Abstract
With a growing scholarship on post-industrialism, an ethnographic view about industrial mining industry in DR Congo remains largely absent. This article takes the immediate surroundings of an industrial mine, with its blast rhythm and chemical reagents that spill over from its boundaries, as an object of ethnographic attention. It investigates how exuding fumes create an everyday shaped by nervousness and shaping rumors. Drawing from the asymmetries of knowing that arise when living in toxic worlds, this article thinks with extractive landscapes through the notion of a sore. From this vantage point, rumors and accusations not only contextualize extraction, but keep geological sores open by refusing them from being sealed. This article tracks colonial attempts to ridden itself from sores to the cumulative deepening of extractive processes into postcolonial times in which hyper-industries and chemical proliferations are met with suspicions.
Introduction
Charles (45) is a Congolese chemist working in the treatment plant at a large-scale industrial mine in Eastern DR Congo. He lost part of his eyesight after touching his left eye with chemical reagents. Working long shifts, he accidentally lifted his protective glasses and rubbed one of his eyes. He and his younger brother, Harry (41), an underground driller at the mine, originate from the copper-producing region of Katanga. To forget anxieties about exposures to dust in the underground and chemical reagents in the treatment plant, they often spend their evenings together in drink.
One evening, Charles explained: “Sometimes the electricity goes down in the plant. Then the chemicals in the treatment plant’s classifier risk overflowing. It happened last week.” On the one hand, his observation relates to his private concerns about harm and risk. On the other, it referred to the boundaries of the mine itself, always at risk of spilling and brimming over. According to him, his colleagues, and nearby residents, “there is always a potential leak,” there is always “something that cannot be contained.”
Charles and Harry were not only aware of the dangers in the workplace, but also about the asymmetries in knowledge between nearby residents of the mine and what they knew as workers for the company. In return, their suspicions spilled over from the workplace into everyday life. Later that week, dead fish were found in the nearby river. Accusations were launched by civil society and nearby residents, but the company’s response was unequivocal: there was no breach and the dead fish were unrelated to a chemical leak. With every act of neglect by the company, suspicions and rumors surged alongside a sense of “nervousness” (Hunt, 2015).
In this article, the health and environmental consequences of mining do not take central stage. Rather, they shape the contours of “living in toxic worlds (Nading, 2020). In the following, I highlight the rumors, suspicions and accusations that emerge amidst the asymmetries of knowing about exposures. By placing these narrative textures in productive tension to the historical condition of “nervousness” in DR Congo, I circumscribe these narrative textures as part of situated historical assemblages – tracking a “mood of nervousness” as it produced a colonial regime that tried to control and contain the colonized, yet continues to shape acts of defiance and unruliness and leave its mark on postcolonial extractive worlds.
To attend to these socio-historic continuities, I develop the notion of a geological sore. The leakiness of something which continues to fester, ooze and spill beyond its bounds yet cannot be contained, is suggestive of a “sore” (Povinelli, 2011). Seeking to nuance material metaphors of repair such as suturing or stitching, I reflect upon sores and “leaky bodies” as part of ongoing toxicities that remain open and refuse to be healed (Reno, 2016). At first sight, the materially informed metaphor of a geological sore speaks to the very concrete expansion of extractive landscapes (with bodies and the earth’s crust mixing with aquifers, dust and aerosols, and fuel). However, the objective requires expanding the mine’s infirmity towards situated histories, imaginaries and narrative structures which mimic a similar sense of spilling over.
This approach is useful, because it requires us to remain ethnographically and historically attentive to the way hyper-industries mark the human and non-human bodies – and equally shape the narrative contours that contest a “regime of imperceptibility” by the company (Murphy, 2008). Rather than calming and containing nervousness, I suggest that suspicions, rumors, and accusations defy the company’s attempts to hide potential risks and seal leakiness. Always translating, aggrandizing and re-appearing, rumors subtly attest to the company’s infirmity. In doing so, rumors and accusations are part of a social register that contests the locked-off and self-contained impression of a hard-rock mine, an image that is actively produced by the company’s discourses, practices, legal measures, and protocols.
Within a wider tendency toward post-industrialism, industrial mining often seems relegated to a bygone era. However, this can equally be understood as a wider tendency that “eclipses” spaces of global production whilst foregrounding global consumption of digital worlds that need these minerals (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2015; Smith, 2021). Rather than speaking about post-industrialism, industries have become hyper-intensified and are increasingly black-boxed from the perspective of communities and ethnography alike (Blanchette, 2020). This poses serious limits to the way ethnography may or may not unfold.
