Toxicity, Racial Capitalism, and Colonial Mining: Lessons from Cyanide and Gold Mining in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia)

This chapter explores the connections between work, nature, and contamination under racial capitalism in the colonies. The aim is to show, through an empirical detailed case study, how environmental history can engage with the history of racial and class oppression focusing on subaltern bodies and their entanglement with power within toxic workplaces. The colonial extractivist system is a perfect laboratory for such an experiment in environmental history. The chapter focuses on gold extraction in the colony of Southern Rhodesia by white settler mining companies from the 1890s to the 1940s. Due to the low quality of the mineral, from around 1900 the colonial gold mining industry adopted the cyanide process to treat low-grade refractory ores. This chapter examines how the use of cyanidation technology chemicalised landscapes and generated racialised chemical exposure. That historical case is a telling example of silent chemical violence and toxic extractivism. Theoretically, it relates to the concepts of slow violence, trans-corporeality, and Wasteocene, while articulating with multidisciplinary research on environmental justice, working-class environmentalism, and labour and the environment. The chapter uses archival material from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspaper articles, and secondary literature.