Book launch digs into Mining waste management

On the 17th of April 2024 the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) co-hosted the launch of two books with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. The book on Residual Governance: How South Africa foretells planetary futures by Professor Gabrielle Hecht explores the management of mining waste, broadly defined, while Potšišo Phasha’s A City on a Hill is a visual and poetic rendition of that residual governance, focussing on the activities of the zama-zama miners.  

In ‘Residual Governance’, Gabrielle Hecht discusses the governance of toxic mining waste in the Witwatersrand. For her, the term waste is not only about the materiality of tailings dams, mining rock stockpiles, acid mine drainage, dust, sand and their effects on human health. The term waste also captures the ideology of the black mineworker’s limited value. In this sense, residual governance is about purposefully mismanaging these wastes for the benefit of racial capitalism and the dogma of white supremacy (social contract) at the global level. To this end, the tactics involve delaying the applications of environmental laws; and the deliberate creation of ignorance on matters associated with environmental damage, where only the costs of a mining commodity are counted without considering those of ecological destruction (minimalism). The tactics also involve the reduction to a few components of complex contamination pathways and related contexts (simplification). The effect of racial capitalism, then, is the acceleration of the Anthropocene – the period during which human activity is a major force in environmental degradation, pollution and other features of planetary predicament. The book uses multiple entry points to discuss these issues, particularly drawing some of the research material from the Tudor Shaft informal settlement in Kagiso to illustrate how residual governance looks like at that scale.

Potšišo Phasha’s A City on a Hill attends to another outcome of residual governance – the activities of the zama-zama miners – through the formal verse, photos and associated creative captions. This book builds on Phasha’s earlier work, a chapter on ‘Scavenger Economies of the Mine Dumps’ in the 2017 GCRO publication, Mining Landscapes of the Gauteng City- Region. In A City on a Hill amongst other exploits of the book, Phasha’s photos serve a documentary purpose, with the humanisation of zama-zama miners becoming a radical act.