In response, I track the expansion of a geological sore from an extractive regime under colonial rule to a postcolonial present of synthetic chemicals and hyper-industries. The mineral-rich provinces of DR Congo are currently associated with the rise of artisanal and small-scale mining since the 1980s and the ensuing wars (Geenen, 2015). In addition, the disrupted development and the disintegration of industrial mining during the 1990s has, to a certain extent, black-boxed the lives of miners who work in industrial enterprises who started to extract under a new joint-venture law introduced with the 2002 mining code (Radley, 2023).
The ethnography took place in the immediate surroundings of an industrial mine in the eastern provinces of DR Congo. Although the mine largely remained out of sight from the viewpoint of its residents, the mine’s open pit and treatment plant exuded fumes and volatile debris covered trees, leaves, and residents’ homes. Depending on the wind, its blasts were audible and its fumes noticeable as they covered the surroundings. It dictated a rhythm around which daily life, social relations, and toxic nervousness were organized in its perimeter. This article is written from these margins and in conversation with chemists, residents, and drillers who equally live and work in this perimeter.
Data collection for this study started with a 5-week field visit during which I accompanied a team of local surveyors. In parallel, I carried out daily in-depth interviews and participant observation, with follow-up conversations continuing via WhatsApp, which allowed for extended engagement and the trust-building necessary for qualitative insights. These intensive fieldwork activities were further complemented by long-term ethnographic research I have conducted in DR Congo, focusing on different hard-rock and alluvial mining practices (Marijsse, 2026a).
During fieldwork, we were granted access by the mine from its directors located ‘elsewhere’ in capital cities around the globe. Yet, when I was there, permissions became increasingly negotiated and evaded locally. Interviews were conducted with its local board, eventually but remained generic and evasive. The mine was black-boxed and my viewpoint was reduced to that of people who live in its vicinity, who do not see the pit. At the same time, the ethnography started to leak outward, so to speak, as I met with drillers, former security experts, chemists, blasters, healers, families, artisanal miners who had left the industrial mine (and vice versa), and workers for sub-contracting companies to the mine. From these oral biographies and descriptions of technical sequences in and around the mine, this article emerged and moves between the embodied scale of these biographies to the fumes and aquifers which spread into the mine’s perimeter and the everyday nervosities they compose.
In a first part, I place the question of hard-rock mining within the wider anthropology of mining and the geologic turn in late liberalism (D’Angelo and Pijpers, 2022). In the second part, I describe how the birth of a mine and concessionist economies under colonial rule can be read through the registers of a sore that cannot be closed. After that, the sore intrudes from the archive to the field. The three ethnographic sections are titled after mining terminology that was collected during interviews: Intrusion, Blast Radius, Emulsion. Intrusion denotes the way chemicals may or may not penetrate the soil. Here, however, I use it to describe the way miners connect embodied exposures to rumors and accusations. In Blast Radius, I think with the areas affected by explosions and the way they produce safety zones. This section speaks to the way residents and miners understand its uncertain limits and thus unsettle assumptions of containment. Finally, Emulsion refers to the use of emulsion-explosives (a liquid of ammonium nitrate, fuel and emulsifier which after detonation produces toxic gases which contain nitrogen oxides) used for blasting rocks in the underground and the open-pit. Other than a blasting agent for rock breaking, here it emerges as an agent of rumors surrounding vanishing minerals. From blasting to extracting and from masking minerals to transporting them across borders, this article describes the way chemical relationalities reshape everyday concerns about and narrative textures surrounding toxic exposures.
Opening up geo-social assemblages and toxic workspaces
Within the ongoing debate about the Anthropocene, the notion of atmospheric toxicities has gained a planetary rather than global force. Since the end of the Second World War, industrial states have geo-engineered and remade atmospheres and ecologies which cannot be unmade or repaired (Masco, 2013). For Masco, it is the cumulative fallout of the 20th century which continues to shift global and earth systems, and which requires us to imagine “a new politics of air, soil, water, energy, and finance, while also demanding new concepts of planetary security.” Others trace the notion of respiratory economies back to the phenomenon of gas warfare and decode modernity in terms of increasing atmosphere-explication. Toxic gas and its sores confronted us for the first time with the fact of our “immersion in a breathable milieu” and the necessity to design and shape our breathability (Sloterdijk, 2009).
DR Congo’s history is similarly shaped by atmospheric toxicities and extractive regimes that took place under colonial rule. Its uranium (extracted in the Shinkolobwe uranium and radium mine in the Haut-Katanga region of DR Congo) was used as part of the Manhattan Project which served the production of the atomic bombs that would devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and signal the end of World War II (Hecht, 2014). These extractive histories are embedded in earlier forms of dispossession from which geological sores emerge. Directing our attention to the larger history of extractive landscapes, this metaphor allows us to think not in terms of aftermaths, a simple before and after, but about cumulative colonial and postcolonial continuities of toxicity (Peša, 2023). More so, the sore restages the question about what it means to live and work within this late industrial capitalist logic.
