Bitteres Gold: Bergbau, land und geld in Westafrika

Abstract

On the cover of Bitteres Gold: Bergbau, land und geld in Westafrika (Bitter Gold: Mining, land and money in West Africa) Katja Werthmann says that she aims to contribute to socio-scientific and comparative research on the gold fever phenomenon; the ethnography and history of West Africa; the relation between land rights, local power structures, and the state in Africa; and the ethnology of money. Through seven rather independent chapters (history, gold rush, boomtown, land, money, society, cosmology) she tries to contextualize her research findings from an artisanal mining village in the south-west of Burkina Faso within these vast theoretical landscapes. Werthmann has a good plot. In 1997 she pitched up in a resettlement village to study the impacts of a regional resettlement programme that moved Mossi farmers from the Volta valley to the south-west of Burkina Faso. She documents the history of ‘her community’, how the resettled population and their hosts cope with their new setting and how this affects land tenure systems, relations, local politics, cosmologies, et cetera. Just a year later, gold was found near the villages and she had the chance to experience firsthand a massive gold rush that attracted up to ten thousand miners, auxiliaries, officials, and others. The rush obviously challenged the existing social relations and confronted ‘traditional’ systems with regulations and approaches from the World Bank's recipe book on subjects such as mining, land, and governance: a perfect place for an anthropologist to observe the impacts of modernization on various fragmented societies engaged in a process of change and adaptation.