No abstract

African rural dwellers have faced depressed economic prospects for several decades. Now, in a number of mineral‐rich countries, multiple discoveries of gold and precious stones have attracted large numbers of prospective small‐scale miners. While their ‘rush’ to, and activities within, mining sites are increasingly being noted, there is little analysis of miners' mobility patterns and material outcomes. In this article, on the basis of a sample survey and interviews at two gold‐mining sites in Tanzania, we probe when and why miners leave one site in favour of another. Our findings indicate that movement is often ‘rushed’ but rarely rash. Whereas movement to the first site may be an adventure, movement to subsequent sites is calculated with knowledge of the many risks entailed. Miners spend considerable time at each site before migrating onwards. Those with the highest site mobility tend to be more affluent than the others, suggesting that movement can be rewarding for those willing to ‘try their luck’ with the hard work and social networking demands of mining another site.

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 * 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.

Small‐scale mining supports the livelihoods of several hundred thousand rural households in Africa. Nonetheless, the understanding of the organizational dynamics of small‐scale miners' activities is modest. The paper outlines the small‐scale mining codes in Tanzania and contrasts them to prevalent organizational practices in two Tanzanian small‐scale mining settlements. It is argued that there is a need to adjust the regulatory mechanisms to well‐consolidated practices: If basic practices differ substantially from official prescriptions of the mining codes over an extended period of time, certain elements of the regulatory framework need reconsideration. The paper examines three pertinent operational components that vary in form and managing practices between the two study sites: dealing with licence acquisition, accessing working capital, and sharing output. These components are considered vital for the proper manoeuvring of local small‐scale mining operators and the reasons for the variations are essential to understand for policymakers and development practitioners. By incorporating prevalent practices and context‐dependent variations in some of the crucial organizational components, it is possible to design a robust and resilient regulatory framework for small‐scale mining. A number of policy adjustments are consequently proposed.