The mineral-rich regions of DR Congo are the playground of (inter)national elites who reap benefits based on (neo)colonial relations to Euro-America and the intensification of Chinese capitalism. In this region, global resource networks are shaped by the rise of ASGM, the return of some large-scale tin and gold mining companies, the historic presence of industrial copper mining, and the re-emergence of limestone mining as part of a developing cement industry (Bikubanya, 2025). Here, the global quest for green belts which contain gold, Katangese copper, and Kivutien tin, tantalum and tungsten (the so-called 3T digital minerals) is increasingly integrated as part of a wider green scramble or green revolution and the quest for renewable energies (Rubbers, 2013). However, these situated mining worlds always suggest embodied endurance and expenditure, abandonment and neglect. Opening the geological sore in this context speaks to the leaking outward of wealth within a context of economic extraversion (Bayart, 2009).
From these extractive landscapes, I develop the notion of a geological sore. In Elizabeth Povinelli’s work, the notion of a sore emerges at the productive intersection between embodied and geological registers. At first, it is used to describe acts of abandon and neglect, and a sense of being left open to rot. Initially, a still-festering sore represents a symptom that is potentially a sign of HIV (Povinelli, 2006). Later on, she thinks with “the social world of rotten things” in productive tension with extractive industries and planetary depletion (2016, p. 10). In doing so, the sore connects the earth’s crust to the miner’s body as they endure the exhaustion of untimely exhaustion of energies (and associated exposures to chemicals, aquifers, emulsions).
From this preliminary angle, thinking with a still-festering sore touches upon a wider burgeoning geological turn in post-human studies (Ellsworth and Kruse, 2012; Ozug, 2020). Here, the extraction of fossil fuels and resources from the earth’s crust anticipates what Povinelli calls the affective space of “the desert” (2016). It represents the imaginary realm of planetary depletion to come and is already materially present in ever-advancing borders of resource extraction, scrambles for energize-able dead matter, and the accumulation and storage of minerals. However, the dead matter that is hunted for in the race for minerals is easily contrasted to the neglected and ignored workers in the underground. The geological sores and the neglect they evoke are symptomatic of this affective space.
Similar to the geological turn, thinking with chemical relationalities has previously fueled post-human accounts of “suspensions and volatiles” that reshape the planet but which equally throw physical bodies into a mix of compositions (Choy and Zee, 2015: p. 216). Yet, the precise aim of this article is to move beyond the strict material confines of these material relations and to integrate the production of rumors and accusations into the logic of the sore. Inasmuch as a mine oozes contaminants, minerals, tailings, and noise outwards, miners also spill nervousness and rumors about exposure. In return, it requires us to index not only the endurance of those who live in its perimeter (using alcohol and self-medication to endure but not heal), but also to consider the way histories (rumors, accusations, suspicions) emerge and attest to the reconfigurations of social worlds shaped by life under exposure.
Contributing to ethnographies at the intersection of chemical and geological worlds, I track situated ways of knowing and reading exposures as they emerge from these toxic work- and living spaces. In doing so, I restate the need for a critical medical and environmental anthropology of mining which attunes to registers of nervousness and rumors. Here, nervousness does not merely circumscribe the contours of an “everyday mood” (Hunt, 2015: p. 149). Rather, it is a mood that plays its part in “keeping the monstrous alive” (ibid. p. 18). That is as much to say as, rumors and accusations not only reveal anxieties, “contain uncertainties” or “constitute meaning amidst contradiction,” but they also integrate into a social register what the company’s regime seeks to neglect or rebut and allows us to unsettle the notion of opaque and black-boxed industry (White, 2000: p. 70). In the following part, I track the notion of a sore to colonial rule and introduce the reader to cumulative histories of extraction and everyday coloniality in DR Congo.
Birthing a geological sore
On 5 June 1951, Léon Depage, delegate administrator of the colonial tin mining company Symétain, in Maniema province, spoke at the inauguration of an exposition at the Museum of the Belgian Congo in Tervuren. During his speech, he addressed the “birth and development” of a mining enterprise in a rainforest region. Next to missionaries and mercenaries, geologists and prospectors became the pioneers of the “penetration of our civilization as they uprooted, from a most hostile nature, the secrets of tin deposits which we exploit today,” Depage announced (Exposition, nd). According to him, it was through their “efforts to give birth” that the region was able to rid itself of its “sores.”
Colonial rule (1885-1961) expanded into a concessionist economy at the meeting point between logistics, population displacement, and the import of technologies of extraction. First, local populations were displaced from their traditional forests and lands to make space for industrial mining. Dépage’s descriptions were embedded within a larger colonial rhetoric that juxtaposed the advent of the industrial enterprise to the earlier Arab slave trade, sleeping sickness, and the absence of roads. Similar to Symétain, in other provinces of what is now DR Congo, foreign prospectors found gold and copper. During the first half of the 20th century, the Belgian government established mining compagnies (sociétés minières) and compartmentalized the region into concessions. 1 If geologists and technicians were the doctors and healers to Africa’s so-called “sores”, then extractive infrastructures were its medicine as they scavenged for mineral deposits in regions where communities had been displaced.
