Unstable Ground
The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa
Published on 4. March 2025
Book
Hardback
656 pages
978-0-231-21611-1 (ISBN)
Description
Winner, 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award
What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world's richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicit-often deadly-search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possible-and gold's profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.
From the vantage point of the closure of South Africa's gold mines, Rosalind C. Morris reconsiders their histories, beginning in the present and descending into the pasts that shaped them. Anchored in evocative descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half. Viewing this industry from its margins, against the backdrop of the cyanide revolution, the gold standard's demise, and recurrent sinkholes, as well as the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue to this day, it recasts the history of South Africa and the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid amid the transformations of the global economy. In writing that is by turns immersive, incisive, and poetic, Morris unearths a history that was born of imperial aspiration and that persists as a speculative mirage. Interweaving ethnography, history, personal testimony, and political thought with striking readings of South African literary texts, Unstable Ground is a work of extraordinary ambition and depth.
What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world's richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicit-often deadly-search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possible-and gold's profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.
From the vantage point of the closure of South Africa's gold mines, Rosalind C. Morris reconsiders their histories, beginning in the present and descending into the pasts that shaped them. Anchored in evocative descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half. Viewing this industry from its margins, against the backdrop of the cyanide revolution, the gold standard's demise, and recurrent sinkholes, as well as the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue to this day, it recasts the history of South Africa and the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid amid the transformations of the global economy. In writing that is by turns immersive, incisive, and poetic, Morris unearths a history that was born of imperial aspiration and that persists as a speculative mirage. Interweaving ethnography, history, personal testimony, and political thought with striking readings of South African literary texts, Unstable Ground is a work of extraordinary ambition and depth.
Reviews / Votes
Morris offers an ethnography that astutely and illuminatingly captures the stubborn fiction that there is such a thing as a distinction between the formal and informal sectors of the economy, or between the normal and abnormal modes of existence in southern Africa's political economy. This is all one economy. The haves and the have-nots inhabit one world. Different for sure but one. -- Jacob S. Dlamini, author of <i>The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police</i> This is a history of South Africa and the gold mining at its core unlike any you have encountered. Enriched by two and a half decades of field and archival research, this exquisitely crafted book calibrates many registers: poetical and lyrical, geological, legal, philosophical, technical, sociological, and much more. The result is sumptuously layered, each page shimmering with insight and a delight to read. -- Isabel Hofmeyr, author of <i>Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House</i> Brilliant! With writerly flair, Morris presents interviews from the margins and gives them a close reading based on more than twenty years of wide-ranging research, combined with dazzling theoretical analyses. Vivid and compelling, this counter-history is a work of exceptional power and literary richness. -- Antjie Krog, author of <i>Pillage</i> and <i>Country of My Skull</i> Rosalind Morris is a remarkable scholar, deep thinker, and artist. The tragedy of gold mining and its relationship to the emergence and sustenance of Apartheid and its aftermath is a story that needs to be told. In this book, she develops an astonishingly capacious and powerful analysis through the lens of fetishism in order to understand the enduring fantasies of, and feverish desires for, gold as well as racialized politics within South Africa's race-based capitalism. -- Andrew C. Willford, author of <i>The Future of Bangalore's Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Difference in a Global City</i>More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-231-21611-1 (9780231216111)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2025
1st Edition
Columbia University Press
€30.99
Available for download
Person
Rosalind C. Morris is professor of anthropology at Columbia University. A writer, cultural critic, and documentary filmmaker, she has received numerous awards for her scholarly and artistic work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Content
Preface: Ground-Preliminary Definitions
A Note on Orthography and Capitalization
1. Clearing Ground
Part I. Groundwork
2. Letters, Ruin: Migrancy's Remainders
3. Gold Fools: Or, What Is a Gold Rush?
4. Cyanide Dreams and the Redemption of Waste: Or, Snowballs in Hell
5. "We're Ground Underfoot": Movements Without Mobility
6. Down, in Africa: Women Surpassing Protest
Part II. The Deep
7. Figure, Ground, and Sinkhole
8. The Sky's the Limit: Visions and Divisions of the World
9. Utopia on the Highveld
10. Good as Gold: Standards and Margins of Value
11. Catalytic Conversions: Becoming Organized
12. Go Underground: Or, When Was Youth?
13. Zombies Sing Pata Pata: The Impossible Subject of Political Violence
Part III. Surfacing
14. Terrain of the Fetish: Dislocations Relocations, and the Difficulty of Moving On
15. Rush, Panic, Rush: A New Book of the Dead
16. Magic Mountain: Debt and the Ancestors
17. Gambling on Gold Again
18. Afterward, Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
A Note on Orthography and Capitalization
1. Clearing Ground
Part I. Groundwork
2. Letters, Ruin: Migrancy's Remainders
3. Gold Fools: Or, What Is a Gold Rush?
4. Cyanide Dreams and the Redemption of Waste: Or, Snowballs in Hell
5. "We're Ground Underfoot": Movements Without Mobility
6. Down, in Africa: Women Surpassing Protest
Part II. The Deep
7. Figure, Ground, and Sinkhole
8. The Sky's the Limit: Visions and Divisions of the World
9. Utopia on the Highveld
10. Good as Gold: Standards and Margins of Value
11. Catalytic Conversions: Becoming Organized
12. Go Underground: Or, When Was Youth?
13. Zombies Sing Pata Pata: The Impossible Subject of Political Violence
Part III. Surfacing
14. Terrain of the Fetish: Dislocations Relocations, and the Difficulty of Moving On
15. Rush, Panic, Rush: A New Book of the Dead
16. Magic Mountain: Debt and the Ancestors
17. Gambling on Gold Again
18. Afterward, Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index