdote encapsulated, in micro terms, many of the main features of the contemporary neo-colonial situation. A hierarchy of status and power is clear: the white foreign investor renders himself innocent of any potentially exploitative role through acts of charity, demonstrating largesse towards the “natives,” who are supposed to be grateful (i.e., for the flour and sugar). But the “natives” want something different: perhaps they want a greater share; possibly they want what the mine owner has; or they want the mine owner to leave their lands; or perhaps they want “justice.” The law, however, does not support their desires or their working out of what their desires are; they have to act outside the law to express those desires. The legal framework protects white Western privilege and property and thus becomes identifiable as part of the architecture of colonialist violence. The liberalized mining and investment laws of the post-1989 era have privileged foreign investors; and meanwhile, the civil law, enforced by the local police, has allowed the foreign white investor to retrieve his (illegitimate) material wealth and has reconstituted local citizen-employees as criminals on their own land. The white investor then performs himself as the traumatized victim – becoming depressed – as a result of this experience of violation. He performs himself as a “feeling man.” This is a classic narrative of twenty-first-century colonialist resource extraction. One final “besiegement” story reworks the elements of the fortress imagery. This interviewee recounted being at a remote exploration site in a southern African country and having the camp attacked at night by armed bandits. He ended up with personal undercover military protection arranged by the “host” government: By the end of about an hour we’d been shot at and stuff like that, bad guys out in the dark shooting in towards the camp where we had lights, which is a really bad idea, but we didn’t think that we were going to get shot at, so the next day, I radioed the head office in [city], there was some discussion, we drove 50 km to a police station in a little village, police didn’t have any vehicles or anything like that, there’s nothing, nobody could do anything, we were basically just sitting ducks, but about three or four days later, a couple of Toyota Landcruisers showed up in the camp with – I

186  Colonial Extractions forget what the title is now, I can’t remember his name – the essentially the Colin Powell of [country] – the chief of the military, he was like a political figure but also the head of the military, so this guy shows up in unmarked vehicles, un-uniformed, with a couple of security guys that were armed, and he has lunch with us, and he says, “Mr. – , I recommend that you get a gun, and if you see these [bandits] in the camp again, kill them. And we’ll come and pick up the bodies.” And I said, well, “Mr. – -, I’m not a mercenary, I’m just a rock-jock, I’d rather not do that,” and he says, “yeah, if you’d rather not do that, you probably won’t have to because now we’ll plant security people in the area and those people will be found, and they will disappear.” That’s how much they want – you know, they don’t want foreigners to be shot at and scared away, they want them to stay there, they want them to work, they want them to try to find things.

This narrative reproduces in classic terms the American Western frontier imagery of vulnerable civilizing subjects surrounded and attacked by lawless Others. The narrator constructs himself in quintessential terms: he is a decent guy, a harmless, peace-loving earth scientist, someone who will bring economic development to this country that is not even his own. He is good to the point of naivety: he left the lights on in the camp because it never occurred to him that they might be attacked. He is not there to cause anyone any harm; rather, he is there to “find things,” to make geological discoveries. This narrative ends on a different note than the others I have included: he is left in a better position, secure and well-protected against “the bad guys out in the dark.” Moreover, he has obtained this security without performing any act of violence himself. As is typical of the colonialist order, the armed force that is engaged to protect his white body and white privilege against African resentment and entitlement is embodied in other Africans – and paid for by the host African country. Clearly, the structural elements require the cultural element – that is, the white foreign investor in African mineral resources is protected against a threat by a co-opted African host-state government whose interests are allied with foreigners against African citizens, thus reinforcing a story of white innocence, goodness, and besiegement. This scenario allows the besieged Canadian mining professional to demonstrate his superior cultural traits by refusing violence; he towers morally in the African landscape through subjectification not as a mercenary but rather as a harmless geologist: “just a rock jock.” Having scripted himself in terms of this colonialist cultural imaginary, he is psychologically

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equipped and positioned to appropriate African mineral wealth without qualms. Claiming Ourselves as Good Canadians In analysing the forms of legitimization of colonial domination, Mbembe identifies claims of goodness as a classic strategy: The [colonial] state that flows from this sovereignty defines itself as protective. The native is its protégé. The strength of this state lies as much in the feeling that arises from the right to protect the weak as from the hardheaded quest for metropolitan profit. Its strength is a strength for good and goodness.20

European colonial powers routinely represented themselves as bringing civilization, Christianity, literacy and education, superior legal systems, advanced technology, infrastructure, and so on – all ostensibly good things. Canada’s own history as a colonizer-state has given rise to a particularly strong version of the narrative of goodness – and, more precisely, of whiteness as goodness – at the heart of Canadian national mythology. On the international stage, figures like Stephen Lewis and Roméo Dallaire have functioned as icons of Canadian goodness and humble but passionate heroism. As noted earlier, a subjectivity that emerged repeatedly in the Mining Hall of Fame inductee profiles was that of the “gentleman geologist”: the figure who improved mine safety standards, gave back to the community through philanthropy, employed Indigenous people, and/or was a caring and effective manager. So it is not surprising that variations on the theme of the Good Canadian turned out to be among the most common stories produced in the interviews. “Just Rock-Jocks” The interviewees often claimed that their presence in African mining was driven entirely by a fascination with rocks and rock formations – with the science of geology. Adopting the subjectivity of the knowledgeproducing earth scientist is one of the easiest ways for contemporary Canadian mining professionals to “secure innocence” and distance themselves from concepts such as capitalist exploitation and resource plunder. Such claims were expressed in many of the Mining Hall of

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Fame inductees’ profiles. To cite just one example, Robert William Boyle (1920–2003) “developed a fascination with and love for science and the natural world.”21 Similarly, many interviewees represented themselves as having a romantic attraction to and fascination with “the biology of the earth.” Their presence in African countries was the result of an apolitical, objective, scientific fascination with African geological formations: It wasn’t so much an attraction to mining but rather an attraction to geology. I had read geology books and geology fascinated me. I didn’t want a desk job and I enjoyed and preferred working outdoors, and my two choices were, the two options at the time that were appealing were forestry and natural resources, earth sciences, and I chose earth sciences … The deposits are beautiful, and for a mining engineer, when you have beautiful deposits, it’s always, then you are a good mining engineer. Ah, I’ve worked in [ ––– ] underground mine in [African country], you know, that’s a beautiful mine, [name of another mine] underground mine – beautiful deposit, it’s a dream, it’s really nice, so it’s really enjoyable and you can do a lot of things that you cannot, in my opinion, do anywhere else, even in America.

Because their fascination was with geology as a natural entity, as nature, the mining professionals I interviewed could securely represent their interventions as apolitical and thus innocent. Lurking in their comments was a representation of nature both as an object of love/ admiration/interest and as something that could be mastered, brought under control, and used. There is extensive documentation of how this sort of classic sexualized colonial imagery casts resource-rich newly found lands as like women’s bodies in a patriarchal world, available for both loving and dominating/raping.22 Some interviewees drew on this imagery, emphasizing the love/romance aspect. This stood in some contrast to the manner in which the industry routinely treats metals and minerals as impersonal, technical, prehistorical entities. Technical presentations at mining conferences and articles in The Northern Miner are typified more by statements like the following: “Deeper diamond drilling will be carried out to evaluate the nature and nickel content of the underlying peridotite host rock below the nickeliferous laterite.”23

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A cumulative effect of such technical discourse is to characterize mining as a non-political and non-social activity; this renders mining professionals such as geologists unthinkable as political subjects engaged in racialized relations of power. Virtuous Subjects: “Doing Good Wherever We Are” Another turn of the kaleidoscope leaves behind the innocent, apolitical “rock jock” and gives us another subject-variation: the virtuous Canadian who does good in the world – the “gentleman geologist.” As I have already indicated, there is an extensive literature (Coleman, 2006; Thobani, 2007; Lozanski, 2007; Heron, 2007) that identifies the intense preoccupation of white settler states with legitimizing their existence through processes that include strategic forgetting and the establishment of national identities of goodness, sensitivity, and virtue. It could be said that a settler-state like Canada is caught up in an ongoing process of managing the contradiction between functioning as – to use Memmi’s distinctions – a “colonizer who accepts” and a “colonizer who refuses.” That is, between someone who embraces and benefits from the colonialist project, and someone who, altruistic yet full of angst, speaks out against colonial injustice albeit while still benefiting from it. A classic expression of this tension occurred during one of the national round tables on CSR organized by the Canadian government in the fall of 2006. Many witnesses provided accounts of human rights violations and environmental harms at Canadian mining and exploration sites in the global South. A mining industry executive defended the industry, starting off by saying: “I consider myself a very decent person.” This statement captures one of the most common and most visceral claims of the Canadian mining professionals I interviewed: the virtuous subject’s claim of fundamental decency and goodness – a claim that is narrated as quintessentially Canadian. Before proceeding with some of the many examples of this, we must acknowledge that some interviewees critiqued and even ridiculed Canada, and Canadian policy, as “too soft.” This is a clear example of how a turn of the kaleidoscope produces a startlingly different image – still without changing any of the constituent parts. For these interviewees, mythologies of Canadian goodness were liabilities that inhibited white diasporic capitalist expansion and exploitation. With its alleged concerns for social welfare, environmental responsibility, and Aboriginal rights, Canadian-ness was cast by some as an identity that hobbled

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their aggressive capitalist aspirations. This limited the scope to act, to take risks, to acquire positions, to dominate the sector and maximize profits. One interviewee put it this way: “Because we’re too good, we’re good guys. Oh, we think we’re wonderful. We’re wonderful good guys. We’re the laughing stock of the bloody world.” Canada was critiqued by some for being too soft, too kind, to the point of being naive, gullible. As various interviewees stated: “we don’t actually know what the hell’s going on in the world”; “we sit on the fence because we don’t want to offend anyone”; “we’re at the beck and call of Aboriginal groups”; “we can’t solve our problems in our own backyard with Aboriginals”; “Canadians don’t make good expats, they’re too kind and gullible.” The frustration was sometimes palpable. There were too many environmental regulations; labour costs were too high; anti-mining and corporate responsibility activists were too vocal; and Indigenous peoples in Canada had acquired too much political clout, including rights of informed consent regarding decisions to develop mineral-rich lands. In cases like Newfoundland and Labrador’s Voisey’s Bay nickel discovery, long-term political and social considerations were castigated for having slowed down negotiations and licensing procedures. What they construed as emasculated or “soft” social justice concerns had made mining too costly and cumbersome in Canada, especially compared to African countries. One interviewee stated: Now you look at how difficult it is, I mean with Aboriginal land claims, environmentalism, Brian Tobin-like figures … Brian Tobin stepped in, you know, the People’s Republic of Newfoundland, and put a lid on the [Voisey’s Bay] deal … There’s just more and more restrictions on you all the time and finally you feel like, I can’t move anymore – let’s just go somewhere else. Like let’s go to Africa.

Such a statement was startling for the blunt manner in which it undercut dominant representations of the good Canadian; here, a Canadian miner was poised and eager to plunder resources, and if he couldn’t do it at home, he’d go to “Africa.” Such ostensibly anti-Canadian commentary is important for what it may signal with regard to internal tensions concerning the meaning of Canadian-ness and for its indication of a shifting Canadian national identity. In recent years, in both military and economic arenas, Canada has assumed a more hegemonic hypermasculine identity on the world stage.24 The data from my interviews suggest that

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leading actors in the Canadian mining sector may be contributing significantly to such a shift, as such a refabrication of Canadian national identity may be regarded as part of what is needed for Canada to acquire and maintain a dominant global role in mining in an increasingly polarized and volatile global economy. The interview data also suggest that, at least for some Canadian mining professionals, there is nothing particularly nationalistic in their identification as Canadians or as Canadian companies. Such an identification is, rather, instrumental, and can be understood as an example of Aihwa Ong’s “neoliberal anthropos”: the global capitalist subject who holds only the thinnest attachment to any particular home place. Canadian national identity arguably functions as a strategic tool in service of white diasporic capitalist aspirations. Despite the counter-narration I have just acknowledged, narratives of Canadian goodness remain extremely useful. Widely and vigorously disseminated, such narratives contribute to producing the mesmerization that is central to twenty-first-century forms of colonialist domination. Such narratives continue to be deployed strategically, whether consciously or unconsciously, to legitimize Canadian companies’ access to Indigenous, African, and other “developing” countries’ lands and mineral resources. Moreover, “Canada the Good” animates a wider field of virtuous discourses that includes “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility.” I turn now to present some of the common expressions of virtuous subjectivity on the part of Canadian mining professionals operating in African countries. Canadians as “Quite Sensitive People” Canadians, interviewees claimed, have a special relationship with African host-country nationals, a different relationship than many other expatriate mining professionals have had: The respect for the Canadians is in part due to the personal philosophies of most of the people and the Canadian companies. In that they seem to have established a pretty good willingness to work with people, as opposed to coming in and having everyone do it my way.

Compared to other European expatriates, Canadians have a “professional, equal, more equal, kind of relationship” with African people.25 Canadians do good in Africa, and they do it unobtrusively:

192  Colonial Extractions Canada’s got a massive influence in the region, through the government and through aid programs, very well respected in all the places it does business, and tends to be more focused on health care, education, agriculture, quietly carried out but seen to be there, it’s not an aggressive flagwaver, it’s a participatory sort of thing. There’s a lot of work done, but it isn’t always that obvious.

A host of similar assertions were expressed: Canadians were not pushy or aggressive; they were respectful, good at interpersonal relationships, fair-minded, and reasonable; Canadians worked in participatory ways; Canadians related empathetically to other countries and peoples; Canadians were “adaptable, as long as it’s not too hostile”; Canadians didn’t act like former colonial powers; Canadians would tell the truth, be up front with people about what they were doing. Finally, as one interviewee earnestly stated, “a lot of the Canadian mining professionals working in Africa are quite sensitive people.” This sort of mythologized national subjectivity is deeply resonant in the Canadian public imaginary; such comments are persuasive because they “make sense.” An important form of the sensitive Canadian’s care for “Africa” is the provision of foreign capital for investment. One interviewee expressed this with considerable passion and conviction: You know, we take care of our people, we take care of the country, we stayed in [country] when nobody else would, we’ve always believed in the country, and we’re pouring dollars into it. So I’m not sure what else you could possibly do that would be more positive. And not only that, we’re out there championing the country. I mean, we’re telling people that they need to be there. And we were the first people, we developed the first new mine in [country] in ten years. And fought the stigma of doing that. You have to keep in mind that we are a public company. And you know when you tell someone that you’re developing a mine in [country], the first thing they want to do is rush out and sell their stock. I think we’re probably the, if not the number one, among the top five in the world, the top five performers of the year, as far as stock price goes. So we’ve come a long way as far as people’s view of Africa, and most of that is by taking people, we’ve taken some of the largest institutions in Canada, [company], people like that, who are, you know, they come back and they tell everybody that Africa’s not a bad place to be. Which I think is responsible corporate citizenship, because what it’s telling you is that you’re creating people that come back, who run large sums of money, who when someone else comes in and says, look, we’ve got this project in Africa, instead of

Narratives of Canadian Mining Professionals in African States  193 saying “look, I don’t like Africa, it’s too risky,” they say, well tell me about it, maybe we’ll invest in it, and maybe more money will go into Africa. Because that’s what Africa needs, Africa needs investment. It needs somebody to care about it.

This passage is extraordinary, revealing as it does the manner in which the good Canadian subject can narrate the extraordinary financial success of a Canadian mining company in an African setting as a noble act of caring about “Africa.” In this interviewee’s account, investment (even on terms he acknowledges to be exceptionally beneficial to the foreign investor and to shareholders) is construed as a moral act, an act of goodness and generosity. A corollary of the notion that Canadians are good, caring, moral people is the assertion that African people like Canadians. Interviewees clearly wanted to carry on with profitable mining of African minerals while believing themselves to be, and representing themselves as, “friends of Africa.” There is here evidence of a fantasized or desired relationship of affection with the racial Other – a relationship that many scholars26 have classified as a classic feature of colonialism and of racially structured societies more generally. Interviewees paternalistically expressed fondness for, and appreciation of, the people of the country where they were working, as well as a sense that they too, the Canadians, were well-liked: Everybody is very friendly and all the villagers are going “hi [name]” and they’re all smiling and even in the city of [ ––– ] I don’t feel threatened by taking cabs anywhere in the city. I’ve never been approached by anybody who had a violent nature, as a matter of fact most [nationality] are not – not a violent people – they don’t have a distaste for the white, and I think we’ve been treated extremely fairly by the local people. And after so many years, I liked to work with the Africans. And there is no problem. It’s enjoyable. We’ve been very well-received there … I think it’s safe to say that we’re seen as the saviour of the area, everyone wants the mine to proceed, we have no opposition from the populace.

There are only the slightest hints in these comments that the local people might dislike, resent, or be hostile towards them. It seems that these interviewees either had filtered out any unpleasant

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experiences – perhaps for the purposes of an interview – or had taken (and constructed) “African friendliness” at face value as something that allowed them to disavow neo-colonialist injustice. Indeed, one could speculate that the interviewees repeatedly emphasized the “friendly African villager” in ways similar to how the infantilized “happy slave” was constructed in American slave literature, or the “friendly Algonquins” in the speech cited at the end of chapter 3. Such representations do not consider the effects of internalized racism/ colonialism or the extent to which superficially friendly, nonconflictual relations with dominant groups on the part of subordinated groups may be astute strategies indicating an acute awareness of power dynamics. As is evident from the testimony at the C-300 SCFAIT hearings, and from the cases presented in chapter 4 and elsewhere, there is extensive evidence that not all “African” people are happy with or welcoming of the Canadian mining presence. One interviewee, referring to Canadian companies, noted that “a number of companies are not liked because they are arrogant. And their race relations part of things is lacking in their perception and sensitivity.” As a result, “people start to, either try to undermine your efforts, sabotage your work, strikes, demands.” Significantly, the 2009 study conducted by the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict of the global mining sector’s violations of corporate social responsibility between 1999 and 2009 found that Canadian companies were “much more prone to conflict with local communities. Poor community relations were involved in 60% of incidents involving Canadian companies.”27 Canadians as Culturally Sensitive Nevertheless, the interviews were rife with assertions of sensitivity and in particular of cultural sensitivity. The interviewees claimed to want to adapt themselves and their companies to local cultures, not only to minimize problems or to enrich their own life experiences – although these were significant motivations – but also to show themselves to be liberal, open-minded, and progressive, as Canadians are known to be. Here are comments from three different interviews: You have to understand there are cultural issues as well. You don’t want to, people have culture, a culture and a way of life that you don’t want to

Narratives of Canadian Mining Professionals in African States  195 just tramp over, you know, you’ve got to, you know, that’s where you’ve got to work with the locals, so that you’re not taking to being a witch doctor but you know, there’s certain, these guys believe in certain things, they believe in it that’s fine by me, you know. I tried to understand – my approach is always to try to understand where people are coming from because then it’s much easier to deal with them and work with them. If you want to build a mine in Mali, you’d better build a Malian organization. If you want to build a mine in Ghana, you’d better build a Ghanaian organization … it’s cultural as well as legal, and we do go out of our way to localize.

Without denying the value or sincerity of genuine intercultural respect and exchange, it is fair to suggest that in global mining, cultural tolerance and cultural appreciation function both to render expatriate miners as virtuous and competent subjects, and as a management technology, a way of mitigating potential resistance and resentment and maintaining efficiency in the workplace.28 In this manner, cultural sensitivity serves the interests of foreign capital. There is little evidence of respect from the mining industry for cultural values and practices that would involve decisions not to allow exploration or mining to proceed, or that would cede priority in access to minerals to local (artisanal) miners. Canadians as Environmentally Responsible Another version of the “good Canadian” narrative portrayed Canadian mining companies as engaged in superior mining practices and as exemplary “corporate citizens.” Canadian mining professionals narrated themselves as conduits of “Canadian values” and as highly responsible with regard to environmental standards and respect for human rights. As one interviewee stated: I mean it’s such a global community now, that you can’t get away with walking away and leaving a huge scar on the landscape anymore, so it has to be, you know, reclaimed and looked after and maintained, and you know once you leave the site it has to be in good shape. So we’re, you know, as far as accountability and being environmentally responsible and sociologically responsible that’s all part of our mission is to be that.

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Other interviewees claimed that Canadians have “an outstanding reputation for being responsible”; one even stated that “we’re responsible by nature.” The movement within the industry towards greater social and environmental responsibility and accountability is a positive one, although it is important to acknowledge the extent to which that shift has been a response to persistent advocacy by those negatively affected by mining in Canada and in countries around the world. In industry jargon, being socially and environmentally responsible is necessary to secure the “social licence” to operate. At the same time, Canadian companies’ claims to superior responsibility are racially inflected. Canadian corporate performance is routinely contrasted – as it was by several interviewees – with the supposedly low standards of companies from supposedly irresponsible countries, such as “the Indians or the Pakistanis or the Koreans or a lot of other nations.” Assertions of superior “Canadian values” – now taking the form of environmental and corporate social responsibility – are central to the racialized imaginary of Canadian internationalism. Canadians Do Not Participate in Bribery or Corruption Significantly, the interviewees often wanted to talk about corruption – that is, extralegal business practices such as bribery, “gifts,” or “dash.” The number of organizations (Global Witness, Publish What You Pay, Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative, etc.) that have been created in recent years to address problems of corruption and lack of transparency in the global resource extraction sector indicates how serious and widespread this problem is. As noted in chapter 4, some Canadian companies were identified in a UN investigation into corrupt practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,29 and other companies with global operations that include mining-related work have been subject to more recent fraud investigations. Of the 608 companies and individuals currently on the World Bank’s list of entities prohibited from bidding on projects due to corrupt practices, 119 (almost 20 per cent) are Canadian.30 The RCMP is investigating more than thirty Canadian companies under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act; three companies have been convicted since 1999.31 Faced with mounting pressure from “responsible mining” civil society groups and from the UN and other G8 member countries, in June 2013 Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Canada’s intention to develop mandatory reporting requirements for Canadian resource extraction companies, which will

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be required to report payments to public officials in countries where they operate.32 These measures suggest a gap between realities “on the ground” and Canada’s reputation as a corruption-free society. Nevertheless, the myth that Canadians do not engage in corrupt practices in global mining was vigorously reproduced in the interviews. Anti-corruption discourse seems to signal an ontological “contact zone” where racially dominant male Western subjects are compelled to confront and work through questions of racial identity, difference, culture, and moral entitlement to rule. The interviewees’ desire to talk about corruption could be interpreted as suggesting that this issue provokes a particular set of anxieties or dilemmas. If African culture is stereotyped as innately inferior on the (supposed) grounds that African societies tolerate routine graft and bribery (as implied in statements such as “it’s their culture”), the Canadian ”gentleman geologist” must be demonstrably able to resist such practices. Interviewees thus constructed their comments in such a way as to assert the moral stature of Canadians in general or the interviewee’s company (or him/herself) in particular. The message was that, although faced constantly with enticements and temptations, they valiantly resisted becoming engaged in corrupt practices. Interestingly, some exceptions were identified. Many interviewees referred to other Canadian companies that had engaged in corrupt practices, or so they had heard, but not surprisingly, all denied any participation personally or by their own company. Two versions of virtuous Canadian subjects thus emerged from this anti-corruption discourse: the morally pure subject who walks away rather than pay a bribe, who does not want to contaminate himself by stooping to corruption (“we’re not ones to pay dash”; Canadians obey the law, are law-abiding people; “it’s illegal number one, it’s a federal offence”); and the tough, principled subject who refuses to pay bribes but who also refuses to walk away – who gets what he wants (access to minerals) without paying bribes. These two basic stances are evident in the following excerpts: Those are some of the problems inherent in doing business in some of these countries. If you don’t want to play the game that everyone else is playing, then it can be very difficult. Certainly in my career I’ve never used the brown envelope approach and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone go that route. The wheels turn slower, but we’re not interested in making them run fast because we give them some dash. Not the way we work.

198  Colonial Extractions If you go to Africa you have to be prepared to deal with everything from high-level to low-level corruption … On principle, I refuse to pay bribes to anyone. It’s a matter of principle but also of self-protection. It will always leak out. And others will line up … Most people are amazed that I’ve hung in. I refuse to let the bad guys win. You have to have staying power … otherwise don’t go to Africa.

Apparently, the cost of being virtuous is that some lucrative opportunities will be forfeited. However, there is evidence elsewhere in the interview data – particularly with regard to the terms of mining laws and the protection of rights to mining concessions (see chapter 5) – that these principled Canadian mining men have access to other, “legal” forms of coercion such as Canadian diplomatic influence. Either way, Canadian mining professionals are actively engaged in self-making as superior moral law-abiding subjects even while acquiring and maintaining access to African resources on highly beneficial terms. Several interviewees embellished this moral Canadian subjectivity by expressing a paternalistic tolerance and understanding of the Other’s “corruption,” construing it as the result of a kind of primordial poverty disconnected from social relations of exploitation and domination: You get a country where there is chronic poverty and the machinery [i.e. corruption] impedes you all the time. In [country], there are things which I think are not proper, but which – I see them as not proper from my point of view, which is the Western point of view. You know, from the [country] point of view, they are probably perfectly correct. It all goes back to lack of money, so that if you are very poor, you have to survive somehow anyway, and if there happens to be a big company around with more money than your government has, then that’s probably a good way of surviving. So you get situations where you feel that you are being requested for things which are really you should not be asked for. And I’m not talking about money under the table, I’m not talking about bribes under the table. I’m talking about very straight, open requests.

This interviewee wanted to self-represent as an understanding person. But he did not register being “a big company with more money than [the African country] government has” as a curious or troubling fact. Rather, he seemed to posit the situation as natural and ahistorical; he certainly did not consider it from the perspective of a colonial

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history of exploitation that partly explained the systemic poverty with which he was making such an effort to empathize. A Canadian mining industry professional who wishes to self-represent as a virtuous subject must constantly summon this kind of apolitical ignorance of the history of global relations of power and plunder. Canadians as Philanthropists Another common version of the Good Canadian is the philanthropic Canadian. One interview question concerned what benefits interviewees saw for themselves and for African communities or countries as a result of Canadian mining investment and presence. Given that the Canadian government and the Canadian mining industry have adopted sustainable development as both a policy approach and a public relations strategy, interviewees were asked how they understood the concept. It became evident that the term had not been widely popularized among the rank and file of the Canadian mining industry; rather, it appeared to function as an ideological framework whose use was mainly limited to the largest Canadian companies or to those participating in federal and multilateral policy discussions. Most interviewees had only a vague understanding of the concept (several stated that the term made little sense to them, especially when applied to the exploitation of nonrenewable resources) and of “development” more generally. It became evident that few thought of themselves as engaged formally in sustainable development. Only one interviewee had been actively involved in introducing and popularizing the concept within the industry. In a more informal and vernacular manner, however – that is, drawing on everyday notions in Canadian mainstream culture of affluent Canadians providing aid to less fortunate peoples – virtually all the interviewees asserted that they were bringing many developmental benefits to African peoples and countries. These benefits were crucial to their narrations of their presence on African landscapes, and of their virtuous identities. In the terms of the “gentleman geologist” imaginary, Canadian presence, talents, expertise, and investment capital were needed to give African countries and peoples an enlightened, Westernized, capitalist future. Interviewees listed the many benefits and improvements that were accruing to African communities and governments as a result of the Canadian mining presence. Comments routinely featured the stereotypical characterization of African people’s needs as minimalist or

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miniature. For instance, the ways in which small amounts of cash could make a big difference in people’s lives was a popular theme: So we have a fund that puts money into all sorts of small projects, they could be really quite small. For example, a lady in one of the local villages wanted to establish a little bakery, she wanted to make bread. Other things that you might do, for example, is teaching them to grow other things that they are not growing now and that they can sell to other districts like, in the case of [ – ], vegetables. We worked with the local villages to find out what would be most important for them, like putting in water wells and things like that, we did that in a number of villages.

Significantly, there was evidence in the interviews that these minimalist or “micro” projects did not begin to meet the demands, needs, and wishes of local populations. When company personnel asked community members to set out their own requests, the lists thereby produced were ridiculed and deemed excessive. The following comment from one interviewee was typical of the reactions these lists garnered: We would have a meeting with the village and the village would say “this is what we want” and have a checklist this long, with a thousand things, including a recreation center, this is a village of 500 people [interviewee laughs], community halls, clinics and all those kinds of things. So what we did is we started with the most basic thing, we provided, since we had heavy equipment, we did road maintenance in the village, so that usually in the rainy season everything would get pretty badly washed out, so we would maintain the main road, the government provided road maintenance on the basis of once or twice a year and we would provide interim maintenance for the roads, we would go into the various villages and plough out all the roads in the villages and make them up to date. We would start with small projects, for instance like installing an electric pump for water to the villages, and assisting with putting in place clinics, we helped build one clinic, we put up a police station in another village, we helped with the water system in another village.

The “colonial contact zone” dynamics revealed here remind us of the negotiations between the Crown and Indigenous communities in Canada in the late 1800s. Crown officials often noted in their reports

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that Indigenous groups’ treaty demands were excessive. For instance, one treaty commissioner noted in correspondence of 30 July 1871 that “when the subject of reserves came up, it was found that the Indians had misunderstood the object of these reservations, for their demands in this respect were utterly out of the question.”33 It became apparent that most of the interviewees were primarily and unabashedly focused not on “African development” but on acquiring exploration properties, finding mineable resources, and enhancing share values. At times, they would make trinket-like charitable contributions to local villages in order to obtain acquiescence and curry favour: Just like now in Canada, we have to do this with Aboriginal groups, and then when you start exploration, you actually do something serious like you bring a drill in, or something like that, we always buy a cow or a goat or a sheep, something like that, and we slaughter it and give it to the village. And we sort of do that once in a while, you know, once or twice a year. And we’ll buy a – buy stuff for them, we’ll buy a radio that the whole village can use. If we’re doing some drilling, oftentimes we’ll drill a well, get the drill going near a village and we’ll drill a well or two, and you know it usually costs us maybe a couple thousand dollars but it’s not too hard to swallow that in our budget that’s maybe $450,000. So a few thousand dollars is goodwill that goes toward the village.

Many Canadian companies provided social services and infrastructural supports that would more commonly be expected from the state. Canadian companies were sporadically, partially, and arbitrarily financing health clinics, schools, and water and road construction, as well as building police stations. The interviewees often mentioned these, for example: We supported local primary schools, you know, we gave donations for books, and you know, we bought some computers for them, and all that sort of stuff. We set up our own health facilities at the mines, with nurses, that people didn’t have before, trained nurses, and provided health care for the local villagers, you know, including the women, they would bring their kids and get injections and vaccines and stuff like that. So I think we were fairly well thought of in the community.

202  Colonial Extractions Our doctor and our two nurses go out and work with the program, we have vehicles and fuel, we provide as much logistic support to that as we can. We provide dollars to – no one else does, not even the state – to local teachers in the school. When they have a cholera outbreak, you know, we have the only ambulance in the area.

These accounts are part of a much broader national philanthropic discourse of benevolently helping those in need. That discourse plays a central role in the construction and maintenance of colonialist moral superiority and economic power, in the sense that it does not critically examine the historical and structural causes of poverty or economic inequality. Accounts of Canadian mining companies offering various types of charity and assistance to local communities provide mining professionals – and Canadians in general – with an appealing means of rendering themselves as benevolent subjects. The Callous Capitalist: Psychic Dimensions of Whiteness Many scholars of colonialism identify the complex and contradictory, or hypocritical, features and imaginaries of the colonizer. Pratt (1992) emphasizes the discursive construction of an innocent subjectivity, the “anti-conquest” man – the imperialist subject who claims to do no harm. However, Pratt also identifies, with particular reference to British financial investment in South American mining in the 1800s, what she calls the “capitalist vanguard”: subjects who avariciously impose their control over foreign lands and resources in the interest of making excessive profits, who regard capitalist expansion as the only possible rationality, and who demean and misrepresent Indigenous populations.34 Memmi (1957) similarly identifies the “colonizer who accepts” as feeling entitled to dominate, control, and benefit financially from the colonies, on the grounds of his superior racial-cultural talent, and as having no qualms about subordinating Indigenous people. Colonialism is always confronted with resistance and critiques, to which its practitioners respond with various forms of denial and defensiveness. In his “Introduction” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre takes up the question of the consciousness and cognizance of colonial exploitation among Europeans. Alert to the manner in which many European readers will attempt to reject or distance themselves from the harsh portrait Fanon paints of white Europeans, Sartre urges readers to engage with, rather than deny or repress, the truth of Fanon’s

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portrait: “our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable.”35 He asserts that Europeans must know what they are part of – a colonial project of violence, exploitation, domination, and dehumanization – even while they deny it and appear shocked by the furor of anti-colonial resistance. He challenges readers: You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents,’ and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals, and our great industrial cities … With us, to be a man [sic] is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.36

Sartre goes on to argue that, as much as colonialism has attempted to dehumanize its Others and reduce them almost, but not quite, to the state of animals, so colonialism has damaged and destroyed the humanity of the colonizer. In the final section of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon records a series of actual clinical psychiatric cases, involving both colonized and colonizers, that he dealt with as a doctor in an Algerian hospital during the French-Algerian war. One case concerned a French settler whose job was to extract information from Algerians by torturing them. He had come to Dr Fanon complaining that he was losing his capacity for self-control and becoming excessively violent, especially with his own wife and young children. It became clear both to Fanon and to his patient that the source of this mental disorder and tyrannical behaviour at home was his work as a torturer of Algerian prisoners. Fanon concludes this account: “As he could not see his way to stop torturing people (that made nonsense to him for in that case he would have to resign) he asked me without beating about the bush to help him go on torturing Algerian patriots without any prickings of conscience, without any behaviour problems, and with complete equanimity.”37 This story, however extreme it may seem, starkly indicates what is required of racially dominant subjects in a structurally violent racialcolonial order.38 Dominant subjects are required to find a tolerable, even comfortable, way of participating in routine violence against others. The dominant subject’s fundamental loss of, or deliberate suppression of, the ability to conceive of the Other as a Self, and his or

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her repression of self-awareness of callousness and violence, emerge as central twin characteristics of the subjectivity of the contemporary colonizer. Colonialism, both past and present, requires and produces a dominant subject who is capable of repressing (into the psyche and unconscious) and renarrating (in public discourse) his or her involvements as not usurpation/violence or as legitimate usurpation/violence. Various scholars have explored the idea that being positioned as a colonizer creates particular psychological difficulties – even psychoses – which are often expressed as denial or anxiety. Laura Chrisman analyses Rider Haggard’s classic 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines for what it reveals of what she calls the British “imperial unconscious.” The central threat that is “deliberately or unconsciously repressed and suppressed in this anxiety/fantasy” is the relation between “exploitation and civilization.”39 In encountering the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, with their indications of a mining-based, technologically advanced society, the British colonial imaginary is, Chrisman suggests, troubled and haunted by the spectre of African civility, technological skill, and political power and by the even more fearful spectre of themselves as destroyers of civilizations: the British as brutes. Capitalist colonial exploitation is then recast as a romantic discovery of minerals as natural wealth; and the Great Zimbabwe Ruins are cast as a great indeterminate mystery. Chrisman suggests that Haggard’s fiction expresses the British colonizer’s need to make capitalist imperialist exploitation of African minerals and labour something other than “a conscious process” involving violent conquest, occupation of land, and the suppression of Indigenous populations and their political and economic entitlements. Chrisman identifies in Haggard’s work an imperialist subject that is determined to be “confused” about “its own identity in relation to Africa” and whose “confusion” functions as a strategy to avoid having to know itself as a violent subject. Writing of the social psychology of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa more than a full century after the publication of King Solomon’s Mines, Melissa Steyn finds continued white economic domination in post-apartheid South Africa being mystified by the language of normative rational-economic (free market neoliberal) claims. She notes the deliberate ignoring of the recent history of apartheid in South Africa, asserting that the same “conscious decisions not to know” that buttressed white supremacy during apartheid continue to buttress white privilege in the post-apartheid era. This deliberate ignorance of the histories of racism, imperialism, and colonialism typifies the subjectivity

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of the twenty-first-century colonizer. Steyn identifies the prevalence of strategies of denial and defence by white South Africans designed to avoid grappling with feelings of shame, guilt, grief, trauma, and so on, that might have been expected to accompany post-apartheid public naming of the extent of the brutality, violence, and injustices that made white privilege possible. Her research suggests that a capacity and willingness to entertain “uncomfortable feelings” characterized the small proportion of racially privileged South Africans who were prepared to shift from “promoting privilege for some” to “taking responsibility for promoting development of all.”40 The Stories Told: “Capital Pouring into the Country” How do Canadian mining professionals represent what they are doing in African countries at the onset of the twenty-first century? Based on the interview data I collected, it is clear that there was certainly an understanding of the lucrative nature of the business being conducted; however, this could not be conceived, acknowledged, or represented as a colonialist project of resource appropriation. As one interviewee stated: Whatever you say has to be, you have to make sure that you are very comfortable with how it’s going to be interpreted in Africa. So if you’re doing an interview in North America, you can’t walk around telling everybody that you’ve got this great thing going on in Africa and the reason that it’s good is because it’s in Africa and you don’t pay as much money, and things like that, because of the nature of the country. Because as soon as, because of the Internet these days, that type of thing would get back to – they’d read it; they’d call you up and say, so what’s the story?

While clearly pleased to be able to benefit from certain conditions that are present in Africa because it is Africa – where “you don’t pay as much money,” and where you therefore make a lot of money – this interviewee knew that such glee should not be communicated publicly in a way that could leak back to a “host” country. It was something that needed to be hidden, discussed quietly and in private; private spaces are where the awareness of being exploiters tacitly circulates. This awareness of the need to be discrete about certain statements indicated a cognizance of exploitative if not colonialist relations. When the line between private and public space was ruptured or became uncertain, defensiveness was expressed. For instance, when this interviewee was

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asked what sustainable development meant to him, it was as if he felt judged or accused. He reacted with a stock recitation of all the good things that foreign investment in mining brings for everyone, especially for local people and “host” countries: Look, you’re – we’ve invested [pause] – ah, $200 million, $300 million – once [name of mine]’s built, we will have invested $300 million in [African country]. I don’t think you’ll find anybody else that’s invested anywhere near that … That’s $300 million dollars that wouldn’t have been developed – that wouldn’t have been put into the country, that wouldn’t have developed mines and created jobs, sustained families. I think that’s sustainable development. I think where things get a bit grey, specifically in North American standards, is that people want a development that is, ah, – I don’t know how to say this – we’re creating jobs, we’re not doing anything bad environmentally and the mines that we’re building, as an example the new mine that we’re building has a mine life of 18 years with another 10 years in a phase 2 development, so that’s 28 years with capital pouring into the country. On top of that, I’m not sure what you want us to do, we support the hospitals, we support malaria control, we can’t be the people that get rid of AIDS, because it’s just not the way it’s going to happen. Unfortunately the reason Africa has such a huge AIDS epidemic is because of the way the people treat it.

Significantly, this participant circled around what he sensed as criticism, dodging culpability by recourse to a classic stereotyping of “the [African] people,” whose failure to control the spread of AIDS reinstalled the morality of the Canadian company in a cultural context depicted as irredeemably dissolute. Awareness of the limited kinds of benefits for African peoples and states from the Canadian mining presence was managed in various ways by the interviewees. Rather than reacting defensively, another interviewee seemed to embrace the acts of colonial rapaciousness as spectacle; he threw himself dramatically into the role of an oracle-like figure whose venture-capitalist wizardry had dazzled the local “villagers”: They don’t understand capitalism in the sense that we do. They don’t understand that capital – there’s a global pool of capital looking for opportunity to grow and that people in the mining business have got to stick up their hand and wave and wiggle around and say, “Look, I want some of that capital, ’cause we’re going to take your dollar and we’re going to give

Narratives of Canadian Mining Professionals in African States  207 you back ten dollars, and we’re going to sell stock to do that, have a public company, have a trading and an option market, and all that stuff. And after you’ve done all that stuff, then you’re going to take that capital and go to their village in [country] and they’re going to see this stranger walking around with a rock hammer and a vehicle and a whole bunch of local labourers digging holes and taking samples and taking geophysical surveys and things like that. And I don’t think they really understand the whole context of how a company arrives on the scene in their country to look for gold. Like do they know that what I’m doing there is, my number one goal is to make an investor ten times his money? Maybe they think that I’m there because I want to be nice to them. … Well, all we’re there to do is to find something. And increase the value of the market capitalization of the company to benefit the shareholders. If we do that, and actually make a find, what we will have done is we’ll have taken a piece of bare land and with quote nothing, turned it into something, generated value from nothing, pulled it out of thin air. That’s what resource industries are. You have sovereign territory with nothing on it, you find something on it and you generate value. You actually make capital, you make money. [emphases added]

Of course, resource value is not generated from nothing; it is not a miraculous act or a magic trick. Rather, it derives from the possibility of paying Africans lower wages than would be paid to Canadians for the same work, from using donor-nation racial privilege and economic clout to get access to exceptional ore bodies, and from having attractive financial incentives and legal frameworks in place. In this interviewee’s fantastical scenario, however, local “villagers” – the village being the standard infantilizing trope of “Africa” in the colonial imaginary – are like small children standing still, watching and wondering, while foreigners arrive as if from a superior planet and miraculously transform “bare land” into value and money. The frontier lands that the white man needs to possess and dominate are not quite empty: although they are “sovereign territory with nothing on it,” a human presence is detected. But this presence is not deemed problematic; in the colonial imaginary, these persons have no status as political subjects. They pose no threat or contest; indeed, they form an admiring audience for the wondrous performance of the Canadian venture capitalist, whose magic – “you generate value from nothing, you pull it out of thin air” – is vastly superior to theirs. In this

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fantasy, the foreign investor is entertaining the local people, not stealing their resources and exploiting their labour. But he is also entertaining himself; solipsistically, he enjoys observing himself in an exotic setting: I still am thrilled whenever I get off the plane and I smell the spiciness of the air and the earth and when I’m walking around with my sort of good shoes and my good watch and my good T-shirt and I’m walking through a village and I see people living in grass huts, mud huts, I think, “How can it be? How can things be so vastly different?” And so on. That’s a shocker. And it lasts for a long time. Maybe a lifetime.