From the 1930s, mining companies, together with the colonial administration and the church, used segregation, paternalistic practices, and social engineering to “stabilize” and control the workforce (Van Onselen, 2001). For example, in the mining city of Kamituga, in miners started to call themselves garçons de Kaga (the boys from Kamituga) and assumed an identity as “sons” of the company as part of late-colonial paternalst strategies to establish a relationship in kinship terms (Kabunga et al., 2023: p. 88). Currently in DR Congo, with employees calling the company their “father” (tata ya biso) and themselves “children” of the company (bana) (Hendriks, 2022: p. 189).
However, new technologies exposed miners to the harm of dust that became increasingly harmful as it became more fine and invisible in the underground (McCulloch and Miller, 2023). All the while, attracting migrant laborers from nearby African countries, increased the spread of other ailments such as tuberculosis (Van Onselen, 2018). At the same time, it created a “regime of ignorance” with regard to harm and pulmonary afflictions along racial inequalities. In their fight against African sores, other ailments were imported through extractive technologies (and population control and migration policies) that reproduced and accentuated already present social and racial inequalities under colonial rule.
In sum, colonial rule effectively translated the forest, its soil, and its communities into a concessionist economy. Concession has a double meaning. On the one hand, it is a delimited area about which the state has “granted rights” to a company to extract (Hendriks, 2022: p. 7). On the other hand, it holds a “grudging acknowledgement” about “material, discursive, and affective forces” beyond that company’s control, such as remains of memories of historical trauma and customary claims over land (ibid.). Simultaneous to a macropolity of restriction and population control, the colonial state’s paranoia generated an “everyday mood of nervousness” among Belgian colonizers. One of these affective forces as part of the ways Congolese experienced coloniality and which constrained Belgian nervousness are rumors. Indeed, “rumors complicated Belgian nervousness” (ibid., p. 133) and new technologies (for extracting medical science and primary resources) were “met with vivid rumors” (p. 11). To give an example, Congolese deviced local mnemonic systems to name the violence imposed by the colonizer (Likaka, 2009). As discussed in (Marijsse and Mwisha, 2022), miners adopted foul language as mnemonic strategies under colonial rule to connect death in the mines in eastern DR Congo to rumors about white men eating people.
After independence (1961), a wider decolonial current engulfed the country to rid the country of its colonial sores. The country underwent a wider political policy, known as zairianisation. Along with a name change to Zaire, the nationalization of Belgian mining companies, and discourse about authenticité, the country continued to rely heavily on its burgeoning copper industry in the Katanga region (mid-1960s to early 1970s) (Bezy et al., 1981; Peemans, 1975). Confronted with national debts, economic crisis, and plummeting state revenues at the end of the 1970s, the regime opted to alleviate state control over its mining industry and allowed its citizens access to the subsoil in 1982, causing further pressure on industrial mining (Geenen, 2015).
With the Congo wars (1996-2003), what was left of industrial mining was abandoned, yet its shafts and pits remained as open and neglected geological sores. The earlier concessions became increasingly exploited by armed groups and they subcontracted extraction to artisanal miners who were looking for quick windfall. In the subsequent years, industrial mining halted and smuggling networks, implicating state and non-state agents, around a surging artisanal mining sector perpetuated (Smith, 2021). With the new mining code in 2002, a joint-venture law passed that allowed concessions to be managed in a joint-venture. Amidst already extracted colonial concessions, artisanal and small-scale mining and industrial mining and subcontracting companies share a quest for veins, high-grade soils, and tailings.
Yet which sores heal and which remain and fester anew from re-opened extractive landscapes? What “fantastic stories” and “dread” re-emerge and which new realities meet rumors from the past (Hunt, 2015: pp. 18, 149)? In the following sections, an ethnography about toxic exposures and everyday life emerges from within these “already blasted landscapes” (Tsing, 2016).
Intrusion
For Charles, Harry, and other technical personnel in the treatment plant and the underground, everyday life was rife with suspicions. They were looking for patterns in the ailments and treatments around them. According to them, the company’s doctor reduced every disease (and its treatment) to malaria. In turn, death was “always because of malaria.” The illnesses were “deceiving their bodies”, they explained to me. In effect, they became suspicious of each and every cough because it could be indicative of silicosis, tuberculosis, or HIV. People would also actively mask their symptoms. There is a rumor, they explained, that people travelled across the border to be injected with fat to hide their weight loss.
