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4 Tanzanite God gave us the mine and gave investors the brain. Ayub Rioba Our destination was a windswept hillside a few kilometers south of Tanzania’s majestic Mount Kilimanjaro, the site of world’s only known deposit of an obscure gemstone known as tanzanite. We entered the compound through the first of three gates, each staffed with armed guards and ringed with tall fences topped with razor wire. Two were monitored by the security personnel of a South African mining corporation known as Tanzanite One, and the third was patrolled by Tanzanian government officials. The latter marked the entrance to the Mererani Controlled Area, the core of the tanzanite deposit where access is tightly restricted to mining personnel and their official visitors.1 My guide, a young miner who began his career in South Africa, took me first to hear a presentation delivered by one of the firm’s geologists. After learning about the unique 500-million-year-old rock formation that contains tanzanite, he gave me a tour of the mine site itself, providing a brief history of tanzanite production along the way. We drove past sorting and processing facilities, dormitories and a dining hall. At one point, we climbed down into a steeply pitched abandoned mine shaft to get a sense of the spatiality of the underground gem deposits. We then drove to the far edge of the corporate perimeter. Here, my guide stopped and explained that the fence in front of us was absolutely crucial to the mining operation because it worked, as he put it, “to keep the miners in, and the scum, if you like, out.” The “miners,” in this instance, were the employees of Tanzanite One, and the “scum” were the thousands of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) operators and laborers who worked in rudimentary mine shafts located just beyond the fence. Many of the ASM miners operated shafts within what is now the corporate perimeter until they were forcibly relocated by the Tanzanian military when the mining enclave was privatized in the late 1990s. The entrances to their current mines, which were easily visible less than a kilometer from our position, ran perilously close to and occasion4 Tanzanite for Tanzanians 94 Africa after Apartheid ally intersected with corporate shafts underground. The proximity of the different mining operations made for a volatile situation: over the previous decade, dozens of ASM miners had been shot, several fatally, when they were caught “trespassing” within the corporate mining zone. The long-running battle between corporate and ASM miners for control of the tanzanite deposits received extensive coverage in both the national press and trade publications in the mining and jewelry industries after the core of the mine was acquired by South Africans in the mid-1990s. Indeed, tanzanite mining became a national test case regarding the potential pitfalls and benefits of opening up Tanzania’s economy to South African investors, throwing neocolonial economic relationships into graphic relief. In the case of gold and gemstone mining, the promise of quick riches for small-scale miners stood in sharp contrast to the generalized poverty surrounding the mining districts. The extraction of gems and precious metals was a zero-sum game, pitting technologically sophisticated, vertically integrated, multinational mining corporations against artisanal miners using flashlight headlamps and manual equipment. In the case of tanzanite mining, the situation was complicated further by the fact that the gem was strongly associated with the nation: in the view of locals, tanzanite should have been reserved for Tanzanians. Portraying Tanzanian miners as “scum” could only inflame these preexisting tensions. Controversial South African Mining Investments The implementation of economic reforms in Tanzania resulted in a radical restructuring of the country’s mining industry. In 1994, for example, there were only 170 prospecting licenses and 22 mining licenses registered with the government; by 2005, over 2,200 prospecting licenses had been granted and 200 mining licenses were on the books, more than a tenfold increase over the course of a single decade.2 Foreign miners, including some of the largest mining firms in South Africa, flocked to the country during this period, injecting over US$2 billion in FDI into the Tanzanian economy in little more than a decade.3 With an initial investment of US$335 million, including US$205 million to acquire mining rights and US$130 million in project financing, AngloGold, a subsidiary of the Anglo American mining conglomerate, acquired a 50 percent stake in Geita Gold Mine from Ghana’s Ashanti...

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