Here, again, is the moment when the colonizer-subject backs away from knowing the colonial project for what it is and acts “confused.” He in effect admits that he has never probed this “shocker” or investigated it further – he has “never studied anything, never really done any reading about it.” This subject’s dismay at “vast difference” – his “good shoes and good watch” contrasted with the ubiquitous “mud huts” of the African Other – amounts to little more than pleasurable musing. This subject appears to be relishing – feeling invigorated by – his experience as a contemporary colonizer. By claiming rhetorically to be haunted by the shock of inexplicable “vast difference,” he deflects the shock, anesthetizes himself, avoids emotional trauma and implosion. With the same vigour with which he increases share values for shareholders, this interviewee refashions a dominant racial-imperial imaginary in the service of normalizing and consecrating global capitalist racial rule. He does so by subjectifying himself simultaneously as a shrewd capitalist vanguard, as a sensitive fellow who feels the angst of global disparity, and as a happy, buoyant, well-heeled person. He performs a kaleidoscope of seemingly contradictory personae, productively collapsing the oppositions among them. Reminiscent of Alexander Morris, the nineteenth century’s shrewd treaty negotiator for the British Crown, but astutely attuned to the needs of twenty-first-century neoliberal imperialism, this subject has fashioned a compellingly duplicitous and ambiguous subjectivity for emulation by those positioned as post-colonial colonizers. This is the subject required to participate in structural violence without psychological distress. Conclusion: Performing Twenty-First-Century Whiteness One question raised early in this chapter was whether the Canadian mining professional is an agentive subject. Agency has been described

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as “the ability to act or perform an action. In contemporary theory, it hinges on the question of whether individuals can freely and autonomously initiate action, or whether the things they do are determined by how their identity has been constructed.”41 Being a “self-made man” – success achieved through hard work, astute intelligence, persistence, and a bit of luck – is a common image in the popular literature of the mining industry, as well as in the accounts of success in the global mining sector that the interviewees presented. To be “self-made” is to be autonomous, self-determining, and agentive. Yet the extent to which these subjects consistently represent themselves in the terms of an identifiable set of established discourses – including vintage colonial discourse – raises questions about how “self-determining” such subjects actually are and what it would take for them to question or refuse the terms of the colonialist resource project. Past and contemporary colonialist projects have required the production of dominant colonizer-subjects who will not destabilize the foundations of colonialist relations. In this sense, they appear to have little real agency. By way of example, we have heard Canadian mining professionals express raw racist contempt, a sense of victimization linked to a sense of entitlement, and many claims to innocence, benevolence, cultural sensitivity, and superior environmental practices. What we have not heard is much sense of identification with, feeling for, or apprehension of the rights of local people affected by the presence of foreign mining companies. Arguably, these expressions are prohibited within the terms of colonialist discourse; thus, we have heard a “whitewashed” account of what happens when Canadian exploration and mining companies come to operate in African countries. For instance, the interviewees told no stories resembling the following account of the effects of foreign mining in “developing countries,” published in 2009 in the Berkeley Law Journal: Conflict brings violence in the form of killings and injuries inflicted by soldiers and corporate security firms. Villagers are subjected to forced eviction from lands they have known for generations; roads and extraction sites destroy the habitat from which peoples derived their sustenance and bring crime and corruption; previous cultural norms disintegrate and the new cash economy brings divisiveness and promotes previously unknown self-centered conduct; land and water become polluted and destroy game and fish populations that were crucial to subsistence; and traditional tribal and family authority is replaced by indifferent corporate and governmental entities. Together, these impacts are not unlike those of war.42

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What is signified by the absence of such accounts? Colonizing societies generally disavow and renarrate the brutality and theft in which they participate or from which they benefit. Those who are positioned as colonizers – and who are benefiting materially from such positioning – must find a tolerable, indeed a comfortable, way of participating in structural violence against others. It is crucial to understand this skill – this capacity to participate in processes that cause harm to others while maintaining a happy personal life and mental health – as both monstrous in the sense of what it makes possible, and as having a long and complex genealogy. The dissemination of comforting scripts – sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, Canada the Good – is an effective and indeed crucial tactic in response to the problem of needing to not know. These are the new virtual narratives, the glossy, buffering, and mesmerizingly misleading stories of Canadian competence and goodness. But as we have seen, an abrupt turn of the kaleidoscope can also bring into focus bald racism and racial contempt. This is not dissonance, but coherence: it coherently dissembles. Colonialist discourse chronically and creatively manages a narrative tension between accounts of violence and accounts of innocence. The Canadian mining professional can be understood as a specific historical subject: one who, like the French torturer, fully caught up in a colonialist system and lacking or eschewing genuine self-determination, cannot consider “resigning.” The strategy he/she is offered – the subjectivity into which he/she is interpellated – encompasses the figure of the profit-maximizing entrepreneur with overt racist views and the decent, feeling subject who desires friendly relations and who wants to do good. Generally, these two orientations are considered opposites; these are dominant subjects that often oppose each other in the public sphere. Racial dominance, however, anchors the common positioning of the white profiteer and the white humanitarian. In the figure of the mining industry professional, these postures become, Janus-like, two sides of a single subjectivity. The subject must continually turn about, in kaleidoscopic shifts, to blur the contradictions. If this is the nature of the contemporary colonizer, in the form of a Canadian mining professional working in an African country, how does such a subject relate to the African peoples whose resources are being appropriated?

7 “I Wouldn’t Glorify Them as Prospectors”: Colonial Contact Zones and the Eradication of African “Artisanal” Miners

That’s right, I wouldn’t glorify them [West African artisanal miners] as prospectors like Canadians opening up the Canadian north, sort of developing the whole mining industry here. They [Canadian prospectors] were the pioneers for sure on that one, but these guys [West Africans] don’t tend to be that organized. (Interviewee) Defining others reductively in such a way as to exclude them, is at once to constitute the other as enemy, to engage him or her in relations of violence. (D.T. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 60)

In chapter 3 of this book, the treaty processes between the British Crown/Government of Canada and First Nations were analysed with reference to Mary Louise Pratt’s term, “colonial contact zones,” which refers to places where colonized and colonizer meet and interact, but not on equal or mutually agreed terms. It is “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”1 Despite the power disparity that characterizes such situations, Pratt posits a colonized subject who exercises a degree of agency in engaging the colonizer and who is therefore partly able to shape the terms of the encounter. As she states: “A ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized … not in terms of separateness or apartheid,

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but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”2 In this chapter, Canadian owned and licensed mining/exploration sites in African countries are conceptualized as contemporary colonialist contact zones where artisanal or “citizen-miners” and local community members come into contact with foreign – in this case, Canadian – mining personnel. The analysis considers the racial dimensions of this contact, a dimension that is significantly absent from the burgeoning literature on artisanal and small-scale mining. While Pratt’s concept of the contact zone provided an initial way to think about the terms and terrain of this racialized encounter, the data generated in the interviews lead to a different characterization of this contact. While Pratt refers to “co-presence” and “interaction,” what emerged from the interview data was rather a mode of separateness entailing a refusal of relationship. So in this chapter I will be identifying a conceptual stance and institutional practices that seem directed towards the eradication of local citizen-miners – that is, their physical removal from the space of industrial mining and the cessation of such activity as a form of livelihood. At times, such practices also mean the deaths of citizen-miners. This chapter has three sections. Drawing on the interviews conducted, as well as on mining industry, government, and multilateral aid agency texts and reports, I document how African miners are represented by various Canadian and other Western agencies; I then contrast this with a growing body of empirical evidence that presents a different understanding of these subjects. The second section reviews how the sector has been subject to processes of management, reform, and redirection through “alternative livelihood” projects. The third section closely examines the encounter between Canadian mining professionals and African citizen-miners, asking, for instance, how Canadians make sense of or perceive artisanal/citizen miners and how these miners affect the Canadians’ sense of self or subjectivity. Ontologically, how do Canadians manage or negotiate their presence vis-à-vis African citizens on mineral-rich African lands? What Are “African Citizen-Miners”? In the 1990s, a particular subject , the “artisanal miner” or “small-scale miner,” began to appear with increasing frequency in the dominant discourse of large international development agencies and actors, such as the UN Development Programme, the World Bank, the ILO, some

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Western governments, and international mining industry associations. Jonsson and Fold (2009) define small-scale mining as practices of “individual or collective labour-intensive mineral extraction, legal or illegal, with limited capital investments using basic tools, manual devices and/or simple portable equipment.”3 These miners can also be defined as those who are mining outside the employ of large-scale, capitalintensive, often foreign-owned mining companies. Although there are a host of country-specific names for such miners (garimperos, galamsey, and orpailleurs are only three), the term most commonly used in governmental and multilateral agency texts to describe this mining as “artisanal” or “small-scale.” This choice of terminology is, I contend, a political act – as is, of course, the choice of “citizen-miner” as a term. For example, while there are many similarities between “artisanals” and what in North America have been called “prospectors” or simply “miners” (e.g., during the California, Fraser Valley, and Yukon gold rushes), post-colonial African, Asian, and Latin American actors are not identified with these terms. Indeed, the World Bank’s use of the word “primitive”4 to describe the technology used by artisanal miners seems generally indicative of the pejorative tone vis-à-vis such miners in much of the official discourse. My frequent use throughout this chapter of an alternative term coined by Tundu Lissu, “African citizen-miner,”5 or my own term, African independent miner, is an attempt to draw attention to the politics of naming and its material effects by denaturalizing the terms “small-scale” and “artisanal.” By casting African miners in diminutive terms, this nomenclature naturalizes a hierarchical relationship between African and Western miners. Also, the terms “artisanal” and “small-scale” homogenize and stereotype what is in fact a diverse population whose labour and social contexts differ greatly from one country to the next as well as within countries. In a number of ways, the term “small-scale,” if taken literally, is also misleading.6 The ILO’s seminal 1999 study estimated conservatively that between 3 and 3.7 million African people were engaged in small-scale mining, part of an estimated world total of 11.5 to 13 million. This slightly exceeded the estimated number of industrial mineworkers (10 to 11 million) globally.7 More recent data (February 2009) compiled by Communities and Small-Scale Mining (CASM), an organization that emerged out of the World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review as a clearing house for research on and programmatic interventions directed towards this sector, estimates that there are, in forty-one African countries, between 4,075,000 and 10,700,000 artisanal miners.8

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Indeed, there is considerable empirical evidence that the number of people in African countries making a living as “artisanal” miners is increasing.9 This fact is widely understood to be related to poverty and driven by unemployment; – income from artisanal mining generally exceeds income from agriculture and other subsistence occupations. A 2002 study commissioned by an industry association, Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD), estimated that globally, smallscale mining “affects livelihoods of a further 80–100 million” and noted that “in Zimbabwe and other parts of Southern Africa, the number [of people engaged in small-scale mining] is expected to triple over the next 10 years.”10 Industrial mining is capital rather than labour intensive and thus has a minimal impact in terms of employment generation, whereas by definition, small-scale/artisanal mining is highly labourintensive. Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan (2011) report that in Ghana, industrial mining employed 17,332 people in 2009, while artisanal mining employed 50,000 to 200,000.11 The 2010 EITI report on Ghana estimated there were 500,000 artisanal miners operating in that country.12 The volume and monetary value of metals produced by “small-scale” miners is considerable. In a number of African countries, artisanal miners produce between 50 and 100 per cent of some minerals and precious stones.13 According to Ghana’s Mineral Commission, “small-scale” gold production in Ghana exceeded 2 million ounces annually between 2000 and 2007.14 By comparison, large-scale industrial gold mines typically produce between 200,000 and 500,000 ounces a year using highly mechanized procedures. According to the ILO’s 1999 report, annual revenues from artisanal mining in Africa exceed US$1 billion – a figure that has undoubtedly increased since that research was conducted.15 Lissu suggests that earnings from artisanal mining cushioned the hardest blows of Tanzania’s structural adjustment program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.16 By his reading of state mineral statistics, most of the increase in national revenues from the mining sector from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s was due to artisanal mining.17 Also, there is considerable evidence that citizen mining in various African countries has reduced and mitigated the harshest effects of poverty, loss of public sector employment resulting from economic liberalization throughout the 1990s, and displacement by large-scale mining.18 Poverty is mitigated as earnings from citizen mining stay in local communities, paying family expenses and supporting local businesses.19 Citizen-miners are not a homogeneous group; they operate in a variety of conditions throughout Africa. Studies of artisanal/citizen miners

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in Tanzania and Ghana have revealed that, while the composition and demographics of the sector change over time – for example, in Ghana in recent years, many more unskilled young adults have entered this field20 – citizen-miners include men and women, farmers, teachers, students, business people, ex-soldiers, and craftspeople.”21 Some miners mine in their own communities, where they have established family roots, while others move from place to place. Some mine on a full-time basis while others enter mining seasonally. There may be considerable cultural differences with regard to how mining is organized and how decisions are made from one community or region to another. Class differentiation exists in some artisanal mining sectors, with some actors owning the equipment and licences while others work in their employ carrying out various tasks. Some interviewees asserted that local politicians and military personnel were involved in artisanal mining. Another described female artisanal miners as encompassing a range of social class positions, from educated middle-class women to poor women with no formal education. MMSD’s 2002 report notes that while women “play a relatively small part in large-scale mining,” they “are frequently involved in smaller-scale operations … In Madagascar, Mali and Zimbabwe, the proportion is 50%; and in Guinea, the figure is 75%.”22 More recent studies suggest that on average in African countries, women are 40 to 50 per cent of the artisanal/citizen mining workforce.23 A large number of children under eighteen also work as citizen-miners. Qualitative research conducted with groups of citizen-miners in various countries indicates that the literacy rate among citizen-miners is consistent with national literacy rates; many “artisanals” have a secondary- or even tertiary-level education. Many are highly skilled in a range of fields, from prospecting to accounting. Why Focus on Canadian Miners’ Relationships with African Citizen-Miners? Canadian mining professionals engaged in exploration or mining in African countries encounter many different local and national actors – government officials, including politicians and ministry bureaucrats; leaders and members of the communities in the vicinity of the mine or exploration site; local workers and employees of the company; and, sometimes, independent artisanal miners. One figure who often appeared in the interview data was the elite government official (e.g., the Minister of Mines), who was usually described favourably as a

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cooperative, intelligent, welcoming figure supportive of the presence of Canadian mining companies. This figure was effectively whitened: described as speaking English beautifully and being Western-educated and sophisticated, yet someone who also understood his or her indigenous culture and could thus function as an effective intermediary. Castigated by anti-colonial scholars like Fanon (1963), Armah (1965), and Serequeberhan (2000) as a collaborator who facilitates foreign domination, and by critical race scholar Lopez (2005) as a “nonwhite bourgeois subject with an investment in whiteness,”24 the elite “Westernized” African functions in the Canadian colonialist imaginary to situate the Canadian mining professional as a friend and colleague of African states, not as a colonizer. Another important figure is the local employee of the Canadianowned mine. Given that Canadian companies own or hold interest in some forty-three mines throughout the continent, tens of thousands of citizens in various African countries25 are employed as mineworkers. Canadian junior exploration companies hire local people to dig trenches and carry out other tasks for them. Those interviewees who had worked as mine managers in African countries spoke of their employees paternalistically, even fondly at times, as friendly and willing workers grateful for waged jobs with a responsible employer. Others, however, spoke with racist contempt, describing these employees as unteachable, untrustworthy, and unreliable. Interviewees invariably denied the existence of labour tensions or organized confrontations and consistently represented labour relations at operating mines as being free of serious problems. Other sources, though, suggest there is far more labour dissent and conflict than was reported by the mining professionals I interviewed. Inquiry into the nature of labour relations at Canadian-owned mines in African countries is an important area of research that is beyond the scope of this book. When questions were posed about artisanal miners, the interviewees showed considerable discomfort. It was hard for them to successfully represent these subjects as supporting the Canadian presence and the entitlement of Canadian companies to African minerals. So a focus on Canadian relations with African citizen-miners is warranted, not only because of their sheer numbers, but also because these citizen-miners, often as members of local communities adjacent to foreign-owned mines, appear to have raised some of the most sustained challenges to the expatriate presence in the African mineral sector.

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Producing the Artisanal Miner as a Subject A theme woven throughout this book is, to reprise Edward Said, that “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”26 Producing a particular narrative about “small-scale/artisanal miners” blocks other narratives – such as one about the leading role of independent citizen-miners in national economic development – and at the same time makes possible and thinkable, and indeed natural and reasonable, certain practices and policies that have structural and material effects – for example, in terms of “who gets the gold” and gets to live a healthy, secure, and dignified life. Official narratives about artisanal/small-scale mining are contemporary examples of colonial discourse that reveal the centrality of that discourse in structuring new colonial power relations in the neoliberal global economy. A review of key multilateral agency documents indicates that a figure called the “artisanal miner” has been actively produced since the early 1990s. But citizen mining did not begin in 1990; it was widely practised on the African continent throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, it long pre-dated the colonial era – in Ghana, for by at least one thousand years – and was the subject of occasional and cursory multilateral/international attention in the 1970s and 1980s.27 But with the end of the Cold War, the advent of structural adjustment, and the liberalization of African mining sectors, this figure came to be fashioned and subjected to what can be called, drawing on Foucault’s concepts, regulatory/disciplinary interest. The outpouring of research about, analysis of, and discursive construction of “artisanal/small-scale” miners by many international agencies in the global North is a response designed to contain, reframe, and redirect the anti-colonial challenge posed by, or potentially posed by, these subjects. Artisanal Miner as Savage Subject Africa has long been depicted in the Western colonial imagination as a place of savagery, populated by savage subjects. Mbembe draws attention to Hegel’s Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History; Reason in History, written between 1822 and 1830: “The negro [writes Hegel] is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness, and if we wish to understand him at all, we must put aside all our

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European attitudes … All that is foreign to man in his immediate existence, and nothing consonant with humanity, is to be found in his character.”28 In Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, E.C. Eze (1987) points to similar depictions in works by many canonical European thinkers. This tradition of heinous and sensational stereotypes about Africa and Africans continues into the present, with African “primitiveness,” “exoticism,” and “savagery” routinely referenced in novels, films, magazines, and other sites of popular Euro-American culture. The contemporary dominant discursive production of African artisanal/small-scale miners can be identified as part of this pattern of racist representation.29 In a seminal policy document of 1992, Strategy for African Mining, the World Bank depicts artisanal mining as unruly, anarchic, and chaotic. Such forces must be brought under control. Here is the opening paragraph of the section on artisanal miners: Responsibility for artisanal mining would rest with the Department of Mines. This sector of the mining industry has undergone considerable growth in many African countries in response to accelerating economic decline, overvalued official exchange rates which encourage smuggling, and the inability of governments to exert effective control. This has brought problems of law and order, safety, environmental degradation, and the loss of potential government revenue. Many attempts have been made to regulate the sector and stem the flow of smuggled wealth, but the situation will persist until miners can see some prospect of gain through integration into the formal mining sector.30

Other sections of this document castigate artisanal miners for using child labour. Furthermore, they “sell their product to whoever turns up to buy it,” they “operate seasonally,” they typically “have no mining rights, no mining plan,” they “operate illegally with respect to a multiplicity of national laws and regulations,” they have “little or no knowledge of rock stability,” and they live in “informal villages” with “little or no basic sanitary services.”31 Here, in the space of a few pages, are most of the key features of small-scale/artisanal mining that are ubiquitous in the multilateral agency literature: these miners are technologically primitive, irresponsible, environmentally destructive, disorderly, unsafe, criminal, illegal, and rapacious. They are depicted as savages or “rubbish people”32 who can and must be legitimately reformed, redirected, or removed. It seems that representations of this type by an agency as influential as the World Bank shape official attitudes in a number of places.

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In Tanzania between 1994 and 1996, when artisanal/citizen miners were refusing to vacate the Bulyanhulu area, which had been licensed to a Canadian company, Canadian officials in their diplomatic memos repeatedly referred to these people as “the illegals.” The term “illegals” came to be synonymous with “artisanal” or “small-scale” miners – a conceptual and representational shift that led to artisanal mining being normatively regarded as a form of criminality. The connotation of “rubbish people” also came to be established. Such savage subjects cannot be nation builders. Extracts from Canadian diplomatic memos echo and elaborate on the World Bank’s discursive production of the artisanal miner as savage subject: The illegal miners operated in horrendous conditions; they lacked adequate housing (many used UNHCR tents destined for the Rwandan refugee camps); there was no waste disposal system; miners were directly exposed to mercury in the processing phase; the mercury, aside from endangering the miners, seeped into the ground water and put all the people at risk; there was evidence that the “Miners Association” extorted protection money from the miners, depriving them of even the smallest wage; safety standards were totally absent.33

Seven months later, on 30 June 1997, another piece of diplomatic correspondence stated: Each year millions of dollar’ worth of gold was smuggled out of the country. Frequently money was laundered. No taxes or royalties were paid by any of those concerned. The miners often received only food, no salary. The profits went to shaft owners and middlemen. A portion was paid to a “Mining Committee” purportedly to provide local services.34

More recent examples demonstrate the resilience of such images. A 23 November 2011 issue of Embassy magazine – a publication on Canadian foreign policy – carried an article titled “A Reality Check on Canadian Mining in Africa.” That article, authored by the CEO of the Canadian Council on Africa, whose members include most of the largest Canadian mining companies with African interests, stated: There are tensions and conflicts between mining companies and communities. This is true and we don’t foresee that it will disappear soon. This situation is, in many circumstances, due to artisanal small-scale mining.

220  Colonial Extractions This means people going to a mine and using their hands and artisanal tools to collect raw materials, extract the metal and sell it through informal channels. This is a large problem, not only for the mining companies that have received formal licenses from the government, but also for governments that don’t receive any benefit, royalties or taxes from these operations. We are talking about millions of persons in these totally unregulated environments. It also brings with it a number of serious problems: it has fuelled many conflicts including those in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola; poor working conditions with high fatality and injury rates; and child labour. It creates a violent working environment. And mercury pollution from artisanal gold mining is the world’s top source of toxic pollution.35

This lengthy excerpt is rooted in the pejorative representation of artisanal miners that has persisted for more than twenty-five years. Mbembe describes colonial discourse as dehistoricized and as commonly based on little direct experience. He further identifies representational repetition as a key feature of colonialist discourse; indeed, he compares its insistent, callous repetitions to the repeated phallic thrust of rape.36 The torture and rape of a thingified Other is, of course, a classic theme and documented practice of colonial violence.37 Not surprisingly, many of the mining professionals I interviewed also represented African citizen-miners as incompetent and often criminal. This manifested itself as a clear unwillingness to view them as valid economic actors. In one interview, this became especially clear when I posed a comparison between early Canadian prospectors and contemporary African citizen-miners. The interviewee disagreed: That was individual prospecting licences though. It was regulated a lot better than it is in [West African country]. In [West African country] there’s not actual claims so to speak. In the past, I believe what you’re looking at, you still staked claims and what not, claims to part of the creek and stuff like that. In [West African country] that doesn’t exist at all. It’s strictly – you know, you go out on to, well, some mining lease, some big mining company’s lease, or wherever they’re finding it and you do your artisanal mining practices – like you’re looking at nineteen-hundreds, the early gold history of Canada and stuff like that, ‘claim-jumpers’ were not the most popular people around –

I Wouldn’t Glorify Them as Prospectors  221 PB: Right, okay, so claim jumpers would be more the equivalent to artisanal – I: That’s right, I wouldn’t glorify them as prospectors and great Canadians

opening the Canadian North, sort of developing the whole mining industry here, they [i.e., Canadian miners] were the pioneers for sure on that one, but these guys [i.e., West Africans] – they [i.e., Canadian mining pioneers] were fairly legal and organized – whereas in [West African country] and South America and stuff they don’t tend to be that organized.

Significantly, the main strategy this interviewee used to counter the suggestion that these figures might be comparable to North America’s mythologized prospectors and miners was to invoke cultural incompetence and lawlessness. African independent miners could not be nation builders because they were, again, “illegals,” “claim jumpers,” taking advantage of others’ industriousness and operating outside the law. In view of these abject cultural behaviours, understood as manifestations of race difference, African citizen-miners were categorically and conceptually excluded from being imagined as agentive nation builders in their own countries. In other interviews, local miners’ savagery and thus non-entitlement to lucrative resources was established with reference to the alleged widespread use of child labour and to their destructive environmental practices. In both these areas, the Canadians depicted themselves as possessing superior moral sensibility and technical standards. Dismay was expressed at the use of child labour: It’s very dangerous, there’s a lot of child labour used … I don’t know how deep they are but I’m told they go down one hundred feet. I’m standing there, and a ten-year-old kid climbs up out of the hole! You know!

Of course, there is much valid concern among African governments and human rights groups, with regard to the conditions that drive children into artisanal mining and the conditions they endure while engaged in this work. What is noteworthy, though, is how Canadian mining professionals decried African child labour in mining as part of a narrative of cultural superiority. Canadian sensibilities also abhor the allegedly careless treatment of the natural environment by African artisanal miners: They are doing a lot of damage to the environment, a lot of it … They’ve destroyed a lot of rivers, they’ve destroyed a lot of natural habitat, the rest

222  Colonial Extractions of the landscape is just huge pits, you know, some as deep as – the deepest one we saw was fifty meters … It’s like a moonscape and animals fall in there, and it’s just, it’s a disaster.

The intention here is not to minimize the real environmental problems associated with artisanal mining but to suggest that such representations have as much to do with justifying Canadian mining presence as they do with concern for environmental damage. Another common discursive strategy – again, an echo of the Canadian diplomatic texts quoted earlier – is to depict artisanal mining as a criminal racket in which powerful local actors – often armed groups, such as UNITA in Angola or various “warlords” in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter DRC) coerce vulnerable people into slave labour: Because the miners are the slaves then, they are really – they do all the work, they’ll work ten hours a day to get a kilo of coltan or ten kilos of copper ore, they’ll sell it to somebody that will buy it for nothing. And the poor guy will go back to work the next day and he will not get anything. … So the small-scale mining for me is really you will end up with a lot of slaves.

Furthermore, according to this conceptual paradigm, thieves and brutes exploit not just vulnerable individuals but the nation as a whole. In these accounts, the vilification of African independent miners as “illegals” engaged in lawless, dangerous activities is intensified. The careless, cavalier, irresponsible, and purely self-interested artisanal miner ostensibly lacks basic respect for human life and the natural environment. Thereby revealed is the depth of this figure’s cultural inadequacy as a modern subject – more specifically, as a subject who should not be entitled to or entrusted with the extraction of lucrative mineral resources. Significantly, African governments and officials are sometimes painted with a similar brush by Western donors, who see them as failing to address the problem of “illegal” miners. Subtle doubts are expressed regarding the competence of African governments. The World Bank’s 1992 policy document suggested that some governments were unable to “exert effective control” and had erred in maintaining “overvalued official exchange rates” (i.e., prior to the liberalization of currency exchange). In the Bulyanhulu diplomatic files, Canadian officials make a significant number of comments that express dissatisfaction with the

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Tanzanian government’s response to the presence of artisanal miners on property licensed to Canadians. One official states: “The laxness of the authorities in dealing with illegal mining has emboldened the artisanal miners and aggravated the situation.”38 A number of diplomatic meetings were subsequently arranged to explain to the Tanzanian authorities what had to be done to protect and promote private foreign investment. Government of Canada diplomatic correspondence of 28 June 1996 states: We are [censored] trying to ensure Tanz govt [censored] respects rule of law without any exceptions in mining sector and assures security of title to mining properties. We have enlisted support of [censored]. The decision makers will be fully aware of how important this mining sector, Cdn participation, and rule of law is to their economy.

African governments’ claims to being modern neoliberal states risk being rendered questionable when their actions suggest even a modest prioritization of citizen interests over foreign interests. Implicitly, African governments are being instructed in the importance of being “nonwhite bourgeois subjects invested in whiteness.”39 A number of scholars support the critique I am making of how African citizen-miners are represented. Indeed, such a critique should be situated within the field of literature that has demonstrated how symbolic violence – such as racist, sexist, and otherwise demeaning representations of particular social groups, who come to be seen as “rubbish people” – functions to routinize and legitimize covert and overt forms of violence against, and exclusion of, such groups.40 Tschakert’s study of artisanal mining in Ghana documents the extent to which the Ghanaian media, governmental, and popular discourse exhibits pejorative and exaggerated depictions of artisanals, referring to them as “threats,” “problems,” a “menace,” and “violent criminals.” Such imagery resembles and echoes the World Bank and Canadian diplomatic depictions noted above. Tschakert then draws creatively on philosopher Nancy Fraser’s use of the concepts of recognition and redistribution. Asserting that most artisanal miners have been forced into “illegal” practices in response to circumstances beyond their control and that most are simply trying to ensure the survival of themselves and their families, Tschakert suggests that the chronic vilification of artisanals constitutes “status injury” – that is, an injury with both physical and psychological consequences that results from the failure of others to extend them

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dignity as legitimate or agentive subjects. In Canadian human rights law, “status injury” is comparable to a violation of equality rights. Much of the qualitative research conducted in the past decade that has investigated the socio-economic conditions of artisanal miners in African countries has generated a very different image of these subjects than appears in the texts I have been citing. None of these authors ignore or dismiss the real problems that are associated with this sector – the dangerous use of mercury, unsafe working conditions, the povertydriven use of child labour, HIV/AIDS, prostitution, alcoholism, and so on. They argue, however, that these miners are not inherently criminals. It is possible that a small percentage of them are simply looking for a quick buck (which could have been said of Canada’s early gold rush prospectors, as well as many of today’s international investors), but most of them take up artisanal mining for basic economic survival – to secure a reliable, decent income in the absence of viable alternatives.41 Bryceson and Jonsson’s research in two artisanal gold-mining districts in Tanzania produced the observation that “despite the high intake of alcohol and smoking of marijuana, especially among youthful diggers, most small-scale miners are committed to hard work and display a strong work ethic.”42 Hilson’s study of artisanal miners in Ghana found that many work as miners because it is what they know how to do: it is their skill, their competency, and it is part of their cultural identity – just as might be for coal miners in England or eastern Canada.43 While it has been easy for certain interests to disparage citizenminers as lawless subjects – that is, as operating illegally, or cheating – much evidence suggests that many work without exploration and mining licences because of the considerable financial and logistical barriers to obtaining them.44 Obtaining a licence may entail costly travel to a distant city, application fees, and long waits. For people with immediate daily survival needs, this is unrealistic. In this regard, citizenminers end up at a disadvantage in relation to foreign junior mining companies, which have the human and financial resources to establish offices and contacts in urban centres and obtain licences. There is also considerable evidence that African governments have not adequately prioritized the “small-scale” sector by designating enough areas with good mineral endowments for their legal use. Instead, priority has been given to large-scale mines, which are usually owned and operated by foreigners.45 One could reasonably speculate that a factor in such decisions has been pressure from bilateral donors and the international financial institutions.

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Thus, many citizens end up mining without a licence and can be charged with, and castigated for, working illegally, at least in a technical sense; but at the same time, many do possess licenses and do pay taxes and conduct their work in an orderly manner. Moreover, many groups of artisanal miners have developed well-organized and highly sophisticated divisions of labour and revenues.46 As stated above, many are skilled and experienced, having worked in large-scale underground mines or having worked in areas with long-established traditions of local mining. The miners whom Lissu came to know at Bulyanhulu had organized themselves into mining associations that had local and regional branches; they were aware of and able to assert their rights using the existing legal and political structures. The depiction of local African miners as responsible and astute civic leaders is supported by other scholarship, such as Carolyn Brown’s (2003) ethnographic research on the culture and politics of coal miners at Enugu, Nigeria, during British colonial rule, Anneli Tolvanen’s (2003) research among local miners in Nicaragua, and, as already referenced, Petra Tschakert’s (2009) research with Ghanaian gold miners. No doubt, some nefarious types can be found within such a large population, but it is inaccurate to paint these subjects as all criminals. Such stereotypes are discriminatory.

Eradication by Assimilation A more concrete reason why the World Bank and foreign investors so sharply oppose African artisanal miners can be gleaned from the seminal 1992 policy document, Strategy for African Mining: The infringement of legally granted mining concessions is a frequent problem with high-grading by artisanal miners reducing the overall grade of mineral subsequently available to the industrial operator. In addition, the need to police the concession increases operating expenses, reducing earnings and taxes.47 (emphasis added)

By mining out the most accessible high-grade minerals, artisanal miners take profits that supposedly should accrue to “industrial operators” – who are, most often, foreign investors; they also (allegedly) reduce the taxes that otherwise would go to the African state. The annual report of one Canadian mining company operating in West Africa, in a section titled “Risk and Uncertainties,” states that “during the past 30 months, management estimates that approximately

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15% of the indicated resource … has been lost to artisanal mining activity despite security measures carried out by mine management.” This kind of admission of a direct material conflict of interest between racialized foreigners and locals is rare in the documents I examined, although it is evidently a real concern. Such commentary appears to refute the argument sometimes made that there is no direct competition over resources between artisanal/citizen miners and foreign industrial miners because artisanal miners cannot access metals below a certain depth. Most foreign-owned industrial mines in African countries today are open pit, not underground, which suggests that many valuable resources are still close to the surface, accessible to the artisanals. To avoid charges of colonialist resource appropriation, official narratives attempt to deny there is any direct racial antagonism and competition; they also present the relationship as one of natural differences, with the technologically advanced Canadians better equipped to exploit the resources efficiently and effectively and thus entitled to do so. We can begin now to view the great outpouring of reports, conferences, and policy recommendations from multilateral and donor agencies as a broad effort to manage and redirect artisanal and small-scale miners – that is, remove them – without overt force. One strategy, taken up when artisanal miners actually do hold government-issued exploration and mining licences for particular parcels of land, is to carry out land tenure reform so as to introduce private property rights to the artisanal mining regime. In effect, this ends the practice whereby certain areas in each country are permanently designated for small-scale citizen mining and can only be turned over to other citizen-miners (i.e., those parcels cannot be sold to industrial and/or foreign companies). The 1992 World Bank policy paper advises: The concession should also be freely tradable so that the artisanal miner can later sell that right to a commercial mining company if the opportunity arises … If he can sell his rights to a mining company he may prefer to continue as an employee. In successful cases, the mine is developed more rationally on a larger scale which results in greater production, increased revenues, and taxes for the government.48 (italics added)

It is highly significant that this statement casts African country citizens not as owners of their own mining enterprises but rather as potential employees of large, foreign-owned mines. I read such commentary as deceptive: it implies a false concern for the welfare of artisanals when,

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as becomes quite clear, the real concern is with clearing political and geophysical space for large-scale, capital-intensive mining operations. In supporting the transformation of artisanal miners from independent into dependent economic subjects (i.e., turning them into employees of big mines instead of owners of small ones), the Canadian mining professionals I interviewed seemed unable to imagine or identify this shift as involving any kind of loss of status for citizen-miners. They consistently depicted this shift in employment status as offering better lives for artisanal miners: “You can go here, get in our way and hinder us from making a mine by doing, you know, by artisanal mining, or you can work for us, we’ll hire you to do specific things. We’ll give you hard cash every day and you may, you know, end up helping us build a big mine here.’ So we’ve taken that to them and then generally it’s worked out quite well. We’ve hired quite a few of those people. We employ everyone and they would rather get a cheque from us every Friday than be up at five o’clock in the morning with a pick, yeah, with no idea what they’re really going to find there. Sometimes there’s nothing. And you can dig for two weeks and find nothing. So if somebody’s paying you, and you can start work at eight o’clock in the morning and be finished by 4:30 and you get money now …

Significantly, research conducted by Jonsson and Fold with artisanal miners in southern Tanzania found that, even in the context of artisanal mining, labourers preferred to hold shares that entitled them to a portion of the ore instead of receiving a fixed wage from the pit manager or owner.49 These miners astutely calculated, and the researchers confirmed, that a portion of the gold ore mined was worth considerably more than many days’ wages and was therefore worth the wait. Moreover, as is clear from the figures presented earlier in this chapter, the number of artisanal miners greatly exceeds the number of jobs available in the capital-intensive (versus labour-intensive) large-scale mines. In this way falls apart the argument that citizen-miners would be better off as employees of large-scale foreign-owned mines (especially openpit mines, which are the least labour-intensive), given that most of them would not find jobs. In addition, this claim deflects attention from the impact of policy and legal changes that weaken local claims to land and that increase foreign investors’ secure access to mineral-rich terrain.

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The Canadian mining professionals I interviewed were careful to minimize, or failed to acknowledge, any power imbalance between local citizen-miners with small-scale licences and foreign junior and senior mining companies. Interactions between Canadians and citizens of the “host” country were presented as operating on a level playing field; they were “doing business” in a straightforward, transparent manner: I: Yes, you can get an artisanal mining license in [West African country]. PB: Right. And that isn’t – is that any concern to companies like yours – who

may not want to have to be dealing with local people coming onto your – I: Well, they can’t overlap. So if there’s been a permit issued, a concession is-

sued to an artisanal mining venture, you can’t overlap that, and they can’t overlap you, the boundaries would be distinctive. So it’s not a real concern. I guess a concern from a business point of view is that, well if too many people got interested in doing it, they’d make a mess of the land map in [West African country], they’d kind of checkerboard it with all sorts of little nuisance claims inside it – which would be just strictly a business issue. PB: Right. But that’s not happening in your experience. I: No. No, there are some good artisanal permits in western [name of country] that we’ve looked at, or that are in areas that we’re interested in, but we haven’t … and it would strictly be a business problem, because if they had it and you wanted it, you would have to contact them and negotiate with them and maybe you can negotiate with them and maybe you can’t. I think you could.