As described in the work of Luise White, the epistemic categories of rumors, gossip and accusations are not to be neatly separated (2000, p. 59). More so, they all “allocate responsibility” and “contextualize extraction” (p. 62). They do so by incorporating oddities and contradictions into a temporary order and connect “specific places” to “specific histories” (p. 83). However, the connection between embodied harm, rumors, and accusations not only reveals anxieties or “naturalizes the unnatural” (p. 70), but it also renders perceptible what the company wished to retreat from sight.
Something was in the air, literally and figuratively, and intruded into their body. Harry explained: “My colleagues had illnesses due to toxic chemicals that spread through the mine as dust. As soon as you inhale the dust of the drill, their nostrils become blocked, and sores on their liver appeared. It was because they used to drill and you know… the dust of these rocks, just like the car passes and disperses the dust, that is the way it is for the driller. And the guys from security give you dust masks. But at a given moment, you feel it go in and you say to yourself, because of this mask, all will go well. It is said that everything you breathe through the mask is dry and will go directly to your lungs. But at a given moment you will have a chest that starts to hurt, and you will think it is poison.”
The invisibility of toxic air is made salient as a vector of unease through the presence of measures of control and protection that betray that something might be harmful. “Every individual is responsible to follow the security instructions, saying we need to put anti-dust masks. Apart from that, no responsibility is taken to guarantee the future. But the masks do not work. It does not filter it properly. There is a possibility that toxicities pass alongside it. There, where you cannot see the dust, but it is there because there are a lot of machines, dust is permanently there, even if it is invisible.” From the viewpoint of silicotic sores in the lungs, exposure can be decoded through the dusty regions shaped by dust-producing machines and a wider history of medicalization. Without adequate technologies to visualize the sores, however, there is no way to clinically diagnose this incurable disease and thus to delegate a miner’s life to a life under prognosis or to receive compensation for occupational diseases (Marijsse, 2026a).
Medical knowledge, however, travels across borders, from capital cities to the mine. “We are exposed to it (silicosis) and it is that disease of which the enterprise does not want to admit that it exists. I went to a capital city to seek medical aid. There, they say you have silicosis, but if you return here, their doctor denies it and give you anti-malaria pills.” Later that week, in conversation with the director of health of the mine, I enquired about the way silicosis impacts workers. He shrugged and stated “silicosis, what is silicosis?” The company’s regime subordinated Charles’ experience about exposure to the realm of neglect.
In turn, this neglect became contested through everyday suspicions, accusations, and rumors – and which bear the traces of cumulative extractive histories. According to Charles and his brother, the company’s diagnostic infrastructure did not suffice. “We learned about silicosis from our supervisor, he worked in the mines at the time of the Belgians in Lubumbashi. He told me it was an illness that is provoked by the dust that one inhales, and it created problems for the lungs, kidneys, and liver. But the company here does not want us to talk about it.” In sum, the company’s “regime of imperceptibility” was met with defiance, observation, accusation, and rumor (Murphy, 2008).
I think with Harry’s scarred lungs and Charles’ eyes and understand them as embodied sores that linger and unsettle the epidermal limit between their bodies and intruding abiotic and toxic agents. It allows us to understand their bodies and exposures, as Vanessa Agard-Jones put it, as “a melding together of blood, bones, flesh, chemicals, chromosomes, cells, and spirit” and “bearing the traces of multiple forms of power” Agard-Jones (2013). From the viewpoint of Charles and his brother’s bodies, their sores are left “on the shelf to rot” – literally visible but neglected by medical care and the discursive politics of mining companies (Povinelli, 2006: p. 34). Against the backdrop of global resource networks, a different kind of “normal” or everyday emerges here, where “people’s expectations change; they live their lives through a different kind of filter that includes expecting to be breathless at the top of a flight of stairs, expecting to have that telltale grey tinge to the skin, expecting to die by the age of 40” (Cartwright, 2016: p. 428).
In this section, I highlighted the way miners attune to toxic exposures and the way a regime of neglect is actively pushed back against. From Charles and Harry’s vantage point, their workspace cannot be reduced to a conjunction of pathogenic and environmental risks. If their living surroundings were no longer perceived to be benevolent, then they became suspect and shaped a shared atmosphere of distress (Anderson, 2009). Here, exposures need to be decoded in conjunction with the way miners live with their sores and the way these sores are kept open by workers as a form of defiance against the company’s practices, policies and discourses of neglect. In the following, we move from the miner’s body to the mine’s own perimeter and the way its fumes radiate and spread outward.
Blast radius
The mine’s plant and underground remained out of sight during fieldwork, yet experienced by nearby residents through its planned blasts and fumes and the suspicions that travelled from workers to nearby homes. Even to the workers in the mine, the so-called production of minerals remained largely an unknown procedure, cut up into a labyrinth and black-boxed set of different mechanical and chemical processes. In other words, I wondered how social life is shaped through volatiles and toxic agents which disperse beyond the mine and how these exposures are endured. In this section, I track the way the observed effects and radius of industrial processing impact and shape everyday life.
