Browsing by Author "Shaba, Jabulani"

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    Women in mining worlds : a socio-environmental history of women in artisanal gold mining in Zimbabwe, with specific reference to Mazowe District, c. 1932 to 2021
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Shaba, Jabulani; Swart, Sandra; Swart, Sandra Scott; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines the socio-environmental history of women in Artisanal Gold Mining (AGM) in Zimbabwe with specific reference to Mazowe, between 1932 and 2021. Using Carlo Ginzburg’s micro-history approach and drawing from the Feminist Political Economy theory, this study joins the growing yet still nascent, scholarship on resource extraction, women, and labour in southern Africa. By examining changes and continuities in the gold mining sector, relying on new evidence from oral interviews, archival data, newspapers, mining reports, international policy reports and secondary literature, the thesis explores the changing roles of women in mining and across ancillary activities such as vending and sex work. Shifting from scholarship that emphasizes the dominant role of politics and patronage, the political economy, and illegality in AGM, this thesis makes a historiographical turn by relating stories of women in mining settlements within the broader context of survival and livelihoods. It demonstrates that women are central to the matrix of capital accumulation, shape artisanal mining life worlds and deftly navigate patriarchy and masculinity. Starting in 1932 with the rise of the white women miners of Rhodesia, the thesis shows how women contributed to gold outputs. The study expands Zimbabwean scholarship on women and the colonial economy by adding women’s participation and voices in the historiography of resource extraction. The period between 1932 and the late 1970s provides a critical historical context to understand dynamics that shaped women’s participation in AGM in the postcolonial period. It demonstrates that white women mine owners benefitted from class, connections, and capital – fundamental aspects that were critical in navigating Zimbabwe’s postcolonial AGM sector. The thesis demonstrates how women shifted from being labourers to gold pit sponsors and entrepreneurs in the post-2000 period. It analyses how they benefitted from local technologies, their networks, how they learnt new skills, tapped into the ritual world in expanding their business enterprises. The thesis engages with how women deployed local knowledges in negotiating toxic mining landscapes. The study explores critical periods in Zimbabwean history such as the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, (FTLRP), the period of Operation Chikorokoza Chapera, (No more illegal gold mining), dollarization and the Covid-19 era to understand women’s lived experiences in localities of resource extraction. Overall, the thesis offers an analysis on rethinking mining labour and livelihoods in Zimbabwe, Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.