Clearly, the large multilateral aid agencies agree with, and support, this person’s assessment that fruitful “negotiations” are possible with artisanal miners. The World Bank’s 1992 policy statement on African mining openly named the priority it placed on “improving the policy, regulatory and institutional conditions for attracting private mining investment. The overall objective of such assistance is to transform informal mining into environmentally sustainable, legally structured, formal mining.”50 The report on a World Bank–organized 1995 roundtable on artisanal mining stated tersely: “A key conclusion: No real solutions are possible unless artisanal miners are given full legal and transferable mining titles to their claims.”51 As several commentators have noted, this clearly opens the way for increased foreign acquisition of mineral-rich lands.52 In the UN Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC’s) Committee on Natural Resources’ 1996 report, “Developments in

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Small-Scale Mining,” the specific policy recommendation to transform the legal terms of land tenure are repeated: “The question of transferable mineral rights, a principal issue for the artisanal miner, still needs to be answered in many developing countries.”53 In this regard, Tanzania is praised for eventually having got it right, although undoubtedly, considerable pressure was placed on its government to do so: “In its legislative reform, the Government has paid particular attention to the small-scale miners. Of particular note is the removal of constraints formerly preventing the sale or transfer of mineral rights.”54 The ECOSOC text goes on to admit: “In some instances, such relationships may have the effect of ultimately replacing artisanal and small commercial mines in the area with large-scale mechanized operations.”55 The objective, which is clear enough when one reads carefully, is to assimilate the small-scale sector into the neoliberal framework by introducing private, transferrable ownership regimes – in effect, to eradicate the sector by making it possible for private foreign investors to progressively acquire the assets of African citizen-miners. Indeed, the MMSD 2002 report states nonchalantly: “In the longer term, however, most ASM (artisanal/small-scale mining) activities will – and should – disappear naturally if progress towards sustainable development is made since alternative, more attractive employment options for small-scale miners will become available.”56 The term “naturally” is ironic, to say the least, in light of the evidence of intense and intentional discursive, legal, financial, and diplomatic efforts to bring about this “disappearance.” Alternative Livelihoods: Refashioning African Citizen-Miners as Poor People Requiring Development Assistance I turn now to what these “more attractive employment options” may be. Clearly, something attractive must be offered to the artisanal miners before they can realistically be expected to disappear. What has emerged is a program of “alternative livelihoods”: a variety of small-scale businessgenerating or “income-generating” projects aimed both at preventing new stampedes to the artisanal mining sector and at drawing existing artisanals into new modes of livelihood. There is considerable evidence that these programs have not succeeded.57 According to the growing body of literature on such programs, the “fashionable” projects that have been introduced include fish ponds, snail farming, batik, silkworm production, grasscutter (“bush-rat”) rearing, and goat rearing. Analyses of these efforts suggest that their failure can be linked

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to a number of factors, including inadequate in-depth baseline studies of the local socio-economic context, inadequate understanding of local cultures, lack of marketing opportunities, unrealistic expectations regarding the demand for such products, lack of development expertise on the part of those recruited to design such programs, and, in general, a failure to engage local citizen-miners in participatory identification of their needs and possible solutions. As several authors point out, the continuing growth of artisanal mining, both legal and illegal, indicates that these alternatives have failed to offer comparably high and reliable incomes. The alternative livelihood approach has required multilateral agencies to reconceptualize artisanal miners. As a result, a new discursive strategy is emerging. Artisanal miners are now becoming objects of development discourse and development programming. No longer necessarily bandits and vigilantes running rampant on a Wild West landscape, and certainly not seen as geologists, prospectors, pit managers, accountants, or entrepreneurs, artisanals are being refigured within an imagined village setting as impoverished, uneducated, unhealthy, and economically disadvantaged subjects who require social assistance. This reformulation has generated a new, foreign-aid-funded development approach to the sector. In the UNDP’s “Artisanal Mining for Sustainable Livelihoods” document (1999), and in the MMSD 2002 document, the artisanal/small-scale mining subject has been reconstituted as an impoverished but teachable agent with the potential to contribute to sustainable development. He or she can either learn to mine properly, or find employment with a large-scale mining company, or be directed into other types of poverty-reducing employment. ECOSOC recommends that artisanal mining in developing countries and countries with economies in transition be viewed not only as a mining issue that requires mining expertise but also as a poverty and socio-economic issue that requires attention on a multisectoral level. The report calls for technical assistance in mining, as well as assistance in such areas as alternative income-generating activities, education, health and the advancement of women.58

Thus subjectified, African citizen-miners are entitled to assistance from a cavalcade of helping professionals: “the multisectoral approach would include community development sociologists, economists, legal experts and public health experts … It is also a more holistic and

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people-centred development approach that would expand the audience of those receiving information about artisanal mining, and would make small-scale mining assistance more palatable to Governments and donors.”59 This paternalistic approach, because it appears to be non-coercive and non-violent, will be more effective and productive in achieving the desired end, which is the eradication of “artisanals” as an “unregulated” or anarchic/self-determining presence on mineral-rich territories. Significantly, it is also at this point that the multilateral agencies’ gaze turns to – in a sense, “sees” and fashions – women miners, child labour in mining, and environmental impact as subcategories of the reform agenda for artisanal/small-scale mining. The ILO’s 1999 report, Social and Labour Issues in Small-Scale Mines, devoted a full chapter each to “women in small-scale mining” and “child labour in small-scale mines.” Concerns for women, children, and the environment are now fairly standard tropes in development discourse as means to authorize paternalistic Western interventions. Adapting Spivak’s identification of the colonialist trope of “white men saving brown women from brown men,”60 critical theorists can recognize the new imperative within the mining sector for “white people to save brown Nature – the environment – from brown people.” “Brown” people, including smallscale miners, who supposedly endanger and destroy the environment through irresponsible use of mercury and by failing to restore grazing and agricultural lands, can be helped to embrace better practices. Such projects will include, for instance, training in alternatives to mercury for gold amalgamation; training in environmental conservation; training in mine safety; the eradication of child labour; the development of alternative income-generating activities; and so on.61 All of this sounds promising and valuable, and indeed it might be, depending on the broader policy framework. But the neoliberal framework here has been established by a foreign dominated and controlled development industry that is concerned primarily with maintaining “the rule of law” and adherence to market forces. From a post-colonial, critical development perspective, development interventions arising from such a framework may have a mesmerizing and dissembling effect on public awareness because they seem so reasonable, so wellintentioned, and so good. It seems good to teach people better methods of using mercury, and to reduce the numbers of children working as miners. Yet as Marc Dubois asserts, development interventions like these may be constitutive of the regulatory relations of domination;

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the local agencies that carry out such projects are “uniquely efficient colonizers on behalf of central strategies of power.”62 With Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon63 in mind, Dubois identifies the project of rendering impoverished or non-Western people’s lives transparent and known as a key strategy of disciplinary development power. In the guise of obtaining better microeconomic and cultural data about marginalized populations such as African citizen-miners – in order, supposedly, to better assist them – development agencies acquire greater knowledge of, and power over, the previously private rationality of these populations. Through knowledge acquisition – even, at times, via participatory research methods – it is possible to design more efficient technologies of reform.64 Given all this, it is not surprising that citizenminers are notoriously distrustful of government agents, researchers, and foreigners more generally. Casting artisanal miners as a needy population that can be assisted and reformed is also effective because it allows Canadian and other foreign mining actors to maintain a secure position as superior but benevolent. Certainly there are some Canadian mining industry professionals who sincerely – albeit still paternalistically – embrace the idea of helping artisanal mining populations. In the portions of my interviews in which artisanal mining was discussed, many Canadians represented themselves as quite willing to assist, teach, and redirect the African miners. That goodness reflects Canada’s preferred self-image. One mining professional – referring, in this case, to a South American context – unabashedly explained how his company helped the local artisanals: “We would bring out the cat[erpillar], dig a trench, and open up a vein for them. It kept them busy.” Some Canadian mining professionals expressed great satisfaction at having been able to help sort out the artisanal miners’ problems: First of all, we helped the community decide who was legitimately, who was legitimately there, because you have a group that maybe has been there for a while, then others who have come in, eventually they can sort each other out, to say “These guys, you know, they are not really part of the original group here,” so you get the group to sort of consolidate around a – and then you help them develop a co-op, so they have some kind of economic approach, you develop education programs for the kids and get them off using child labour, you develop safety practices for them so that they’re not so subject to accidents from land slides and so forth, and you get them off mercury. In this case I think we developed a gravity separator that they could use instead of mercury.

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Another interviewee reported efforts to help local citizen-miners professionalize their approach: I’ve tried to work with them … more trying to teach them the business end of things. You know, some of them, basically, they are not geologists or anything, they are not really prospectors in the licensed sense, but they have a mine, what they call a mine, a hole in the ground … First we’ll do a business plan, let’s look at what you’ve got, let’s see what you’ve sold in the last little while, get a sense of what business you have here, is it viable, then we talk about opening a bank account, you have to have a bank account, credit, learn how the banks work, and all of that, how to manage a business and the money’s not yours, it belongs to the company, that’s the biggest hurdle.

While these interviewees may have been well-intentioned, their patronizing tone is unmistakable. That tone is necessary to maintain a hierarchical relationship with citizen-miners, who must remain positioned as subordinate and in need of guidance and reform. Tschakert uses the concept of “flourishing” to think in more analytical terms about the goal of development assistance directed at the artisanal mining sector. Will the “assistance” offered enable these people and their communities to flourish? The term “flourish,” while ambiguous, could be heard as connoting comprehensive well-being: economic, political, cultural, and spiritual. It also implies a long-term process of selfdetermination with sustainable outcomes, as opposed to a quick fix via “fashionable” but poorly conceived income-generating projects. It implies respect for alterity and places the impetus for transformative change within the community itself and on its own terms. It may not be a straightforward task to identify which development assistance interventions (if any) directed at the large number of artisanal mining communities and sectors in African countries could be deemed to support genuine flourishing, and which can be fairly regarded as “social risk mitigation” exercises or reform programs functioning to assimilate actors into a neoliberal economic system in which they are assigned marginal positions. Certainly, political recognition, cessation of representations that give rise to “status injury,” and an institutional context and policy framework that accords rights, voice, respect, and dignity to African citizen-miners would be more conducive to the former. In the interview data I collected, there was little evidence of such an approach.

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Erasing the Other: Canadian Miners Encountering Autonomous Miners in African Countries What is it that prevents Canadian mining subjects from recognizing African citizen-miners as entitled subjects, as similarly situated “Selves” rather than inferiorized “Others”? As an ideal, democracy is based on the eradication of such hierarchical distinctions. This seeming incapacity or refusal to recognize the Other as a Self, which continues to be complexly produced in the contemporary era, has a long genealogy in racialized colonial-capitalist relations. We can turn again to Hegel, whose classic “master–slave” analytic65 on the nature of human self-consciousness – fashioned in terms of a violently hierarchical and abstracted apprehension of an (enslaved) Other – has been recontextualized and reinterpreted with reference to the Haitian slave revolt that arose in 1791, continued for thirteen years, and led to Haitian selfdetermination.66 Sibylle Fischer figures Hegel, a leading Enlightenment scholar, as being aware of the implications of the slave revolt, which clearly asserted human equality and the right to self-determination via control of territory and resources. She regards Hegel’s inability or refusal to “write the next chapter” in the master–slave story (i.e., the story of the post-revolution relationship), as well as his failure to concretely reference or allude to actual historical events, as indicative of a refusal within European modernity and the European psyche to engage radical or substantive democracy – indeed, as a refusal to recognize all others as equals. Many scholars have identified this refusal as the paradox at the heart of modernity’s claims to equality, democracy, and universal human rights. This paradox served as the linchpin that enabled the European Enlightenment to flourish in tandem with the most intensive global program of economic and political invasion and domination of others’ bodies, lands, and polities ever accomplished on the planet. As noted in chapter 2, D.T. Goldberg, among other critical race scholars, identifies race categories and racial hierarchies as the enabling conditions of this disturbing anomaly.67 Goldberg argues that from early on, difference and heterogeneity were regarded as threats to the European self and state. This perception arose from a deep anxiety over status and control. The gradually emerging view that racial difference was a threat functioned as a justification to establish control, reduce risk, and secure the existing social order. In this way, modernity not only relied on a reification of the idea of race but also became equated with whiteness and

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its protection. This made possible the racial hierarchies and racial differentiation in rights that profoundly characterized European colonialism; indeed, those hierarchies and that differentiation became central features of colonial rationality, the colonial imaginary, modern subjectivity, and the capacity of colonial economic actors to extort profit. As George Orwell showed in his classic 1936 essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” individual participants in the colonial enterprise were required to “perform race” as domination and control. Moreover, colonizers were required to learn to apprehend the colonized other in racial terms as either ontologically (essentially) different, or as subordinate – that is, as occupying a child-like or infantile stage of development. (Thus, for instance, adult African men could be routinely called “boy” by European masters – a practice that persists to this day in the derogatory term “houseboy.”) Achille Mbembe describes these two approaches to the racialized colonial relationship as either “Hegelian” or “Bergsonian”: In … what we shall call the Hegelian tradition, the native subjected to power and to the colonial state could in no way be another “myself.” … In such circumstances, the only possible relationship with him was one of violence and domination. At the heart of that relationship, the colonized could only be envisaged as the property and thing of power. He/she was a tool subordinated to the one who fashioned, and could now use him/ her at will. As such, he/she belonged to the sphere of objects … The second tradition could be called Bergsonian. It rested on the idea that one could, as with an animal, sympathize with the colonized, even “love” him or her; … But, above all, the colonized, like the animal, was an object of experimentation in a game that the colonizer played with himself/herself, conscious that between him/her and the colonized there hardly existed a community of essence.68

Such a typology – on one hand, the “thingification” of the colonized subject; on the other, the adoption of a paternalistic relationship – offers a way of interpreting and organizing the data I obtained through interviews with Canadian mining professionals operating in contemporary African mining contexts. I have introduced this scholarship on the nature of the colonial “Self–Other” relationship at this point because my preliminary reading of the interview data raised questions that catalysed a search for tools of interpretation. In addition to the political and economic reasons for non-recognition, what stood out for me was the Canadian mining

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professionals’ affective and psychological inability or refusal to apprehend the African citizen-miner as a Self with dignity, entitlements, and an inherent right to self-determination. I wanted to know where this inability or refusal came from in order to think about whether it could be different. The interview data indicate that the Canadian mining professional, as a particular historical subject, has internalized the content of well-established contemporary and historical discursive traditions vis-à-vis racialized representations of the African Other, and manifests or performs a racist categorization of both Self and Other that lends itself to an erasure of the Other. In behaving thus, the Canadian subject appears to forgo agency. In the sections that follow, I examine more closely the discursive and psychological strategies the interviewees used in their efforts to “deal with” the problematic phenomenon of local citizen-miners. The White-Out of African Miners A classic strategy of colonization is to legitimize presence in foreign lands on the grounds that such lands are unpopulated. In the legal doctrine of terra nullius, there is no one there to contest the presence of, or to be harmed by, the imperialist actors. Significantly, Canadian mining industry texts (The Northern Miner, company annual reports, etc.) rarely acknowledge the presence of African independent miners. When references are made, they are cursory and brief – no more than a phrase or a single sentence – and they typically refer simply to the presence of “artisanal workings.” The gaze is directed at artefacts in the landscape, “workings,” rather than at the “workers,” who are effectively airbrushed out of the scene. There is no suggestion that “artisanal workings” might indicate the presence of persons holding a prior entitlement to land or mineral resources, and there is no mention of competition or contestation between the Canadian prospectors and local miners. Indeed, “artisanal workings” are usually mentioned to assure potential investors and shareholders that mineable resources are already indicated in the area licensed for exploration by Canadian companies. Ironically, this suggests that industry professionals recognize the validity of the geological knowledge of local miners. Yet as Goldberg observes, “being written into the official record as not white is at once to be whitened out … to be made part of the natural landscape, the silent backdrop in

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relation to which life is lived, taken for granted or passed by while being ignored.”69 This desire to erase Indigenous populations, or at any rate to minimize any problems associated with them, was evident in the interview data. Interviewees made use of a variety of rhetorical strategies: they denied that there were any “artisanals” on or near their areas of operation; or they asserted that local mining had only occurred in the long distant past; or they acknowledged that they knew of other situations elsewhere where there had been “problems” with artisanals, but that they personally, or their companies, had never had any such problems. I also often noted a refusal or inability to offer any personal accounts of face-to-face interactions or relations with local citizen-miners. The following interview segment illustrates how Indigenous mining presence and knowledge was dismissed: I: Most of the artisanal workings in [West African country] are from centu-

ries ago. They’re unoccupied …There are ancient – they call them ancient “travaux” – there are ancient workings on all of our projects, but none of them are occupied. Now there are some artisanal miners in the western part of [West African country], here and there, but none of the properties that we have, have them. PB: You mentioned that sometimes the local people would know where they – I: They all know where things are. PB: So there’s still some local knowledge. I: Yeah, I think that sort of thing carries on for a long time, and I think these young boys that are running around with the goats and stuff, they see them so they know where every one of these things is, but they don’t do anything. And they’ve been told by their fathers et cetera that there’s gold there, somebody started that, somewhere, generations ago.

Significantly, in this interview segment, when it became difficult for the interviewee to continue asserting that geological knowledge was part of an irretrievably distant past, the argumentation shifted to a claim that local people, infantilized as “these young boys running around with goats,” were not entitled to mineral resources on the grounds that “they don’t do anything.” This apparent failure to act in ways appreciable by Western values and cultural norms is a classic justification of colonialist intervention and conquest.70 Moreover, there is of course, as indicated above, extensive evidence that economically important local mining is carried out.

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Colonization = “Thingification”71 What the interviewees’ discursive strategies and claims make possible, eventually, is a commonplace “thingification” and consequent exploitation of artisanal miners by foreign companies. In the interviews, a topic that routinely surfaced was the utility of artisanal miners to Canadian companies in the initial identification of mineral deposits. One might speculate that in this situation, a potentially egalitarian and mutually respectful relation might emerge – that is, a relationship formed around shared or complementary geological and environmental knowledge. Yet even here – particularly here – the Canadians represented the local miners in a manner that maintained racial distance between themselves and African independent miners. The latter were represented and positioned as subordinates and indeed as instruments of the Canadian explorers, as “canaries” as it were. That is, African persons’ bodies could be used to signal the presence of valuable minerals for the material advantage of Western men: We were never against small-scale mining, you know. In fact, it’s quite a good exploration tool because the guys will show you where things are, so we never had a big problem with it, you know. If it affected our operations we would, we would look into it. Usually every place we go there are [small-scale] miners there. Basically most of the deposits in [West African country] have been found by the small-scale miners, the orpailleurs … We don’t ban it completely, because they’re actually fairly good prospectors, in other words, they can go out and find these little things and then they may end up becoming big zones. We’ll assess them afterwards. So they are kind of useful at times. We don’t encourage it on any particular area, but you know, we don’t actually go out and kick everybody off because that’s just not – not productive.

The following extract fleshes out this “thingifying” attitude in which African miners are toyed with, their apparent gullibility providing a certain amusement to the large-scale miners: So we basically use them as an exploration tool, they do all the exploration for us. They dig all these pits, and then we just go in and sample. We don’t have to pay anyone to dig a pit that deep. So there’s an advantage to it, and on our property in [name of country] they’ve actually, the illegal miners

I Wouldn’t Glorify Them as Prospectors  239 have opened up a whole different section of the property that we knew very little about … They’ve opened up a whole new area where we had very little information. You couldn’t see anything there, there weren’t any outcrops, the ground was just there flat, you have no idea what’s underneath, and how are you going to find out, you can spend a lot of money trenching … These guys go and they make the pits for you, so we found twenty-six new pits in an area that – you know, it was just great, because we just go in there and sample all these pits and suddenly we’ve extended our mineralized zone by another 800 metres from these guys doing the work. Yes, so you leave them alone and then encourage them actually – “Why don’t you guys start looking over there, maybe you want to try over there, it could be good ground.” They put pits down, especially if the geologists are suggesting that that might be good. I mean by the middle of next week you’ll have five pits going down and then that’s, it’s exploration for us.

At other times, a need to minimize the knowledge and capabilities of these miners was apparent. The Canadian interviewees sometimes admitted that African citizen-miners were “pretty good prospectors,” yet it seemed important for them to cast them as unsophisticated, harmless, and non-threatening as competitors: So there’s a natural progression of them having finished their work, and if the opportunities continue to say a kilometre down, a small-scale miner’s not going to make use of that. He’ll move to other pickings. And you could say there’s a natural progression that they tend to be used, they can be viewed as the early stage workers, legal or illegal. Actually the small guys are pretty good prospectors, they find the stuff, and obviously you don’t mind if they’re doing a little small-scale mining because they can’t get underground to get it anyways, they can only go down so far or things are going to collapse.

In these interview segments, not only are these persons treated instrumentally, but they are placed at the margins of history. There is, as one interviewee put it, a natural progression from small, shallow African operations to large, deep Canadian ones. This suggests a need to minimize any possible legitimacy or competition posed by artisanals that would disturb the Canadians’ sense of rational entitlement. Invocations of a naturalized cultural/technological hierarchy allow the Canadian mining subjects to occupy a comfortable place of civility that

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is dominant and benevolent. The Canadians are cast as the real nation builders, those who will bring the really substantial economic development to the countries where they are operating. At the same time, Canadian mining professionals remain deeply invested in performing themselves as good people whose presence in African countries’ mining sectors leads to a “win–win” outcome in which everyone benefits. The Canadian chronically self-represents as a figure who prefers to treat local people with kindness, tol-erance, reason, and generosity, even if it means “turning a blind eye” to certain “illegal” practices. Interviewees seemed to find it important to assert how reasonable and tolerant they typically were in relation to artisanals, and the extent to which they preferred to avoid conflicts: Maybe three or four years ago we did have a problem with one particular area, but we did some quick exploration on it, got everyone out, realized it wasn’t a very big system, and then we said, “Okay, well, we can’t do anything about it anyway, we’re not going to mine it, so go ahead. Go ahead and do what you can do.

However, self-representation as highly tolerant, patient, reasonable and accommodating is always qualified by the need to be practical, realistic, firm when necessary, and never weak: We’ll have to decide when we get closer to the time whether we allow artisanal miners to continue to be on the concession or not, and if we do, we’ll have to regulate it so that it’s safe and environmentally responsible. I think we will probably not allow them to stay, because the [name of African nationality] just find ways to manipulate, you know every – a touch of kindness is taken as a sign of weakness. Unfortunately.

When Contact Becomes Confrontation Sometimes, though, when the Canadians say “no more – you have to get off here,” African independent miners refuse to leave. They talk back, they continue mining. They may sabotage Canadian property and/or involve lawyers to challenge the Canadians’ property rights or to demand appropriate financial compensation in exchange for leaving. They may defy their relegation to diminutive, “primitive” forms of mining. As one interviewee complained:

I Wouldn’t Glorify Them as Prospectors  241 There’s a few areas they have just really been – set in fairly well, but they’re not mining on a small scale any more. They’re mining – you know, they’re putting, excavating some quite large holes and have crushers going. They have, you know, they’ve got – they’ve accessed some of our underground workings and are working illegally there. They broke into our explosive cache and stole dynamite and they are blasting and all sorts of fun stuff. They are fairly serious. And it’s very unsafe practice in a lot of cases, there’s a lot of deaths associated with the galamsey activities – cave ins and collapses, working with mercury and you know it’s not very safe at all.

When the determination of African citizen-miners and populations to assert entitlement to local resources reaches a certain level, the colonial imagination registers these subjects as a threat to Western rationality and its white neoliberal project. The threat to property rights and to financial security and enrichment is never explicit, but clearly it lurks below the surface of thought and texts. This fear now appears in representations of artisanals as a “horde,” a “mass”; this is the metaphorical frontier fortress, the trope of besiegement, with a small group of disciplined men of reason (Canadian mining professionals) inside the “fort” facing the hordes outside the walls who threaten to destroy the edifice of colonialist modernity. In many interview segments, there is evidence of the dominant subject’s psychological need to be in control and of corresponding anxiety when that control appears threatened. Interviewees claim to be prepared to accommodate artisanal miners as long as they, the Canadians, remain in control. It is precisely in the moments when they feel or imagine that their control is at risk that recourse to more overtly violent means is considered. The response to organized local challenges sometimes involves the use of armed force provided by the “host” government’s army or police, or, alternatively, by private security firms hired by the mining company: I: At that particular mine it became a safety issue because the company had

a permit to mine it and whenever they had a chance the artisanal miners or what they called in this case, illegal miners, would storm the gates and come in and have three thousand people out there with their pans trying to get gold out while at the same time you have huge bulldozers and trucks hauling ore back and forth to the mill. PB: Was that a Canadian company?

242  Colonial Extractions I: No, that was a French operation. PB: And what happened? I: Oh, they had to bring the army in to get these people out.

Significantly, Canadians are almost never identified as actors who engage in direct violence. Being nationals of a country that adheres to the rule of law marks the Canadians as good, progressive, and “civilized.” That identity is constructed to contrast with non-Western governance practices, such as the alleged behaviour of Vietnamese authorities: This is a story I heard years ago in Vietnam, that the government wanted to remove some small-scale miners and their way of doing it was going in and shooting a number of them.

Actions the Canadians understand to be lawful and legitimate protect material interests while preserving a sense of the Canadians’ reasonableness. To illustrate, this interviewee continued: Right. And then you have all the gradations in between. You buy them out. But do they have tenure? Now [African country] in some cases they were given tenure, so there was a compensation issue with the small-scale miners. The mine that we just purchased in July had one of those issues, there was some controversy about that but we’re working through that … Right now we don’t have small-scale miners in the area of this mine that we purchased, there were small-scale miners there at one point, but they’ve been either compensated or they’ve moved off.

It becomes quite important to the project of installing free-market disciplinary rule in post-colonial African settings for Western actors to dominate and rule as much as possible through unspectacular, legal forms of power – that is, through lawful force accompanied and authorized by mythologies of civility. As stated by the Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania at the time of the Bulyanhulu crisis: “I indicated that we had agreed that the illegals had to be removed to permit the mining operation to proceed but had insisted that their departure be accomplished peacefully without any violence or bloodshed.”72 Distancing the Other In contrast to Pratt’s depiction of the colonial contact zone, I contend that Canadian mining professionals’ relations with African independent

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miners are structured expressly to avoid “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.” In most post-colonial situations, it is precisely this unsettling possibility that is systematically avoided and foreclosed (discursively and materially). The post-colonial era can be distinguished from the colonial era by the ubiquity of contact situations: global information flow via the Internet and air travel has given rise to an unprecedented degree of access to knowledge about others’ living conditions. That access is apprehended in some cases as a threat to structural inequality that must be managed. In the twentyfirst century, the maintenance of “radically asymmetrical relations of power” requires affective and discursive distancing – a kind of ontological apartheid – between the colonizer and the colonized. When actual contact does occur, it is structured within the parameters of paternalism, the law, or business relations – all technologies of ontological distancing. The function of this distancing is to foreclose the possibility of apprehending the Other as an entitled Subject possessing, among other features of his/her inviolate alterity, equal political status, a right to self-determination, exercise of sovereignty, and valid claims to mineral resources. “Rule of law” and “market-competition business practice” both offer this objectifying and distancing possibility. Such discourses eschew direct force but perpetuate relations of domination. As noted in chapter 5, the rule of law provides the scaffolding for a non-confrontational (ostensibly non-violent) but still hierarchical relationship between colonizer and colonized. As Blomley observes, “violence is also imposed on other bodies through routine legal acts … It is the mundane and routinized ways in which law is often ‘enforced’ that demands the most careful inquiry.”73 This kind of “routinized violence” is apparent in the following extract: We don’t generally have a problem with them because the laws basically say that if you have an exploration permit for that particular area, then artisanal mining, no matter how long it’s been going on, it’s forbidden there.

The disinterested authority of “the law” produces and maintains a de-personalization, a protective distance, between the Canadian miners and the local miners; the Canadians simply do not have to think about the situation; the law itself – unquestioned, dehistoricized, and thus naturalized – forecloses complexity, history, and questions of ethics. This is possible because the violence, coercion, and imperialist relations of

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power involved in establishing liberalized mining law in African countries in the twenty-first century are obscured and disavowed. Liberalized mining codes organize the neo-colonial–post-colonial contact zone as a rationalized economic space that precludes any privileging of claims on the grounds of race, citizenship, cultural values, history, or redistributive justice. In colour-blind liberal modernity, only the profit motive and the free market arbitrate and allocate access to mineral properties. The post-colonial capitalist subject becomes invested in a fantasy in which the African Other is an economic subject with whom private foreign investors are engaged in fair competition on a level playing field. That construction legitimizes any superior or privileged position the foreign investor is able to obtain – since it will all have been done fairly, through fair competition and according to the rules. In this way, economic domination is made out to be the natural outcome of market forces; foreign economic control of African mineral sectors will not be nameable as neo-colonial domination. The African citizen-miner is simply another economic actor with whom the private foreign investor is engaged in rational, rules-based, capitalist competition. In an interview segment cited earlier, the Canadian mining professional referred to the likelihood of being able to acquire a property from an artisanal miner: There are some good artisanal permits in western [name of country] that we’ve looked at, or that are in areas that we’re interested in, but we haven’t … and it would strictly be a business problem, because if they had it and you wanted it, you would have to contact them and negotiate with them and maybe you can negotiate with them and maybe you can’t. I think you could.

Here, unequal access to capital and differences in the size of claims that artisanal and non-artisanal miners can legally obtain are implicitly acknowledged but treated as an ahistorical, natural occurrence. The consequence of a business deal such as the one this interviewee believes could be negotiated would be the extension and increase of private, foreign-licensed property and the removal or withdrawal of the indigenous African mining presence – that is, a racial-spatial exclusion in which whiteness is ultimately privileged. Privileged, secure, trouble-free access to African minerals and exploration properties is the primary goal of contemporary Canadian mining companies. The post-colonial Canadian “gentleman geologist” desires a non-confrontational, rules-based structure so as to be able to relate impersonally on an imagined level playing field to African people subjectified as

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raceless, rational economic actors. This will allow the Canadian subject to maintain an identity as a non-colonizing agent of civility. Non-Recognition: The Other as a Different Kind of Human Ultimately, what seems to be required goes beyond paternalism; what I observed was an essentializing move that rendered the African independent miner a different kind of being. The pretence that there was an economic “level playing field” on which locals and foreigners could fairly compete as equal economic subjects was difficult to sustain. Rather than confronting the evident inequalities resulting from particular histories and colonial/social relations of power, the neo-colonialist subject opts for the view that an African person living in dramatically different economic circumstances must be a different kind of human being – one who is accustomed to not having much and who essentially doesn’t need as much: Look at your economy, your average wage. [If] you’re not working at a gold mine, you’re looking at fairly small wages, $150 sort of a month thing, and you know gold is obviously, you know, help subsidize that. They obviously mine what’s on surface, they don’t go down very deep. And it’s very often a supplement to their living. So they – I don’t think many of them – I’ve certainly never met anyone who made all his money from mining. They do it as I say in the rainy season in particular and it’s just a supplement to what they do the rest of the year. But it can be an important supplement to their living. If you find a nice nugget, you know, a gram or so of gold, it’s going to bring in what to them is a fortune. The problem is always if you have a thousand people digging on the mine and you have ten thousand people living from this thousand and ten thousand or one hundred thousand supported. Now from one day to the other they don’t have anything to eat, so it’s a big social problem. They’re living in a village, there’s no livelihood, there’s no job, there is no social assistance of any kind, and you want to be self employed, you get a pick and you go and dig a hole, see what you can find there.

I have presented many examples to indicate how extensive interviewees’ awareness of the Others’ circumstances is. These are strikingly graphic accounts of the effects of living in proximity, or of the

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contact zone. However, the maintenance of colonialist structural relations requires a suppression of affect, a refusal of egalitarian relationship. These passages are descriptive without offering explanations. On one level, the interviewees seem to identify with the local independent miners; they indicate that they know something about the real circumstances of their lives, their desire for work and need for money. These are potential points of connection – what Pratt calls “copresence … interlocking understandings and practices.” Yet Pratt’s depiction does not match what seems to be occurring. The potential point of connection or identification proves impossible to locate because such an identification would call into question and render ethically untenable the entire colonialist structure. The contradictions and hypocrisies these persons’ life-conditions (“no livelihood, no job, no social assistance of any kind”) raise for dominant subjects are such that, as an act of psycho-affective self-preservation in service of the broader project, the colonial imaginary at a certain point simply recasts these figures as innately, essentially different: a different sort of human. These two figures – the Canadian miner and the African miner – cannot coexist on the same ontological plane. They cannot experience what Alfred Lopez calls a radically interdependent relationship of “being-with.”74 The Canadian interviewees need to bracket the personhood, qualify the humanity of African miners.75 The fact (or claim) that few African independent miners work full-time as miners – that they are not professionals, as it were – contributes to the production of this bracketing; the obscurity of “what they do the rest of the year” helps figure the African artisanal miner as an entirely different sort of economic subject. Poverty and economic trauma (“from one day to the other they don’t have anything to eat”) seem to be construed in the Canadian colonial imaginary as an original, primordial condition – the way things are in “Africa” – rather than specific, historically produced effects of particular relations of power. This primordial condition of economic deprivation has constituted an African subject who is innately different. This is what makes possible statements such as, “What to a Canadian is ‘a nice nugget’ is to an African ‘a fortune.’” In this colonialist imaginary, Africans are understood as (i.e., produced as) beings who have only ever known conditions of minimal income and resources. It is easier, less strenuous, and less unsettling for Canadian miners to accept this as “truth” and to ask no further questions. Asking further questions would require the kind of courage that is deliberately feminized, and thus ridiculed, within the patriarchal-neoliberal ideological order.

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Goldberg draws attention to the “denial of the invented relationships between Self and Other in modernity – and now postmodernity – that have been necessary in making possible the standard of living achieved by the ‘civilized,’ ‘developed,’ ‘progressive,’ ‘historical’ beings.”76 The political effect, and effectiveness, of these invented subjectivities is to further consolidate the idea that “practically, they are not like us: they do not need what we need” and that therefore we do not need to think about, examine, or be accountable for economic disparities. The scale of these disparities, and the fact that they are still actively being produced, makes them unthinkable for neo-colonizers because of the profound threat to their sense of moral, benevolent selfhood: there would be a crisis of identity, a loss of personhood. Rather, the impoverished Other, a product of massive, primordial, ahistorical poverty, is imagined, known, and treated as essentially different from the affluent Western Self. A profound chasm is created. This fabricated yet naturalized chasm, operating at the level of the psyche and affect, inures the neo-colonizer to any genuinely egalitarian relationship with the anticolonial subject. The Canadian colonizer, I suggest, becomes heavily invested, affectively, in the maintenance of this fabrication – that is, of the essentially different Other. Such a stance characterizes dominant subjectivities in colonialist and white settler societies. Conclusion African citizen-miners, who number in the millions throughout the continent, present a particular dilemma for the Canadian resource extraction sector; their presence, and the terms of their representation, must be managed astutely. They pose a dilemma because they are competing for some of the same resources and because their claims to the land challenge the Canadians’ claims. Moreover, their numbers challenge the logic of a capital-intensive versus labour-intensive approach to resource extraction in African countries. Indeed, the vast gap between available employment in the formal large-scale capital-intensive mining sector and employment in labour-intensive artisanal/citizen mining supports the view that African governments could be encouraged and supported by Canadians and others to pursue an approach to their mining sectors that, while preserving a place for large-scale mining, would prioritize the employment-generating artisanal sector, allocate substantial resource-rich territories to it, and invest in it – through training, enhanced safety and health measures, and so on – in a manner that

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would foster the “flourishing” of its participants, their communities, and the nation. They would be primary “development actors” instead of being relegated to a secondary status or entirely eliminated. In this chapter I have identified discursive mechanisms that operate to foreclose such an approach. I have shown how the interplay between savage subject and impoverished subject in the construction of African artisanal miners corresponds to a shifting kaleidoscope of practices in the methodology and imaginary of contemporary neoliberal global rule. These conceptual shifts correspond to particular policies and practices designed to install a liberal market economy and regulatory racial rule: on the one hand, via the introduction of privatized and transferable land tenure practices that privilege private capital and whiteness; and on the other, via the redirection of African independent miners into non-mining micro-enterprises or waged employment by foreign-owned mining companies. They will be eradicated/removed, or domesticated/assimilated. In the terms of the contemporary capitalist imaginary, local African mining is merely the warm-up act for the real foreign-operated industrial mining show. Canadians cast themselves as the real nation builders, the real geniuses of African mineral development. The parallels in the colonialist narratives between the conquest of African mineral frontiers in the twenty-first century and the opening up of Canada’s mining frontiers – where unnamed “Indians” naively guided the white settlers and explorers to valuable mineral deposits – are evident and striking. As was also evident (although often effaced) in Canadian mining history, the settlers depended heavily on local Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and assistance, and specifically – in the case of Canadian mining as much as in the case of contemporary African mining – on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of minerals, metals, geology, and other aspects of the natural and cultural environment. As noted in chapter 3, Marshall has documented and re-entered into official history an alternative set of “facts” to demonstrate the agentive role of Indigenous miners in Canada and to unmask the power relations embedded in the dominant colonialist accounts that persistently and paternalistically erase, marginalize, and infantilize Others, whether “Indians” or “artisanals.” Colonizers do an extraordinary amount of work at the level of the dominant imaginary: they produce multilateral agency report after multilateral agency report on artisanal mining, and hammer into place the notion of artisanals-as-illegals, in order to justify and make possible the acquisition of extensive tracts of mineral-rich land. This

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work is required to maintain an identity myth that Canadians are morally entitled to the privileges and opportunities that affluence provides. The refusal to divest the colonizer-Self of such a mythology requires non-recognition of the Other as Self; this enables and perpetuates the continuing violence of a colonial relationship. The cost is immeasurable, not just for the African miners, communities, and states and for the continent as a whole – which continues to lose massive resource wealth to foreign actors, investors, and elite African collaborators – but also to the neo-colonizers. For as Ranjana Khanna states, acknowledging the sameness of the Other, that is, that the Other is a self, also paradoxically allows one to see that the Other is actually different, and has its own history that propels it into desiring a future in which political freedom for oneself and others can be worked for alongside ontological freedom.77

8 Refusing the “White Man’s Burden”:1 Investing in Colour-Blind Mining in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada has recently become aware of the proposed legislation in South Africa that would significantly affect mineral exploration by Canadian companies in South Africa … PDAC is concerned that investment by Canadian exploration companies would be effectively barred by the proposed restrictions. (Letter from PDAC to Ralph Goodale, Minister of Natural Resources, Government of Canada, 23 February 2001)2

Canada’s involvement in the redesign of South Africa’s post-apartheid mining law underscores the incommensurability of substantive justice and colour-blind neoliberalism. In examining South Africa’s mining reforms, this chapter consolidates the analysis of Canadian efforts to ensure the installation of neoliberal mining laws in African states as a mechanism of renewed colonialist-capitalist domination. This mode of domination operates through a form of “post-racial racism” that claims to value “diversity,” espouse “colour-blindness,” ignore historical causes of inequality, and place domestic and foreign players in competition on a mythical “level playing field.” South Africa’s new mining legislation, in its draft and final forms,3 confronted the Canadian mining industry with a dilemma – how to appear to sympathize with and support the South African state’s transition to a post-apartheid society in which resources would be more widely shared across racial lines, while simultaneously protecting Canadian companies’ access to and profits from South Africa’s mineral resources. Moreover, there was undoubtedly considerable concern that South Africa’s policy choices would ripple throughout the continent. To negotiate this dilemma, the Canadian mining industry,

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with support from some sectors of the Canadian government, was compelled to articulate, legitimize, and defend its reactions and in so doing to produce particular narratives. The South African mining bill, in both its initial draft and its final form, consequently became an intensely “storied” site: one in which it was possible to see the mutually constitutive relationships among the processes of naming/narrating and imagining a racial state, the coercive techniques of (white) capital, and the racial structuring of livelihoods. These influential Canadian actors’ responses to the draft mining legislation, in concert with those of other actors, served to press the post-apartheid state to adopt the institutional, cultural, and economic orientation of a “racial state” as opposed, of course, to a “racist state,” but also (and less obviously) as opposed to an anti-racist state. These interventions by the Canadian mining industry and the Canadian government support the view that Canada’s own social order constitutes a “racial state.” Such a state plays a significant role in promoting and servicing the institutional and ideological needs of a free-market and white supremacist global order. The data on which this chapter’s arguments are based feature responses to questions4 I posed to interview subjects regarding the new South African mining law. I draw extensively on the two formal submissions (released in March 2001 and April 2002) prepared by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) on, respectively, the first draft bill and the amended bill; on a file of diplomatic correspondence and documentation obtained with extreme difficulty5 from the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) through the Access to Information Act; and on a submission to the South African parliament prepared by a South African law firm representing six foreign mining companies (from four countries), including at least one senior Canadian company. (The companies had a third party prepare the submission in order to maintain anonymity.) This document is titled “Concerned International Prospecting and Mining Companies’ Submission on Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Bill”; I will refer to it in this chapter as the “Concerned Companies” submission. Theorizing Racial Equality in South African Mining As indicated in chapter 2, David Theo Goldberg (2002) distinguishes between “racist” and “racial” states. Both, he suggests, are types of

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white supremacist states. “Racist states” (such as Germany under Nazi rule, apartheid South Africa, the pre-Civil Rights Movement United States, and Canada with its “White Canada” immigration policy up to 1962 and its Indian Act) are those that overtly legislate the categorization and differentiation of citizens on “racial” grounds; in such a state, all citizens do not hold equal rights or the same status before the law. This applies to both civil rights and economic rights such as property rights. As also noted in chapter 2, the colonial state is a type of racist state. “Racial states,” by contrast, have adopted formal (legal) equality rights and have removed overt and formal (legally enshrined) racial distinctions, yet racialized differences in status and opportunities persist. Formal equality is typically limited to the realm of civil rights and some social rights; it does not extend in any substantive manner to access to wealth and resources. Moreover, a dominant white cultural imaginary, and various manifestations of institutional racism, continue to shape the contemporary nation in ways that tacitly allow the persistence of white dominance. The legacy of past overtly racist policies manifests itself in patterns of continuing racialized poverty and political underrepresentation and exclusion of racialized minorities. Official claims to pluralism and post-racialism, and to “celebrate and welcome diversity,” are often, ironically, indicators of the persistence of white power, which now protects and masks itself in new ways.6 The “racial state,” then, is not a state that has “left race/racism behind,” but rather one that has masked or whitewashed – and that denies – a reconfigured system of white privilege and dominance. This is particularly the case with settler states such as Canada, the United States, and South Africa. African American legal scholar Cheryl Harris explains “affirmative action” as one of the mechanisms that paradoxically often protects whiteness in white settler states. In her canonic essay “Whiteness as Property,” Harris draws on American jurisprudence related to property rights, race identity legislation, and affirmative action to demonstrate how privileges arising from white racial identity have acquired the kind of strong legal protections in American law that have historically pertained to private property. Whiteness, she asserts, is a type of property that in white settler states is offered legal protection. At a conference on “Constitution-Making for the New South Africa” held at the University of the Western Cape in 1991,7 where she presented her paper, her ideas contributed to a discussion about the “affirmative action” instruments in South Africa’s postapartheid constitutional framework. Writing before the formal end of apartheid, she stated hopefully:

Investing in Colour-Blind Mining in Post-Apartheid South Africa  253 South Africans consider affirmative action a strategic measure to address directly the distribution of property and power … This policy has not yet been clearly defined, but what is implied … is that existing distributions of property will be modified by rectifying unjust loss and inequality … This conception is in fact consistent with the fundamental principle of affirmative action and effectively removes the constraint imposed in the American model that strangulates affirmative action principles by protecting the property interest in whiteness.8 [italics added]

Harris proceeds to distinguish between the “corrective” and “distributive” dimensions of affirmative action goals, arguing that the American legal focus on “corrective” justice (redressing inequality of opportunity and access) has avoided distributive justice in order to leave intact the property rights of white capital. Drawing on an array of cases that went to the US Supreme Court, she argues that the legal history of affirmative action policies in the United States demonstrates the extent to which the legal establishment has acted to defend property interest in whiteness by accepting as valid the argument that affirmative action unfairly burdens innocent whites.9 Harris asserts that in “racial states,” affirmative action policies have been hotly contested precisely because they challenge the core of white domination: “One reason then for the court’s hostility toward affirmative action is that it seeks to de-legitimate the assumptions surrounding existing inequality. It exposes the illusion that the original or current distribution of power, property and resources is the result of ‘right’ and ‘merit.’”10 In the South African context, where inequality is acknowledged to be the result of colonization and racist apartheid policies, such illusions are less tenable, even while they are still subtly implied. The new mining legislation became a site in which affirmative action strategies to substantively advance racial economic equality came into direct confrontation with strategies and narratives designed to maintain the privileges of capital and whiteness. The Canadian mining industry, in conjunction with other foreign and some South African mining interests, threw its weight in support of the latter. To do so, it fashioned narratives that gave fresh content to the notions of “right” and “merit.” Drafting the New South African Mining Law As formal apartheid in South Africa drew to a close, many forces conspired to influence the socio-economic policies of the new African

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National Congress government as well as the terms of what would be a new national imaginary. Tshitereke (2004) identifies some of these forces as the global hegemony of neoliberal ideology that emerged following the end of the Cold War and that was expressed institutionally and legally in the rules of the World Trade Organization; the role of World Bank economists and white South African banking, mining, and insurance companies in vigorously disseminating economic policy recommendations for post-apartheid South Africa; and quiet pressure from foreign investors.11 Critics have also pointed to the willingness of influential members of the ANC to respond favourably to these pressures and to adopt a neoliberal economic plan. One of the first projects undertaken by the ANC government was to draft new legislation to govern the country’s mining sector, which had long been dominated by a powerful white elite and viewed as the country’s economic engine. This process culminated in a policy framework that differed significantly from the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter, which stated in visionary, socialist rhetoric: “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole!”12 Although the ANC, once in power, distanced itself from any program for a sweeping nationalization of the mining sector, the mining industry and foreign mining investors were paying anxious attention. Between 1995 and 2000, the government conducted public and “bilateral” consultations with a range of interested parties (mineworkers’ associations and unions, local governments, domestic and foreign mining companies, etc.) to discuss the content of new mining sector governance and regulation. This process generated various iterations of draft policy, including “Minerals and Mining Policy for South Africa: A Green Paper for Discussion” (1998) and the “Minerals Development Bill” (2000). The final policy, “Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Bill,” or “B15,” became law in 2002. It was accompanied by a partner document, the “Broad-Based Socio-Economic Empowerment Charter for the South African Mining Industry,” otherwise known as the “Mining Charter.” Canadians participated actively in public and private conversations throughout this period. For instance, in the context of the early round of public consultations in 1995, the (former) Canadian mining multinational, Falconbridge, long involved in nickel and diamond mining in southern Africa, prepared a written submission.13 In 2002, a South African industry magazine, Mining Weekly, noted that “Canadian enterprises were probably the foreign mining companies most consulted

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by the South African government … The South African government received a lot of input from the whole spectrum of the Canadian mining industry, from prospecting companies through mining houses all the way to analysts at the Toronto Stock Exchange.”14 A diplomatic official in Canada’s trade office in Johannesburg is cited: “The changes in the mining legislation have been a long time in coming and I do know that there has been substantial Canadian input.”15 Extensive input came from the PDAC, Canada’s largest mining industry association, which in March 2001 produced a twenty-five-page analysis and critique of the draft bill, followed in April 2002 by a second lengthy critical commentary of the redrafted bill before it was passed into law in June. The Canadian High Commission facilitated the delivery of these submissions to the appropriate South African officials.16 During the period between the first and final drafts of the bill, the PDAC and individual Canadian mining companies with interests in South Africa worked informally with Canadian federal and Ontario government officials (Minister of Mining) to ensure that the South Africans were aware of Canadian industry concerns about the effects of the proposed mining code changes on their present and future involvement in the South African mining sector. With other European and World Bank officials, selected Canadian officials participated in an “international reference group” established by the South African government to comment on the proposed legislation. During this period, the South African Minister of Mines made a trip to Canada, where she met with government officials and the industry; she attempted to reassure them of a continued role for them in the South African mining industry, while also insisting on the need for strong measures to racially democratize economic opportunities in the country’s mining industry. In the months following the passage of the new bill, the CEO of one of Canada’s largest mining companies and senior executives of one of Canada’s largest banks carried out high-profile visits to South Africa to meet with South African government officials, Canadian diplomatic personnel, and key figures in the (still predominantly white) South African mining industry. What Was So Unusual about the South African Mining Law? On 26 June 2002, the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa passed the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Bill. Canada’s export credit agency, Export Development Canada, called this bill “the

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African National Congress’ most interventionist legislation since 1994.”17 The very first statement in the final bill outlined its primary objective: “to make provision for equitable access to and sustainable development of the nation’s mineral and petroleum resources; and to provide for matters connected therewith.” Put simply, the bill treated natural resources as part of the national patrimony and set out to democratize a sector that had been historically controlled and owned by a powerful white elite. In chapter 5, I identified the primary features of an ideal modern mining law as it was being actively promoted in the 1990s by multilateral institutions and Western mining countries: it was to offer a first-comefirst-served licensing system; remove or reduce ministerial discretion; minimize royalty rates; treat mining licences as mortgageable and transferable; and, more generally, offer a means of governing the mining sector in a transparent, bureaucratic manner rather than in a political (i.e., nationalistic or redistributive) manner. In a clear departure from this recommended international template, the South African law imposed higher-than-average royalty rates; a high degree of ministerial discretion over the granting and renewal of mining and exploration licences; and preferential treatment to mining companies owned by what were euphemistically referred to as “historically disadvantaged”18 South Africans. A number of other aspects of the bill represented dramatic changes in how the South African mining industry was to be managed. The Dutch system of freehold private property mining rights that had existed under the apartheid regime would be terminated within five years, to be replaced by a system in which mineral rights belonged to the state. (In fact, as noted in chapter 3, the tenure of subsurface mineral rights by the state or the Crown – with exploration and mining licences granted by the Crown to private actors – is the practice in Canada; thus South Africa was moving to adopt a similar system.) In South Africa in 1994, around two-thirds of all mineral properties were privately owned, and virtually all of these were held by white South Africans.19 Under the new bill, private ownership would be terminated, with ownership passing to the state, which would then require companies – including the long-established corporate giants of the South African industry (and some major Canadian companies) – to apply for licences under the terms of the new law.20 And there was no guarantee that those applications would be approved; they would be subject to the new law, which prioritized the granting of mining rights to “historically disadvantaged” South Africans.

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In fact, what made the new South African mining law especially controversial was that it linked the transformation, granting, or renewal of mining and exploration licences under the new system to affirmative action measures (“Black Economic Empowerment” or BEE) and social development goals. The bill specified that within five years, at least 15 per cent of the equity or shares in mining companies wishing to acquire exploration or mining licences in South Africa would have to be owned by “historically disadvantaged South Africans,” with 26 per cent ownership to be achieved within ten years. In addition to this, the Mining Charter attached to the legislation set employment quotas – 40 per cent Black employment in management positions, 10 per cent employment of women – and called for skills training and “mentoring” of Black employees previously excluded from certain types of mine work, as well as the privileging of “historically disadvantaged” suppliers of mining services and equipment. Other social dimensions of the proposed legislation included the requirement that exploration and mining companies develop social and environmental impact studies and share these with local communities; those communities had a right to be consulted and were empowered to refuse exploration or mine developments or to establish criteria for them. Indeed, the term “sustainable development” was given fresh meaning in the draft law in the sense that mining was to contribute to locally owned and conceived social development projects. Companies wishing to obtain or renew licences would have to meet the above criteria to the satisfaction of the minister, who, under the new law, held the authority to refuse to grant licences. The law also made it clear that in the event of a direct competition for a licence for the same concession between a historically disadvantaged company and a historically privileged one, the former would receive preferential treatment. For the foreign mining companies, this was a disturbing departure from their expectation of a colour-blind, ostensibly neutral (apolitical) “first come, first served” approach to the granting of licences. In the intense negotiations between industry and government that ensued between the appearance of the draft bill and the adoption in June 2002 of the new legislation, significant modifications were made and compromises were struck. Ministerial discretion was not eliminated, but it was curtailed and made subject to formal explanations and appeal processes. Most significantly for the mining industry – and for the protection of white class privilege as a property right – mining licences were constituted as property that was “transferable” and

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“mortgageable,” although such transfers would still, in formal terms, require the minister’s approval. In this way, mining licences were afforded the same legal protections as private property. However, the “affirmative action” dimensions of the bill were retained (i.e., 26 per cent Black ownership within ten years; Black management and Black employment; local procurement quotas). One legal analyst observed: It appears that the Bill substantially effects the Mbulwa Accord by providing secure, continued tenure for existing mining rights; limiting Ministerial discretion in accordance with modern principles of administrative law; ensuring that the bill’s regulatory regime for mineral rights follows globally accepted norms and standards; and implementing transitional mechanisms that ensure minimum disruption to the mining industry. Not surprisingly, initial response has been largely favourable. The devil lies in its detail. While administrative discretion has largely been circumscribed the Bill ingeniously imports discretion through the back door by linking two of its vital social goals – black economic empowerment and socioeconomic welfare – to the grant of the most important regulatory consents, the grant of prospecting and mining rights, while applying similar discretionary standards to the conversion of old order mining rights.21

At this point, the method of reading texts that will be used throughout this chapter can be introduced. A surface reading of the commentary above would be as follows: the compromises and trade-offs contained in the final version of the legislation allowed both the ANC government and the mining industry to portray the outcome as “win–win,” with both achieving some of their key objectives. Reading this sample of text through the lens of critical race theory, however, allows us to identify common textual and ideological strategies used to legitimize white capitalist power and to discredit substantive or radical anti-racist tendencies. For example, the words “modern” and “globally accepted” are associated with reason or good sense, while the words “discretion” and “discretionary,” linked to “Black economic empowerment,” cast doubt and aspersions on the mining law. As demonstrated in chapter 5, the word “discretion” has been ubiquitously deployed in mining industry texts as a racially inflected code for despotism and corruption and thus backwardness: concepts that, in the colonialist imaginary, slip conceptually towards non-modern, irrational, lawless, and savage – what Kipling calls “heathen folly.”22 Indeed, the foolishness of the ANC

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mining law would become a common theme among those who were unhappy with its terms. Anti-Racist Mining Law versus “Colour-Blind” Mining Law The foreign mining industry and South African public opinion would come to castigate the ANC’s changes to the mining sector as merely replacing “a white elite with a Black elite.” Race inequity seemed to transition rapidly into class inequity. I will return to this critique of the bill later in the chapter. For now, I want to treat the South African mining law – especially its 2000 draft version – as legislation that was, at least in its initial stages, significantly oriented towards installing a substantively democratic social order characterized by a commitment to racial justice. It was precisely this racial justice vision that the Canadian mining industry vigorously resisted, which ultimately contributed to a watering down of the law. This resistance took a number of forms, including a racially coded discursive strategy that represented the law as unreasonable, naive, dictatorial, and sure to lead to economic disaster. The Canadians’ alternative proposal – one that maintained and resecured a significant degree of de facto white privilege for investors in South African mining, in part by reframing it as colour-blind market rationalism – was presented as a more sensible, practical, and civilized option. This discursive framing accompanied direct policy interventions with the South African government – interventions that involved both Canadian corporate actors and Canadian federal and provincial government actors, who contributed to certain key modifications to the South African mining law. The Canadians were not acting alone, but in concert with the established, white-dominated South African mining industry and various foreign investors. In attempting to institutionalize what amounted to affirmative action (i.e., preferential treatment) for “historically disadvantaged” South Africans, the new law put forward a fragile vision of a transformation from a “racist state” to an “anti-racist state.” The fragility of that vision was in large part due to the fact that racism was conceptualized narrowly in terms of the presence or absence of phenotypically marked bodies rather than as a historical structural economic relation heavily dependent on the idea of private property. Capitalism’s historical and ongoing dependence on racism was not adequately acknowledged. Partly due to the Canadian interventions, the final version of the mining law conformed more closely (although not entirely) to the kind of

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legal and administrative architecture needed to guide South Africa in the direction of becoming a neoliberal “racial state” rather than an antiracist state. Transition to a racial state – that is, to a state of colour-blind neoliberalism rather than to an anti-racist, anti-neo-colonial, nationalist, radically democratic state – was crucial in order to protect white South African and foreign (including Canadian) property interests, investments, and future economic opportunities in post-apartheid South Africa. From the mining industry’s perspective, there was an important “risk reduction” goal. Canada’s own economic prosperity – or, more precisely, the prosperity of middle- and upper-class Canadians and a relatively small legal-corporate-investment elite – demanded a certain type of mining law in South Africa, one that would discreetly allow the continuation of the privileges of foreign and domestic white mining capital. The debate over this law, like the debates over “affirmative action” more generally, makes visible the often hidden contest between substantive anti-racism and liberal colour-blindness. My examination of the texts and talk generated by the Canadians and other foreign actors identifies some of the ways in which liberal colour-blindness, as a denial of and refusal to countenance racialized power,23 comes to prevail as a hegemonic form of white supremacy that advances and normalizes global privatized racial rule in the post-colonial era. Such an analysis gives rise to recurring questions: What kind of subjectivity is needed to animate this neo-colonialist project and to make possible the hegemony of colour-blindness as a form of white supremacy in the twenty-first-century global order? What does it take to produce subjects who will choose injustice over justice? Installing Colour-Blind Governance of South Africa’s Mining Sector: Discursive Strategies Introduced With a view to identifying key discursive strategies, I move now to a close examination of the selected texts and interview data concerning the new South African mining law. Taken together, these texts reveal a determined ideological and discursive effort on the part of certain “developed countries,” including Canada, to oppose the thrust of the new law. I start with the legal submission to the South African government on behalf of six “Concerned International Prospecting and Mining Companies,” at least one of which was a senior Canadian company. Early in this text, a fundamental challenge is posed concerning whether the South African government has the right to exercise

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sovereignty over its mineral resources. Such a direct challenge appears cognizant of the body of international human rights law that recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination as well as nations’ sovereignty over the natural resources and wealth found on their territories. These principles were developed within the UN system after the Second World War and were shaped in particular by decolonizing states’ demands for economic independence and development. In 1962 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources,” which recognized “the inalienable right of all States freely to dispose of their natural wealth and resources in accordance with their national interests and on respect for the economic independence of States”; it also asserted that “the provision of economic and technical assistance, loans and increased foreign investment must not be subject to conditions which conflict with the interests of the recipient State.”24 In more recent years, international efforts to recognize other kinds of natural resource rights, such as the right to food and the right to water, as fundamental and justiciable human rights under international law, have achieved some modest success. These developments, however, have exposed the schism between international human rights law – particularly the protection of social, economic, and cultural rights – and the property rights of investors within international trade and investment law. With this fraught legal context in mind, we can now turn to the opening sections of the “Concerned Companies” submission to the South African government: The companies are furthermore disconcerted by the reference in section 2(a) of the Bill which states that one of the objects of the Bill is to recognize the “internationally accepted right of the state to exercise sovereignty over all the mineral resources within the Republic.” The companies are mindful that the White Paper of October 1998 referred in this regard to the United Nations Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of the State and the statement in the White Paper that the article granted to states full permanent “sovereignty, including possession and disposal, over all its natural resources.” The companies wish to emphasize that this Charter was adopted in the plenary session of the General Assembly by a majority of votes – with 6 votes against and 10 abstentions. The Charter was disapproved of, or not supported, by the developed countries and it has no binding force either on the basis of customary international law or otherwise.25

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Western democracy purports to respect a majority vote; yet here, because the majority did not include or represent the powerful “developed” countries, the Charter was being dismissed. The Concerned Companies were making clear from the outset their legal opinion that South Africa’s claimed right to exercise state sovereignty over mineral resources had no legally binding or enforceable status. Particularly objectionable to “the developed countries” was article 2(2)(c) of the UN Charter, which they cited in full: Each state has the right: (c) To nationalize, expropriate or transfer ownership of foreign property, in which case appropriate compensation should be paid by the state adopting such measures, taking into account its relevant laws and regulations and all circumstances that a state considers pertinent. In any case where the question of compensation gives rise to a controversy, it shall be settled under the domestic law of the nationalizing State and by its tribunals, unless it is freely and mutually agreed by all States concerned that other peaceful means be sought on the basis of the sovereign equality of States and in accordance with the principles of free choice of means.26 (emphasis added)

Their concerns here were the threat of expropriation and the provision that adjudication of disputes and compensation could be determined by domestic courts rather than international investment tribunals. To counter this possibility, the UN Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States was set in opposition to a host of bilateral investment treaties that South Africa had signed with various countries. For instance, in 1995, Canada had concluded a “Bilateral Investment Agreement” with South Africa (although it never entered into force.)27 Bilateral investment agreements typically include legally binding provisions against expropriation – using a broad legal understanding of this concept – and give companies the right to recourse to international tribunals and the right to sue for compensation in the event of expropriation of property. The submission by “Concerned International Prospecting and Mining Companies” posed this pointed question (with its threatening consequences) to the post-apartheid South African government: Does Parliament subscribe to the contents of article 2(c) of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States as quoted above?

Investing in Colour-Blind Mining in Post-Apartheid South Africa  263 If so, is Parliament prepared to accept the Bill and legislate it into binding law in direct contravention of article 5 of the Agreement between the Government of the REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA and the GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND for the Promotion and Protection of Investments as well as the identical article contained in the various bilateral international treaties on the protection of investments, cited above? We point out that the consequences of doing so will be those consonant upon breach of international obligations of the Republic of South Africa.28

Put another way, if it passed new mining legislation in its proposed form, the Republic of South Africa risked being sued for breaching its own investment treaties with several foreign countries. Through legal saber rattling, South Africa was being pressed by a group of foreign mining companies to make a choice: it could protect whiteness, in the form of the rights of unmarked/unraced foreign investors to legal protections for mining and exploration in South Africa; or it could protect the right of the post-apartheid state to “make provision for equitable access to and sustainable development of the nation’s mineral resources.” The Concerned Companies’ text then moved from a legal argument to what was cast as a philosophical and normative argument: Furthermore, expropriation without compensation cannot be justified in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom taking into account the nature of the rights, the importance, purpose, nature and extent of the absolute limitation with respect to compensation and the proportionality between no compensation on the one hand and the purpose of the Bill, which could have been attained by less restrictive means, e.g. by requiring the person to whom the prospecting right, mining right or mining permit is eventually granted, in the absence of the holder thereof exercising such rights, to compensate the existing holder of the rights. The across the board confiscation of rights without compensation can never be proportionate to the purpose of advancing black economic advancement, social advancement or the other purposes mentioned in the Bill. The financial burden of social advancement and black economic empowerment, which are in essence state functions, should not be the burden of the individual investor in this field. What manner of equity requires the individual to carry the financial burden for society at large? [emphasis added]29

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The concluding sentence, with its melodramatic pitch, reveals what is at stake. Dense rhetorical and ideological work is being conducted here to normalize and protect the expectations of capital. Having opened their letter with a direct threat, the Concerned Companies now proceed to mobilize Western liberalism’s ideological claims – protection of democracy, human dignity, equality, and freedom, and underlying all of this, reasonableness (in short, the construed attributes of a civilized modern society) – in order to cast aspersions on the South African draft mining act. What kind of “open and democratic society” would embed social responsibility and political accountability in the act of acquiring financial equity, of investing? By implication, any state that would attempt such a thing is not a properly modern, “developed” state that respects “human dignity, equality and freedom.” They then make a bold assertion. Achieving racial justice and racial reparation – “the purpose of advancing black economic advancement, social advancement or the other purposes mentioned in the Bill” – can never, they declare, be a burden or responsibility to be placed on the shoulders of private individuals or companies, as would be the case if they were obliged to relinquish their mining licences or mineral holdings to the state for redistribution to “historically disadvantaged” South Africans. On what they construe as purely rational and normative grounds, the seemingly raceless shareholders and investors collectively represented by the “Concerned Companies” must not be compelled to carry this particular “white man’s burden” – that is, to bear some of the costs of redressing the violent and unjust legacy of apartheid. What emerges at this point as a key feature of neoliberal discourse is the Investor/Shareholder as a mythological subject. This subject is placed outside the fray of history, where it can maintain its benign subjectivity as non-interventionist, unraced, rules-oriented, rational, and ostensibly harmless. With these features established, the figure of the Investor – an unraced, colour-blind figure, where raceless colour-blindness is a strategy of white capitalist power – cannot be required to bear costly private responsibility or accountability for historical, systemic social injustice. There can be no commitment to, or expectation of responsibility for, global racial and economic justice on the part of the Investor/Shareholder subject. In actual practice, the Investor/Shareholder subject can be, and is, occupied by some phenotypically “non-white” people who perform capitalist whiteness in order to gain access to its benefits. This is the case even while

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phenotypical whiteness still characterizes the vast majority of South Africa’s domestic and foreign investors and corporate shareholders. As a mythological figure, the Investor obtains power by manipulating race categories to eliminate race barriers while simultaneously protecting whiteness. Drawing on such a figure, the Concerned Companies, as shown in the text above, are thus able to posit ostensibly raceless private/individual jurisdictions and assets – such as private property and financial equity – as unthinkable as sites of accountability for historical relations of racial oppression, exploitation, plunder, and violence. “An open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom” – now appearing as a euphemism for the rationalism of Western capitalism and whiteness – is thus made to seem, ironically, incommensurate with “advancing black economic advancement,” when such a goal means material loss or deprivation for presently privileged persons. This reasoning is deliberately confusing, but by constituting the Investor as a sacrosanct, rational, raceless subject who exists outside historical, social relations of power, it legitimizes the prioritizing of bilateral international investment agreements over South African domestic law, and in so doing enables the continuation of modes of economic inequality and racialized structural violence. Resources appropriated from the (Black) public by the (white) private cannot be reappropriated by or for the (Black) public. To recall that the private was once the public is deemed impractical, while it is frivolous to recall that both private and public are socially constructed, culturally specific, and politically strategic concepts whose emergence can be traced historically. Anti-racism is thus rendered as a rather idealistic and naive objective to be pursued in public spaces and at the expense of increasingly impoverished public institutions; meanwhile, the rationality and freedom of the private individual investor and the corporation is normatively constituted as including the freedom to reproduce existing racial hierarchies and inequities and to be protected from, or unburdened by, any responsibility for racial in/justice. So it is not surprising that very little sense of solidarity or empathy with the South Africans’ anti-racist social objectives, as embodied in the new mining law, was or could be expressed by the Canadian mining professionals who were interviewed. They could not endorse this anti-racist, anti-colonial legislative initiative because to do so would expose the continuing salience of racial oppression and inequality and pose a material and psychological threat to Canadian subjects: a loss of white economic power.

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PDAC: Refusing the Burden of Responsibility and Redress The curtailing of the pursuit of substantive racial economic justice from the (socially constructed) private spaces of capital is also expressed in the PDAC’s commentaries on the early and later versions of the South African mining bill. In commenting on the first draft bill, they insisted that “redressing past wrongs should not be done in a manner detrimental to the shareholders of companies that contribute to the growth of South African mineral development.”30 This conviction became more pointed in their comments on the final 2002 version of the bill. Making an urgent and extensively argued business case for “security of tenure” by constituting mining licences as effective property rights that must be “mortgage-able and transferable,” they bluntly asserted that “affirmative action could not be built into the property right itself.”31 Here, again, is the moment when the crucial public/private split is produced, treated as natural and inviolable, and advanced as a tactic. If the core feature of property, as it has emerged in Euro-American law and cultural practice over two centuries, is the private right to exclude others, then an affirmative action provision that opens up the notion of property to social inclusion – that deprivatizes property, reconstituting it as “the commons,” sustaining collective livelihoods – cannot be considered. It must be shown to be unreasonable and naive. Private property rights must remain incommensurable with the program of achieving substantive equality rights. There is to be no “level playing field” – a favourite expression and concept in the mining industry; more precisely, there is to be no common field, where these two kinds of rights can engage each other, where the strategic, socially constituted private/public differentiation might disappear or be reconfigured. Reading the PDAC commentaries on South Africa’s draft and final post-apartheid mining laws in light of Cheryl Harris’s work illuminates the extent to which the PDAC’s reaction to the concept of an affirmative action (BEE) requirement moves precisely in the direction that Harris has identified as having “strangled” affirmative action in the United States. Affirmative action measures will be tolerated only as long as they place no significant burden on owners of private property rights and only as long as they do not raise certain kinds of questions about the nature of inequality. In effect, private lives, wealth, assets, and rights must not be subjected to the demands that may flow

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from historically informed scrutiny. Whiteness is thus revealed to be a right to privacy as well as a property right; whiteness-as-privacy cannot be legally compelled to enter the public realm. The right to privateness, to privacy/secrecy, to be shielded, to security inside the fortress, cannot be taken away or limited. This aspect of whiteness is one of the cultural, ideological, psychological, and institutionalized dimensions of racial power that has enabled white supremacy to survive the transition from “racist” to (formally colour-blind) “racial” societies. A further example from the Canadian High Commission in South Africa diplomatic files is illustrative. A Canadian consultant involved in identifying South African contacts for a visiting Canadian mining executive to South Africa in 2002 raised the following query with Canadian diplomatic personnel: “The white industry members may be better met separately [by the Canadian mining executive] although you may want to get other opinions from the High Commissioner. [Canadian company officials] may not want to publicly (in front of Black companies and government) associate themselves with the white-owned mining industry here for strategic reasons.”32 Such a comment reveals the continuing stark political salience of racialized identities and alliances despite the public rhetoric of non-racialism and colour-blindness. As it turns out, private spaces and private conversations are still both racially exclusive and productive; moreover, white racial power is maintained through strategic uses of private and public settings. Operating in private and never disclosing in any publicly accessible form what goes on or what is said turns out to be a central social technology for maintaining white power in twenty-first-century neoliberal multicultural states. How wealth was acquired does not have to be revealed. In effect, the ANC government’s draft mining bill introduced, or at least alluded to, precisely such questions. In a situation of naturalized or normalized white supremacy, white advantage, dominance, and wealth appears to arise naturally from the acquisition, possession, and astute use of capital and to be the outcome of merit, not race privilege. Where the mining bill exposed and responded to the historically racialized nature of power in South African society, the PDAC, on behalf of the Canadian mining industry, had to find a way to dehistoricize and renaturalize the privileges of white capital. This involved a concerted critique of the mining bills, along with a range of tactics to discredit their most egregious features.

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Effrontery: “You can’t just grab it from people” There is a marked tone of effrontery in both the PDAC commentaries and the interviewees’ comments on the bills. This effrontery seems both genuine and performed. In the case of the PDAC, it is expressed most extensively with regard to the degree of discretion that the minister would hold, as well as the impact of the loss of the (ostensibly colour-blind, meritocratic) “first come, first served” licensing procedures. While there are numerous examples, the following two quotations are typical: The Draft Bill imposes no objective criteria on the Minister’s discretion to refuse transfers, other than the wide-ranging objectives of the Draft Bill. Indeed, subsection 3(4) requires the Minister to favour historically disadvantaged persons;33 There is nothing in the Draft Bill that prevents the Minister from prohibiting all transfers except to historically disadvantaged persons, who might offer just a fraction of the value of the rights. Indeed, nothing prohibits the Minister from prohibiting all transfers in order to force the prospecting right to lapse so the Minister could subsequently grant the right to historically disadvantaged persons.34

What is conveyed here is a visceral objection on the part of Canadian companies to being potentially excluded on racial and redistributive grounds from opportunities to invest in and profit from South Africa’s mineral sector. Such a redistribution of mining/exploration rights and financial equity in the manner proposed is intolerable and offensive. Apartheid history must not be allowed to justify the exclusion of Canadian explorers/ investors on the grounds that they are historically privileged white foreign actors. This sense of effrontery is then channelled into a host of arguments to discredit the proposed new law. I return to these further down. The sense of effrontery was also apparent in the interviews carried out with Canadian mining professionals. It was often expressed more bluntly and in more personal terms. None of the interviewees was enthusiastic about South Africa’s new mining law or ready to actively support its full implementation. As the conversations proceeded, most interviewees moved progressively from a position of claiming not to know much about the South African draft law, to expressions of qualified support, to outright condemnation and indignation. It is when the interviewees comment on the effects of the changed titling procedures

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– the nature of property rights, how mining and exploration licences are to be obtained and renewed, and under what terms – that they become most animated and aggrieved: So what they’re really saying is that if you find something, you only own 60 per cent of it. To just hand off, if you’re owning a business here or anywhere in the world, you just sell 40 per cent of it to someone who’s not going to do anything, at what price? You’ve got to know exactly what the return’s going to be to your shareholders, there’s a risk there, you’re going to lose 40 per cent of it, the law’s going to change, I mean that law was written essentially overnight … What’s the basis of valuation, who’s going to evaluate it, I mean if I was going to sell 40 per cent we’d be sitting down and it would be a deal, as opposed to something I was mandated to do.

While it is worth pointing out that these interviewees were confusing the 40 per cent target for affirmative action employment in management positions with the 26 per cent ten-year goal for Black ownership of the industry, their consternation is certainly apparent. They express a strong sense of both entitlement and unfairness. To analyse these reactions, I turn again to Cheryl Harris’s insights. She shows how, in the historical context of American nation making shaped by colonial occupation and the institution of slavery, whiteness came to be associated with particular expectations of privilege, benefits, access, and opportunities; in time, these expectations came to be treated as a form of property that could be, and was, legally recognized and protected. The particular form the recognition and protection took changed over time, but the essential relationship remained intact. In puzzling over the significance of “expectations,” Harris draws on the work of legal scholar Margaret Radin, who had argued that “to achieve proper self-development, an individual needs some control over resources in his or her external environment: the requisite assurances of control take the form of property rights.”35 Harris then demonstrates how property contains a “legal expectation” that one’s right or claim to property (including whiteness) will be protected and enforced “by society or the state, by custom or convention of law.”36 This expectation comes to function psychologically for propertied subjects; expectations of protection of white privilege and expectations of security of property are conflated as central

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to dominant subject formation. The racially dominant subject is a propertied subject, even if his/her only property is his/her whiteness, or normalized racial privilege. This subject’s expectation of the maintenance of a racial social order that accords him/her a specially protected capacity to plan for and guarantee his/her own privileged future and longevity (and that of his/her family) comes to function as a (legally defensible) property right as well as a psychological trait. To the extent that, as Radin puts it, “your personhood depends on the realization of these expectations,”37 any perceived threat to such expectations will elicit a strong psychological reaction.38 The collapsing of the threat to property into a threat to (privileged white) personhood provides an explanation for the interviewees’ strong expressions of effrontery and indignation.39 The expectation of entitlement and the preservation of a secure self emerges as a thing seemingly threatened, and requiring forceful, aggressive response – including legal measures and, as I will show next, technologies of risk reduction. As Mbembe observes, the technologies of domination in the post-colonial era “result from the responses that the victorious actors in the ongoing struggles around the continent give to the following questions: […] who has the right to live and exist, and who has not, and why?”40 Such stark questions, implicitly raised by South Africa’s affirmative action measures, are psychologically threatening for privileged subjects. It is a privilege of whiteness to maintain the right to live, to live well, and to not be confronted with such stark questions. A key aspect of the legal and cultural protection of private assets and thus of the sense of personal security is the development of technologies of risk reduction and risk management. While such terms are presented as discourses of economic rationality, their use of racially coded “white talk” is extensive. The twenty-first-century colonialist imaginary encodes racial dominance in talk of political risk: white Western states pose little risk to investors, while Black/African states – some more than others – pose high risks. The discourse of risk thus functions as a racializing marker, indicating safety versus danger for capital investments, even while actual economic and physical risk is primarily borne by racialized bodies. Risk is a concept whose genealogy is complexly interwoven with capitalist modernity and with the production of the racially dominant colonizing subject. Ironically, the subject who is imaginatively constituted as superior and as entitled to rule due to his manly capacity to take risks turns out to be, simultaneously, a subject who ingeniously does everything to minimize risk by arranging

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for risk to be borne by multiple/public rather than individual/private actors. As Colin Gordon writes: “Risk, enterprise, progress and modernity are genealogically interdependent social ideas … The very terms ‘risk’ and ‘risk-taking’ are products of insurance techniques. The insurer ‘takes’ the risk of the client entrepreneur: capitalism’s Faustian daring depends on this capability of taking the risk out of risk.”41 The importance of the concept of risk, risk management, and risk reduction is apparent in the various texts reviewed for this chapter. For instance, in their submission concerning South Africa’s new mining law, the “Concerned Companies” remind the South African parliament that NEPAD’s (New Economic Plan for African Development) “first priority is to address investors’ perception of Africa as a ‘high risk’ continent, especially with regard to security of property rights, regulatory framework and markets.” Similarly, in its commentary on the draft bill, the PDAC is concerned that the bill inadequately socializes risk (i.e., inadequately spreads risk across society at large), leaving, in effect, too much risk to be borne directly by private shareholders – who, they claim, will eschew involvement. Emphasizing the inherent geological risks of mining exploration, they argue that investors will not tolerate additional political and social risk. “Responsible” states will minimize the latter by ensuring “a stable and predictable fiscal and regulatory (macro) environment.” Considering the affirmative action content of the new mining bill as a possible approach to reducing “social risk,” the PDAC concedes that social risk “might perhaps” be reduced through the enlarged participation of “historically disadvantaged South Africans.” But it is not clear to the PDAC that the cost of such a program to shareholders will generate adequately “countervailing reductions of risks.” Racial justice goals are here subsumed under the terms and logic of business risk calculations as a primary social technology of neoliberalism. Risk designations are thus seen to have disciplining racial effects, discursively as much as institutionally and financially. Risk designations, and the investment actions or inactions they trigger, as well as the insurance measures put in place, function to protect the private assets and personhood of racially and financially privileged investors and shareholders. Redeploying Colonial Binaries in the Defence of White Property Rights As I have argued throughout this book, the protection of white property rights and racial privilege deploys a shifting, kaleidoscopic range

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of tactics and technologies in its own interests. One tactic is racially coded discourse posing as economic rationalism; another is the use of quite overt racist binaries that are directly reminiscent of the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial era. With regard to South Africa’s post-apartheid mining law, the texts under review here demonstrate once again the use of a classic racist contrast between the ostensibly reasonable white Western Self and the ostensibly irrational non-Western Other. Drawing on this binary, Canadian mining investors are construed as the midwives of South Africa’s future. They will facilitate mining sector growth and development and thereby help the New Black South Africa join successful capitalist modernity. Conversely, the trope of the irrational Other is deployed to raise doubts about the logic of the proposed mining law. These tactics are visible both in interview data and in the more formal texts. The PDAC commentary states on its first page: “PDAC assumes that the South African government encourages contribution of capital, exploration and mining expertise and risk-taking to add value to South Africa’s mineral base, to generate revenue for the State and to promote local economic development.”42 The PDAC fashions itself rhetorically as wanting to assume that South Africa is a sensible, reasonable nation; but (regrettably, as the tone suggests), the content of the draft bill raises certain concerns. A reasonable/civilized nation, it is implied, would encourage Canadians to contribute capital, expertise, and risk-taking to its mining industry, not dissuade them. A reasonable/civilized nation would want to “add value,” “generate revenue,” and “promote economic development.” This tone sets up the PDAC’s respectful but firm – which is to say, paternalistic – twenty-five-page guide for the South African government to produce a more reasonable, more realistic mining code. As authors of the provocative law and leaders of the new South Africa, the Black political elite – in particular, the staff of the Ministry of Mines – become a target of particular “concern” for the Canadian and other foreign mining interests. These elite subjects are not the “cooperative elite Africans” identified in chapter 3, but leaders with nationalistic leanings who need to be dealt with assertively and, to the extent possible, influenced to support the interests of (foreign) capital. The tactic taken up by the “Concerned Companies” is to show that the proposed law is impractical, naïve, and potentially ruinous. In particular, the draft law is criticized for allowing a degree of control on the part of the Mines Minister, who would be able to wield an unsettling degree of subjective, discretionary authority over the

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granting and renewal of mining, exploration, and prospecting licences. As the “Concerned Companies” warn in their submission to the South African parliament: “From an international investors’ perception, the system advanced in the Bill will be a breeding ground of political patronage and corruption without any predictability and transparency, all of which are fatal to the assessment of South Africa as a preferred investment destination.”43 In its two commentaries on the initial draft and the final law, the PDAC formulates a sharp and extensive critique of the discretionary authority that the new law extends to the Minister of Mines. Timothy Mitchell’s sardonic comment is relevant: “Compared to the universal rules of a modern system of law, native government proceeded by personal decision and the caprice of power.”44 In the case of the South African mining law, the “caprice of power” – again, Kipling’s “heathen folly” – deemed to be residing in the Minister of Mines could be fatal to the emergence of a modern post-apartheid mining industry, according to the PDAC, which complains at length about the minister’s discretionary authority: Section 61 of the Draft Bill prohibits any mortgage or transfer unless the Minister approves. An exploration company could find itself having to abandon valuable rights that it was not permitted to sell and could not mine itself.45 Whether an exploration company could realize any of the value it adds to a geological tract would depend on ministerial favour!46 The Minister controls every aspect of mining and simply retains the mining company to “add value” to the State’s mineral resource ownership.47

The Canadians here sound affronted. In the consternation they express over ministerial discretion and “control,” one senses a certain fear of emasculation – at the stroke of a pen wielded, no less, by Black women. The Mines Minister at the time was Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who was subsequently promoted to Deputy President of South Africa and replaced as Mines Minister by another woman, Lindiwe Hendricks. The Deputy Mines Minister at the time was yet another woman, Lulu Xingwana. It seemed that white male privilege was being insulted and threatened by discretionary, “arbitrary,” sovereign female “native” power. This appears intolerable for the Canadians, who it seemed were now vulnerable to a reversal of colonial structures, subject to the whims of powerful Black women.48

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In a Northern Miner editorial of 23 September 2005 lewdly titled “South African Deputy Minister doesn’t get it Down Under,” this gendered sense of insult was expressed as ridicule of these women’s obliviousness to the concerns of foreign investors. The article begins: For the third consecutive year, the appearance of a South African Deputy Mines Minister at the Africa Down Under Conference in Perth, Western Australia, failed to convince Australian investors and explorers that South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki government fully comprehends that there are major problems for foreign companies doing business there … While mines ministers and departmental heads from places like Tanzania, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia in recent years have painted pictures of opportunity, their counterparts from South Africa have created pictures of confusion and ignorance.49

The article goes on to depict Xingwana as “showing serious naivety” and a “lack of comprehension” of the current economics of the mining industry. The same had been “reflected in comments made by predecessor Susan Shabangu three years earlier.” Evidence of Xingwana’s naivety and lack of comprehension was the fact that “last year, Xingwana devoted most of her presentation to women’s rights when the audience wanted some clarity on Black empowerment (BEE) issues. At the time, she implied there were no problems.”50 The editorial concludes with the suggestion that, under such naive leadership, South Africa is headed in the direction of Zimbabwe, which now functions in the dominant white Western imaginary as a symbol of (an imagined return to) savagery and unreason. While in Perth, Xingwana told journalists that South Africa was talking to other countries about the introduction of BEE [Black economic empowerment]. We’re told Botswana wants little to do with this and other valueadded impositions on exploration and mining that South Africa embraces. Zimbabwe, however, was reportedly considering the issue. But what explorer would venture into Zimbabwe – a once-fabulous country that is now the subject of President Robert Mugabe’s inhumane and scorchedearth policies?51

Evoking the incompetent Other, the subtext here is that the New Black South African mines ministry lacks a realistic sense of what is required to function successfully in the globalizing business climate. The PDAC

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recommends that changes be made to curtail ministerial discretion so that decisions will be “independently reviewable for unreasonableness.”52 Elsewhere, it adopts a parental tone: “Accordingly, PDAC offers the following commentary in hopes of assisting the South African government to formulate legislation that simultaneously promotes Canadian participation and achieves South Africa’s domestic goals.”53 We hear in this some concern to make a point without unduly irritating the South Africans, but it is still familiar colonialist discursive terrain in which the white man purports to know better than African people how to manage, improve, and govern Africa’s material and human resources. What emerges above all, and most strikingly, is the manner in which a law that purports to be in part about racial democratization is vigorously recast by the Canadians as a bad, unfair, unreasonable law that threatens to send South Africa down the path of degeneracy and economic implosion such as is deemed to have occurred in neighbouring Zimbabwe. This discursive recasting of the South African law is crucial for Canada’s economic interests in South Africa, but it is equally crucial for cultural and ideological reasons. The law must be narrated in terms that allow Canadians to maintain their image on the world stage as progressive and altruistic. These discourses must therefore depict the Canadian mining industry as led by reasonable, practical, industrious, and caring men. Encountered here is a familiar figure from white settler mythology: an industrious, risk-taking subject who discovers minerals, who produces value, meaning, and structure out of wilderness, and who brings development and order to the benefit of all. In post-apartheid South Africa, this noble, industrious subject finds himself once again resisted and besieged, the fruits of his efforts being potentially seized – stolen – by what is construed as an irrational racial Other. Again, a sense of emasculation can be detected. Being “mandated” to bring in Black business partners seems to threaten manliness and race/class status; it is entirely different from “we’d be sitting down and it would be a deal.” By producing a raced and gendered colonialist script in which he can represent himself as an honourable, industrious, and practical man besieged, victimized, and even humiliated by an irrational Other, this subject turns the neo-colonialist project inside out, making his own dominance disappear and figuring the Other’s justiceseeking policies as forms of theft and “heathen folly.” In contrast to the unreasonable Other, the Canadians are made out to be reasonable, progressive, and open-minded. Their commentary on the South African mining law includes an acknowledgment of the

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importance in principle of Black empowerment goals; these, after all, reflect Western values of human equality and democracy. Interviewees thus align themselves with Western modernity, representing themselves as liberal, democratically minded, non-racist, and politically progressive: It’s – black empowerment – the principle’s important, it’s absolutely essential. It’s not in theory a bad thing to try to facilitate things for people to get into that situation who would otherwise – because in Canada in the past we subsidized people going to university so that people from poor families could have the same chance … That kind of thing can be beneficial because it basically puts everybody on the same level. The other aspects of it, in terms of getting people involved locally etc. is good.