Mining for minerals is unlike that of oil extraction, for example. In the latter, the fluid gushing and extraction of high volumes transported in pipelines and tankers requires self-contained units (rigs and drilling platforms) that can literally be assembled, dismantled and moved elsewhere (Appel, 2019). Minerals, however, are concentrated in deposits, such as green belts, which need mechanical and chemical processes to extract. Exploration, prospection, and extraction remain largely fixed to the situated soils which are categorized into waste, low- and high-grade categories by geologists. Unlike oil, these minerals are not gushing. In the case of gold, for example, geologists look for anything higher than 5g per tonne. Through its use of chemical explosives and reagents and resources such as water which is required in the industrial processing sequence, the geological sore expands in the landscape.
The notion of a radius to the blasting zone is part of the way the mine’s area of exposure is imagined, assessed and measured. The mine’s security chief explained to me: “Blasting takes place every day at 2 pm, for open pit, and 6 am and pm in the underground. But where does it halt?” He continued: “There is a disease tied to the vapor of blasting. This smoke which contains nitrate touches the lungs, and you die immediately. As I supervise the explosion, I only allow people to come, 15 to 30 minutes after blasting. But the fumes remain visible, it makes dust lift off and we wait until we no longer see the dust.”
For nearby residents, these extractive processes are largely invisible in its totality, yet its presence shapes the total experience of everyday life. It is either experienced up front, as in the lives of Charles and Harry, through the machines, drills and chemicals that reshape the earth’s crust. Or it is experienced at a distance: through fumes, noises and odors that have created a certain routine in everyday life. In the words of a truck driver in the open pit who lives with his family near the mine: “They know they destroy life, but they do not seek to save the life of the people around it by saying that you cannot live in this environment, because after blasting, the dust rises, and this dust contains chemical products. It goes up, and then it spreads following the winds. Today even, at 2 pm there was a blast and the mothers went to the field to get vegetables.”
The experiences of miners and nearby residents do not mutually exclude each other. Rather, the miner’s experiences spread and co-shape the affective space of residents and families nearby. After their shift, Charles and his brother return to their family who live nearby the mine. Their experience is shared with their families and friends and they shape their attunements to toxicities outside of the mine’s internal cavities and treatment plant. For example, the wife of a chemical engineer explained: “I think that, if we do an analysis of this river, we would find water that could have certain reagents that come from the plant, just like the air we breathe. My husband says the air is an ensemble of gases, the air in the environment cannot be healthy. When they blast, the chemicals they use evaporate into the atmosphere. If you breathe this air, you will understand that this is not pure air, even if they say so, it is air that is polluted at every level.”
These coordinated blasts mix with the dry and rainy seasons and co-shape situated coping practices and attunements in everyday life. One of his colleagues, an underground driller explained: “Here, we are in danger because of the chemical products. I saw these products dry onto the trees, trees that give avocados, but they dry up because of the cyanide and the acids. At the level of the company, they sensitize us. But the international workers in the camp receive bottled water from elsewhere. We (local employees) take water from the well and it is treated with products. People who live nearby, use other wells. But how does it affect them? They say they treat it, but they themselves take it from elsewhere.” In response, people were buying their own purification tablets because they noticed workers at the mine were drinking bottled water.
In a similar way, a mother and a wife of an employee of the mine explained how she pays attention to seasonal changes when attending to her crops: “In the dry season, when the dust goes on the leaves of vegetables, it stays there. And when you look for vegetables, you notice some have colored dust on them. And you ask yourself, whether to take them and wash them or not. But in the rainy season, the rain will wash everything. There will always be spillage and it can spill and enter the vegetables because also the leaves breathe.”
In sum, a mine has its very own concoction of gasses, liquids, solids, and which mix with its surroundings. I return briefly to the conversation with the security chief in charge of blasting. During the interview, he explained that “the effects on the vegetables are not visible, but when we do blast, we look at where the smoke goes, this smoke has a color. It is a bit green, yellow, orange, and you see it go over the villages, where there are people, houses, gardens. This smoke does not stay in the sky.” Similar to the border region of Katanga in southeastern DR Congo, and witnessed first-hand by Charles, toxic exhaust and volatile waste spreads across the border into Zambia (Peša, 2022).
