Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis Original article “We are one big happy family”: The social organisation of artisanal and small scale gold mining in Eastern Zimbabwe Njabulo Chipangura Robert Bosch Stiftung Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES), School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Big happy family Artisanal mining Habitus Apprenticeship Mining lottery Mutanda Range Violence ABSTRACT In Eastern Zimbabwe, artisanal and small scale mining (ASM) has become a way of life that provides a source of livelihood to thousands of unemployed people. Moving away from the popularised discourse that views artisanal miners as ‘illegal’ villains who recklessly pollute the environment, this paper takes an inside look into their social organisation. It argues that artisanal gold mining is an entrepreneurial activity that is regulated by a set of socio- cultural processes. The paper looks specifically at the growth of ASM within Mutanda Range in Odzi communal lands in Eastern Zimbabwe; it is based on long-term ethnographic engagements involving interviews with miners and participant observation. Despite being labelled as criminals because of the informal nature of their activities, this paper will argue that gold miners working at Mutanda Range have well-organised working structures with clearly defined roles for those who undertake mining. 1. Introduction In Zimbabwe, artisanal and small scale mining (ASM) for gold is undertaken through the exploitation of reefs and alluvial placer de- posits. It is estimated that as many as two million people across the country derive their livelihoods from ASM (Mawowa, 2013; Spiegel, 2017; Chipangura, 2019). Despite the huge role of ASM, relatively little has been written on its social organisation. The exception to this is work focusing on the political economy of ASM, which has been projected as riddled by violent conflicts and capital accumulation by elites (Katsaura, 2010; Moore and Mawowa, 2010; Alexander and McGregor, 2013; Mawowa, 2013; Maringira and Nyamunda, 2016; Spiegel, 2017). This paper aims to help fill this gap by looking at the social orga- nisation of ASM at Mutanda Range, in Odzi communal lands in Eastern Zimbabwe. I will illuminate the evolution and growth of ASM at Mutanda Range as a socio-cultural practice that has its own set of knowledge practices, developed and perfected by makorokozas (gold miners) through mutually constituted working relationships over time. Based on engagement with makorokozas working at Mutanda, which took the form of interactive conversations and observations, the study reveals ASM to be a normative way of life structured by apprenticeship processes, organised syndicates and family-like connections. Although ASM in Zimbabwe is often associated with illegality, violence and en- vironmental destruction, the activities of makorokozas working at Mutanda Range were found to be clearly organised and to follow defined social patterns and chains of operations. In presenting this argument I concur with Lahiri-Dutt (2018: 15) who suggests that deep ethnographic insights into the social networks of small-scale miners can allow us to move beyond the generalised tropes of anarchy, greed, blood, conflicts and violence which have long been associated with ASM. Indeed, when I undertook my ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern Zimbabwe during the period 2015–2018, I ob- served an organised ASM sector in which makorokozas were working together in syndicates, literally operating as big happy families, with an overall objective of alleviating themselves from poverty in a country where there are virtually no jobs (Fisher, 2007; Thornton, 2014; Nhlengetwa and Hein, 2015; Hilson et al., 2018; Lahiri-Dutt, 2018; Chipangura, 2019). However, this paper will also examine some in- cidents of mining conflicts which have been reported in other parts of Zimbabwe, in order to highlight that these violent clashes are gang related and are confined to Midlands and Mashonaland provinces. The paper includes verbatim quotations; the identities of interlocutors are kept confidential through the use of pseudonyms. 2. Gold mining habitus, syndicates and the apprenticeship process Habitus — a term originally coined by Bourdieu — is a recognition of a set of learned responses to the world which evolves over time through relationships between individuals and groups (Joyce, 2000; Roux, 2007). Social habitus reflects behaviours, thoughts or https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.08.001 Received 10 March 2019; Received in revised form 22 June 2019; Accepted 5 August 2019 E-mail address: njabulo.chipangura@wits.ac.za. The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 2214-790X/ © 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Please cite this article as: Njabulo Chipangura, The Extractive Industries and Society, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.08.001