Almost immediately, however, this affirmation of the principle inspiring the act is qualified by a litany of “what is realistic, what is practical.” A great deal of rhetorical work ensues here to construct the South African mining act as fundamentally impractical while maintaining self-representation as progressive-minded and generous. A productive dichotomy is activated that sets idealism in tension with practicality. In this construction, acquiring the status of being a successful, modern, civilized person or state requires the capacity to ground idealism in practicality. This allows the Canadians’ true objection to the act to be figured as an objection not to its anti-racist economic goals of redistributive justice but to its impracticality and unworkability. The practical white Euro-American male knows how to carry out complex projects that advance important ideals; as such, he is entitled, even morally bound, to revise, scuttle, or undermine the flawed, unworkable policies of overly idealistic, overly ambitious African policy-makers. In the process of discrediting the South Africans’ anti-racist mining policy, the Canadians represent themselves as superior subjects. In the following selections from the interview data, what is unworkable about the act is framed as being “too much” (too ambitious, too complex, etc.), “too fast” (the time line is unrealistic), and lacking the necessary prerequisites (e.g., Black South Africans with appropriate experience). Several interviewees suggest that the act is, in short, unreasonable – a term that, once again, functions deftly and concisely to elicit

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a whole established white colonialist discourse of the African Other as incompetent. Most interviewees try to maintain their self-understanding /self-representation as progressive and open-minded by expressing their critiques paternalistically as concerns and questions. They are not opposed to the act in principle, but they are doubtful about its practicality: And that’s just the beginning, because the Act imposes 26 per cent of all mines should be owned by black economic empowerment groups within ten years. So you know these are highly ambitious targets that they have set. I’m not sure that they are realistically achievable, and I worry a little bit about what the consequences of not achieving them will be. At the same time they are changing the entire title system in South Africa from a free-hold title system to a lease-hold title system. And essentially what they’re doing is going from an American title system to a Canadian title system … If they were just doing that, that would be a huge challenge itself, because it’s going to require an awful lot of legal work and paperwork … So there’s a lot of nervousness about that. But what they’ve done is they’ve connected the two objectives! … That’s hugely complicated. I’m not sure about the reasonableness of all the goals.

They are trying to couch their doubts about the bill as merely practical or logistical, but what also emerges here are expressions of doubt about the capacity of “historically disadvantaged” South Africans to successfully take on mining operations. They question whether there are enough Black people with the requisite experience, qualifications, and managerial skills. One interviewee observes that “they’ve got no money, they’ve got no skills,” while another puts it in these terms: What that is basically saying is that people have the talents, they don’t necessarily have the means, and I guess my question is, it will work as long as the people have the talents but if people don’t have the talents, providing the means is not going to help.

There is, it seems, a dangerous discursive slippage between a lack of “talents” or skills (and capital/money) due to lack of opportunity and outright oppression under the apartheid system, and some kind of inherent incapacity. For those interviewees who made overtly racist comments throughout the interviews, it is very likely the latter.

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But even for those who did not, practicality dictates that management must be done – and ownership held – by those who currently have the “talents.” What Cheryl Harris calls a “neutral base-line” is thus established, in which the lack of capital is taken as a given and effectively naturalized. The historical racial explanation is conveniently overwritten by a naturalist colour-blind practicality. The condition of lacking capital and skills is refigured as a condition that regrettably necessitates the ongoing exclusion of Blacks from company ownership and mineral resource management. In this way, a de facto racialized reality legitimizes white privilege and white domination in the twenty-first-century international mining industry. We hear in all of this that if the ANC government persists in handing over portions of the mining industry to a population that has neither the capital nor the “talents,” disaster will follow. The reference to Zimbabwe in the Northern Miner editorial above elicits a racist spectre of economic and financial chaos. This is also precisely the discursive effect created in the PDAC commentary on the new South African mining law. Excessive ministerial discretion will generate bureaucratic bottlenecks, causing delays and inefficiencies. This degree of ministerial discretion will inevitably lead to cronyism, nepotism, and corruption. Above all, investor flight will ensue, and what it “took white South Africans a hundred years to build up” (as one interviewee described it) will be rapidly destroyed. In the interview transcripts, further spectres of failed transitions to Black economic rule are evoked in the context of commentary on the South African mining law. These reveal classic racist colonial contempt: It doesn’t make any sense. Politically definitely, yeah, it makes sense, to make the big black population happy it’s no question that they have to do something like that. [But] look at that situation that Mugabe created in Zimbabwe. And Mobutu in ’73 … said all the companies must have a Congolese responsible for the company. So somehow he nationalized everything and it came under the control of the Congolese. That was really the end of everything. There were lots of farms all over the country that were still operated by lots of Italians, Greeks, anyway – Then they had Congolese and that was it. That was the end of it. Not because he’s black, but because, like I said, that was his own property and he would go in and tak[e] the cash and that’s it. Even if they have 5 per cent [i.e., ownership] they’re going to want seats on the Board, and when they have seats on the Board they’re going to want to be President of the Board, and when they’re President of the Board

Investing in Colour-Blind Mining in Post-Apartheid South Africa  279 they’re not going to call meetings, so you have to have four meetings a year and you’ll have trouble getting one in and then the company, it’ll be one problem after another. Even when we pay directors fees we can’t get the guys to come to the meetings regularly. Or sign the minutes after the meetings. Things don’t work there. It’s going to take many years to rebuild the function, the business function, so if they started off doing the South African recent policies it would be fatal.

Indeed, in the terms of this racist imaginary, if the supposed aim of the new mining law is the “advancement of the nation,” then according to the PDAC and the persons interviewed, this is not what can be expected. The new South African mining law will simply foster self-serving opportunism on the part of an emergent, corrupt Black elite – as interviewees variously said, “it’s probably just a few individuals that are going to get fairly wealthy out of the whole situation”; “it’ll go to two per cent of the population”; “Winnie Mandela will be right in there!” While this particular critique is apparently shared by many ordinary South Africans, and with some justification, this is clearly not the Canadians’ real complaint about the law. Rather, it is simply another strategy to discredit the proposed changes. These warnings are augmented by predictions that capital will leave South Africa and that, ultimately, no one will benefit: I think South Africa needs to be really careful with what they’re doing, they could totally screw up one of the major generators of revenue for the country. You know, it could drive South Africa to some actions that would be very damaging to its international reputation with respect to captive capital, and so forth. In other words, if they get very draconian and seize some of the assets and turn it over to black empowerment groups or something of that sort, that kind of expropriation, it could just make South Africa a pariah state for a different reason from which it was a pariah state for many years. Longer term, it’s going to be a significant issue to think about … I certainly know that a lot of people have stepped out, they were looking at investing but decided not to.

Canadian Miners: Guiding South Africa’s Future Ultimately, the Canadians fashion a script in which they are engaged in a rescue mission: they must guide the South Africans into writing

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a proper law that will guarantee a future for all South Africans. Here the Canadian mining interests are represented as sharing common ground with the African non-elite majority in opposition to an opportunistic African elite posing as pro-Black nationalists. The Canadian miners’ objections to the new Mining Act are refigured as the objections of non-elite Africans, “villagers.” These people are figured in the interviews as either uninterested in the politics of ownership of South African mineral resources or as systemically excluded on class grounds from the benefits of the act. What villagers really care about – according to one interviewee – is not African resource ownership, but immediate, modest, tangible improvements in their lives, something a Canadian (or other “developed nation”) company is more likely to provide: If I’m looking at the villages around where we operate in [African country], I don’t think they care who owns what.” As to who actually owns the mine – you know, there’s no guarantee that if it’s owned by a local [national] they’d be better off. A lot of it has to do with equity, how you distribute the end result, what benefit there is to the community … If you end up putting a road through there for them, and somebody sets up a little mini-mart, so they don’t have to ride a bicycle for two hours in one direction to go buy a loaf of bread, and their kids can be checked if they’re not well, and you’ve got a well with clean water, sometimes things like that.

White South African, Canadian, and other Western mining investors are, in contrast to (what is construed as) the opportunistic Black South African elite, not only men of reason, principle, and practicality, but also moral actors, humanitarians who care about the common people. Because the Canadian mining subject cares more about the well-being of African “villagers” than do their own African politicians and elites, an active (white) foreign investor presence in the country can be defended as a good thing for African “villagers.” This is the story, once again, of the good colonizer with a civilizing mission, the larger-than-life Canadian colonizer who cares, who is the midwife of the (South African) people’s future – and, as it happens, of some Canadians’ futures too.

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Conclusion Changes in the policy landscape in South African mining have continued in recent years. These indicate resistance to the thrust of the 2002 Mining Act (MPRDA) and its Mining Charter, as well as persistent if not defiant efforts by the South African government and the court system to uphold and advance a vision of racial justice and equity in the mining sector. The 2009 review of the Mining Charter showed disappointing results. The target of 15 per cent ownership by historically disadvantaged South Africans within five years had not been met; at best, it was approaching 9 per cent.54 The review further indicated “shocking levels of non-compliance” on the part of the corporate mining sector with the charter, with the result that “the intended benefits flowing from the mining industry fall significantly below the expectations and aspirations of the majority of South Africans as intended by the Charter.”55 The report expressed its frustration in scathing terms: The underlying empowerment funding model has resulted in the actual ownership of mining assets intended for transformation purposes being tied in loan agreements. Accordingly, the net value of a large proportion of empowerment deals is negative, due to high interest rates on the loan and moderate dividend flows, compounded by the recent implosion of the global financial markets. The rapacious tendencies of the capital markets have consistently thwarted the intended progress towards attaining the goals of transformation, as embedded in the Charter.56

Other sources of analysis and research on the impact of BEE concluded that the mining industry was perhaps minimally trying to comply with “the letter of the law” but was not supporting its spirit. A spirit of cooperation and shared social vision on the part of large segments of the domestic and foreign mining sector was deemed to be absent. The consistently negative attitude of the mining industry towards South Africa’s BEE strategies is captured in the following comments from the 2011 edition of Global Mining Finance: RBC Capital Markets analyst Leon Esterhuizen cites the uncertain BEE situation as the main reason the widely expected consolidation of SA’s platinum sector did not get going during 2010 as he – and other observers –

282  Colonial Extractions had predicted. Esterhuizen highlights the “overriding negative impact of Black Empowerment” and “the significant uncertainty in the South African mining law.”57

In combination with ongoing discussion of nationalization within some South African government circles, the BEE policy has led to what the mining sector calls “the South African discount,” that is, a punitive suspension of investment in South Africa, leading to a slowing of new developments and depressed share values – presumably until such time as the country demonstrates an unequivocal commitment to liberalized governance of mining. This disciplinary action on the part of international mining and financial interests, including Canadian interests, is reminiscent of the actions that were taken against Julius Nyerere’s socialist policies in Tanzania decades earlier: It’s no wonder the CEO of a South African gold producer – who has requested anonymity – was stunned to be told by Edinburgh institutions on an investor road show that they would rather put their money into Zimbabwe or the Democratic Republic of Congo than South Africa. Casualties of this situation include the country’s gold and platinum mines – the former mainly through the “SA discount” on their share prices – and the latter because of the brake the uncertain BEE situation has put on merger and acquisition activity.58

As mentioned at the outset, a routine criticism of the BEE policies has been that they have primarily advantaged a small, powerful, politically connected Black elite (cleverly dubbed the “BEE-llionaires”59). The participation of such figures can be understood as contributing to the colour-blind politics of neoliberalism and thus stabilizing structural whiteness in the global mining industry. These beneficiaries are often influential people with whom foreign companies feel comfortable working deals; indeed, those dealings have become one of the ways that foreign and domestic companies cope with the BEE equity requirements. It has allowed them to follow the letter of the law, to appear to support anti-racism objectives, to maintain access to profitable resources, and yet simultaneously to vindicate their criticisms of the law. In response to these practices, and in combination with the findings of the 2009 review, the South African government introduced additional measures in the revised 2010 Mining Charter aimed at achieving more genuinely “broad-based” Black economic empowerment.60 While

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it is too early to evaluate these additional measures, some analysts have identified a shift away from companies partnering with elite BEE companies towards other measures such as employee purchase schemes and partnerships with community organizations. The purchase of 13 per cent equity in Royal Bafokeng Platinum by Bafokeng Traditional Community (300,000 people) is the most commonly cited example of the latter.61 In light of insufficient case study research to date, it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to assess the impact of these further modifications of the Mining Charter in meeting the objective of enhanced racial and social-class democratization of the minerals industry.62 So far, the charter’s achievements seem to have fallen considerably short of its intentions and vision. Meanwhile, the constitutionality of the 2002 Mining Act – specifically, on the issue of expropriation – has been subjected to legal challenge from foreign and domestic companies. The most recent South African Constitutional Court ruling of 18 April 2013 on such cases upheld the state’s right to transform freehold mining licences to leasehold licences without payment of compensation. The court differentiated between being deprived of property (“deprivation”) and having property expropriated; determined that the concept of indirect expropriation did not apply in South African law; and further found that the transformation of “old order mining rights” to the “new order” licensing system under the 2002 law constituted deprivation but not expropriation. One critic of the court decision observed, citing paragraphs 48 and 59 respectively of the final judgment:63 In distinguishing between expropriation and deprivation the Court provided that: “Deprivation relates to sacrifices that holders of private property rights may have to make without compensation, whereas expropriation entails state acquisition of that property in the public interest and must always be accompanied by compensation.” Maybe what is even more worrisome is the declaration by the court that: “There can be no expropriation in circumstances where deprivation does not result in property being acquired by the state.”64

This legal decision points to a continuing effort among some elements of South African society to resist the race-denying, universalistic logic of international capitalist law in favour of a contextually shaped, racecognizant use of law to advance South Africa’s emancipatory goals of social justice through state regulation of the country’s mineral resources

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and mining sector. Another wide-ranging amendment to the Mining Act itself, introduced for parliamentary debate in June 2013, aims to eliminate certain ambiguities and legal loopholes and would introduce more stringent requirements to meet the act’s objectives. These changes would include increasing the scope of ministerial approval required for transferring or mortgaging mining licences, requiring compliance with the Mining Charter to obtain a prospecting licence, eliminating white women from the definition of “historically disadvantaged South Africans,” requiring companies to invest in domestic skills development and research, and increasing domestic “beneficiation” of minerals. The draft amendment bill has elicited as much furor as did the original draft bill. This chapter has implicated Canada in the difficulties encountered by the popularly elected South African government in its attempts to racially democratize access to and benefit from the nation’s mineral wealth with a view to enhancing the well-being of all South Africans. According to a recent Government of Canada briefing paper on trade relations with South Africa, Canadian mining assets in South Africa were worth more than $4 billion in 2010.65 Given such assets, and South Africa’s still untapped mineral wealth, we can expect Canadians to maintain pressure on South Africa to adopt policies that will enable a substantial Canadian presence in the sector. The influence exercised by Canada – by federal and provincial governments, the mining industry, the banking sector, and law firms – vis-à-vis the South African mining sector, while clearly significant, arguably falls short of what constitutes a colonialist relationship. Indeed, South Africa’s persistent efforts to transform the mining sector despite formidable opposition demonstrates spirited nationalist/anti-colonial vision and action. The point to be made is that Canada, despite its mythologized status as an international champion of human rights, democracy, and equality, has not actively supported a racially cognizant transformation of South Africa’s mining sector – a sector that emerged in the context of, profited from, and bolstered the white supremacist apartheid system. To the contrary, the Canadian industry, with government support, is precisely opposed to “resource nationalism” as exemplified by South Africa’s approach. The South African state’s determination to use legal measures to bring about a racially cognizant transformation of the mining sector, while resisting and even defying the use of law as an instrument of a globalized white capitalist order, has compelled Canadians to apply a range of disciplinary and ideological strategies to protect their interests in the South African mining sector. Canada’s presence in South

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Africa’s mining industry remains substantial, subtle, and multifaceted, with influence being achieved not only through direct nation-to-nation diplomacy, trade, and investment but also through aid programs and Canada’s influence in international mining and investment sector policy-making arenas. To the extent that contemporary forms of imperialism and global white supremacy operate through direct and indirect processes, Canada can be deemed to have pursued a colonialist trajectory, subordinating racial justice objectives to the demands of globalizing white capital. In its final form, the MPRDA was obliged to strike a complex compromise between two incompatible trajectories: an anti-colonial, antiracist path and a neoliberal, colour-blind path. Globalizing capitalism in the mining sector has been shown to be largely incompatible with substantive race-cognizant politics and anti-racism goals (i.e., where “substantive” implies structural transformation and not merely the inclusion of bodies phenotypically marked as non-white). When economic power is not recognized as racially organized, then white racial dominance can carry on while being presented as a meritocratic system of individual effort, capability, and achievement – as an imagined “level playing field.” As Giroux argues with reference to the United States, whiteness thus creates “an ideological space free of guilt, selfreflection and political responsibility, despite the fact that blacks have a disadvantage in almost all areas of social life.”66 Denials of race-based injustices and claims to have achieved, or to have been achieving, a post-racial society support a rejection of “affirmative action” policies meant to redress historical exclusion and marginalization. Affirmative action – and substantive justice – is rejected on the grounds that it is too risky, too irrational, no longer necessary, and, ultimately, too great a threat to the private privileges of whiteness. In the end, the subject for whom risk matters, and in whose name these transformations are rejected as too risky, is the ostensibly unraced shareholder or investor. In the terms of this narrative, white Canadian mining professionals and company directors are not acting in their own (racial, class, and national) interests or advancing/protecting their own material well-being, but acting dispassionately in the name of hardworking, middle-class shareholders and investors, including, potentially, Black South Africans. Those well-meaning, innocent investors can never be expected to carry the burden of systemic redress of historical racial injustices. After all, in a globalized, kaleidoscopic economy, anyone and everyone can be an investor or a shareholder.

9 Conclusion: Imagining Decolonized Relations

And something terrible was happening as time went on. It was getting harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it attracted, attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustingly confused feeling all the time these heavy days. (Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 12)

The Canadian global mining industry is lucrative for most of the companies involved. In recent years, the value of Canadian-listed mining assets in African countries has reached as much as $27 billion.1 Global mining profits have played a significant role in keeping Canadian stock markets and chartered banks – and thousands of investment portfolios – buoyant at a time when other industrialized nations are struggling to balance budgets. Yet many of the African countries where Canadian mining companies are operating have among the lowest per capita incomes and quality-of-life indicators on the planet. With Mbembe’s classic questions still ringing – “To whom do a country’s riches belong? Who has the right to live and exist, and who has not, and why?”2 – it is pertinent to restate some of the indicators of social well-being, such as life expectancy at birth. Male/female longevity for Canadians is 78/83, in diamond-, uranium-, and titanium-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is 46/49; in uranium-rich Niger, it is 50/52; and in gold- and uranium-rich Tanzania, it is 55/56.3 To put a face on these figures, I have continued to think about the young daughter of Tanzanian Emmanuel Magige: according to reports, she was born shortly after her twenty-six-year-old father’s 2011 death, alleged to have occurred near a Canadian gold mine while he was scavenging for gold-bearing ore to support his family.4 I have wondered what her life circumstances

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are and how her life has been and will be shaped by the proximity of a largely Canadian-owned mine. In placing greater emphasis in this book on the ostensibly banal aspects of racialized structural and discursive violence, I have not dwelt much on the more sensational events that are too frequently associated with Canadian global mining. Rather, my purpose has been to emphasize the rationalized, routine, unspectacular manner in which systemic harm occurs, garnering little media attention and even less consistent public concern and outrage. I have also shown how that violence – the violence of routine inequality related to resource appropriation – is sanctioned by supposedly ordinary people (who are generally not called “settlers” or “colonizers”) from a supposedly ordinary modern democratic country (which is, outside critical academic circles, rarely called a “white supremacist settler-state”). I have argued in this book that the Canadian mining sector’s global activities draw on, require, and contribute to the reproduction of a white colonial imaginary in Canada and to the reconsolidation of Canada as a capitalist, racial state. As electronic communications technologies and air travel make it increasingly easier to know more about one another’s life conditions on the planet, new and ever-more-sophisticated strategies must be developed to reframe or suppress the implications of that knowledge. These strategies draw on and reproduce established racialized economic hierarchies and stratifications, as well as racist concepts of Self versus Other, but they do so in ways that are both more subtle and more callous. Fundamentally deceptive, they require white supremacist subjects – subjects who are drawn into or opt into whiteness – who are willing to internalize and perform dissemblance. Whiteness is enacted as a kaleidoscope of mesmerizing claims to truth. The performance of whiteness as goodness, which is central to the maintenance of a contemporary white supremacist global order, enables comfortable participation in, and tacit endorsement of, a system of racial-capitalist privilege, domination, and injustice. Can the racially dominant neoliberal subject resist or refuse his or her subjectification? Theoretically, there is always some interstitial, interdiscursive space, some possibility for resistance and refusal. But in practice, very few dominant subjects undertake such refusals, and we are actively discouraged, perhaps even prevented, by dominant cultural messaging from doing so. Moreover, legal, financial, and economic strategies actively block such moves. Irrespective of one’s assigned

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racial identity, to be courageously agentive in refusing the hegemonic order is to face both loss of material wealth/power and ridicule or emasculation within the logic of this same order. Hegemonic masculinity is scripted in ways that feminize the relinquishing of privilege, property, and power, condemnations of injustice, and radical respect for Others. The performance of the “colonizer who cares” or the “feeling man,” – the CSR manager, for instance – while somewhat encouraged, is carefully subordinated to, and managed in relation to, the requirements of colonialist-capitalist control. Performances like these are often used strategically as proof of the goodness of the colonizer, of capital, and of whiteness. Moreover, colourful, kaleidoscopic scripting provides a way of meeting the Other that does not expose dominant subjects – subjects who perform whiteness – to the risk or fear of being changed, a process associated with self-annihilation or self-implosion. Buffered from meeting subordinated peoples in a Self-Self modality – a modality that would require and compel structural change – dominant actors are thus equipped to continue appropriating African mineral resources with few, if any, “prickings of conscience.” Paradoxically, the hegemonic order requires a kind of hypermasculinity that performs itself as authoritative, enterprising, and risk-taking but that must in actuality be non-agentive and non–self-determining. To maintain his or her own anesthetization, and the social structures from which his or her own privileged subjectivity flows, he or she actively supports and disseminates colonialist narratives of goodness. Actual freedom, selfdetermination, and heterogeneity are suppressed. During the writing of this book, a number of significant developments appeared to bear out the accuracy of my analysis. Many of these have involved a programmatic intensification of “the immense cultural and ideological work” required to sustain colonialist relations of domination.5 As noted in chapter 1, the Canadian government has provided $25 million to establish the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development and made a further $15 million contribution to the African Minerals Development Centre in Maputo, Mozambique. In June 2013, Prime Minister Harper announced the establishment of “new mandatory reporting standards for payments made to foreign and domestic governments by Canadian extractive companies.”6 These actions and investments signal an interest on the state’s part to appear to be “doing good” in resource-rich African countries, to maintain Canadian influence over African mining policy and practice, and to enhance the corporate mining sector’s capacity to more

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effectively manage “social and political risk.” Less publicly visible has been the government’s negotiation of foreign investment protection agreements with many of the resource-rich African countries where Canadian mining companies are operating. While a full discussion of these agreements is beyond the scope of this concluding chapter, these treaties offer strong protection to Canadian investors and act as brakes on African governments’ potential moves in the direction of greater “resource nationalism.”7 Cross-sectoral and “public–private” partnerships are part of the intensified “cultural and ideological work” involved in legitimizing Canada’s globalized mining. An example of the kind of strategy that is becoming more common is a collaboration involving one of Canada’s leading universities, a major Canadian law firm, and one or more mining companies, to offer short courses in African countries on corporate social responsibility. In 2013 a week-long “executive education certificate program” held in South Africa cost around C$3,500, exclusive of accommodation and transportation to the site. This course is advertised as targeting “professionals and leaders from private, public and civil society,”8 but the cost indicates that it will be attended mainly by corporate executives, given that the fee is far beyond the reach of not-for-profit or community-based organizations in the vicinity of mines. So it appears to be an exclusive training that will not allow for a full range of perspectives to be heard. If the law firms co-sponsoring or co-teaching these courses also offer legal services to the mining industry, or take positions against the legislated regulation of corporate social responsibility in relation to Canadian global mining, the political bias of these courses will be clear. Indeed, courses like this can be understood as exemplifying the “social technology” that operationalizes the cultural/ideological dimension of globalized white capitalist power. All major Canadian mining companies now feature their “corporate social responsibility” activities prominently on their webpages. Many claim to be engaged in fruitful consultations and relationship building with local communities. In this regard, there is a burgeoning field of CSR consultants specializing in community engagement on behalf of the mining industry. Some of these CSR consulting firms offer mining companies particular expertise in negotiating and managing “relocations” of villages and communities. An increasingly common strategy among mining companies to secure the “social licence” to operate is the establishment of charities or NGOs in the region where they are operating (and sometimes also in Canada).9 Typically, these registered

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charities provide services in communities in the vicinity of the mine relating to health care, education/training, and micro-enterprise. These activities are accompanied by appealing public relations marketing. Companies cast the shift from national state (public) to foreign corporate (private) social service provision as more efficient. A significant development during the writing of this book was the launching of a pilot project by CIDA (now DFATD) consisting of multimillion-dollar aid funding to partnerships between three major Canadian mining companies and three long-established Canadian NGOs.10 Leveraging the social programming expertise of the NGOs, these programs are meant to support community development programs near the locations of Canadian mines or in the country as a whole.11 Initiatives like this have been vigorously debated and critiqued on a number of grounds. They are seen by some as a form of public subsidy for the private mining sector; as a way to deflect attention from the harms associated with foreign mining in African countries; and as having the potential to muzzle or discourage independent NGO reports of human rights concerns associated with Canadian mining. Supporters of the programs assert that they are win–win projects: progressive examples of how mining revenues in partnership with social development expertise can make a difference in communities near industrial mines. With reference to the cultural and ideological scaffolding needed for colonialist processes, the extent to which some of these public–private partnerships are focused on gender equity and “girl/woman rescue” is also noteworthy. Programs that emphasize the dearth of life opportunities available to African girls and women and that purport to redress this deprivation become effective means of garnering broad-based public support and enthusiasm in ­Canada for aid/charity to “Africa.” Such programs offer little i­nformation on the structural and historical causes of the constrained life ­opportunities of African girls or their communities more ­generally, and they do not engage debate on the merits of FDI-dependent resource extraction as a development model. With gender equity in mind, Women in Mining Canada was launched in 2009 with the stated purpose of promoting increased employment and retention of women in the Canadian mining industry. One of its key objectives, however, has been “to advocate for increased public support for the mining and exploration industry.”12 Significantly, its “platinum” and “gold” sponsors for 2012 included several of the largest Canadian mining companies operating in Africa.13 These developments are part of a broad pattern of dissemination of what could be

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called “pseudo-feminist discourse” or “transnational business feminism,”14 discourses which twin commitments to gender empowerment with support for market-led strategies that characterize renewed forms of imperialism.15 As Canadian colonialist resource appropriation in the global South (and North) accelerates, so must the seductive processes of mesmerization, the massive, kaleidoscopic dissemination of the lie of colonialismas-goodness. Perhaps most revealing here is the manner in which the Canadian public, through the public education system, is being primed to receive this messaging as rational and commonsensical. As Stuart Tannock (2010) has shown, the mining industry now finances and produces educational resources, training kits, and programming on geology and mining for use in schools; the PDAC’s “Mining Matters” curriculum is reported to have reached half a million students and teachers across Canada (and certainly more in the years since Tannock’s work was published). As Tannock notes, these curriculum materials emphasize the positive contributions of the mining sector, such as providing the raw materials used in almost every instrument and tool of modern life; but at the same time, they avoid “asking students to reflect on the broader social, economic, political and environmental consequences of their own resource use.”16 In general, the alliances between the business sector and public education are strengthening; they include collaborative projects involving corporate and foundation funding, university faculties of business (some of which are recipients of mining company endowments),17 and faculties of education and public schooling. These developments, which reflect a broad corporate-capitalist social vision and strategy, are generally supportive of mining industry (and other corporate sector) interests. As Edward Said and Achille Mbembe have argued, and as I have been showing throughout this book, colonialism may be principally about acquiring land, resources, “cheap labour,” and markets, but it requires a massive program of popular consent as well as the fostering of a “central cultural imaginary.” By partnering strategically with the education and charity/philanthropy sectors, and by redeploying the mythology of the Good Canadian via corporate social responsibility discourse, the mining industry and the Canadian state are drawing Canadians into widespread and largely uninformed and therefore uncritical support for publicly subsidized African resource appropriation. In presenting a critique of Canada’s globalized mining sector, one is often expected to explain how it could be done better or what needs

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to change. As has been noted in earlier chapters – chapter 4 in particular – there has been no absence of credible diagnoses and reasonable recommendations to address the problems currently associated with foreign-investment-financed African resource extraction. Indeed, the moderate erosion of metals (especially gold) values from the peak of 2012, and companies’ expressions of dismay over their reduced profit margins, validate those who have long pointed out the risks to any country of depending too heavily on export of primary commodities. Meanwhile, recent publications, which appeared as this book was being completed, and which draw on research in African and Latin American countries as well as in Canada, reconfirm many of the existing recommendations concerning what needs to change so that mining will be linked more closely to development outcomes. These works underscore the importance of revisiting the dominant models that have been in place since the early 1990s. Thus, based on field-based research in Mali, Ghana, and DRC, Campbell (2013) concludes (among other things) that support of and investment in artisanal mining could be taken much more seriously and in some cases prioritized; that socio-political relations of power in mineral-rich regions need to be analysed and addressed in ways that enable greater control, ownership, and input into policy decisions by local communities and through national democratic processes; that there must be policy space for context-specific, heterogeneous approaches to resource extraction rather than the singletemplate approach that has been promoted by Western agencies; and that the fundamental objectives of “development” need to be revisited. Drawing on studies of six Latin American countries, Veltmeyer and Petras (2014) raise fundamental concerns about the extreme social and environment costs of mining, frequently borne by Indigenous peoples, and the tendency of capitalist mining to exacerbate socio-economic inequalities across local, national, and international sites. This suggests that if Canada is to operate in a manner that supports the flourishing of societies on the African continent and in other regions of the world (including at home), foundational shifts will need to occur. Despite settler-Canadians’ established mining expertise and accumulations of capital for investment, we need to relinquish the notion that we are entitled to mine resources anywhere on the planet where profits might be made from them. Many communities wish to reject mining initiated and operated by foreign companies, and this needs to be respected. Indeed, countries may choose to develop other aspects of their economy and not prioritize the resource extraction sector at all. At

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the same time, governments that are determined to increase national control and ownership, whether private or public, of their resource sectors, and to design their own approaches to the mining sector within wider development plans, need to be respected and supported. The industry’s and the Canadian government’s support for voluntary CSR initiatives – often little more than a crass strategy to obtain a “social licence” from impoverished, often displaced local people – rings particularly hollow when set against the global North’s virulent objections to resource-rich but impoverished countries’ resource nationalism. To be sincere and convincing in our claims to be a humanitarian state would require a fundamental ontological shift characterized by an ethic of mutuality and of respect for Others as Self. There is little evidence or likelihood of such a transformed approach on the part of the Canadian mining industry or the Canadian government. This brings my argument back to the nature of a white settler state. Such a state is born from colonial violence, theft, and racism. While the examples I have used in this book have focused on the Canadian mining presence in African states, the analysis I present of the material benefits that accrue disproportionately to settler Canadians suggests that, to date, the most significant Canadian project of racialized resource appropriation is the one that has occurred historically in Canada and that continues into the present day. This resource appropriation is that of land/territory and labour, targeting Indigenous peoples and racialized peoples. It is because of this living history as a white settler-colonizer state that the dominant political-cultural polity called “Canada” has become so skilled at, and invested in, producing and disseminating a mythology of goodness and civility. Canada’s most significant national shame is the one that has arisen from more than two centuries of land and mineral appropriation from Indigenous nations. As a modern state determined to deny its disreputable past while aspiring to play a more forceful role in the global order, Canada is at risk of incurring further shame via its colonialist extractions.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1 Sproat, G.M., Scenes and Studies of Savage life, cited in Cumming and Mickenberg, Native Rights in Canada, 175. Similar sentiments continue to be expressed by many Indigenous peoples. For another contemporary example, see the statement of the Guyanese Indigenous leader, Councillor Taruka, “Why are strangers coming onto our lands from the USA, Sao Paulo or wherever? Why do these people not stay on their own lands; we do not go on theirs? Why is the Government selling our lands in a hiding way?” Colchester, La Rose, and James, Mining and Amerindians in Guyana, 1. 2 Kerr and Holloway. “Special Investigative Report,” University of Toronto Varsity and the Atkinsonian, 15 April 2002, 8. 3 The five were Emmanuel Magige, 27, Chacha Mwasi, 25, Chacha Ngoka, 26, Chawali Bhoke, 26, and Mwikwabe Manwa, 35. Varying accounts of these events can be found at the following: Koven, “Seven ‘intruders’ killed”; Wright and Edwards, “Seven dead in clash”; York, “In an African mine”; Barrick Gold Corporation, “Rebuilding trust at North Mara.” A history of events at this mine site is recounted in Butler, “Colonial Walls.” 4 York, “In an African mine.” Reference to the wall construction and installation of closed-circuit TVs along the wall can also be found in Barrick Gold Corporation, “Statement from Barrick Gold Corporation concerning the North Mara Mine, Tanzania,” 30 May 2011, http://www.barrick.com/ investors/news/news-details/2011/North-Mara-Mine-Tanzania/default. aspx. The wall was referenced again in an article in the Tanzania Daily News in which it was noted that “the Canadian investor has also been forced to set up a multimillion wall fence to boost safety and security at the mine.” Mugini, “Tanzania: North Mara Gold Mine.”

296  Notes to pages 4–6 5 Lawrence, Fractured Homelands, 184­–7. 6 In May 2008, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the sentence had been too harsh and released them with ten weeks of jail time served. See Howlett, “Ontario settles.” 7 The company, God’s Lake Resources, was paid $3.5 million in March 2012 by the Province of Ontario to relinquish its exploration licences following sustained protests by Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation. 8 James Keller, “Tsilhqot’in Nation establishes rules for mining in its territory near Williams Lake, B.C.” Globe and Mail, 31 July 2014, accessed 5 November 2014 at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/britishcolumbia/tsilhqotin-nation-establish-rules-for-mining-in-its-territorynear-williams-lake-bc/article19884783. See also “Tsilhqot’in Nation call on governments to reject re-submitted ‘New Prosperity’ Mine,” 8 June 2011, accessed 24 August 2012 at http://www.miningwatch.ca/news/ tsilhqot-nation-call-governments-reject-re-submitted-new-prosperity-mine. 9 Bose and Lyons, Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation, 3. 10 Notably, Campbell, “Canadian Mining Interests,” as well as an earlier version of this ground-breaking essay, which was circulated to some nongovernmental organizations in1998. 11 Critical race theory emerged from “critical legal studies” in the United States and was associated with African American legal scholars such as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. In Canada it developed in a multidisciplinary fashion encompassing the fields of education, feminist theory, politics, law, geography, post-colonial, and anti-colonial studies. Critical race theory views the production of racial categories as a historical social process interlinked with other hierarchical systems of social power such as patriarchy and capitalism; these operate domestically and globally to structure and legitimize unequal and inequitable access to rights and resources. 12 For instance, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, addressing a G20 news conference in Pittsburgh in September 2009, stated: “We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.” See Junggren, “Every G20 nation.” 13 In compliance with the Tri-Council Policy research ethics protocols with “research involving human subjects,” steps were taken to protect the anonymity of those who participated in my research as interviewees. They are not identified by name, nor are they identified by the names of any companies they worked for, or by names of mines. Also, given the limited number of large Canadian companies operating in a number of African

Notes to pages 8–12  297 countries, I generally refer only to regions (e.g., West Africa) rather than to the specific African countries where they worked. Where individual companies or situations are named, that information is already in the public domain and was not part of the primary research I conducted. 14 Canada, Building the Canadian Advantage. 15 In 2009, foreign-based companies undertook 34 per cent of all larger company exploration in Canada. Larger companies active in Canada were based in the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and China. See Drake, “Overview of Trends.” 16 The importance of maintaining significant levels of domestic ownership of the Canadian mining industry is debated from different perspectives. Recent and continuing amendments to the federal Investment Canada Act, which increase the size of the foreign investment required to trigger a federal review by Investment Canada, indicate, in general, a strong commitment on the part of the Canadian government – one that is shared by industry – to a highly liberalized mining economy. See Torys on Mining and Metals, “Canada announces intention.” See also Wakil, “Investment Canada Act Update.” 17 Natural Resources Canada, “Canadian Mining Assets: Information Bulletin December 2013” accessed 5 Nov. 2014 at http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/ mining-materials/publications/15382. See also Arlene Drake, “Overview of Trends, 5.6. 18 Canada, NRC, “Canada’s Mining Assets Abroad.” 19 MineAfrica Inc., “Directory of TMX Group.” 20 Campbell, “Canadian Mining in Africa.” 21 TSX Inc., “A Capital Opportunity,” 29. 22 See, for instance, Third World Network, Press Release; Moody, Rocks and Hard Places; Action Aid, Precious Metal; Sherman, Dishonour of the Crown; McGee, “The Community Referendum”; Coumans, “Alternative Accountability Mechanisms”; Gifford, Kestler, and Anand, “Building Local Legitimacy”; Rogerson, “Mining Enterprise”; and Lange, “Gold and Governance.” 23 These included the Equator Principles, developed by the banking sector; OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises; the International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards; and the UN Global Compact. 24 See, for instance, Hamann, Khagram, and Rohan’s discussion, in “South Africa’s Charter Approach,” of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment program as a type of CSR initiative, one with limited success. See also Garvin and colleagues’ discussion, in “Community–Company Relations,” of the limited effectiveness of CSR in the gold mining sector

298  Notes to pages 13–24 in Ghana. See also Gifford, Kestler, and Anand, in “Building Local Legitimacy,” for a more positive assessment of CSR in mining projects in Peru; Mujih, “‘Co-deregulation,’” on state–industry collaboration on CSR programming; and the special issue of Canadian Journal of Development Studies 30, nos. 1–2 (2010), on CSR and resource extraction. 25 See Coumans, “Alternative Accountability Mechanisms.” See also “Norway’s public pension fund bars Barrick Gold,” CCPA Monitor 15.9 (March 2009): 19. 26 Federal Interdepartmental National Roundtable Steering Committee, “National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Canadian Extractive Sector in Developing Countries: Discussion Paper.” (Ottawa: DFAIT, June 2006), 4. 27 Policy Monitor, “Creation of the Canadian International Institute.” 28 Gravelle, “Resource Nationalism”; Butler, “Canadian Mining and ‘Resource Nationalism.’ ” 29 On the suppression of public debate in Canada through SLAPP suits (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”), see Landry, Threatening Democracy; see also Sheila Dawn Gill, “The Unspeakability of Racism.” 30 For a discussion of neoliberalism’s “proto-fascist” control of public speech in the United States, see Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism. 31 Tifsberger, “Uncertainty and Method,” 316. 32 No government officials in CIDA, DFAIT, or NRC agreed to on-the-record interviews. 33 For an analysis of race, colonialism, and the role of Canadian female development workers in African countries, see Heron, Desire for Development. 34 Steyn, “‘White Talk,’” 121. 35 For a remarkable account of the physicality of “white space,” see Ahmed, “The Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Chapter 2 1 Mills, Blackness Visible, 107. 2 Mills, Blackness Visible, 98. 3 Mills, Blackness Visible, 109. 4 Mills, Blackness Visible, 104. 5 Marx, Capital, 775. 6 Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 232. 7 Luxemburg asserts that capitalism is unable to sustain an accumulation of profit without access to raw materials and to non-capitalist economies and geographies for exploitation. She writes: “Accumulation is

Notes to pages 24–30  299 impossible in an exclusively capitalist environment. Therefore, we find that capital has been driven since its very inception to expand into non-capitalist strata and nations, ruin artisans and peasantry, proletarianize the intermediate strata, the politics of colonialism, the politics of ‘opening up’ and the export of capital. The development of capitalism has been possible only through constant expansion into new domains of production and new countries.” Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 145. 8 Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 92–3. 9 Marx, Capital, 874. 10 Marx, Capital, 915. 11 Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 92. 12 Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 228–33. 13 Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 172–5. 14 This analysis is supported by Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism, 15–17. 15 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 105. 16 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 74. 17 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 14–15. 18 Notably, Samuel Morton’s influential – although later discredited – tome purporting to demonstrate the division of humankind into a hierarchy of scientifically classifiable “races,” Crania Americana, was published between 1839 and 1849. 19 Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 164. 20 Bhattacharyya, Gabriel, and Small, Race and Power, 3. 21 Miles and Brown, Racism, 120. 22 Miles and Brown, Racism, 122–9. For instance, the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance defined race as “persons of European, Asiatic or African origin as the case may be.” See also Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya, 28–62, who describes the impact of various laws and ordinances passed by the colonial state in Kenya to secure productive land for the white settlers and to force Kenyans to work for white farmers. These included the Masters and Servants Ordinance, which “bound the African worker to serve out a contract on pain of imprisonment,” and the Resident Labourers Ordinance, which took effect after 1918. 23 Miles and Brown, Racism, 129. 24 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 127. 25 Bhattacharyya, Gabriel, and Small, Race and Power, 34. 26 Roberts and Mahtani, “Neoliberalizing Race,” 250. 27 Bhattacharyya, Gabriel, and Small, Race and Power, 30. 28 Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism, 46.