Because toxins engage at the smallest scale, they easily intrude bodies and radiate across frontiers. Within this context, the masks that do not filter fine dust and the blasting which could affect the air they breathe and contaminate the underground water supply and aquatic life re-energized everyday conversations about the mine’s toxicity and infirmity. In sum, the mine not only remakes and reshuffles the surface of the earth and interferes with the production of atmospheres, aquifers, and soils – it also generates suspicions, attunements and a new milieu. Thinking with extraction lets us trace how regions connect to bodies that are connected to “carbon cycles of eating, drinking, and breathing” which are afforded “through industrial based production and consumption and the minerals (coal, steel, copper, gold) needed to compose the global factories for it, creating waste and going into the environment of the people who live close to it” (Povinelli, 2016). At the same time, these carbon cycles (and the way toxic exposures become part of these cycles) are decided by distances to the mine, communal and individual evading and coping strategies, and company policies along measured or neglected assessments.
The blurry limits of the mine allow everyday life to take shape under a shared mood. Similar to Hunt’s account of “nervousness” under colonial rule, here, rumors can be understood as forces that impede and contest. Shaped by hearsay, acts of witnessing, knowledge from outside, and the reading of one’s bodies and surroundings, rumors keep suspicions alive and refuse to let leakages be simply covered up. However, rather than shaping a regime of control and containment – as it was under colonial rule – here a mood of nervousness among residents and miners emerges from the company’s repeated inattentions and its attempts at rebuttal by way of environmental tests and security protocols. From this perspective, rumors may very well be understood as a strategy of defiance, whether intended or not, as these narratives refuse leakages to be silenced or simply covered up.
Emulsion
As with knowledge about exposure to rock dust invading the drillers and other underground miners’ lungs, temporal shards that pertain to colonial rule re-energize now and then. It is a widely recounted register in Eastern DR Congo that colonists hid the true value of the subsoil. Actively maintaining epistemic asymmetries, now retired miners who worked for Belgian mining companies recollect how they were told to use gloves, masks, and glasses (Marijsse, 2026b). On the one hand, it protected against the toxicity of chemical vapors and liquids, yet the use of protective instruments was equally maintained to demonstrate that minerals such as gold were poisonous. Such forms of storytelling and rumors were channeled as a theft prevention policy under colonial rule and were used to convince Congolese workers about minerals’ toxicity.
These stories moved and grew along a colonially imposed “macropolity” that controlled and restricted social life (Balandier, as cited in Hunt, 2015: p. 17). In Uganda, similar narratives emerged around “spraying” practices (White, 2000: p. 96). European fumigation technologies were used as a “plague control measure in southern Uganda in the 1930s” and engendered a link between public health campaign fumes and personal attacks. The fumigants (poisonous insecticides) used on human dwellings were lethal and provoked a “strong smell”. As such, narratives of past toxicities and deaths are welded to a present in which the debris of deteriorated colonial infrastructures meets extractive flows and chemicals. Re-energizing and shaping a postcolonial present, they reconnect and establish local epistemologies and hierarchies surrounding death, exposure, contamination and chemicals.
Similar narratives can be retrieved in the world of hard-rock mining in DR Congo. For my interlocutors, the word “emulsion” refers to the use of an explosive blend for blasting and rock excavation. As the chief of security explained to me, it is a liquid of ammonium nitrate, fuel and emulsifier and is used as a blasting agent for rock breaking. In conversation with drillers, security experts, and chemists of the mine, this reagent, colloquially called mosho surfaced repeatedly and connected different registers of meaning.
Late one evening, Charles came by, explaining: “A Zambian miner died because of gas exposure. He had a pulmonary problem. He is around 37 years old. It’s mosho (emulsion) that killed him. When they blast, breaking the rocks in the hard-rock, you need to blast first in order to bring it to the crushers that render it finer so that it can go to the smelting plant. To degas those blasting spaces, you need to send in a lot of air, and this air will evacuate the bad gas that will leave the area. And this gas, together with the dust from the explosion, if you inhale it, it impacts your respiratory system.”
Charles explained he did not know the correct word in French because mosho is derived from English mining terminology. Miners, engineers and chemists colloquially refer to “emulsion” as mosho, which implies a world of volatiles, smog and smoke and the rhythmic blasts. Moshi/o is a local atavism which speaks to the mining world because it refers to something like ‘smoking’. Charles continued: “The gas that killed the Zambian after the blast is the thing they use to change the color of the minerals. Even if it is right in front of you, you will see its black color. You see nothing but black and you can no longer identify the minerals in it, if it is gold, sulphur, copper. This system of blasting uses a reagent called mosho, that actively masks it. You know, the company still uses it, even though it is not allowed at an international level, to avoid theft. If we would no longer steal, they would no longer need to use mosho.”
Mosho also creates tension between geologists and blasters. “Geologists tell us where to blast with it. They follow red lines in their notes, and they take samples which they take to the lab. They analyze per 15 m^2 and they make a lot of holes with the drilling machine. First, they spot pyrite to know if it is highly mineralized. Then, after the tests, they will tell us where to continue to blast for the high-grade and steer clear of waste or low-grade and estimate the concentration. But if we look at the soil, there is no difference between low- and high-grade. Yet they tell us to throw it away. The parts they keep and transport to treat, we see the same soil because it is already masked.”
