Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T12:41:22.695Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Miners' magic: artisanal mining, the albino fetish and murder in Tanzania*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Deborah Fahy Bryceson*
Affiliation:
Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, United Kingdom
Jesper Bosse Jønsson*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10, 1350 København K, Denmark
Richard Sherrington*
Affiliation:
Centre for African Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom

Abstract

A series of murders of albinos in Tanzania's north-west mining frontier has been shrouded in a discourse of primitivism by the international and national press, sidestepping the significance of the contextual circumstances of an artisanal mining boom firmly embedded in a global commodity chain and local profit maximisation. The murders are connected to gold and diamond miners' efforts to secure lucky charms for finding minerals and protection against danger while mining. Through the concept of fetish creation, this article interrogates the agency of those involved in the murders: the miners who purchase the albino charms, the waganga healers renowned for their healing, divination and sorcery skills who prescribe and sell the charms, and the albino murder victims. The agrarian background, miners' ambitions and a clash of values comprise our starting point for understanding the victimisation of albinos.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Deborah Fahy Bryceson, a sociologist/geographer and graduate of the University of Dar es Salaam, lived in Tanzania between 1971 and 1981 and has continued since then to work with University of Dar es Salaam colleagues on Tanzanian rural and urban subject matter. Jesper Bosse Jønsson, a geographer, has worked in Tanzania for ten years on rural livelihoods and unfolding developments in mining, both as an academic and NGO representative. Richard Sherrington, an anthropologist, has researched development and mining issues in Tanzania since 2000, specifically artisanal diamond mining in Mwanza and Shinyanga. We are grateful to Ray Abrahams, Simeon Mesaki and Koen Stroeken for elucidating comments during the article's preparation and to unnamed referees for their criticisms of our paper.