300  Notes to pages 30–9 29 See, among many, Saturnino et al., “Toward a Better Understanding.” The literature on land grabs is now vast. 30 Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” 21. 31 Escobar, “Beyond the Third World,” 209. 32 Bhattacharyya, Gabriel, and Small, Race and Power, 9. 33 See Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism, 61–80. The chapter is titled “Neoliberalism and the Politics of the New Racism.” 34 For an account of this process in Canada, see Galabuzi, Canada’s Economic Apartheid. 35 On race, whiteness, and futurism, see Baldwin, “Racialisation and Potentiality.” 36 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 193–6. 37 Arat-Koç, “New Whiteness,” 162. 38 Armah, The Beautyful Ones, 12. 39 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii. 40 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 25. 41 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 25. 42 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 35. 43 For example, the slogan “if you want to be a Canadian company, act like a Canadian company,” which was developed by not-for-profit mining activist organizations to hold mining companies listed on Canadian stock markets accountable to high human rights standards, inadvertently equates Canadian-ness with goodness, thus reproducing this foundational myth – a myth that refuses to see Canada as a violent settler-colonizer state. 44 See Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Dyer, White; Heron, Desire for Development. 45 For a succinct and comprehensive overview, see D. Hall, Subjectivity. 46 See Barrett, The Politics of Truth; Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin (2000). 47 Barrett, The Politics of Truth, 100. 48 McHoul and Grace, A Foucault Primer, 22. 49 Bergland, The National Uncanny, 10. 50 Tifsberger, “Uncertainty and Method,” 315–28. 51 This is the term that Welch, in “Colonial Violence,” uses in her analysis of the psychic tension produced by Tocqueville’s support for liberal-democratic values and his simultaneous support for the brutal French colonial war in Algeria. She concludes by observing that “liberals experience more guilt, have fewer acceptable means to expiate that guilt, and thus are tempted to turn to more subtle means of psychic insulation … In such a world, Tocqueville’s efforts to make colonial violence absent to his imagination are worthy of particular reflection” (257).

Notes to pages 40–9  301 52 For an overview of this perception of the state in Marxist thought, see Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism, 147. 53 Strange, The Retreat of the State, 4. 54 Weiss, “Globalization,” 3. 55 Szablowski, Transnational Law, 43–60. 56 See, for instance Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: “I have harped on the role of the state in part because of the need to reject what has been an overly economistic understanding of capitalism. But I have also focused on the role of the state because I believe it to have been no less an essential feature of capitalism than the market and capitalist relations of production themselves, and its future role is today among the most important contradictory aspects of the current crisis” (248). See also the detailed discussion in Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism, 143–53. 57 Meiskins Wood, cited in Sethi, The Politics of Postcolonialism, 55. 58 Butler, “Deconstructing a Colonial Archive.” 59 Sethi, The Politics of Postcolonialism, 54. 60 Sethi, The Politics of Postcolonialism, 55–6. 61 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 25. 62 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 33. 63 Foucault, Two Lectures (1976), in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect, 105. 64 Indeed, many migrant workers and others, such as those deemed terrorist risks, lack even de jure racial equality. 65 Goldberg, The Racial State, 114. 66 Goldberg, The Racial State, 110–11. 67 Agamben, States of Exception, 50. 68 Agamben, States of Exception, 86–7. 69 Agamben, States of Exception, 48. 70 Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism, 15–32. 71 For a classic introduction and case studies, see Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies. For debates over the implications of this term as applied to Canada, see Abele and Stasiulis, “Canada as a ‘White Settler Colony’”; Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism”; and Phung, “Are People of Colour Settlers Too?” 72 Jakubowski, “‘Managing’ Canadian Immigration,” 96. 73 Lozanski, “Memory.” 74 See Bergland, The National Uncanny; Kelen, Hymns. 75 See Said’s seminal work, Culture and Imperialism. 76 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Shohat and Stam, “The Imperial Imaginary”; Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law.

302  Notes to pages 50–9   77 Accominotti, Rezzik, and Zumer, “Black Man’s Burden,” 49.   78 Accominotti, Rezzik, and Zumer, “Black Man’s Burden,” 67–8.   79 See Galabuzi, Canada’s Economic Apartheid; and Li, “The Market Value.”   80 This term, and analysis, was coined by Ruth Frankenberg (1993).   81 Dua, “Introduction,” 26n7.   82 Abele and Stasiulis, “Canada as a ‘White Settler Colony,’” 242.   83 Williams, in Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 125.   84 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 122.   85 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 122.   86 Klassen, “Canada and the New Imperialism,” 167.   87 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 134.   88 Niosi, Canadian Multinationals, 34–6.   89 Niosi, Canadian Multinationals, 36.   90 T. Gordon, in Imperialist Canada, 23, identifies these as the classic accounts of Canada’s tenuous economic sovereignty: K. Levitt, Silent Surrender: the Multinational Corporation in Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970); G. Teeple, ed., Capital and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); R.T. Taylor, The History of Canadian Business (Toronto: Lorimer, 1975); and W. Clement and D. Drache, A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978).   91 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 123.   92 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 130.   93 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 127.   94 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 129.   95 Clement and Williams, eds., The New Canadian Political Economy, 129.   96 T. Gordon, Imperialist Canada, 135.   97 See Prime Minister Paul Martin’s introduction to the new foreign policy introduced in 2005. See also Razack, Dark Threats, White Knights.   98 T. Gordon, Imperialist Canada, 19.   99 Klassen, “Canada and the New Imperialism,” 183. 100 T. Gordon, Imperialist Canada, 46–9. 101 McKay and Swift, Warrior Nation, 46–7. 102 McNally, “Canada and Empire,” 5. 103 Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, cited in Sethi, The Politics of Postcolonialism, 62. 104 See Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Khanna, Dark Continents; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest; etc.

Notes to pages 60–2  303 Chapter 3 1 A term used by some Indigenous scholars. 2 On these themes, see Abele and Stasiulis, “Canada as a ‘White Settler Colony’”; Lozanski, “Memory”; and Asch, “Canadian Sovereignty.” 3 There is a burgeoning scholarly literature on Canadian colonial history and contact told from Indigenous sources and perspectives. Many of these accounts concern questions of Indigenous agency in the process of treaty making, and some touch on mining and resource extraction. See Webber and Macleod, Between Consenting Peoples; Paul W. DePasquale, ed., Natives and Settlers Now and Then; Lessard, Johnson, and Webber, eds., Storied Communities. 4 The sociological literature on Canadian mining has left many important aspects of the industry unexamined, especially from a critical race, post-colonial, analytical perspective. For instance, the role of the Geological Survey of Canada has not been studied from this perspective, even though it was a major public institution created by the British colonial government prior to Confederation and is still influential. In addition, while much of the Canadian mining industry’s current work is in regions of the country with predominantly Indigenous populations, and while the industry has in recent years become more publicly committed to establishing positive and “socially responsible” relationships with Indigenous communities – as well as to employing more Indigenous and “new” Canadians – there has been relatively little scholarly research to assess these relationships from a critical race and anti-colonial perspective along the lines of Banerjee’s work. 5 Mouat, Metal Mining in Canada, 65. 6 Longo, Historical Highlights, ix, 3. 7 Longo, Historical Highlights, 3. 8 Even recent court proceedings use such imagery. See, for instance, para. 4 of Platinex v. K.I. (Ontario Superior Court of Justice, 2008-03-18): “The case highlights the clash of two very different perspectives and cultures in a struggle over one of Canada’s last remaining frontiers. On the one hand, there is the desire for economic development of the rich resources located on a vast tract of pristine land in a remote portion of Northern Ontario. Resisting this development is an Aboriginal community fighting to safeguard its traditional land, culture, way of life and core beliefs.” Accessed 19 March 2012 at http://caid.ca/PlaDec-1-2008.pdf. 9 For an evocative fictional example, see Michael Ondaatje’s description of the protagonist’s immigrant father, who makes his living setting underground explosives in asbestos mines. Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion.

304  Notes to pages 63–6 10 Most Canadian critical race scholars and Indigenous scholars assert the illegality of land invasion and theft. See, for example, Asch, “Canadian Sovereignty”; Borrows, Recovering Canada; Mack, “Hoquotist”; Sherman, Dishonour of the Crown; and Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 11 On ideologies of legitimation of colonial land usurpation in Canada, see DePasquale, “Introduction,” in DePasquale, ed., Natives and Settlers Now and Then, xxiv. 12 Cumming and Mickenberg, eds., Native Rights in Canada, 17. They are here citing part of the legal reasoning pertaining to the US Supreme Court cases Johnson v. MacIntosh (1823) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832). 13 Cumming and Mickenberg, eds., Native Rights in Canada, 18–19. 14 There is a long genealogy of such thinking, which can be traced back to the highly influential writings of John Locke in the 1600s. David Armitage defends the legitimacy of a “colonial reading” of Locke’s “On Property.” Specifically, he supports the view that Locke’s philosophical position on private property rights were informed by his close involvement in the governance of the Carolina colonies in the 1600s and his friendship with Sir Peter Colleton, owner of one of the largest slave plantations in Barbados. Locke defended the right to appropriate land in the colonies using racist arguments about which actors had the competence to agriculturally develop the land; “savages,” as Locke called the Indigenous people, did not. Racial hierarchy was thus built into the earliest conceptions of private property. 15 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1722n47. Such rationale for “legal” land appropriation continues to the present day. For instance, the World Bank’s 2010 report on foreign acquisition of farmland (mainly in Africa), Rising Global Interest in Farmland, identifies low productivity, “yield gaps,” and underutilization of land in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. The bank goes on to argue that “if properly regulated … land deals could facilitate the transfer of land rights from less to more efficient producers – the logic underlying its market-based land and agricultural reforms over the past two decades.” Hall, “Land Grabbing in Southern Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 38.128 (June 2011): 194. 16 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1722. 17 Borrows, Recovering Canada, 95–6. 18 Asch, “Canadian Sovereignty,” 30–1. 19 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 20 See Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, “Aboriginal-Mining Company Contractual Agreements in Australia and Canada: Implications of Political Autonomy and Community Development”; Viviane Weitzner, “Indigenous

Notes to pages 66–75  305 Participation in MultiPartite Dialogues on Extractives: What Lessons Can Canada and Others Share?”; David Szablowski, “Operationalizing Free, Prior, and Informed Consent in the Extractive Industry Sector? Examining the Challenges of a Negotiated Model of Justice,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 30.1–2 (2010): 69–130. 21 Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 16. 22 Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 170. 23 Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 62. 24 Again, there are striking parallels with recent court cases between settler mining companies and Indigenous communities. Following the conclusion of Platinex v. K.I. (2007), the Ontario government paid Platinex $5 million to relinquish the mining licences they had been granted. Even more recently, a similar payment of $3.5 million was made to God’s Lake Resources for the same purpose. Such payments vastly exceed those that governments made to Indigenous nations when ceding their lands during treaty negotiations. See Howlett, Globe and Mail, “Ontario settles.” Presently, the Whitefish Lake First Nation near Sudbury, Ontario, is suing the Government of Canada and the Province of Ontario for $550 billion for the loss of mineral-rich territory wrongly obtained by the Canadian government in 1885. 25 Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 94–5. 26 The Morris texts leave readers with the impression that no Indigenous peoples – or at least, none in Northern Ontario or the western provinces – had any agricultural skill or knowledge. This is undoubtedly false, given that Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Algonquin, and other Indigenous nations were skilled at growing beans, corn, squash, and wild rice, while in the Great Lakes area, maple sap was harvested and made into sugar and syrup. 27 Cumming and Mickenberg, Native Rights in Canada, 175. 28 Examples of “revolving doors” and family connections that blur the lines between business and state were evident during the Bill C-300 hearings. Raymond Chrétien, nephew of the former prime minister, and James Peterson, former Minister of International Trade, attended the hearings as spokespersons for the law firm Fasken Martineau DuMoulin, while Perrin Beatty, a former cabinet minister, attended the hearings as the CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. 29 Laforce, Lapointe, and Lebuis, “Mining Sector Regulation,” 59. 30 Laforce, Lapointe, and Lebuis, “Mining Sector Regulation,” 59. 31 Cruikshank, “Images of Society.” 32 Berton, Klondike. 33 Berton, Klondike, 42–3, cited in Cruikshank, “Images of Society,” 7.

306  Notes to pages 75–85 3 4 Cruikshank, “Images of Society,”14. 35 Lawrence, “Rewriting Histories of the Land,” 43. See also Wightman and Wightman, The Land Between. These authors provide further details from archival sources of disputes over access to minerals. In one case, the well-known Ojibway leader Shingwauk was involved: “After mid-decade Shingwauk, with his son-in-law, Chief Nebanaigooching of the Batchawana band, became the most active opponent of any property usurpation by whites. In 1846 Mr. Alex Vidal, who had been ordered by the Crown Lands Office to survey a town plot at Sault Ste. Marie, reported a very heated session with these two about his rights to do so. They argued that the colonial government had not yet purchased the site from their people. He also reported that these chiefs were even more upset about government licences for mining purposes on land that was still untreatied Native domain. Vidal’s response was an ill-conceived threat of official reaction, if they, their bands, or any other Natives were to offer the miners resistance.” 36 Lawrence, “Rewriting Histories of the Land,” 43. 37 Cumming and Mickenberg, eds., Native Rights in Canada, 116. 38 Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 16. 39 Lawrence, “Rewriting Histories of the Land,” 45n56. 40 Marshall, “Rickard Revisited,” 96. 41 Marshall, “Rickard Revisited,” 99. 42 Marshall, “Rickard Revisited,” 100. 43 Marshall, “Rickard Revisited,” 100–1. 44 Clement, “Transformation in Mining,” 178. 45 Vasiliadis, Dangerous Truth, 54. 46 Scott Kerwin, “Analysis of Platinex Inc. v. Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation case,” O.J. No. 3140 (QL), 2006 CanLII 26171, Ontario Superior Court of Justice (G.P. Smith J.), 28 July 2006. Accessed 16 April 2010 at http://www.miningwatchcanada.ca. 47 Platinex v. K.I. (2008) Par. 15. Accessed 19 March 2012 at http://caid.ca/ PlaDec-1-2008.pdf. 48 Sherman, Dishonour of the Crown. 49 Jon Baird, President, PDAC, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Canada’s Mineral Exploration Sector: Doing the Right Thing Wherever We Work,” speech to Economic Club of Canada, 23 June 2009. Chapter 4 1 Natural Resources Canada, http://www.nrcan.gc.ca. 2 MineAfrica Inc., “Directory.”

Notes to pages 87–92  307 3 Bourgois, “The Continuum of Violence in War and Peace,” 426. 4 Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” 4–5. 5 Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism,149–50. 6 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 266. 7 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 10. 8 For an excellent, succinct explanation of this phenomenon, see Sharife, “‘Transparency.’” 9 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 100. 10 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 65. The source of this figure is not clear, as the Africa Progress Panel report references the Curtis and Lissu report, A Golden Opportunity, without providing a page number from it. The reference to a shortfall of $25 million in royalties that I found in the Curtis and Lissu report is found on page 25, relating to the years 1999 to 2003 as covered in the Alex Stewart Assayer’s report, and pertains to calculated royalties due for which there is no proof of payment – not low royalty rates. The latter is, however, also assessed and calculated by Curtis and Lissu. 11 Curtis and Lissu, A Golden Opportunity, 25. 12 Curtis and Lissu, A Golden Opportunity, 24. 13 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 65. 14 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 65. 15 Curtis and Lissu, A Golden Opportunity, 18. See also Lange, who in “Gold and Governance” notes with regard to Tanzanian mining: “In the period 1998–2002, mining companies kept more than 90 percent of the total value of the exports … Five years later, in 2007, when some of the mines had passed the five-year period of VAT and duty exemption, the government’s revenue from mining had risen to US$119.2 million. This yearly income is still disappointingly low.” 16 See country reports on the website of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, http://www.eiti.org. 17 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Demographic Yearbook, 2009–2010 (New York: 2011). 18 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives, 15–16, 18, 23. 19 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 67. 20 Africa Progress Panel, Equity in Extractives 17. 21 Laudati, “Beyond Minerals,” 33–4. 22 CCSRC, “Corporate Social Responsibility,” 7. 23 CCSRC, “Corporate Social Responsibility […] A Survey,” 3. http://www .resourceconflict.org/ccsrc_report_0906.pdf.

308  Notes to pages 92–3 24 This company was sold in 2010 to a Russian firm, which delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange in October 2013. 25 RIMM/International Women and Mining Network, “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out,” 21. 26 COSATU, “COSATU North-West Press Statement.” The Mines Health and Safety Inspectorate Act report of 2006–7, 15–16, indicated that for the years 2005 and 2006, the Northwest region, where the Dominion Reefs mine is located, had the greatest number of fatalities and injuries of all regions in the country. The report did not indicate at which mines the deaths and injuries occurred. This report can be accessed at http://www.dmr.gov.za/ mhsi-annual-reports/summary/128-annual-reports/884-mhsi-annualreport-2006-2007.html. 27 Miningmx. “Uranium One rejects,” union’s health accusations,” August 16, 2007. Accessed May 1, 2014 at https://www.google.ca/#q=Uranium+O ne+rejects+union%27s+health+accusations 28 Visit “Women and Mining” at http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ womenmining/conversations/topics/1227?var=0. 29 In response to the letter-writing campaign directed at Uranium One in late 2008 and early 2009, Chris Saddler, VP for Investor Relations, stated in a letter to Tanya Roberts-Davis that “after four days of refusing to return to work despite having received several directives to do so, as well as a Court Order of the Labour Court of South Africa declaring the strike unprotected, and interdicting and restraining the striking workers from continuing with, participating in or promoting the strike, the striking workers were dismissed. Dismissed workers have received all monies owing to them and are not entitled to severance packages.” This latter statement was later challenged by workers’ advocacy groups. Visit “Women and Mining” at http://groups. yahoo.com/neo/groups/womenmining/conversations/topics/1227?var=0. 30 RIMM/International Women and Mining Network, “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out, 24. These events were also reported in a press release of 14 October 2008 prepared by Mariette Liefferink of Public Environmental Arbiters issued on behalf of Jubilee South Africa, a network of not-for-profit social justice organizations; and in Roberts-Davis, “One deadly reputation.” According to COSATU, the Department of Minerals and Energy made unsuccessful attempts to meet with the management of the company to investigate and address the grievances. In 2007, government inspectors allegedly told the company to halt operations until Mine Health and Safety Act standards were met. 31 Uranium One, “News Release, 22 October 2008.”

Notes to pages 93–7  309 3 2 Uranium One, Annual Report 2008. 33 RIMM/International Women and Mining Network, “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out,” 21. 34 RIMM/International Women and Mining Network, “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out,” 23. 35 RIMM/International Women and Mining Network, “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out,” 22. I contacted the mining company in January 2014 to learn their views on the range of claims and allegations pertaining to this mine, and was directed to information on their website. In May 2014 I made a further inquiry specifically concerning the company’s response to the child’s death, but received no reply. 36 Correspondence between Chris Saddler and Tanya Roberts-Davis, accessed 10 January 2014 at http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ womenmining/conversations/topics/1227?var=0. 37 Reuters, “Uranium One to delist shares.” 38 Mmusi, “Uranium Mining Nightmare Story.” 39 Darimani, “Canadian Company Plunders Ghana.” 40 Campbell, “Canadian Mining in Africa.” 41 Garvin et al., “Community–Company Relations.” 42 Garvin et al., “Community–Company Relations,” 580. 43 Garvin et al., “Community–Company Relations,” 577. 44 Hilson and Yaklovleva, “Strained Relations.” 45 See Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, for an account of the role of the Belgian- and American-dominated rubber industry in Congo in the early 1900s in fostering multifaceted forms of violence. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness offers a fictionalized account of the brutality associated with the Belgian/European-dominated ivory plunder in Congo in the 1800s. 46 UN, Report of the Panel of Experts, S/2001/357, para. 7. 47 UN, Report of the Panel of Experts, S/2001/357, para. 183. 48 Abadie, “Canada and the Geopolitics of Mining Interests,” 292–3. See also testimony of Denis Tougas of Entr’aide Missionaire to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on Bill C-300, 24 November 2009, FAAE, No. 041, 2nd session, 40th parliament, pp. 3–4. 49 The International Rescue Committee reported that 2.5 million deaths occurred in DRC between August 1998 and April 2001 due to the war and the occupation of eastern Congo by Rwandan and Uganda military. The UN Panel of Experts extrapolated these findings up to April 2002 and concluded that at least 3 to 3.5 million Congolese had died during this period. See paras. 63–4 and 131 in the Panel of Experts report of October 2002,

310  Notes to pages 97–100 accessed 10 January 2014 at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/ GEN/N02/621/79/PDF/N0262179.pdf?OpenElement. 50 Miningwatch Canada, “Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” 51 UN Security Council. S/2002/1146/Add. 1, 20 June 2003. 52 I became familiar with this case when I was asked to participate in a discussion with this company, held at DFAIT in relation to the establishment of the OECD’s “National Contact Point” process to facilitate or encourage compliance with the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. I listened and participated directly in the conversation with this company; significantly, however, I was prohibited from taping and transcribing the verbatim discussion. A succinct summary of the case is included in Campbell, “Canadian Mining in Africa.” 53 UN, Report of the Panel of Experts, S/2002/1146, paras. 63–4. 54 Seeger, “Mining Company Analysis.” 55 Anvil Mining Inc., “News Release.” 56 UN, Mission de l’Organisation, “Report.” 57 Interestingly, when initially challenged on the support it had provided to the Congolese army for actions that were later linked to gross violations of human rights, the company defended its actions on the grounds that it was acting within the parameters of Congolese law – that is, just obeying the law. But the law cited was an ordinance, passed in 1940 during Belgian colonization, that had been retained in post-colonial Congo. This was a curious defence for the company to offer, as it both implied a view of an earlier colonial government and its system of laws as a legitimate system of governance, and demonstrated an actual continuity – not merely metaphorical – of colonial and post-colonial law. 58 UN, Mission de l’Organisation “Report,” 6, para. 24. 59 This information was conveyed during an OECD Contact Point process held in Ottawa at DFAIT, at which I was present. 60 See http://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/766/Anvil-Mining-et-al (accessed 2 May 2014) for details of the case. 61 This was reported in a briefing paper on the Anvil mining case by the Canadian Centre for International Justice: “Following numerous irregularities during the trial, the military tribunal acquitted all the defendants. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time, Louise Arbour, now a member of CCIJ’s Honorary Council, stated: ‘I am concerned at the court’s conclusions that the events in Kilwa were the accidental results of fighting, despite the presence at the trial of substantial eye-witness testimony and material evidence pointing to the commission of serious and deliberate human rights violations.’ Subsequent attempts to

Notes to pages 100–8  311 appeal the decision of the military trial court have been refused. A monumental 2010 United Nations report cited the Anvil case as a prime example of how justice is often not done in the DRC.” Accessed 2 May 2014 at http://www.ccij.ca/programs/cases/index.php?DOC_INST=14. 62 Press release, 31 January 2012, “Congolese massacre survivors to pursue justice at the Supreme Court of Canada,” issued by RAID, L’Entraide Missionaire, ASADHO, CCIJ, Global Witness, and ACIDH. 63 RAID, “Anvil Mining Limited and the Kilwa Incident, DRC: Unresolved Issues,” 26 September 2005, 3. Available at http://www.raid-uk.org. 64 Letter to MONUC 20 June 2005, MONUC report,10n15. 65 York, “Kinross Defends Tasiast Mine Layoffs.” 66 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 163–4. 67 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 165. 68 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 179. 69 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 162–89. 70 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 177. 71 Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, 12. 72 Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, 234. 73 Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, xiv. 74 Lanning and Mueller, Africa Undermined, 498­–9. 75 Mushingwe, “Tanzanian Mining Industry,” 41. 76 See UNECA, Minerals and Africa’s Development, 92: “But the widespread sense that Africa has not obtained commensurate compensation from exploitation of its mineral resources is impossible to ignore.” 77 Mkandawire and Soludo, Our Continent Our Future, 35. 78 UNECA, Minerals and Africa’s Development, 116. 79 Jourdan, “Creating Resource Industry Linkages in Mining.” 80 Arellano-Yanguas, “A Thoroughly Modern Resource Curse?”, 5. 81 Arellano-Yanguas, “A Thoroughly Modern Resource Curse?”, 12. 82 See chapter 2 of this book, pp. 39–42, on contrasting theorizations of the nature of the state and state power in the global neoliberal economy. I argue that strongly nationalistic states are required in the global South in order to maximize the benefits of resource industries for local populations and citizens. 83 See Campbell, “Canadian Mining Interests and Human Rights in Africa”; see also Campbell, ed., Regulating Mining in Africa. 84 Canadian mining companies’ public relations materials routinely assert that wages paid to workers in African countries are higher than most other types of waged employment available in the country. This may well be the case, but they remain much lower than wages/salaries for the same work done in Canada.

312  Notes to pages 108–13 8 5 ILO, Global Wage Report. 86 This was a presidential commission set up by Tanzanian President Kikwete in 2007 to investigate accusations of “theft” of natural resources by predominantly foreign mining companies. It was chaired by a highly respected Tanzanian legal expert and former Supreme Court Justice, Judge Mark Bomani. 87 Curtis and Lissu, “A Golden Opportunity?” 38–9. 88 Curtis and Lissu, A Golden Opportunity, 39. 89 Morris, Kablinsky, and Kaplan, “Commodities and Linkages,” 21. 90 Cynthia Enloe suggests that the more precise term should be “labour made cheap”; see Enloe, The Curious Feminist, 2. See also Galabuzi, Canada’s Economic Apartheid, 40–54. 91 See Campbell, “Canadian Mining in Africa”; Campbell, ed., Regulating Mining in Africa; and Akabzaa, “Mining Legislation.” Documenting the same phenomenon, Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan in “Commodities and Linkages” note with regard to Tanzania that “the low-tax regime introduced to foster the gold industry meant that the contribution of the gold sector to total government revenue was only $46.5m in 2004–5 (the most recent year for which data is available), contributing only 1.4 percent of total government revenue” (44). 92 Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2010,” p. 8. 93 UNECA, Minerals and Africa’s Development, xiv. 94 Sinkamba, “Zambia lacks a comprehensive trickle down.” 95 Candy, “ANC Youth League Memorandum.” 96 Hoffman, “Skilled Immigrants Staff Sudbury Gem Plant.” Ironically, while this cutting and polishing industry was created as an employment-generating venture in light of Sudbury’s 10 per cent unemployment rate at that time, all initial employees were experienced Vietnamese diamond cutters brought in on special work permits. The same multinational company was also employing Vietnamese workers at its diamond polishing plant in Yellowknife. The hourly wage for these workers is not reported, although logically, it would have to be low enough to offset the cost of transporting workers from Vietnam. The company is reportedly working with a Sudbury college to develop a diamond polishing and cutting training program for local residents. 97 Both South Africa and Botswana have attempted to develop stronger upstream and downstream industries in connection with mining, and both countries continue to struggle to achieve this. See Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan, “Commodities and Linkages”; Rogerson, “Mining Enterprise,” 13377.

Notes to pages 113–15  313   98 Other scholars have encountered considerable challenges and barriers to obtaining quantitative data pertaining to the mining sectors in African countries. Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan attempted to study mining industry “linkages” in sub-Saharan Africa and found that “despite our attempts to utilise a rigorous, common and structured methodology, without exception, all of our studies (although to varying degrees) encountered substantial problems in accessing the data required to document what was being observed … In Angola, Botswana and Nigeria the majority of firms who were approached agreed to participate in the study. By contrast in Tanzania the barriers to research access were formidable, in part because the government was revising its policy towards the mining sector and the lead mining firms were concentrating on keeping a very low profile.” “Commodities and Linkages,” 8.   99 Conversation with MEC staff, 21 November 2011. 100 Conversation with MEC staff, 21 November 2011. 101 “Infomine subscriptions.” Accessed 12 November 2014 at http://www. infomine.com/subscribe/ratesprivs.asp. 102 Costmine, “Mining Labour Compensation Reports,” accessed 12 November 2014 at costs.infomine.com/laborcompensationreports. 103 Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 238. 104 Paul Stothart, personal communication, 31 October 2011. 105 Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2010,” 111. 106 Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 238. 107 Paul Stothart, personal communication, 31 October 2011. 108 As discussed later in this chapter, this is a highly contested issue. According to Curtis and Lissu in A Golden Opportunity, the Tanzanian government received “around US$28 million a year in royalties and taxes” on gold exports between 1997 and 2005 compared to a value of exported gold of US$2.54 billion over the same period (7). Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan, “Commodities and Linkages” (44), cite Tanzanian government income from gold mining in 2004–5 as US$46.5 million – only 1.4 per cent of total revenues. 109 Such as the provision by the EDC of a loan of $940,000 to facilitate the sale of three trucks manufactured by a firm in Burlington, Ontario, to a Canadian gold-mining company in Ghana. 110 The mission was a visit by the DRC’s Minister of Mines to meet with the Canadian mining sector at the PDAC annual conference in March 1998, the year following the ouster of long-time Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The minister’s visit was hosted jointly by the mining industry and

314  Notes to pages 115–21

111 112

113 1 14 115 116 117 118 1 19 120 121

1 22 123 124 1 25 126

127 128

129

DFAIT, which commissioned the organization of the visit to a large Canadian engineering firm with mining expertise. Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability, “Dirty Business, Dirty Practices.” Such embassy support was identified by many of the mining industry professionals I interviewed; see especially chapters 6 and 7 of this book for references to Canadian government support re mining law reform. Information on the Mineral Exploration Tax Credit can be found at http://www.pdac.ca/pdac/advocacy/financial/flow-through.html. Tannock, “Learning to Plunder,” 85. McQuaig and Brooks, “The Trouble with Billionaires.” Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 58. Women in Mining Canada, “Ramp Up,” 8. See also Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 56–7. Paul Stothart, Mining Association of Canada, personal correspondence, 31 October 2011. This is an estimate – no hard figures are available. Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 13. Canada, NRC, “Canadian Suppliers of Mining Goods and Services,” xv. Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 51. The figure they give is 7.5 per cent Aboriginal participation, but this does not square up with the figures provided: i.e., 4,515 Indigenous employees in 2006 out of a total mining industry workforce of 362,940. Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 58. Mining Association of Canada, “Facts and Figures 2011,” 60. Statistics Canada, Trade Data Online, accessed 5 November 2011 at http://www.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrkti/tdst/tdo/tdo.php. TSX, “A Capital Opportunity,” 15. Source cited is Capital IQ. The following mutual funds were reviewed on 24 October 2011: RBC Global Precious Metals Fund, Sentry Precious Metals Growth Fund, Sprott Gold & Precious Minerals Fund, Mackenzie Universal Precious Metals Fund, BMO Precious Metals Fund, TD Precious Metals Fund, and Altamira Precious and Strategic Metals. These companies are Avion Gold, Barrick Gold, Golden Star, Iamgold, Kinross, and Semafo. RBC Global Asset Management, RBC Global Precious Metals Fund, 21 October 2011, accessed 24 October 2011 at http://fundinfo.rbcgam.com/ mutual-funds/rbc-funds/fund-pages/rbf468.fs. CPP Investment Board, “Canadian Publicly Traded Equity Holdings as of March 31, 2011,” accessed 26 Oct. 2011 from http://www.cpp.ca. Portion

Notes to pages 121–6  315 invested in African mining calculated by author. Note that on 31 March 2011, public equity holdings were 36.1 per cent of total CPP investments, and total Canadian public equities were about 36 per cent of that. Thus the CPP shares in Canadian publicly traded mining/exploration companies with operations in African countries appear to account for less than 1 per cent of overall CPP investments. Information about CPP investments in private companies is not publicly available. 130 See testimony of Denis Tougas to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, 3–4. 131 See Galabuzi, Canada’s Economic Apartheid. 132 Their research included a review of financial reports of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, and archival materials located “in virtually every British archive,” as well as “the archives of the coal and steel industries, and county and city record offices throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain.” In addition, they carried out research at the Universities of California, Oxford, and Cambridge, and at other British universities, as well as “the libraries of the Institute of Historical Research, the India Office, the British Museum, the former Colonial Office and the Guild Hall.” Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, ix. 133 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 306. 134 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 307. 135 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 314. 136 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 250–1. 137 Examples of such assessment include UNECA, Minerals and Africa’s Development; and Curtis and Lissu, A Golden Opportunity. 138 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. 139 See discussion in chapter 2 of this book, p. 56; and McKay and Swift, Warrior Nation, 29–63. Chapter 5 1 See Campbell et.al., Regulating Mining in Africa.. 2 These terms are used rhetorically in numerous government statements, policies, and speeches – for example, in the federal government’s International Human Rights Policy, the Speech from the Throne of 3 March 2010, and the Department of National Defence statement “Our Mission in Afghanistan.” In addition, “good governance and democratic development” constituted an official development assistance program funding category for what was formerly CIDA.

316  Notes to pages 127–35 3 See in particular Backhouse, Colour-Coded; James W. Walker, “Race,” Rights, and the Law; Thobani, Exalted Subjects; Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law; Borrows, Recovering Canada; and Laforce, Lapointe, and Lebuis, “Mining Sector Regulation.” 4 Some scholars argue that labour laws as well as the laws establishing the “social safety net” in Canada served the interests of capital by mitigating social disparity and reducing the potential for revolutionary action. 5 Naffine, The Law and the Sexes, 24, cited in Comack, ed., Locating Law, 20. 6 For a critique of the failure of the Canadian legal system, including human rights law and Charter equality provisions, to foster substantive social justice, see Iyer, “Categorical Denials”; and Jhappan, “The Equality Pit.” 7 See Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech,” for an insightful discussion of the limitations placed on freedom of expression in American law with regard to libel and false advertising but not with regard to racist slurs. 8 Mattei and Nader, Plunder, 12. 9 See Mattei and Nader, Plunder, 12–13. 10 See Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. 11 Fitzpatrick, “Terminal Legality,” 19. 12 As noted in chapter 2, Borrows in Recovering Canada argues that Canada as a modern state is built, “like a house of sand,” on successive violations of the rule of law. 13 Mattei and Nader, Plunder, 60. 14 Mattei and Nader, Plunder, Ibid., pp. 71–2. See my discussion in this ­chapter, pp. 135–7, of Canadian government officials’ statements regarding the “lack of capacity” (and thus the need for “capacity building”) of “developing countries” vis-à-vis resource extraction sector management. 15 Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence,” 124–5. 16 Naito, Remy, and Williams, Review, iii. 17 On the concept “discourses of whiteness,” see Steyn, “ ‘White Talk’”; and Subhabrata Banerjee, “Grass Burning under Our Feet.” 18 Naito, Remy, and Williams, Review of Legal and Fiscal Frameworks, iii. 19 In fact, there are many examples of individuals moving from federal government positions in trade and finance to senior positions in the mining industry – or to law firms with mining law expertise – and vice versa. A number of senior cabinet ministers in the federal government and several prime ministers have gone on to sit as directors or advisers of Canadian mining companies with operations in African countries. One does not find a similar “fluidity” between government and the civil society, human rights, or academic sectors.

Notes to pages 135–46  317 20 For instance, during the 20 October 2009 session, an official from Natural Resources Canada used the expression no less than twelve times in his presentation. Participants from the Mining Association of Canada and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada also used the phrase extensively. 21 Campbell, “Factoring in Governance Is Not Enough: Mining Codes in Africa, Policy Reform, and Corporate Responsibility,” in Minerals and Energy – Raw Materials Report 18, no. 3 (2003): 4, cited in Lange, “Gold and Governance,” 234. 22 Abrahamsen and Williams, “Public/Private, Global/Local,” 550. 23 Vaccaro, “Mugabe’s Meltdown.” 24 Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan, “Commodities and Linkages,” 17.. 25 IIED and WBCSD, “Chapter 13,” 16–17. In addition to the Access to Information file A-1997-3632, for varying accounts of the events at Bulyanhulu during 1995–6 I have drawn on the following: Compliance Advisor/ Ombudsman (CAO), “Assessment Report Summary”; Cooksey, “The Investment and Business Environment for Gold Exploration and Mining in Tanzania”; Kerr and Holloway, “Special Investigative Report”; Lawyers Environmental Action Team, “Complaint concerning the Bulyanhulu Gold Mine Project” and “Response to Assessment Report Summary”; Phillips et al., “Tanzania’s Precious Metal Boom.” As a member of the international NGO team that attempted to visit Bulyanhulu in March 2002 and listened to claims of some of the small-scale miners, I agreed that an independent, impartial investigation was warranted. This never occurred. The call for such an investigation was not supported by the Government of Tanzania, the Canadian company that owned the Bulyanhulu mine by 2002, the Canadian High Commission in Tanzania, or the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency/World Bank Group, which had provided political risk insurance to the Canadian company. A CAO representative visited the mine area in March 2002 in response to a complaint from a Tanzanian NGO representing local miners, concerning issues that included failure to engage local communities in consultation processes, failure to provide adequate financial compensation for those who had been displaced and/or lost property or assets, and failure to adequately investigate the lawfulness of the licensing process by which the Canadian company had acquired exploration rights. An investigation into the alleged deaths was not part of the complaint to which the CAO was responding; however, the report it prepared expressed the view that the allegations of deaths could not be substantiated. While identifying some weaknesses in MIGA’s performance on this file, the CAO report did

318  Notes to pages 146–9 not recommend a compliance audit of MIGA, and it did not support the call, organized by civil society groups, for a comprehensive, independent investigation into the removals of artisanal miners at Bulyanhulu. Canada’s DFAIT accepted this assessment in 2002 and took no further action. The company and the Canadian High Commission maintained throughout that the allegations were fabricated and that no deaths occurred due to the bulldozing of the artisanal pits. 26 Cooksey, “The Investment and Business Environment for Gold Exploration and Mining in Tanzania,” 30. 27 “Access to Information Request A-1997-3632, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Government of Canada” (hereafter A-1997-3632), was requested and obtained by Probe International. 28 The title of post-colonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s celebrated essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” can be taken up in a literal and political manner, as I do here. 29 See Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, for an account of the large numbers of files missing from the British colonial archives pertaining to the British colonial government’s detention of an estimated 1.5 million ethnic Kikuyus in fenced detention camps during the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya from 1952 to 1960. 30 Coleman, White Civility, 34. 31 Sources consulted for this paragraph, regarding the small-scale or artisanal mining sector in Tanzania and specifically at Bulyanhulu, and its economic value, include the follwing: Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO), “Assessment Report Summary”; Cooksey, “The Investment and Business Environment for Gold Exploration and Mining in Tanzania”; Lange, “Gold and Governance”; Lissu, “Conducive Environment for Development”; and Phillips et al., “Tanzania’s Precious Metals Boom.” 32 Phillips et al., “Tanzania’s Precious Metals Boom,” 4. 33 Phillips et al., “Tanzania’s Precious Metals Boom,” 5. 34 Phillips et al., “Tanzania’s Precious Metals Boom,” 10. 35 CAO, “Assessment Report Summary,” 8–9. 36 In March 2002 at Geita, Tanzania, I met members of the Small-Scale Miners Committee and some of the former pit owners from Bulyanhulu. They impressed me with their well-organized, articulate, and dignified manner. 37 While I discuss this term as part of a discursive field (i.e., colonialist discourse), from a technical perspective, Siri Lange (2008, 14) offers this analysis: “Potential investors are given maps that have not been updated for years. Other claim holdings, and even villages, schools or health facilities may lie within the prospecting area without being marked in the map.

