The Perils of Labor in Mining: Migration and Mortality

Abstract

Workers in the precious metal and gem sectors of Guyana’s mining industry, their families, and associates paid an enormous price in developing the country’s economy. Decreasing coastal employment and an increasing labor demand in interior mining were the “push” and “pull” factors influencing a largely African diasporan migratory movement to the gold and diamond fields. El Dorado, the reputedly fabulous and golden city somewhere in the Guyanas fatally continued to lure many men and fewer women in quests to find gold. Earlier explorers in the Americas from the days of Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth century to the prospectors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries risked death to make the legend of El Dorado a reality. Mythical or otherwise, by the 1890s, the legend though generations old, was not time worn. During the more recent period, the seasonal acceleration of workers in gold and diamond mining was accompanied by alarmingly high mortality rates. In Guyana’s cultural repertoire one of the best known songs, Itanami, succinctly reveals the innermost anguish of miners who contemplated aborting their quests and returning home empty-handed on first glimpsing that and other deadly waterfalls on hinterland rivers on their way to the fields.1