References

REFERENCES

Abrahams, R. 1981. The Nyamwezi Today: a Tanzanian people in the 1970s. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Abrahams, R. 1998. Vigilant Citizens: vigilantism and the state. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Bewaji, J. A. I. 1998. ‘Olodumare: God in Yoruba belief and the theistic problem of evil’, African Studies Quarterly: Online Journal for African Studies 2, 1, available at: http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i1a1.htm.Google Scholar
Brandström, P. 1990. ‘Boundless universe: the cultural expansion among the Sukuma-Nyamwezi’, PhD thesis, University of Uppsala.Google Scholar
Bryceson, D. F. 1999. ‘African rural labour, income diversification and livelihood approaches: a long-term development perspective’, Review of African Political Economy 80: 171–89.Google Scholar
Bryceson, D. F. 2002. ‘The scramble in Africa: reorienting rural livelihoods’, World Development 30, 5: 725–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryceson, D. F. 2010, ‘Africa at work: transforming occupational identity and morality’, in Bryceson, D. F., ed. How Africa Works: occupational change, identity and morality. London: Practical Action Publishing, 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryceson, D. F. & Jønsson, J. B.. 2010. ‘Gold digging careers in rural East Africa: small-scale miners’ livelihood choices', World Development 38, 3: 379–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caplan, P. 2010. ‘“Child sacrifice” in Uganda? The BBC, “witchdoctors” and anthropologists’, Anthropology Today 26, 2: 47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colson, E. 2000. ‘The father as witch’, Africa 70, 3: 333–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J. & Comaroff, J.. 1993. Modernity and its Malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, J. & Comaroff, J.. 1999. ‘Occult economies & the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26, 3: 279303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cory, H. 1949. ‘The ingredients of magic medicines’, Africa 19, 1: 1332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drechsler, B. 2001. ‘Small-scale mining and sustainable development within the SADC Region’, research report, London: International Institute for Environment and Development.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Magic and Oracles amongst the Azande People. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Geschiere, P. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Graeber, D. 2005. ‘Fetishism as social creativity or, fetishes are gods in the process of construction’, Anthropological Theory 5, 4: 407–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, K. 2008. ‘Artisanal & small-scale mining and livelihoods in Africa’, Pact, available online at: http://www.pactworld.org/cs/artisanal_smallscale_mining_and_livelihoods_in_africa, accessed 7.4.2010.Google Scholar
Hinton, J. 2006. Communities and Small Scale Mining: an integrated review for development planning. Washington, DC: World Bank.Google Scholar
Hodkinson, P. & Deike, W., eds. 2007. Youth Cultures: scenes, subcultures and tribes. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jangu, M. 2010. ‘Environmental change and transformation of health care services: contextualizing, consuming and producing traditional healing in Mwanza, Tanzania’, conference on engaging anthropology in development, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, January.Google Scholar
Jønsson, J-B. & Bryceson, D. F.. 2009. ‘Rushing for gold: mobility and small-scale mining in East Africa’, Development and Change 40, 2: 249–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jønsson, J.-B. & Fold, N.. 2009. ‘Handling uncertainty: policy and organizational practices in Tanzania's small-scale gold mining sector’, Natural Resources Forum 33, 3: 211–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, R. A. & Summers, C. G.. 2005. ‘Albinism and Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome’, Management of Genetic Syndromes 10.1002/0471695998.mgs005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luedke, L. & West, H., eds. 2006. Borders and Healers: brokering therapeutic resources in southeast Africa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Madulu, N. F. 1998. ‘Changing lifestyles in farming societies of Sukumaland’, Deagrarianisation and Rural Employment Programme working paper, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum.Google Scholar
Mesaki, S. 1994. ‘Witch-killing in Sukumuland’, in Abrahams, R., ed. Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania. Cambridge: Cambridge African Monographs, 4760.Google Scholar
Mesaki, S. 2009. ‘The tragedy of ageing: witch killings and poor governance among the Sukuma’, in Haram, L. & Yamba, C. B., eds. Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives. Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 7290.Google Scholar
Mwaipopo, R., Mutagwaba, W., Nyange, D, & Fisher, E.. 2004. Increasing the Contribution of Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining to Poverty Reduction in Tanzania. London: Department for International Development.Google Scholar
Nash, J. 1979. We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Nash, J. 2001. ‘Cultural resistance and class consciousness in Bolivian tin-mining communities’, in Eckstein, S., ed. Power and Popular Protest in Latin American Social Movements. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 182202.Google Scholar
Red Cross. 2009. Through Albino Eyes: the plight of albino people in Africa's Great Lakes Region and a Red Cross response. Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.Google Scholar
Roszak, T. 1996 [1965]. The Making of a Counter Culture: reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sanders, T. 2001a. ‘Save our skins: structural adjustment, morality and the occult in Tanzania’, in Moore, H. & Sanders, T., eds. Magical Interpretations, Magical Realities. London: Routledge, 160–83.Google Scholar
Sanders, T. 2001b. ‘Territorial and magical migrations in Tanzania’, in Bruijn, M. De, Van Dijk, R. & Foeken, D., eds. Mobile Africa: changing patterns of movement in Africa and beyond. Leiden: Brill, 2746.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanders, T. 2009. ‘Invisible hands and visible goods: revealed and concealed economies in millennial Tanzania’, in Haram, L. & Yamba, C. B., eds. Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives. Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 91–117.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. 2000. ‘The global traffic in human organs’, Current Anthropology 41, 2: 191224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroeken, K. 2001. ‘Defy the gaze: exodelics for the bewitched in Sukumaland and beyond’, Dialectical Anthropology 26, 3–4: 285–.309CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroeken, K. 2008. ‘Believed belief: science/religion versus Sukuma magic’, Social Analysis 52, 1: 144–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroeken, K. 2010. Moral Power: the magic of witchcraft. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Tanner, R. E. S. 1956a. ‘The sorcerer in Northern Sukumaland, Tanganyika’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 12: 437–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tanner, R. E. S. 1956b. ‘An introduction to the spirit beings of the Northern Basukuma’, Anthropological Quarterly 29: 6981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tanzania Studies Association (TSA). 2009. ‘Albino killings’, email debate among members, January 2009 correspondence.Google Scholar
Tanzanian Affairs 2009. ‘Albino atrocities continue’, no.92, 31–2.Google Scholar
Taussig, M. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Vincent, L. 2009. ‘Killing to order: muti murder in post-apartheid South Africa’, presentation at the AEGIS African Studies Conference, Leipzig, June 2009, available at: http://ecas2007.aegiseu.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?PaperID=426.Google Scholar
Whitehouse, H. 2002. ‘Modes of religiosity: towards a cognitive explanation of the sociopolitical dynamics of religion’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14, 3–4: 293–.315CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wijsen, F. J. S. 2008. ‘Beyond Ujamaa: African religion and societal evil’, in Doorn-Harder, P. & Minnema, L., eds. Coping with Evil in Religion and Culture: case studies. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 169–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wijsen, F. J. S. & Tanner, R. E. 2002. I am Just a Sukuma: globalization and identity construction in northwest Tanzania. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Newspapers

Capital News, Nairobi; The Citizen, Dar es Salaam; Daily News, Dar es Salaam; The East African, Nairobi; The Guardian, Dar es Salaam; The Guardian, London; Majira, Dar es Salaam; Nipashe, Dar es Salaam; Times Online, London.