Notes to pages 149–50  319 The mining companies do not feel that they are obliged to compensate such land users as long as they have not been informed about them. In their view, they will all be illegal occupiers upon their property.” So-called illegality was also sometimes the result of conflicting forms and traditions of land tenure and licensing practices. A more detailed discussion of historical and contemporary land tenure, ownership, and law in Tanzania can be found in Lange, “Gold and Governance,” 241–3. 38 A-1997-3632, 232. 39 A-1997-3632, 218; emphasis added. The source of the idea of a proposed mining training centre is difficult to ascertain from the diplomatic files. In an e-mail exchange of 28 April 1997, a CIDA Bilateral official, “Louis,” states that “we have been approached through different channels to assess the potential for CIDA’s involvement in the mining sector in Tanzania. For instance, a request for assistance in the design of a proposal for the training program of the Mining Institute was introduced to CIDA Bilateral in September 1996. More recently in April 1997 […] the issue of CIDA’s assistance in ‘providing training and advice on mining reform and policy … perhaps in the context of developing a program to address the problem of illegal miners’ was raised.” A-1997-3632, 112. Elaine Butcher of External Affairs, East and Southern Africa Division, states: “In my opinion, it is not likely that the Canadian firms could be (or should be) persuaded to develop this idea until we are absolutely certain that the government of Tanzania (GoT) requires (and requests) Canadian input and will support the initiative.” A-1997-3632, 111. In the same exchange of 28 April 1997, Canadian High Commissioner Verona Edelstein states: “The vision of a mining training institute to respond to the needs of the Canadian and other formal sector participants has been enunciated and pursued by myself since 1995 and conveyed to all Canadian mining companies active in Tanzania.” A-1997-3632, 110 (emphasis added). In a communication dated 7 May 1997, Donald McMaster of CIDA responds with some reservations: “In my view it would be working at crosspurposes for CIDA to support (through INC for example) requests for specific kinds of training from individual Canadian companies, without examining the broader question of the overall training needs in this sector in Tanzania.” A-1997-3632, 109. The “Evaluation of the CIDA Country Program 1997–2003,” published in 2006, makes no reference to support for mining training or a mining training centre. However, from February 2010 to June 2012, CIDA did provide funding for a training exchange between the College of the Rockies in British Columbia and the Mineral Resources Institute in Dodoma, Tanzania, designed to

320  Notes to pages 150–4 “better meet the increasing demand for skilled mineral sector workers”. See College of the Rockies, “Madini – Mining and Development Industry Needs Initiative,” http://www.cotr.bc.ca/interDev/cotr_web. asp?IDNumber=215. 40 A-1997-3632, 187. 41 A-1997-3632, 278. 42 These details are drawn from the written ruling of the Court of Appeal of Tanzania, Civil Application No. 51 of 1996, with reference to Civil Case No. 12 of 1995. This document is included in the Bulyanhulu diplomatic files, A-1997-3632, 278–89. 43 Kerr and Holloway, “Special Investigative Report,” 5, note that they tried without success to contact Verona Edelstein, Canadian High Commissioner at the time of these events, to obtain her perspective on why the Tanzanian government “seemed prepared to see the evictions progress without the constitutional panel having convened.” 44 A-1997-3632, 195. 45 A-1997-3632, 214. 46 For instance, diplomatic note of 20 December 1995 states: “One week before election, CCM deputy campaign manager issued press release saying presidential candidate Mkapa would back small-scale miners at Bulyanhulu. Mkapa began to speak of support to small miners in terms of equipment and training.” A-1997-3632, 191. 47 A-1997-3632, 251. 48 A-1997-3632, 179. 49 Such statements appear in diplomatic correspondence in A-1997-3632, on page 214: “Mrs. Edelstein … has been in touch with the Minister of Mines, and the Permanent Secretary of the Interior, to alert them to a potentially explosive situation and to call on them to ensure that the Canadian mining project can be undertaken in a climate of peace and order” (28 March 1995); on page 179: “Sutton and the High Commission have been working closely with Government of Tanzania officials to achieve a peaceful solution” (24 August 1995); on page 72: “The new leadership says it will address the situation in the coming months; a peaceable resolution will do much to satisfy the concerns of the international mining community, anything else will severely damage Tanzania’s mining sector” (January 1996); and on page 253: “Dr. Kipokolo’s ministry will be responsible for resolving the intrusion of artisanal miners on Canadian-held concessions. As mining will become a significant factor in Tanzania’s future growth, and that of Canadian investors, we are hopeful we can build on our close relationship to encourage a rapid and positive solution” (1 May 1996).

Notes to pages 154–7  321 50 For instance, diplomatic correspondence of 20 December 1995 states: “Several Canadian mining dossiers have been in limbo for many months. As Tanzania moved through the processes required by transition to multiparty democracy [censored] … With government now in place, Head of Mission has made strong pitch to President, Minister of Mines, Minister of Finance and Minister of Planning, for adherence to rule of law and respect for existing agreements in mining sector in Tanzania’s own self-interest.” 51 For example, diplomatic correspondence of 7 June 1996 notes the following: “Sutton President, Michael Kenyon, and Vice President, Jonathan Rubenstein, have been in town for the past week attempting to move forward the Bulyanhulu file. They have required and received a great deal of advice and assistance which culminated June 6 in a very successful meeting with Minister of Mines Shija” (75–6). 52 A-1997-3632, 242. Letter dated 28 June 1996. 53 A-1997-3632, 186. 54 Document authored by Elaine Butcher in A-1997-3632, 48. 55 There are numerous references to the Canadian company’s bulldozer in the diplomatic files: a 28 March 1995 note from Aubrey Morantz to Ed Willer notes that “Mrs. Edelstein has wisely counselled Sutton to refrain from putting the bulldozer into operation until the Tanzanian authorities are in a position to ensure the peace” (A-1997-3632, 214); while a note from the High Commission to Ottawa states: “Sutton Chairman, Sinclair, who has now arrived, has reinforced instruction and has responded positively to HOM’s [Head of Mission] request that bulldozer, due to arrive today (29Mar) be kept not/not just idle, but off the site until Tanzanian government has time to address situ” (A-1997-3632, 216). 56 A-1997-3632, 131. 57 A-1997-3632, 41. 58 A-1997-3632, 57. 59 A-1997-3632, 244. 60 Letter dated 18 October 1996 from Verona Edelstein, Canadian High Commissioner, to Michael Kenyon, President and CEO of Sutton Resources, states: “the Ministry of Energy and Minerals is convening a Workshop on the Legal, Regulatory and Fiscal Framework of the Tanzania Mineral Sector in Arusha on 17–18 November … We will check to see whether Sutton and other Canadian companies have been, or can be, invited. I think it important that Sutton have a senior person present – one knowledgeable about legal and regulatory frameworks.” A-1997-3632, 268.

322  Notes to pages 158–63 61 Paula Butler, “Tanzania.: Liberalisation of Investment and the Mining Sector; Analysis of the Content and Certain Implications of the Tanzanian 1998 Mining Act,” in Bonnie Campbell, ed., Regulating Mining in Africa: for Whose Benefit? (Nordiska Afrikainstitutet: Uppsala, 2004), pp. 67-80. 62 Butler, “Tanzania,” 75. 63 Butler, “Tanzania,” 73. 64 Butler, “Tanzania,” 74–5. An extensive study of linkages in the oil/gas and mining sectors in six African countries by Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan, “Commodities and Linkages,” supports this analysis and elaborates on the negative effects of Tanzania’s 1998 mining law’s Mineral Development Agreements on Tanzanian employment and on “localization” of supply chains: “each of the new mines strikes bilateral agreements with Government on specific provisions and rather than this resulting in increasing obligations on foreign investors, in general these have led to individual TNCs bargaining for specific exemptions on the employment of expatriates, on tax and on duty free imports. All of these have the effect of reducing rather than increasing backward linkages” (107). 65 Borrows, Recovering Canada, 113. 66 Borrows, Recovering Canada, 113. Chapter 6 1 See, for example, Vernon Frolick, Fire into Ice: Charles Fipke and the Great Diamond Hunt (Raincoast Books: Vancouver, 1999); Irene Howard, Gold Dust on His Shirt: The True Story of a Pioneer Mining Family (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2008); Franc Joubin, Not for Gold Alone: The Memoirs of a Prospector (Toronto: Deljay Publications, 1986); David L. McKay, Why Mining? (Bloomington: Trafford Publishing, 2002); Viola MacMillan, From the Ground Up: An Autobiography (Toronto: ECW Press, 2001); William R. Roberts and Susan Bond, The Best Miners in the World: Stories from Canada’s Sullivan Mines (Hardrock, 2004); Russell Walter Thompkins, The Richest Canadian: The Life and Career of a Canadian Mining Engineer (Whistler House, 1994). 2 See, in particular, Pratt, Imperial Eyes, for an account of the European botanists and earth scientists who travelled in Africa and South America during the 1700s and 1800s. These men simultaneously demonstrated a sense of entitlement and a view of themselves as harmless and benign. They gradually gave way to businessmen, who saw resources to be exploited. Pratt identifies strategies of representation – which she dubs, ironically, “anti-conquest” strategies – “whereby European bourgeois subjects seek

Notes to pages 166–91  323 to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (7). 3 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 5. 4 Visit Visit Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, http://www.mininghalloffame. ca. 5 Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 106. 6 Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 106–7. 7 See Chan and Mirchandani, eds., Crimes of Colour. See also the discussion of race-based statistics in C. Smith, “Crisis, Conflict and Accountability.” 8 Steyn, “White Talk,” 121. 9 While this is not a small sample for qualitative research, note again that the interview data were extensively augmented by other sources, such as industry publications and conferences, transcripts of fifteen sessions of the parliamentary committee witnesses for and against Bill C-300, and so on. 10 See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Bergland, The National Uncanny; Dean, Capitalism and Citizenship; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; Nelson, National Manhood; and Welch, “Colonial Violence.” 11 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 69–70. 12 Klingner, “Setting the Stage.” 13 Joanne Deschamps, MP, during C-300 SCFAIT hearings, 20 October 2009. 14 This supports Pratt’s observation and analysis. 15 Klingner, “Setting the Stage.” 16 See Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation. 17 Visit Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, http://www.mininghalloffame.ca/ inductees/d-f/charles_e. 18 Shohat and Stam, “The Imperial Imaginary,” 114–21. 19 Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 75. 20 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 35. 21 Visit Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, http://www.mininghalloffame.ca/ inductees/a_c/robert_william_boyle. 22 See, for instance, A. Smith, Conquest. 23 “Pan African Seeks Madagascar Nickel,” The Northern Miner (Toronto), 3 February 2006. 24 See McKay and Swift, Warrior Nation. 25 In my own experience working in non-governmental international development networks, this was also a commonplace notion – that Canadians related to African people in a more egalitarian manner than did Europeans. This suggests to me that such a notion is part of a deeply rooted mythology of Canadianness – a mythology that is drawn upon as much by mining industry professionals as by NGO workers.

324  Notes to pages 193–203 2 6 See: Young, Colonial Desire. 27 CCRSC, “Corporate Social Responsibility,” 10. 28 However, such representations of cultural appreciation and openness may be less evident “on the ground.” Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan, in “Commodities and Linkages,” note the following: “A consequence of the large groupings of expatriates living together in remote sites where they have little or no knowledge of the local economy, is a sense of segregation. This often leads to an antipathy towards anything local, which translates into scepticism about the abilities of local employees and potential suppliers” (60). 29 UN Security Council, Report, S/2002/1146. 30 See Daro, “Canada Leads World Bank blacklist.” For the complete list of debarred firms, visit World Bank, “World Bank Listing of Ineligible Firms & Individuals.” 31 Hasselback, “Canadian mining industry,” 31 July 2013. Financial Post. Accessed 2 October 2013 at http://www.financialpost.com/2013/07/31/ canadina-mining-industry-embraces-transparency-initiative. 32 Hasselback, “Canadian mining industry.” 33 Weymuss M. Simpson, Indian Commissioner, cited in Morris, The Treaties of Canada, 36. 34 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 146–55. 35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 13. 36 Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Introduction” in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 25. 37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 269–70. 38 Joel Bakan playfully asks whether corporations themselves can be identified as psychopaths, and if so, what this implies about the psychology of corporate executives: “We asked Dr. Robert Hare, an internationally renowned expert on psychopathy, for his views on the subject. He told us that many of the attitudes people adopt and the actions they execute when acting as corporate operatives can be characterized as psychopathic … Yet, despite the fact that executives must often manipulate and harm others in pursuit of their corporations’ objectives, Hare insists they are not psychopaths. That is because they can function normally outside the corporation – “they go home, they have a warm and loving relationship with their families, and they love their children, they love their wife, and in fact their friends are friends rather than things to be used.” Businesspeople should therefore take some comfort from their ability to compartmentalize the contradictory moral demands of their corporate and noncorporate lives, for it is precisely this “schizophrenia,” as Roddick calls it, that saves them from becoming psychopaths. Bakan, The Corporation, 56.

Notes to pages 204–14  325 3 9 Chrisman, “The Imperial Unconscious?”, 58. 40 Melissa Steyn, “‘White Talk,’” 132. 41 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, 8. 42 McGee, “The Community Referendum,” 572. Chapter 7 1 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 2 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 3 Jonsson and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty,” 212. 4 M. Barry, “Regularizing Informal Mining: A Summary of the Proceedings of the International Roundtable on Artisanal Mining.” The full statement is: “Artisanal mining was defined for the purposes of discussion as the most primitive type of informal, small-scale mining, characterized by individuals or groups of individuals exploiting deposits – usually illegally – with the simplest equipment.” 5 Lissu coined this term based on his experience with LEAT, which provided legal advocacy services to local miners in the Lake Victoria region of Tanzania during the 1990s. 6 Lissu, “‘Conducive environment’”; Garvin et al., “Community–Company Relations”; Tschakert, “Digging for Justice”; Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects.” 7 ILO, Social and Labour Issues, 6–7. 8 CASM, “Artisanal and Small-Scale Miners.” 9 Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects,” 173. 10 IIED and WBCSD, “Chapter 13,” 13–15. 11 Morris, Kaplinsky, and Kaplan, “Commodities and Linkages,” 29–30. 12 EITI, “Ghana – Overview 2011.” 13 IIED and WBCSD, “Chapter 13,” 13–9/10. 14 Hilson, “Challenges,” 5–6. 15 ILO, Social and Labour Issues, 6. 16 Lissu, “‘Conducive environment,” 5. 17 Lissu, “‘Conducive environment,” 4. This is supported by IIED and WBCSD, “Chapter 13,” 13–15: “Between 1990 and 1995 the number of registered [artisanal] claims increased from 1998 to 4123. This also boosted mineral exports, which between 1989 and 2000 rose from $16 million to $184 million.” 18 Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects,” 175; UNECA, Minerals and Africa’s Development, 2. 19 Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects”; Hilson, “‘Once a Miner”; Hilson and Potter, “Structural Adjustment ,” 108.

326  Notes to pages 215–23 2 0 Hilson and Yakovleva, “Strained Relations,” 107. 21 Tessier, The Challenge of the Mines, 61. See also Hilson and Yakovleva, “Strained Relations”; Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects”; and Jonsson and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty.” 22 IIED and WBCSD, “Chapter 13,” 13–6. 23 Buxton, “Responding to the Challenge,” 3. 24 Lopez, “Introduction,” 17. 25 Employment figures posted on the websites of the Canadian mining companies that in 2005 owned the ten largest Canadian-owned mines in Africa (including several large underground mines) added up to close to 25,000 employees (author’s calculation). Given that there were at this time forty-three mines entirely or partly owned by Canadian companies, the total employment figure clearly exceeds this number. According to Lucien Bradet, CEO of the Canadian Council on Africa, by 2011, Canadian mining companies were providing some 30,000 direct jobs in mining and mineral processing in African countries. His source is not indicated. Visit “A reality check on Canadian mining in Africa,” www.republicofmining. com/2011/11/27/a-reality-check-on-canadian-mining-in-africa-by-lucienbradet-embassy-magazine-november-23-2011. 26 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii. 27 IIED and WBCSD, Mining, Minerals. 28 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 176. 29 See also Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. 30 World Bank, Strategy for African Mining, 42. 31 World Bank, Strategy for African Mining, 42–4. 32 Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” in Violence in War and Peace, 21. 33 Bulyanhulu files: “Access to Information Request A-1997-3632/al, Dept. of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Government of Canada” (hereafter A-1997-3632), correspondence of 26 November 1996; document #337865. 34 A-1997-3632, document #426762, 30 June 1997. Members of the “Miners Committee” and a number of respected Tanzanians asserted to the contrary that required taxes were paid. 35 Bradet, “A Reality Check.” 36 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 178–9. 37 A. Smith, Conquest, 57–67. 38 Bulyanhulu files: A-1997-3632, “Note to GAA (Ed Willer) from GAA (Morantz).” 39 See the discussion in Lopez, Postcolonial Whiteness, 17.

Notes to pages 223–34  327 40 Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” in Violence in War and Peace, 1–31. See also Perry, “The Prevailing Vice,” in On the Edge of Empire, 48–58. 41 Tschakert, “Digging for Justice”; Jonsson, Bosse, and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty”; Hilson and Yakovleva, “Strained Relations”; Garvin et al., “Community–Company Relations”; Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects.” 42 Bryceson and Jonsson, “Gold Digging Careers,” 6. 43 Hilson, “‘Once a Miner.’” 44 Tschakert, “Digging for Justice,” 719; Jonsson and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty,” 215–16; Hilson and Potter, “Structural Adjustment,” 115. 45 Hilson and Potter, “Structural Adjustment” 46 Jonsson and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty.” 47 World Bank, Strategy for African Mining, 44. 48 World Bank, Strategy for African Mining, 44. 49 Jonsson and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty,” 217. 50 World Bank, Strategy for African Mining. 51 Barry, Regularizing Informal Mining, 1. 52 Moody, Rocks and Hard Places, 54; “Tanzania,” 75–6. 53 UN Economic and Social Council, “Development in Small-Scale Mining,” 16. 54 UN Economic and Social Council, “Development in Small-Scale Mining,” 17. 55 UN Economic and Social Council, “Development in Small-Scale Mining,” 20. 56 IIED and WBCSD, “Chapter 13,” 13-4. 57 See Hilson and Banchirigah, “Are Alternative Livelihood Projects”; Hilson, “Challenges”; Garvin et al., “Community–Company Relations”; Jonsson and Fold, “Handling Uncertainty”; Hilson and Yakovleva, “Strained Relations.” 58 UN Economic and Social Council, “Development in Small-Scale Mining,” 2. 59 UN Economic and Social Council, “Development in Small-Scale Mining,” 32. 60 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 284–5. 61 United Nations Development Programme, “Artisanal Mining,” 9. 62 Marc DuBois, “The Governance of the Third World,” 19. 63 The panopticon was a style of prison whose circular architecture featured a guard tower in the centre and cells around the perimeter. Prisoners would thus regulate themselves, aware as they were of their visibility to a powerful gaze. Foucault used the panopticon as a metaphor to describe modern forms of disciplinary governance of populations via self-rule. 64 See, for instance, Heemskerk, “Collecting Data,” 82–7. 65 Written between 1803 and 1806. See Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 27. 66 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. See also Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. 67 D. T. Goldberg, The Racial State (2002), pp. 22-53.

328  Notes to pages 235–51 68 Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 26-27. 69 Goldberg, The Racial State, 92. 70 Harris, “Whiteness as Property”; DePasquale, Natives and Settlers, xxiv. 71 This infamous equation is from Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 21. 72 Verona Edelstein, Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania, diplomatic correspondence of 27 November 1996. 73 Blomley, “Law, Property,” 130. 74 Lopez, Postcolonial Whiteness, 15. 75 See Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 187–93. 76 Goldberg, The Racial State, 157. 77 Khanna, Dark Continents, 225. Chapter 8 1 “Take up the White Man’s burden” is the refrain in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden.” That poem, published in 1899, was a call to American and European readers to take up the “responsibility” of colonial intervention and domination. Some scholars have suggested that the poem be read as a form of propaganda in support of the US annexation of the Philippines and military aggression against Filipino revolutionaries between 1899 and 1902. Kipling was known to be a strong advocate of British imperialism. I use the phrase ironically and with layered meanings throughout this chapter. 2 Natural Resources Canada, in Access to Information Request AD3040-04-84 /JB, 15 October 2004. 3 The text of the 2002 law, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, can be found at http://www.dmr.gov.za/publications/ summary/109-mineral-and-petroleum-resources-developmentact-2002/225-mineraland-petroleum-resources-development-actmprda. html. The law was further amended in 2013. 4 These were: “The Canadian mining industry collectively prepared a strong critique of the new South African Mining Act with its ‘black empowerment’ quotas and its sustainable development framework. What is your view of this new mining legislation? Will it affect Canadian involvement in mining in South Africa? How?” 5 The process took almost twenty-four months. I experienced delays as well as efforts by DFAIT to encourage me to abandon the access request. I learned that DFAIT had one of the worst records of all government departments with regard to failure to respond lawfully to AI requests

Notes to pages 252–6  329 from citizens (see John Ibbitson, “Delays, denials and deadlock: Ottawa’s trouble with disclosure”; Bill Curry, “Access rights at risk of being ‘obliterated’: transparency lacking in Ottawa, report says”; and Lisa Austin, “The access axis: the problem with Canada’s information laws is that government itself has the discretion to disclose,” all in the Globe and Mail, 14 April 2010) – and ultimately had to make a formal appeal through the Information Commissioner before DFAIT agreed to release heavily censored files. Nevertheless, the files provided some additional insights into the roles played by Canadian government and industry actors during the period of South Africa’s post-apartheid revision of its mining law. 6 See Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation; Thobani, Exalted Subjects. 7 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1713n9. 8 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1790–1. 9 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1782. 10 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1778. 11 Tshitereke, GEAR and Labour, 36–8. In the legal and constitutional arena, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms – which offers strong individual rights protections but limited potential to advance substantive equality rights – was drawn on as a model for the Bill of Rights that was part of the new South African Constitution. 12 African National Congress, “Freedom Charter,” 1955. Accessed 12 November 2014 at http://www.blackpast.org/ african-national-congress-freedom-charter 13 Republic of South Africa, “A Minerals and Mining Policy for South Africa” (1998), Appendix – List of Written Submissions.” I was unable to obtain a copy of this submission. 14 Campbell, “Canada Sees Great Opportunities.” Access to Information Request A-2004-00207/fa. 15 Campbell, “Canada Sees Great Opportunities”; Access to Information Request A-2004-00207/fa. 16 Information in this paragraph draws on materials obtained from the the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade through Access to Information Requests AD3040-04-84/JB and A-2004-00207/fa. 17 Export Development Canada, “South Africa – Government Takes Ownership of Minerals Development,” 14 May 2002. 18 This term and concept may have been borrowed from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 15, on equality jurisprudence. The 1989 ground-breaking Supreme Court of Canada case Andrews v. Law

330  Notes to pages 256–69 Society of B.C. introduced the concept of “historical disadvantage” as a test for discrimination arising from statutes. 19 Republic of South Africa, “A Minerals and Mining Policy for South Africa: Green Paper for Discussion,” 1998, Section 1.3.1.2. 20 The state’s unilateral decision to convert “old order” freehold ownership of mining rights to a “new order” leased arrangement was challenged by the domestic and international mining industry as expropriation-in-effect that should be subject to market-value compensation payable by the South African state to companies (including several Canadians firms) that held old-order mining rights. See “State May Face Flood of Lawsuits Over Mines Act,” Business Day (Johannesburg), 5 September 2005. 21 P. Leon, Business Day (Johannesburg), 26 April 2002. 22 Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” stanza 3. First published in McClure’s Magazine, February 1899. Reproduced in Sherene Razack, Dark Threats, White Knights, xi–xii. 23 See Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, for her analysis of “race denial,” “colour denial,” and “power denial.” 24 “Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources,” UN General Assembly resolution 1803 (XVII), 17 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 17) at 15, U.N. doc. A/5217 (1962). 25 Concerned International Prospecting and Mining Companies, “Submission on Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Bill; Existing and future investments in mineral development in the Republic of South Africa should the proposed Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Bill be adopted in its present form” (hereafter “Submission on Minerals”), Section 2.3 (page 5). Access to Information Request A-2004-00207/fa. 26 “Submission on Minerals,” Section 2.7.1. 27 Peterson, “South Africa’s Bilateral Investment Treaties,” 7 and 32. In 1998, Canada and South Africa signed a “Trade and Investment Cooperation Agreement.” 28 “Submission on Minerals,” Sections 2.9.2 and 2.10. 29 “Submission on Minerals,” Section 7.3. 30 PDAC, “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft Bill,” 18. 31 PDAC, “Commentary,” 1. 32 Diplomatic correspondence, 12 September 2002. Access to Information File A-2004-00207/fa, 112. 33 File A-2004-00207/fa, 7. 34 File A-2004-00207/fa, 7. 35 Radin, Reinterpreting Property, 35. 36 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1729n83.

Notes to pages 270–81  331 3 7 Margaret Radin, cited in Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1730. 38 Dean’s analysis of the “atomistic” bourgeois subject in Capitalism and Citizenship supports this theorization. Using English society as her focus, she argues that the loss of nurturing, community-based relationships via the historical emergence of the nuclear family in a competitive, capitalist milieu left individual subjects increasingly bereft of any security other than what they could obtain through personal income and material/financial assets. Those assets thus acquired heightened importance for these psychologically anxious subjects. 39 Steyn, in “‘White Talk,’” identifies the emotional reactions of privileged white South Africans as either a barrier or a portal to social transformation: “‘White Talk’ provides many mechanisms for denial and defense, protecting white South Africans from feeling the very emotions that are needed in order to move through, and out of, the assumptions of exclusivity that underpin whiteness … My data indicate that whites who are shifting their paradigm from preserving privilege for some to taking responsibility for promoting development of all have grappled with, or at least not evaded, these uncomfortable feelings” (132). 40 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 67. 41 Gordon, “Governmental Rationality,” 39. 42 PDAC, “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft bill-Commentary,” 1. 43 “Submission on Minerals,” Section 8.3.4. 44 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 54. 45 PDAC, “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft Bill, 7. 46 PDAC, “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft Bill, 7. 47 PDAC, “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft Bill,” 21. 48 Again, see Steyn’s identification of the manner in which “White Talk” “reconstructs whiteness as victimized positionality” (131). 49 “South African DM doesn’t get it Down Under,” The Northern Miner, 23–9. September 2005, 4. 50 “South African DM,” 4. 51 “South African DM,” 4. 52 PDAC “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft Bill,” 19, 23. 53 PDAC, “Re: South Africa’s Mineral Development Draft Bill,” 1. 54 Shona Kohler, “BEE ownership targets: an ineffective means of transforming SA’s mining industry,” accessed 21 January 2012 at http://www.polity. org.za; Avril Cole, “Mine regulations changing in South Africa,” accessed 21 February 2012 at http://www.internationalresourcejournal.com/ features/january11_features. 55 Republic of South Africa, Department of Minerals, “Mining Charter Impact Assessment Report,” June 2009, 22.

332  Notes to pages 281–9 5 6 Republic of South Africa, “Mining Charter Impact,” 18. 57 Global Mining Finance 2011, 84–5. 58 Global Mining Finance 2011, 84. 59 Hamann, Khagram, and Rohan, “South Africa’s Charter Approach,” 28. 60 Hamann, Khagram, and Rohan, “South Africa’s Charter Approach,” 27–8. 61 Cook, “The Business of Being Bafokeng.” 62 Hamann, Khagram, and Rohan observe that the BEE deals, even the more recent ones that attempt a more broad-based approach, “do not add up to a truly ‘broad-based’ deracialization of the economy just yet.” “South Africa’s Charter Approach,” 28. 63 The full text of the judgment is available at Constitutional Court of South Africa, Agri South Africa v. Republic of South Africa,2013 ZACC 9. Accessed 18 December 2013 at http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2013/9.pdf. 64 Langalanga, “South African Courts.” 65 Canada, “Canada–South Africa Trade Relations,” May 2012. Accessed 9 March 2013 at http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/southafrica-afriquedusud/bilateral_relations_bilaterales/canada_sa-as.aspx?view=d. By comparison, Canadian official development assistance to South Africa over the twenty-five-year period from 1984–5 to 2009–10 was $325 million, an average of $13 million/year. 66 Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism, 65. Chapter 9 1 MineAfrica Inc., “Directory of TMX Group.” 2 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 67. 3 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Demographic Yearbook, 2009–2010 (New York: 2011). 4 See chapter 1n3; see also Leigh Day. This law firm states: “Emmanuel was 26 years old at the time of his death. His wife was pregnant with their first daughter.” 5 For a similar analysis of this phenomenon within the global mining sector more generally, see Moody, “Winning Hearts and Mines,” in Rocks and Hard Places, 154–78. 6 Hasselback, “Canadian Mining Industry.” 7 Butler, “Canadian Mining and ‘Resource Nationalism.’ ” 8 “Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy and Management: Creating Value Through Collaborative Sustainable Development,” McGill University, Institute for the Study of International Development, and Fasken

Notes to pages 289–91  333 Martineau, 4. The 2014 version of the short course was held in Dakar, Senegal. Accessed 10 July 2014 at http://www.mcgill.ca/isid/executive. 9 For example, a group of Barrick Gold employees have set up a Canadian registered charity called CanEducate. Visit http://www.caneducate.ca. 10 There has been extensive coverage, commentary, and debate on these new funding initiatives. An excellent summary of the debate, with links to perspectives from media, industry, and civil society, can be found in Miningwatch Canada, “The debate.” See also Leblanc, “CIDA Funds.” 11 See, for instance, York, “In West Africa.” 12 Visit Women in Mining Canada, http://www.wimcanada.org. 13 In March 2012, its “platinum” sponsors were Golder Associates and Iamgold; its “gold” sponsors were Barrick Gold, Goldcorp, and Kinross. Visit Women in Mining Canada, http://www.wimcanada.org/sponsorship. html. 14 Roberts, “Financial Crisis, Financial Firms and … Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and the Necessity of MarxistFeminist IPE.” 15 Cooke, “Saving Brown Women.” See also Eisenstein, “On Global Misogyny” and “Whose Rights? And for Which Women?”, in Against Empire: 150–62. 16 Tannock, “Learning to Plunder,” 87. 17 Tannock, “Learning to Plunder,” 85–6.

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Index

Abadie, Delphine, 6 Abele, Frances, 51 – 2 Aboriginal peoples. See Indigenous peoples Abrahamsen, Rita, 139 Accominotti, Olivier, 49 – 50 Ademars Ilunga, Colonel, 100 affirmative action programs, 252 – 3, 257 – 8, 259 – 60, 266, 269 – 71, 285; corrective and distributive dimensions of, 253; and property rights, 266 – 7 Africa: Canada compared to, 181, 190 – 1; Canadian imaginary of, 16 – 17, 18; Canadian mining philanthropy in, 199 – 202; capacity for governance in, 135 – 6, 178, 316n14; citizen disenfranchisement in, 157 – 8; development for (see development/underdevelopment); as frontier/region of danger, 179 – 82, 207, 217 – 18; human well-being indicators in, 89 – 90, 286; mineral wealth exported from, 14, 87 – 91, 104 – 5, 138 – 9; nationalist governments in (see resource nationalism); post-colonial

authoritarianism in, 43; as region of poverty and need, 17, 199 – 200, 245 – 7; as unpopulated (terra nullus doctrine), 236 – 7. See also specific countries African citizen-miners. See artisanal miners African Development Bank, 9 African independent miners, 213 African Minerals Development Centre (Mozambique), 9, 288 African mining sector: AU/UNECA recommendations for, 105 – 7; benefits for Canada from, 107 – 23; investment incentives for, 110 – 13, 115; investment profits from, 85, 102 – 3, 115, 120 – 1, 191 – 4; labourvs capital-intensive approaches for, 119, 227, 247 – 8; large- vs small-scale operations in, 111, 119, 213 – 14; legal injunctions or moratorium for, 150 – 6; licensing restrictions in (see licences for mining); mine closures in, 94 – 6; mining professionals as explorers in, 176 – 87; nationalization of, 254; neoliberal mining law reforms

366 Index for, 138 – 59, 250 – 1; privatization of state-owned mines, 88; state equity in, 133, 141 – 3; state regulation for, 106 – 7, 134, 135 – 8, 182 – 3; state revenues from, 88 – 9, 115, 141 – 2; value-added industries for, 104 – 7, 111 – 13, 120, 312n97; wage disparities in (see economic disparities/inequities). See also artisanal miners “African Mining Vision” (AU/ UNECA, 2009), 105, 112, 120 African National Congress (ANC): Freedom Charter (1955), 254; postapartheid government of, 254 – 6, 258 – 9, 267, 278; Youth Wing, 112 African Union (AU), 9, 85, 105, 112, 120, 123 Africa Progress Panel: Equity in Extractives (report, 2013), 87 – 91, 307n10 Africville (Nova Scotia), 148 Agamben, Giorgio, 43, 44, 46 – 7, 129 agriculture: appropriation of farmland, 30, 96, 304n15; Indigenous knowledge of, 305n26 Alfred, Taiaiake, 6 Algeria, 26, 164, 203, 300n51 Algonquin Nation, 4, 81, 83, 305n26 Althusser, Louis, 37 Amin, Ash, 7, 32 Amin, Samir, 52 Amnesty International, 146 ANC. See African National Congress Angola, 80, 89, 220, 222, 313n98 anti-racist mining legislation, 259 – 60, 265 anti-racist state, 251, 259 Anvil Mining Inc., 310 – 11n61

apartheid: ontological apartheid, 243; redressing the legacy of, 264 – 5; in South Africa, 28, 45, 128, 204, 264 – 5 Arat-Koç, Sedef, 7, 33 Arbour, Louise, 100, 310n61 Ardoch Algonquin Nation, 4, 81 Arellano-Yanguas, Javier, 106 – 7 Arendt, Hannah, 165 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 34 – 5, 216, 286 Armitage, David, 304n14 Arone, Shidane, 56 artisanal miners, 146 – 59, 211 – 49; definitions and terminology for, 213, 325n4; alternative livelihoods for, 229 – 30; associations formed by, 225; in Bulyanhulu confrontation (Tanzania), 3 – 4, 131, 146 – 60, 219, 222, 242; Canadian diplomatic memos concerning, 148, 219 – 20, 222 – 3, 242, 317 – 18n25, 319 – 20nn39 – 60, 320n46; Canadian mining professionals' contact with, 212, 237, 242 – 4; Canadian mining professionals description of, 211, 220 – 3, 227 – 8, 232 – 3, 236 – 7; Canadian prospectors compared to, 220 – 1; children working with, 215, 218, 220, 221, 231, 232; criminalization of (“illegal miners”), 149 – 55, 218, 219, 223; demographics of, 215; destruction of mines worked by, 155 – 6, 321n55; economic success of, 148, 214, 245 – 6; eradication/assimilation of, 212, 225 – 2229; government support for, 148, 152 – 5, 241; knowledge, skill, and experience of, 215, 225, 238 – 40, 248; land designated for, 224, 226 – 9; licences

for, 148, 224 – 5, 226, 228; as nation builders, 221, 248; poverty and needs of, 212 – 14, 230 – 1, 245 – 7, 248 – 9; prevalence of, 213 – 14; relations with large-scale mining companies, 119, 148 – 59, 225 – 7, 239, 240 – 2, 247; as “rubbish people,” 218, 219, 223; as savage subjects, 217 – 25; socio-economic problems associated with, 224 – 5; status injury of, 223 – 4; “thingification” of, 238 – 40; violence against, 3 – 4, 146 – 8, 155 – 6, 212; “white-out” of, 236 – 7; women working with, 215, 231. See also African mining sector Asch, Michael, 65 AU. See African Union Austin, Lisa, 329n5 Australia: human well-being indicators in, 89 – 90; mining interests in Africa, 97 – 101, 149; mining sector in, 9, 132, 171; as a white settler state, 48, 49, 89 Bafokeng Traditional Community, 283 Baird, Jon, 82 – 3 Bakan, Joel, 324n38 Banerjee, Subrabhata Bobby, 31, 303n4 Barbados, 304n14 Barrett, Michèle, 38 Barry, M., 325n4 Beatty, Perrin, 305n28 Belgian Congo. See Democratic Republic of the Congo Bergland, Renée, 38 Berton, Pierre, 74 – 5 besiegement trope. See fortress and besiegement tropes

Index 367 Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 7, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32 Bill C-300. See under Canada biological racism, 23, 27 – 8, 32 Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), 94, 257 – 8, 263 – 4, 276 – 9, 281 – 3, 297n24 Blomley, Nicholas, 130, 131, 243, 274 Bolivia, 42 Bomani, Mark, and Bomani Commission, 108, 312n86 Borrows, John, 6, 65, 67, 159 – 60 Bose, Purnima, 4 Botswana: diamond mining in, 109, 142; foreign mining interests in, 172, 274, 313n98; resource management in, 107, 113, 142, 312n97; wage discrepancies in, 109 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30 Bourgois, Philippe, 86 – 7 Boyle, Robert William, 188 British Empire: costs and benefits of, 122 – 3; “Queen” rhetoric in, 68 – 72; white vs black colonies of, 49 – 50 Brown, Carolyn, 225 Brown, Malcolm, 27 – 8 Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, 224 Bulyanhulu (Tanzania), 20, 131, 146 – 60, 219, 222 – 3, 225, 242; Canadian diplomatic files on confrontation in, 148, 219 – 20, 222 – 3, 242, 317 – 18n25, 319 – 20nn39 – 60, 320n46 Burgess, William, 55 Burkina Faso, 10, 92, 119, 172 Butcher, Elaine, 319n39 California Gold Rush, 73, 213 Campbell, Bonnie, 40, 95, 107, 115, 139, 292

368 Index Canada: banks and financial institutions, 120 – 1; benefits from African mining, 107 – 23; Canadian “goodness,” 4 – 5, 166 – 7, 187 – 202, 232 – 3; class – race economic stratification, 51, 121; as a colonizer state, 6, 19, 39 – 40, 44, 48 – 57, 123, 167; compared to Africa, 181, 190 – 1; compared to British Empire, 123; First Nations treaty negotiations with, 65 – 78, 80, 200 – 1; foreign investment protection agreements, 262, 289; human well-being indicators in, 89 – 90; immigration policies of, 48 – 9, 252; national identity of, 148, 190 – 1; as a peacekeeper, 54, 56, 167; political economy analyses of, 51 – 4; as a racial state, 48, 51, 287; as a settler state, 37, 48 – 9, 127, 159 – 60, 252; as a warrior state, 6, 57; as a white supremacist state, 40, 55 – 7  –  Canada Pension Plan (CPP), 121, 122, 124, 315n129  –  Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), 9, 115, 126, 135, 178, 251  –  Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD), 290  –  Export Development Canada (EDC), 9, 115, 116, 119, 135, 255  –  Foreign Investment Review Agency, 54  –  High Commission in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), 147 – 59, 183, 242, 317 – 18n25, 319 – 20n39  –  High Commission in South Africa, 255, 267  –  legislation: Access to Information Act, 251; Bill C-300, 13, 16, 42,

