Geological sores: minerals,toxicities,and rumors in DR Congo

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.