Unlike artisanal mining, industrial mines are experienced as “black boxes of which we need only know the inputs and the outputs” (Latour and Venn, 2002). There is an inherent opacity that is tied to the complexity of the technological processes, and which in turn attends to local narrations that seek to get a grip on these invisible spaces and extractive processes. Although inchoate and oblique, the use of the term mosho actively brought out, criticized, associated, and re-energized colonial memories about theft, toxic vapors, and leaks all the while being the reagent that allows the geological sore to fester, linger and expand and inscribe into everyday life through rumors and suspicions about the closed-circuit or geologic divisions no longer holding. Here, memory traces of colonial trauma re-energized under present conditions and attend to the “colonial roots of toxicity” alike (Peša, 2023). Reading landscapes with rumors, environmental observations connect epistemically to a wider situated historiography of toxicity.
At this point, not only the production processes, but also the resources are black-boxed through synthetic relationalities. Emulsion, however, is tied to both the known and the unknown, as it connects the way it allows rhetoric about emulsion to circulate beyond the mine. Rather, it is the mine’s leaky aspect – time and again actively ignored through the company’s discourse and policies and interpellated and unsettled by the community’s capacity to evoke rumors and acts of witnessing, that show the way earlier extractive histories in concessionist economies cannot be contained. Instead, they co-shape the way harm meets suspicion. In sum, the mine’s leakiness circulated back and rumors and about death, ailments, and invisible minerals held its feet tightly rooted in earlier extractive histories and the witnessing of very real harm.
Conclusion
In this article, I decoded the way toxic exposures shape everyday life around an industrial mine in Eastern DR Congo. As shown, large-scale mining cannot only be approached ethnographically by decoding its black box of industrial sequences and technical reports, but also through the social worlds produced by residents, workers, and material traces of the mine nearby.
Through a multi-scalar approach and connecting geo-anthropology to the anthropology of rumor and nervousness, I moved from spillage to spillage, and from the experience of odors and fumes nearby, to the way dust invades the lungs of drillers. Moving between the miner’s body and the mine’s perimeter, I connected the expansion of the industrial mine it to other places and times, from historic trauma under colonial rule to cross-frontier exposures and travelling fumes. As explained, the leakiness of something which festers, oozes and spills beyond its bounds yet cannot be contained or healed, can be described analytically and empirically as a sore (Povinelli, 2016). What emerges is the materially informed metaphor of a geological sore. Here, the mine is imagined through its very concrete and imaginary leaks, spilling dust and reagents into bodies and its surroundings and equally shaping and producing a sense of nervousness which contest its boundaries and speaks to the mine’s infirmity (Hunt, 2015). In effect, the production of rumors mimics the leakiness of the mine itself and are deeply reflective of these toxic relationalities that shape the everyday.
Engaging ethnographically with rumors and suspicions that emerge from toxic spillovers highlights the way they incorporating oddities and contradictions into a temporary order and connect “specific places” to “specific histories” (White, 2000: p. 83). They engage with what Susan Lepselter calls a “poetic process” or “narrative genre” Lepselter (2012, pp. 85, 101). However, Charles and Harry’s sores not only reveal very real anxieties and harm, nor do they merely “naturalize the unnatural” or “constitute meaning amidst contradiction,” but they also integrate into stubborn social register what the company’s regime of imperceptibility tries to hide from sight (White, 2000: p. 70). Rather than calming nervousness, these narrative structures keep the sores open and defy attempts by corporate infrastructures to obscure harm.
In sum, thinking ethnographically with the mine and toxicities and rumors it produces, equally highlights the social and material sores that refuse to be sutured anew. Blasting open any surface to reach any deposit did not wipe away earlier extractive histories in these concessions. To understand the geological sores, ethnographic attunements require us to historicize exposure from below and read them through situated registers. For this reason, environmental risk should be expanded to include the social worlds and politics of neglect, rumor and suspicion that co-shape life around further expanding extractive landscapes. The experience of risk cannot be reduced to the level of description. Rather, where people experience risk requires us to attune to the way these are translated materially, historically, affectively and politically. Thinking with the mine as a geological sore allowed us to decode the way miners endure and interrogate ongoing exposures and highlighted the way in which these wounds allow us to interpellate earlier extractive histories and cumulative histories of extraction.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wholeheartedly thank Divin-Luc Bikubanya and Philippe Dunia Kabunga for their generous discussions and input concerning these topics.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was funded by FWO / FNRS (Flemish Foundation for Scientific Research / National Foundation for Scientific Research) (G056718N).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