82 – 3, 97 – 8, 131, 135 – 8, 160, 178, 194, 305n28; Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada), 329n11; Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, 197; Indian Act, 28, 252; Investment Canada Act, 297n16; Ontario Mining Act, 80  –  Natural Resources Canada, 9, 81, 113, 135, 317n20  –  Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT), 3, 13, 16, 131, 135, 178, 194 Canadian Aboriginal Mining Association (CAMA), 81 Canadian Association Against Impunity, 100 Canadian Association of Mining Equipment and Services (CAMESE), 119 Canadian Centre for International Justice, 310n61 Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict (CCSRC), 91 Canadian Council on Africa, 218 – 19 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), 8, 115, 135 – 6, 178, 290, 319n39 Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development, 8, 288 Canadian Mining Hall of Fame (Toronto), 117, 163, 167 – 8, 169 – 71, 173, 187 – 8 Canadian mining professionals, 162 – 210; on African “friendliness,” 193 – 4, 216; agency of, 163, 208 – 9, 236; biographies and profiles of, 167 – 78, 172 – 6; as “callous capitalists,” 176, 202 – 8; as colonial explorers, 176 – 87; comments

on artisanal miners, 211, 220 – 3, 227 – 8, 232 – 3, 236 – 7, 238 – 40, 245 – 6; comments on corruption, 196 – 9; comments on female Mines Ministers in South Africa, 273 – 5; contempt for African peoples, 176 – 7, 216; dual subjectivity of, 162, 210; encounters with elite Africans, 215 – 16; as “feeling” men, 185; genealogy as white neoliberal subjects, 163 – 9; as “gentleman geologists,” 168, 187, 189, 197, 199, 244; as “good Canadians,” 176, 187 – 202, 232 – 3, 240; military protection for, 185 – 6; Mining Hall of Fame inductees, 117, 163, 167 – 8, 169 – 71, 173, 187 – 8; as pioneers, 167 – 8, 179 – 82; public/private discourse of, 205 – 8; resistance to racial equality and justice, 234 – 6, 259 – 60, 265, 266; self-representation of, 205 – 8; “whitewashed” accounts of, 209 – 10 Canadian mining sector/industry: and Africa's underdevelopment, 107 – 13; company websites for, 163; “Concerned Companies” submission from, 251, 261 – 5, 271, 272 – 3; contact with artisanal miners, 212; controlled by white males, 171; corrupt practices in, 196 – 7; CRS activities, 289 – 90; diversification strategies for, 118 – 19; domestic vs foreign ownership of, 9 – 10; employment in, 117 – 19; exports of services and equipment, 111 – 12, 119 – 20; GDP and GNP percentages for, 114; global profile, 8 – 14; involvement with African mining legislation, 138 – 46, 150 – 9, 250 – 85; legal actions against,

Index 369 100 – 1; narratives of, 4 – 5, 61 – 3, 82 – 3, 179 – 80; ownership of, 9 – 10; public subsidies for, 107, 115 – 16, 117; recommendations for changes in, 292; revolving-door (business – government) connections in, 73 – 4, 135 – 8, 172, 305n28, 316n19; settler origins of, 60 – 84; sociological literature on, 303n4; state regulation for, 82, 134, 135 – 8, 190 – 1; taxes revenues from, 114 – 15 Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability, 115 capacity: for governance, 135 – 6, 178, 316n14; for managing mineral resources, 277 – 9 capitalism: “callous capitalists,” 200 – 5; capitalist vanguard, 202, 208; and colonialism/racism, 21, 22 – 8, 259 – 60; human labour for, 23 – 4, 27 – 8, 109 – 10; and narcissism, 165 – 6; necrocapitalism (death capitalism), 31; and neoliberalism, 29 – 35, 42 – 3; portrayed as magic, 206 – 7; and primitive accumulation, 23 – 5, 27 – 8 Cardinal, Harold, 6, 67 Carroll, William, 55 Catano, James, 164, 165 Césaire, Aimé, 26 Ceylon, 50 Chad, 90 child labour, 215, 218, 220, 221, 231, 232 child mortality, 89, 90, 91, 98 – 9 Chile, 10, 107, 132, 133 China, 33 Chrétien, Raymond, 305n28 Chrisman, Laura, 204 Christie, Mr (treaty commissiner), 68

370 Index CIDA. See Canadian International Development Agency citizen miners. See artisanal miners class issues: with black elites, 259; with Canadian mining professionals, 174 – 5; with elite capitalist class, 55, 121 – 2; in labour unions, 79 – 80; of racialized bodies, 33 Cobalt (Ontario), 77 coded racism, 23, 31, 133 – 5, 178, 259 Coleman, Daniel, 5, 49, 147 – 8, 166, 189 Colleton, Sir Peter, 304n14 colonial contact zones, 66, 211, 212, 243, 246 colonial explorers, 176 – 87 colonialism/imperialism: definitions and terminology for, 57 – 9; benevolent paternalism with, 184 – 5; and capitalism/racism, 21, 22 – 8, 30 – 1; and disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples, 157 – 8; legitimizing discourses of, 36 – 7, 129 – 31, 187 – 202, 204 – 5, 236 – 7; narrative power of, 217; panopticon metaphor for, 232, 326n63; and post-colonial authoritarianism, 43; psychological impact of, 202 – 5; self-governing vs dependent colonies, 49 – 50; sexual imagery of, 188; as thingification, 235, 238 – 40; upperclass benefits from, 122; as white man's burden, 18, 36, 181, 263 – 4, 328n1; zones of exception with, 43 – 4, 46 – 7, 48, 57, 64 – 5, 129 colonial reformers, 78 colonial subjectivities, 35, 37 – 9 colonizers: colonizers who accept/ refuse, 162; confusion of, 204, 208;

relation to colonized, 176, 212 – 13, 235; white masculinity of, 164 – 5 colour-blind discourse, 31, 51, 178, 252, 260 – 5, 269 – 70 colour line, 33 Communities and Small-Scale Mining (CASM), 213 “Concerned International Prospecting and Mining Companies’ Submission on Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Bill” (“Concerned Companies” submission), 251, 260 – 5, 272 – 3 Congo. See Democratic Republic of the Congo Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 93 Conrad, Joseph, 56, 309n45 copper mining, 63, 98 – 101 copper values, 14 corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards, 12 – 13, 62, 82, 91 – 2, 189, 194, 289 – 91 corruption discourse, 273, 278 corrupt practices, 73, 98, 196 – 9 cosmopolitan neoliberalism, 32 Côte d’Ivoire, 172 critical race theory, 5, 21, 109, 258, 296n11 Cruikshank, Julie, 74 – 5 cultural racism, 23 Cumming, Peter, 63 – 4 Curry, Bill, 329n5 Curtis, Mark, 88, 109, 307n10, 313n108 Dallaire, Roméo, 187 Davis, Lance, 122 – 3 Dean, Kathryn, 164, 165, 330 – 1n37 Delgamuukw decision, 65

Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Belgian Congo, then Zaire): Canadian mining companies in, 10, 97 – 101, 115; Canadian mining professionals in, 172; colonial regime under Leopold II, 43, 56, 102, 126; human well-being indicators in, 89 – 91, 286; illegal export of resources from, 121; land appropriation in, 30; poverty vs resource wealth in, 5, 80, 96 – 101; privatization of mines in, 88; resource profits vs export revenues, 89; resourcerelated violence and deaths in, 96 – 100, 220, 309n49 Deneault, Alain, 6 DePasquale, Paul W., 67 development/underdevelopment: for artisanal miners, 229 – 33; Canada's role in, 107 – 13; development of underdevelopment, 52; development vs underdevelopment, 102 – 13; endogenous development, 102; foreign aid linked to mining law reform, 135, 150 – 1; for nonwhite dependent colonies, 50; and the resource curse, 87 – 91, 103 – 7; uneven development, 30, 31, 50, 87 Dewar, Paul, 97 – 8 diamond mining: in Africa, 80, 109, 142, 159; in Canada, 80, 112 – 13, 312n96 diversity, 32, 34, 250, 252 Dominion Reefs mine (South Africa), 93 – 4, 308n26 downstream industries. See valueadded industries DRC. See Democratic Republic of the Congo

Index 371 Dua, Enakshi, 51 Dubois, Marc, 231 – 2 Du Bois, W.E.B., 33, 231 – 2 Dyer, Richard, 33, 164 – 5, 168 East India Company, 43 École Polytechnique de Montréal, 8 Economic Club of Canada, 82 economic disparities/inequities: with international investment agreements, 265 – 6; and myth of level playing field, 30, 182 – 3, 244 – 6, 250; race-based wage inequities, 102, 108 – 10, 122, 207 – 8; rationalized by “different” needs, 109 – 10, 245 – 7 economic rationalism, 272 – 3 ECOSOC. See United Nations Economic and Social Council Edelstein, Verona, 319n39, 320n43, 320n49, 321n55, 321n60 Eduador, 42 education: of Canadian mining professionals, 168, 171, 173 – 4; school attendance in Africa, 89 – 90, 91 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 56 employment/unemployment: BEE quotas for, 257; employment in Canadian mining sector, 117 – 19; race-based wage inequities, 102, 108 – 10, 122, 207 – 8; unemployment with labour disputes and strikes, 93 – 4; unemployment with large-scale mining, 104, 119, 227; unemployment with mine closures, 94 – 5 Engler, Yves, 6 Enlightenment tradition, 42, 45, 46, 48, 218, 234 Enloe, Cynthia, 312n90

372 Index entitlement (sense of entitlement), 73 – 4, 144, 164, 249, 253, 269 – 70 Enugu coal mine (Nigeria), 102, 225 “Environmental Excellence in Exploration” (“E3”), 12 environmental issues: with artisanal mining, 221 – 2, 231; development programs focused on, 231 – 2; documented complaints about, 11 – 12; with large-scale Canadian mines, 92, 94, 195 – 6, 222; with uranium mines, 94 Equity in Extractives (Africa Progress Panel report, 2013), 87 – 91, 307n10 Escobar, Arturo, 31 Esterhuizen, Leon, 281 – 2 Ethopia, 30 eugenics, 63 Evans, Marketa, 3 exception (zones of exception), 43 – 4, 46 – 7, 48, 57, 64 – 5, 129 Extractive Industries Review (EIR), 12, 213 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), 89, 196, 214 Eze, E.K., 218 Falconbridge, 9, 254 Fanon, Frantz, 202 – 3, 216 FARDC. See Force Armée de la République Démocratique du Congo farming. See agriculture fascism: fascist-colonial states, 46 – 7, 48; modes of masculinity, 56; proto-fascism, 30, 39, 47 Fine, Michelle, 15 First Nations: dignity and assertiveness of, 67, 71 – 2; geological knowledge of, 63, 74 – 5, 80 – 3,

248; and the Indian Act, 28, 252; involvement in mining operations, 11, 81 – 2; mineral wealth taken from, 76 – 7; resistance to mining operations, 11, 75 – 8, 80 – 3; treaty negotiations and land claims, 65 – 78, 190 – 1, 200 – 1; weakened position of, 69 – 71. See also Indigenous peoples Fischer, Sibylle, 234 Fitzpatrick, Peter, 129 Fold, Niels, 213, 227 Force Armée de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), 99 – 100 Fort Carlton treaty, 66 Fort Francis, 67 Fort Pitt treaty, 66 Fort Qu'Appelle, 68 fortress and besiegement tropes, 149, 182 – 7, 241, 267 Foucault, Michel, 44 – 5, 217, 232, 327n63 Fraser, Nancy, 223 Fraser River War (1858), 77 Fraser Valley gold rush, 77 – 8, 213 free entry system, 72 – 4 Freud, Sigmund, 165 Frontenac Ventures, 81 Galabuzi, Grace-Edward, 109 “Gambler, The” (Indigenous spokesman), 68 gender issues, 290; interracial marriages, 78; with mining sector employment, 118 – 19; with sexualized colonial imagery, 188; with wage inequities, 109, 122; with white male Canadian bourgeoisie, 55

geological knowledge: of artisanal miners, 215, 225, 238 – 40, 248; of Indigenous peoples, 63 – 4; technical discourse vs romantic imagery, 188 – 9, 204 Geological Survey of Canada, 9, 303n4 geologists and prospectors: “gentleman geologist” imagery, 168, 187, 189, 197, 199, 244; perceived as harmless, 74, 162, 186 – 7 George, Dudley, 148 Germany: racism and Nazi regime, 15, 45, 47, 128, 252 Ghana: artisanal mining in, 96, 214, 217, 223, 224, 225; Canadian mining interests in, 10, 34, 94 – 6, 115, 119, 172; gold mining in, 94 – 6, 105, 225; mining legislation in, 139; resource exports from, 89, 105; structural violence cases in, 94 – 6, 101; wealth inequities in, 90. See also Nkrumah, Kwame Giroux, Henry, 7, 30, 44, 47, 285 Global Witness, 196 God's Lake Resources, 305n24 Goldberg, David Theo: on racial states, 22, 44 – 6, 51, 126, 251; on Self/Other relationships, 7, 211, 234, 247; on “whiting-out” of nonwhites, 236 Gold Coast, 34, 302n103 gold mining: California Gold Rush, 73, 213; in Canada, 66 – 7, 77 – 8, 79; in Ghana, 94 – 6; in Mauritania, 101; in Tanzania, 146 – 59; Yukon Gold Rush, 74 – 5 gold values, 14, 227, 292 Goodale, Ralph, 250

Index 373 Gordon, Todd, 6, 54 – 5 Guillaumin, Colette, 164, 169 – 70 Guinea, 89, 215 Haggard, Rider, 204 Haitian slave revolt, 234 Hall, Catherine, 164, 166 Hall, Stuart, 27 Hanula, Monica, 61 Hardt, Michael, 41 Harper, Stephen, 8, 196, 296n12 Harris, Cheryl, 64, 252 – 3, 266 – 7, 269, 278 Harvey, David, 24, 109 – 10 Haudenosaunee, 305n26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 217, 234, 235 Heller, Henry, 23, 24, 27, 301n56 Hendricks, Lindiwe, 273 Heron, Barbara, 167, 189 Hilson, Gavin, 224 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 47 Hochschild, Adam, 309n45 hooks, bell, 33 Hudson's Bay Company, 43, 66, 68 Human Development Index (HDI), 90 human well-being indicators, 89 – 91, 286 Humphrey, John, 51 Huttenback, Robert, 122 – 3 Ibbitson, John, 329n5 ILO. See International Labour Organization IMF. See International Monetary Fund imperialism. See colonialism/ imperialism

374 Index independent miners. See artisanal miners India, 33, 50 Indigenous peoples: agricultural knowledge of, 305n26; confrontations with settler populations, 3 – 4; disenfranchisement of, 157 – 8; documented complaints about mining industry, 11 – 12; employment in Canadian mining sector, 118 – 19; erasure (“whiting-out”) of, 236 – 7; geological knowledge of, 63, 74 – 5, 77 – 8, 237, 248; human well-being indicators for, 89; infantilization of, 237; relocations of, 11 – 12, 74, 92; resistance to mining operations, 75 – 8, 240 – 2, 305n24; right of free, prior and informed consent, 13; rights of land possession, 64 – 5; treaty negotiations, 190 – 1; UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 13. See also First Nations Industrial Revolution, 25 – 6, 64 Infomine, 114 Innis, Harold, 52 Innu Nation, 112 International Labour Organization (ILO): Global Wage Report, 108; Social and Labour Issues in Small-Scale Miners (1999), 213, 214, 231 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 98, 141 International Rescue Committee, 309n49 International Women and Mining Network, 92, 93 interracial marriages, 78 investment: cultural sensitivity for, 195; as moral act of goodness,

192 – 3; protection agreements for, 265 – 6, 289; public vs private discourse on, 205, 265 – 7 Investment Canada, 297n16 Ipperwash (Ontario), 148 Iran, 53 Israel, 53 Italy, 47 Jamaica, 50 Johnson v. McIntosh (US, 1823), 64 Jonsson, Jesper Bosse, 213, 224, 227 Jourdan, Paul, 106 justice: corrective vs distributive justice, 253; relation to rule of law, 127 – 8; in South African mining legislation, 253 – 85 Kabila, Laurent, 97 Kahama gold fields (Tanzania), 146 – 59 kaleidoscope metaphor, 34, 162, 189, 208, 210 Kaplan, David, 214, 312n91, 313n98, 322n64, 324n28 Kaplinsky, Raphael, 214, 312n91, 313n98, 322n64, 324n28 Keish (Skookum Jim), 74 – 5, 82 – 3 Kenya, 27 – 8, 172, 299n22, 318n29 Kenyon, Michael, 321nn51 and 60 Khanna, Ranjana, 249 Kiely, Ray, 42 Kikwete, Jakaya, 312n86 Kilwa (DRC), 98 – 100 Kipling, Rudyard, 258, 273, 328n1 Kirkland Lake (Ontario), 76 Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation (Ontario), 4, 80, 303n8, 305n24

Klassen, Jerome, 54 – 5 knowledge production, 14 – 15 labour unions. See unions and labour actions Laforce, Myriam, 72, 73 land and resource appropriation: enforcement of, 30 – 2; in First Nations treaty negotiations, 65 – 78; and land tenure, 143 – 4, 226 – 9; legality of, 304n15; mining professionals' representations of, 205 – 8; population displacements with, 24, 30 – 2, 92, 148; public cooperation and consent for, 290 – 1; from public to private, 254 – 67; recommissioning of mine sites, 95; and right of discovery, 64; as romantic discovery of mineral wealth, 204; and the rule of law, 126 – 61; as structural violence, 86 – 7 Lange, Siri, 307n15, 318 – 19n37 Lanning, Greg, 102, 103 – 4 Lapointe, Ugo, 72, 73 Larder Lake (Ontario), 77 Laudati, Ann, 91, 96 Lawrence, Bonita, 6, 75 – 7 law/rule of law: as alternative to direct force, 30 – 2, 243 – 4; anti-racist mining law reforms, 250 – 85; for artisanal miners, 150 – 6, 225 – 9; colonialism legalized by, 129 – 31; on deprivation vs expropriation, 284; disinterested authority of, 243 – 4; force legitimized by (“law and order”), 127, 147, 153 – 7, 241 – 2; free entry system, 72 – 4; ideal mining law, 132 – 5, 256; vs international investment agreements, 265, 266; for land appropriation,

Index 375 31 – 2, 63 – 5; and lawful/lawless rhetoric, 126, 133 – 5, 147 – 9, 154; and ministerial discretion, 132 – 4, 256, 257 – 8, 267, 272 – 5, 278; neoliberal mining law reforms, 138 – 59, 250 – 1; racially coded discourse in, 23, 133 – 5, 178, 259; relation to justice, 127 – 8; and resource appropriation, 126 – 61; for settler states, 63 – 5, 72 – 5, 159 – 60; as shield vs sword, 138; suspension of (zones of exception), 43 – 4, 46 – 7, 48, 57, 64 – 5, 129. See also property rights; structural violence Lawyers Environmental Action Team (Tanzania), 153 Laxer, James, 52 LeBourdais, Donat Marc, 61 Lebuis, Véronique, 72, 73 Leopold II, king of Belgium, 43, 56, 102, 126 Levitt, Kari, 52 Lewis, Stephen, 187 Leys, Colin, 299n22 liberalized free-market policies, 105, 107, 110, 138 – 46, 231 – 2, 242 – 4 licences for mining: for artisanal miners, 148, 153, 224 – 5; for foreign companies, 182 – 3; under “ideal” mining law, 132, 256; transferability of, 157 – 8, 266 – 7, 284 Liefferink, Mariette, 308n30 life expectancy rates, 89, 90, 286 Lissu, Tundu, 88, 109, 213, 225, 307n10, 313n108 Locke, John, 304n14 Longo, Roy, 61 – 2, 82 Loomba, Ania, 25, 28 Lopez, Alfred, 216, 246 Lott, Eric, 33

376 Index Lozanski, Kristin, 189 Lubumbashi (DRC), 99 – 100 Luxembourg, Rosa, 24, 298 – 9n9 Lyons, Laura E., 4 Mackey, Eva, 49 Mack, Johnny, 81 Madagascar, 10, 215 Magige, Emmanuel, 286, 295n3 Mahtani, Minelle, 7, 29 Malaysia, 42, 107 Mali, 139, 172, 195, 215, 292 Mamdani, Mahmood, 28 Marshall, Daniel P., 77, 248 Marshall, John, 64 Marx, Karl, and Marxist scholarship, 23 – 4, 26 – 7, 40, 87, 165 masculinity. See men and masculinity Mattei, Ugo, 128, 129, 138 Matti, S.A., 107 Mauritania, 10, 101, 172 Ma-we-do-pe-nais, Chief, 67 Mbelwa, Buchwadi, 3, 83 Mbembe, Achille: on legitimizing discourse of colonial violence (colonial rationality), 21, 36 – 7, 43 – 4, 60, 187; on necropolitics, 31; on racialized colonial relationship, 235; on representational repetition of colonial discourse, 32, 217, 220, 291; on right to live and exist, 89, 270, 286; on rule by commandment, 46 Mbulu, Rayford, 112 Mbulwa Accord, 258 McKay, Ian, 6, 56 – 7, 124 McKay, John, 13 McMaster, Donald, 319n39 McNally, David, 58

Medecins Sans Frontières, 98 Memmi, Albert: on colonialism and racism, 25, 163, 176; on colonizers who accept/refuse, 162, 164, 184, 189, 202 men and masculinity: in Canadian mining industry, 119; as colonial rulers and nation builders, 167; the “feeling” man, 164, 166, 175, 185, 288; hypermasculine white national man, 56, 80, 165, 190 – 1; in pioneer/explorer discourse, 167 – 8, 179 – 82; planetary entitlement of, 164; reaction to African female politicians, 273 – 5; the selfmade man, 165 – 6, 167, 174, 209; and sexualized colonial imagery, 188 Metal Mining Agency of Japan, 131, 142, 157 Metals Economics Group (MEG), 113 Mexico, 10 Mickenberg, Neil, 63 – 4 Miles, Robert, 27 – 8 Mills, Charles, 22 – 3, 27, 44, 52 mineral rights: national sovereignty over, 261 – 5; sale or transfer of, 226 – 9 Minerals and Africa’s Development (UNECA/AU, 2011), 85, 105 – 7 mineral values, 14, 135, 138 Mining Association of Canada (MAC), 9, 62, 114, 117, 119 Mining Hall of Fame. See Canadian Mining Hall of Fame Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD), 12, 146, 214, 215, 229, 230 Miningmx (news service), 93

Mining Sector Reform and Investment (Naito and Remy), 131 – 4, 157 ministerial discretion: with ideal mining law, 132 – 4, 256; with South Africa's 2002 mining legislation, 256, 257 – 8, 267, 272 – 5, 278 Mintek (mining research organization), 106 Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUC), 99 – 100 Mis-tah-wah-sis, Chief, 71 Mitchell, Timothy, 130, 131, 145, 273 Mkandawire, Thandika, 105 MKapa, 320n46 Mkapa, Benjamin, 320n44 Mlambo-Ngcuka, Phumzile, 273 MMSD. See Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development Mmusi, Tshepo, 94 Mobutu Sese Seko, 96 – 7, 98, 278, 313n110 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 109 Montreal Mining Company, 73 Monture, Patricia, 6, 65 MONUC. See Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo Morris, Alexander, and Morris treaty texts, 65 – 72, 76, 81, 208, 305n26 Morris, Mike, 214, 312n91, 313n98, 322n64, 324n28 Morton, Samuel, 299n18 Mouat, Jeremy, 61 Mozambique, 9, 90 – 1, 288 Mugabe, Robert, 104, 274, 278 Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), 116, 317 – 18n25;

Index 377 Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) reports, 148, 155, 317 – 18n25 Mussolini, Benito, 47 Nader, Laura, 128, 129, 138 Naffine, Ngaire, 127 Nandy, Ashis, 162, 163, 166 narrative power, 217 National Union of Mine Workers (South Africa), 93 nation-state(s), 39 – 48; and global capitalism, 40 – 2; nationhood narratives, 35 – 9; power of, 39 – 42, 48; as racial vs racist, 44 – 6; sovereignty over mineral rights, 261 – 5 natural resource rights, 261 – 5 Nebanaigooching (Batchawana chief), 306n35 necrocapitalism, 31 necropolitics, 31 Negri, Antonio, 41 Nelson, Dana, 164, 165 neocolonialism: and besiegement/ victim imagery, 185; Bulyanhulu as case study for, 146 – 60; Canada as a neocolonial nation, 98; Nkrumah's discussion on, 58, 59, 101, 103, 302n103 neoliberal anthropos, 191 neoliberal capitalism, 29 – 35 neoliberalism, 29 – 35, 39 – 48; of Canadian mining professionals, 163 – 9; and capitalism, 29 – 35, 41 – 2; and colour-blindness (racedenial), 31, 51, 259 – 60; in development programs, 231 – 3; and diversity (cosmopolitan neoliberalism), 32; and fascism, 47 – 8; features of, 29 – 30; and individualism,

378 Index 47; metaphors for operation of, 34 – 5; structural violence of, 23, 31, 34 – 5; and Washington Consensus, 10, 35, 129 neoliberal states, 39 – 48 neo-Nazis, 15, 22 New Economic Plan for African Development (NEPAD), 271 New Zealand, 49, 171 Nicaragua, 225 nickel mining, 113 Niger, 89 – 90, 172, 286 Nigeria, 90, 102, 225 Niosi, Jorge, 53 Nishinawbe Aski Nation, 80, 106 Nkrumah, Kwame, 58, 59, 101, 103 – 5, 302n103. See also Ghana Nootka Nation, 3, 71 – 2 Northern Miner, 16, 188, 236, 274, 278 North Mara Gold Mine (Tanzania), 91 Northwest Angle Treaty, 67 Numbered Treaties, 66, 68, 70 Nyerere, Julius, 104, 139, 282 Ojibway Nation, 76, 306n35 Ondaatje, Michael, 303n9 Ong, Aihwa, 164, 166, 191 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, 92, 97, 297n23, 310n52 Orientalism, 32, 130, 144 Orwell, George, 235 Other (racialized/colonized Other): as animal or subperson, 22 – 3, 32, 218; characterized by “lack,” 130; class identity of, 33; construction of, 36; corruption of, 198; “difference” or “lesser needs” of, 109 – 10,

245 – 7; disorder/threat signified by, 149; distancing of, 242 – 4; as economic subject, 245; as enemy, 211; infantilization of, 194, 207, 235; inferiorization of, 176 – 8; knowledge about, 243, 245 – 6; level playing field for, 244, 245, 250; racist perceptions of, 25 – 6; vs reasonable Western Self, 258, 272 – 9; relationship of affection with, 193 – 4; as a Self, 234 – 6, 249; thingification of, 220, 235, 238 – 40. See also racism/white supremacy Panel of Experts. See United Nations Panel of Experts panopticon metaphor, 232, 326n63 Paris Club, 98 Parker, Ian, 52 PDAC. See Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada Perry, Adele, 78 – 9 Peru, 40 – 1, 42, 106, 132, 133 Peterson, James, 305n28 Petras, James, 292 philanthropy of Canadian mining companies: in Africa, 184 – 5, 199 – 202; in Canada, 116 – 17 Phillips, Lucie D., 148 planetary entitlement, 73 – 4, 164 Platinex Mining Inc., 80, 303n8, 305n24 platinum mining, 4, 282 – 3 population displacements. See land and resource appropriation Porcupine gold mine ( Ontario), 77, 79 post-colonial theory, 4, 21 post-racialism, 33, 252, 258 post-racial racism, 250

Pratt, Mary Louise: on the capitalist vanguard, 202; on colonial contact zones, 65 – 6, 211 – 12, 242 – 3, 246; on the “feeling” or “anti-conquest” man, 166, 202; on planetary entitlement, 73, 164, 322n2 primitive accumulation, 23 – 5, 27 – 8, 102, 109, 170, 298 – 9n9 Probe International, 147 property rights, 252; customary or traditional rights, 11, 64, 154, 226; vs equality rights, 266 – 7; of Indigenous peoples, 64; in international investment law, 261 – 3; with land tenure, 226 – 9; legal protection for, 129 – 30, 147, 154 – 5, 269 – 70, 283; with mining licences, 269 – 70; and resource-related violence, 240 – 2; and risk, 270 – 1. See also law/rule of law prospectors. See geologists and prospectors Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC): and CSR standards, 12, 82; and Indigenous peoples, 81, 82 – 3; keynote address to (2002), 177 – 8, 179 – 80; “Mining Matters” curriculum, 291; opposition to South Africa's mining legislation, 250 – 2, 255, 266 – 7, 266 – 8, 271 – 5, 278 – 9; role of, 9; Skookum Jim Award, 75, 82 Publish What You Pay, 196 race denial, 51 racelessness, 31 – 2 race neoliberalism, 29 racial fix, 109 racial identities and hierarchies/categories, 22 – 3, 33, 169 – 70, 234, 287

Index 379 racial states, 44 – 6, 51, 126, 251 – 3, 260, 287 racism/white supremacy: and capitalism/colonialism, 21 – 8; and individualism, 47; mesmerizing discourses of, 32 – 3; Mills's definition of, 22 – 3; and neoliberalism, 28, 29 – 35; neo-Nazism compared to, 15, 22; and Orientalism, 32, 130, 144; post-racial racism, 250; and private/public distinctions, 205, 265 – 7; and psychic dimensions of whiteness, 200 – 5; routine rationality and banality of, 31 – 2, 33, 35, 132, 157, 287; slavery legitimized by, 27 – 8; unspeakability of, 15, 31 – 2, 48, 55. See also Other (racialized/colonized Other); whiteness racist state, 45, 251 – 2, 259 – 60 Radin, Margaret, 269 – 70 RAID (Rights and Accountability in Development), 100 Razack, Sherene, 6, 55 – 6, 166, 167 research: on African mining law, 131 – 5; on artisanal miners, 148; empirical data for, 16, 113 – 14, 163; ethics and design for, 15 – 19; on global mining, 10 – 11; methodology for, 14 – 15; participants for, 16 – 18, 172 – 8 resource appropriation. See land and resource appropriation resource curse, 87 – 91, 106 – 7 resource nationalism, 14, 137 – 8, 140 – 2, 272 – 3, 284 – 5, 293, 299 Review of Legal and Fiscal Regulatory Frameworks for Exploration and Mining (Naito, Remy, and ­Williams), 131 – 4, 157

380 Index Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Katanga, 99 – 100 revolving door (business/government) politics, 73 – 4, 135 – 8, 172, 305n28, 316n19 Rex, John, 28 Rhodes, Cecil, 43 right of discovery, 64 right of free, prior, and informed consent, 13 rights of property. See property rights risk: with colonial investments, 49 – 50; concept and tropes of, 18, 78, 149, 270 – 1; with mining industry, 136 – 7, 167 – 8, 179 – 82 Roberts, David J., 7, 29 Roberts-Davis, Tanya, 308n29 Robinson, William B., and Robinson Treaties, 66, 76 Rodney, Walter, 102 – 3, 104, 109, 161 Royal Bafokeng Platinum, 283 Royal Military College (Kingston, Ontario), 56 Royal Niger Company, 43 royalty rates, 88, 115, 133, 140 – 1, 159 Sacher, William, 6 Saddler, Chris, 308n29 Said, Edward, 36, 86, 217, 291 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 122, 202 – 3 Saugeen Ojibway Nation, 76 savagery, 217 – 25 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 87 scientific racism, 26, 63 Scott, James, 70 self-governing colonies, 49 – 50 Serequeberhan, Tsenay, 216 Sethi, Rumina, 41, 42 settler mining, 72 – 8, 305n24

settler states. See white settler states Shabangu, Susan, 274 Shachar, Ayelet, 31 Sherman, Paula, 6 Shingwauk (Anishnaabe chief), 306n35 Shohat, Ella, 73 Sierra Leone, 80, 220 silver mining, 23, 77, 98 – 101 silver values, 14 Simon Fraser University, 8 Simpson, Leanne, 6 Singh, Nikhail, 57 Skookum Jim. See Keish slavery, 23 – 5, 27 – 8, 102, 194, 234, 304n14 small-scale miners. See artisanal miners Smith, Adam, 23 Smith, Andrea, 33 SNL Metals and Mining, 113 social class. See class issues social Darwinism, 63 social fascism, 31 social license (for mining operations), 80, 196, 289, 293 Soludo, Charles C., 105 Somalia, 56, 167 South Africa, 250 – 85; ANC government in, 254, 258 – 9, 267, 278; apartheid regime in, 28, 45, 128, 204, 264 – 5; Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), 94, 257 – 8, 263 – 4, 266, 276 – 9, 281 – 3, 297n24; Black political elite in, 272 – 5, 282 – 3; Canadian High Commission in, 267; Canadian mining interests in, 10, 92 – 4, 119, 172, 250 – 85, 283 – 5; Constitution and

Bill of Rights, 329n11; Dominion Reefs mine, 93 – 4, 308n26; Mines Ministers in, 255, 272 – 5; as a subimperial power, 53; value-added industries in, 312n97; as a white settler state, 48, 49, 252  –  Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Bill (MPRDA, 2002): background and consultation process, 254 – 5; content and significance of, 255 – 6; draft policy documents for, 254; legal arguments against, 261 – 5; licencing restrictions under, 256 – 8, 266, 268 – 9, 273, 283 – 4; ministerial discretion under, 256, 257 – 8, 268, 272 – 5, 278; reviews and impact of, 281 – 3  –  Mining Charter (2002), 254, 257, 281, 282 – 4 South America: artisanal miners in, 221, 222; exploitation and slavery in, 23, 24, 322n2; foreign mining investment in, 132, 172, 202 spacial fix, 109 Sparrow decision (1990), 65 Spivak, Gayatri, 231, 318n28 Stairs, William, 56, 102, 124 Stam, Robert, 73 Stanley, Henry Morton, 56 Stasiulis, Daiva, 51 – 2 state regulation: for African mining sector, 106 – 7, 134, 135 – 8, 182 – 3; for Canadian mining sector/industry, 82, 134, 135 – 8 status injury, 223 – 4, 233 Steyn, Melissa, 18, 170, 204 – 5, 331n38 Strange, Susan, 40 strikes. See under unions and labour actions

Index 381 structural violence: definition of, 86 – 7; explanations for, 101 – 7; and human well-being, 89 – 91; legitimization of colonial violence (colonial rationality), 21, 36 – 7, 43 – 4; localized cases of, 91 – 101, 146 – 59; maintained by law, 128; of neoliberalism, 23, 31, 34 – 5; of the resource curse, 87 – 91, 106 – 7; as routine, banal, and pervasive, 91, 243 – 4, 287; underwritten by military violence, 101. See also law/ rule of law; violence subjectivity, 37 – 9 Sudbury, 113, 117, 305n24, 312n96 sustainable development: discourse on, 15, 199; Canadian mining professionals comments on, 135 – 6, 175, 178, 206; in South Africa's mining legislation, 20, 257 Sutton Resources of Canada, 146 – 59 Swift, Jamie, 6, 56 – 7, 124 Szablowski, David, 40 – 1 Tagish Nation, 74 – 5, 82 Tannock, Stuart, 62, 116, 291 Tanzania: Bulyanhulu confrontation in, 3 – 4, 131, 146 – 60, 219, 222, 242; Canadian mining interests in, 10, 119, 146 – 59, 172; economic disparities in, 89, 90 – 1, 108 – 9; human well-being indicators in, 89 – 91, 286; Mineral Development Agreements, 158 – 9, 322n64; mining legislation in, 133, 139, 147 – 9, 158 – 9, 229; Nyerere's regime in, 104, 139, 282; royalty rates in, 88, 158 – 9 Tanzanian Mines and Construction Workers Union, 108 – 9

382 Index Tanzanian State Mining Company, 146 terra nullius doctrine, 237 “thingification” attitudes, 238 – 40 Third World Network – Africa, 95 Thobani, Sunera, 5, 49, 166, 168, 189 Tifsberger, Martina, 15, 22, 38, 170 T ilhqot’in Nation, 4, 296n8 Tobin, Brian, 190 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 300n51 Tolvanen, Anneli, 225 Toronto Stock Exchange, 9, 10, 85, 98, 255 Toronto Venture Exchange, 10, 85 Tougas, Denis, 98 trade unions. See unions and labour actions treaty negotiations, 65 – 78, 80, 81, 200 – 1; and mineral deposits, 66 – 7, 76 – 8; power imbalance in, 67 – 8, 69 – 71; rhetorical strategies in, 69 – 70, 72 Trotsky, Leon, 87 Tschakert, Petra, 223, 225, 233 Tshitereke, Nyelisani Clarence Muofhe, 254 Tully, James, 67 UNCTAD. See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development underdevelopment. See development/underdevelopment UNECA. See United Nations Economic Commission for Africa unemployment. See employment/ unemployment uneven development. See development

unions and labour actions: in Africa, 92 – 4, 101, 108 – 9, 110, 308n29; in Canada, 78 – 80 United Nations Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of the State, 261 – 3 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 105 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 13, 82 United Nations Development Programme, 9, 212 United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC): Committee on Natural Resources report (1996), 228 – 9, 230 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), 9, 85, 105, 112, 120, 123 United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Panel of Experts), 97, 309n48 United Nations Security Council, 54, 97 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 51 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 148 United States of America: affirmative action in, 252 – 3, 267 – 8; California Gold Rush, 73, 213; Canada's economic relationship with, 51 – 2, 53; Jim Crow laws in, 128; mythologies of, 49; “postracial” era in, 33; proto-fascist

tendencies in, 47; as a racist state, 252; and Washington Consensus, 10, 35, 129; as a white settler state, 48, 49, 252 universal human rights, 234 – 5 University of British Columbia, 8 upstream industries. See valueadded industries uranium mining, 4, 81, 92 – 4, 286, 312n97 Uranium One, 308n29 uranium prices, 93 USAID. See United States Agency for International Development value-added industries, 104 – 7, 111 – 13, 120, 312n97 Vancouver, 8, 9, 91 Vancouver Island, 3, 71 Vasiliadis, Peter, 79 Veltmeyer, Henry, 292 Venne, Sharon H., 67 Vidal, Alex, 306n35 Vietnam, 242 violence: against artisanal miners, 3 – 4, 146 – 8, 155 – 6, 212; law as alternative to, 30 – 1, 243 – 4; and primitive accumulation, 23 – 4; resource-related conflict and violence, 3 – 4, 76 – 7, 96 – 100, 184 – 6, 194, 240 – 2. See also structural violence Voisey's Bay nickel mine (Labrador), 190 wages: compared to mining shares, 227; race-based inequities, 102, 108 – 10, 122, 207 – 8 Washington Consensus, 10, 35, 129

Index 383 Weis, Lois, 15 Weiss, Linda, 42 Welch, Cheryl, 300n51 Wendat, 305n26 white civility, 5, 49 Whitefish Lake First Nation, 305n24 white hotel metaphor, 34 – 5, 286 white man's burden, 18, 36, 181, 263 – 4, 328n1 whiteness (white racial identity): challenged by affirmative action, 253; legal protection for, 252 – 3; linked with privilege, 170 – 1; and privacy, 266 – 7; and property rights, 269 – 70; psychic dimensions of, 202 – 5. See also racism/ white supremacy white settler states: characteristics of, 48 – 9; illegality of, 159 – 60; legitimization of, 61, 189; as racial states, 39, 50 – 1, 252 – 3; and selfmade man, 165 – 6; settler mining, 72 – 8, 305n24 white space, 17 – 18 white supremacy. See racism/white supremacy Wightman, Nancy R., 306n35 Wightman, W. Robert, 306n35 Wilkins, Greg, 109 Williams, Glen, 53 women: in artisanal mining, 215, 231; in Canadian mining industry, 169, 290; development projects focused on, 231, 290; sexualized colonial imagery, 188; in South Africa's Ministry of Mines, 273 – 5. See also gender issues “Women from Mining Affected Communities Speak Out” (2010), 92 – 3

384 Index Women in Mining Canada, 290 Wood, Meiskins, 41 World Bank: Canadian contributions to, 116; Canadians working for, 139; corrupt entities listed by, 196; Extractive Industries Review (EIR), 12, 213; policy on artisanal mining, 212, 213, 225, 226, 228; policy on liberalized free market, 10, 29, 105, 110, 116, 139 – 44, 254  –  publications: Extractive Industries Review (EIR, 2004), 12, 213; Mining Sector Reform and Investment; Results of a Global Survey, 131, 142, 157; Review of Legal and Fiscal Regulatory Frameworks for Exploration and Mining, 131, 142, 157; Rising Global Interest in Farmland (2010), 304n15; Strategy for African Mining (policy statement, 1992), 218, 222, 225, 226, 228 World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 146 World Trade Organization, 29, 40, 55, 254

Xingwana, Lulu, 273 – 4 Yellowknife (North West Territories), 113, 312n96 Young, Robert, 58 Yukon Gold Rush, 74 – 5, 82 – 3, 213 Zaire. See Democratic Republic of the Congo Zambia: Canadian mining interests in, 119, 172; foreign mining investment in, 10, 105, 274; human wellbeing indicators in, 90 – 1; state revenues from mining in, 88 – 9, 112; wage disparities in, 90 – 1, 102 Zimbabwe: artisanal mining in, 214, 215; Canadian mining interests in, 115, 172; foreign investment in, 275, 282; Geological Survey, 140; Great Zimbabwe Ruins, 204; mining law reform in, 139 – 40; Mugabe's regime in, 104, 274, 275, 278 zones of exception, 43 – 4, 46 – 7, 48, 57, 64 – 5, 129