Santa Clara University Scholar Commons Economics Leavey School of Business 6-2015 Gold Mining and Economic and Social Change in West Africa Michael Kevane Santa Clara University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/econ Part of the Economics Commons Recommended Citation Kevane, M. (2015). Gold Mining and Economic and Social Change in West Africa. In C. Monga & J.Y. Lin (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics: Volume 2: Policies and Practices, Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199687107.013.020 This material was originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics: Volume 2: Policies and Practices edited by Célestin Monga & Justin Yifu Lin, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/rights/permissions. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Leavey School of Business at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Economics by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CHAPTER 18 GOLD MINING AND ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN WEST AFRICA MICHAEL KEVANE 18.1 INTRODUCTION THE history of gold mining in West Africa offers an important caveat to the aphorism that "geography is destiny:' The aphorism has considerable appeal. Through much of history the economic opportunities available in a geographic region shaped the social infrastruc­ ture of people who inhabited the region. The institutions of those who lived by the sea differed from those who roamed the desert. The truism is sometimes validated in empiri­ cal analysis: strong correlation across societies of two variables, one geographic and the other social, is interpreted as evidence consistent with a casual story. Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013), thus, found that regions more adaptable to plow-based agriculture developed social institutions unfavorable to women. Fenske (2012) found that regions exhibiting more ecological diversity were more likely to develop complex proto-state institutions. Research on historical and contemporary gold mining in West Africa, however, suggests a more nuanced story. The record suggests a variety of outcomes. There is also considerable room for mismeasurement of outcomes. The further back in time economic historians go, the more their stories, woven from sparse facts, become possibilities rather than certain­ ties. Asante and Mali, the two West African empires that were central to political and eco­ nomic dynamics in West Africa for centuries, may or may not have flourished because of gold. Given the highly unreliable statistics of contemporary West Africa, even in the pre­ sent there may be much disagreement over basic facts. Mali, Ghana and Burkina Faso, West Africa's leading gold exporters in the 2000-2013 period, may or may not be subject to the "resource curse:' Even at the local level, in both past and present, there has been little consen­ sus about how to characterize social institutions in mining regions. The crucible of gold min­ ing has not, apparently, been poured into a standard mold in which economies and societies were cast. GOLD MINING AND ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN WEST AFRICA 341 Gold mining in West Africa may be examined by considering two paradoxes. Regions with gold mines may have given rise to stronger and more complex state structures, while gold mining also gave rise to incentives for rent-seeking, conflict, and undermin­ ing of state structures. The revenues from taxation of gold mining were likely the pri­ mary mechanism for these effects. But another mechanism may have operated. Gold extraction and trade had to be organized through relatively complex social institutions. At the same time, participation in more complex social institutions changed interper­ sonal relationships and identities. In short, gold mining created manifold local economic and social changes that rippled through the broader economy and society. The nature of these changes and the extent of their impact on broader society, however, remain largely speculative. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 summarizes relevant research on the magni­ tudes of the gold mining sectors in West Africa from medieval times to the present. Section 3 discusses the presumption that gold mining was directly implicated in early state formation in medieval times, and strengthened states in subsequent centuries. Section 4 reviews argu­ ments and evidence about how gold mining undermined state functioning. Section 5 briefly reviews work on the social impact of mining. Section 6 concludes by sketching a broad the­ ory of the place of gold mining in West Africa, while noting the severe limitations in the body of evidence available to evaluate the broad theory. 18.2 GOLD MINING IN WEST AFRICA At various points in the economic history of West Africa, gold mining was quite exten­ sive and valuable, and therefore might have influenced social and economic institutions. Unfortunately, the historical and even contemporary record remains quite unsatisfactory. Historians have pieced together limited time-series of gold production levels for various gold producing areas. Even more uncertain are trends in the value of gold extracted in terms of purchasing power, the population involved in gold production, the forms of organization of production and trade, and the ties of gold-producing regions to state-like political forma­ tions. This economic history may be conveniently divided into five periods: (i) the medieval period, when gold from West Africa was a major source of bullion for the growing societies of the Mediterranean and Islamic world; (ii) the period 1700- 1850, when bullion exports from the New World, and shifting of commercial interests to the Atlantic slave trade, appear to have discouraged creation of recorded knowledge of gold mining in West Africa, either because all trade in gold became internal to West Africa and hence was a strictly oral affair, or because production levels fell dramatically so there was nothing worth recording; (iii) the late-18oos, when industrial mining techniques were introduced by European entrepreneurs; (iv) the colonial period proper, when colonial administrators organized and regulated gold extraction; and (v) the post-independence period, including especially the mining boom of the 2000S. Before discussing the magnitude of the gold sector in each period, a digression on pro­ duction techniques is in order. Gold ore has been excavated in several forms in West Africa. First are alluvial deposits of fairly concentrated gold that is embedded in rock. This gold is extracted by panning the shores of rivers, as the gold-bearing rocks are carried downstream 342 MICROECONOMIC AND SECTORAL ISSUES after seasonal rains. Dried up river-beds are also mined for these alluvial deposits. Second are relatively shallow deposits of quartz-bearing rock permeated with gold particles. This gold was extracted through tedious manual digging of pits, crushing of ore, admixture with mercury solutions, panning in water, and heating, concentration, and finally extrac­ tion. Since the early 1900s, open-pit mining using explosives, earth-movers, and industrial crushing of ore and industrial-scale leaching has been deployed. Artisanal gold mining per­ sists, however, because of the large capital expenditures involved in industrial mining and consequent risk. Finally, gold may be extracted in deep shaft mines, such as those common in South Africa. West Africa has seen few deep shaft mines. One is the Obuasi Gold Mine in Ghana owned by AngloGold Asante. Given relatively limited mining exploration in the region, there remain possibilities for large strikes deep underground. Gold in West Africa through the medieval era to the present has come from only a handful of regions, mostly located in a geological zone known as the Birimian greenstone belt. There have been open-pit, alluvial mines in Bambouk (also known as Bambuhu) near the Falame and Senegal rivers near the town of Kayes, and Boure, close to the present-day Guinea-Mali border near the town of Siguiri. These are the same regions where industrial and artisanal mining boomed in the 2000s in Mali. The Akan or Asante goldfields became known to early fifteenth-century Portuguese explorers, whose appellation for their first trading post and later castle, Elmina, referred to the mines. The region around the Tarkwa region to the west of Accra in the late 1800s developed large industrial mines. Goldfields in the Lobi area of south-western Burkina Faso near the border with Ghana may also have been significant in the medieval era. Since the rise in gold prices in the early 2000s, new geological exploration techniques have led to the discovery of numerous mining sites scattered throughout Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. 18.2.1 Medieval period (1300-1700) The largest sources of gold in West Africa over the 1000-1700 period were Bambouk, Boure, and Akan (Gautier 1935; Malowist 1970) . Estimates of the magnitudes of gold extracted and exported from these three regions in medieval and pre-colonial times are unreliable, given the paucity of documentary records. Moreover, units of measure varied across the different gold-trading posts on the trans-Saharan route. Bambouk and Boure were taxed and controlled (to some degree) by the medieval empire of Mali centered, for much of the period, in Nyeni (or Niani). Curtin (1983) sug­ gested that a figure of one ton per year exported across the Sahara was a reasonable edu­ cated guess for the magnitude of exports. Numerous anecdotes in the historical record can be triangulated to generate this approximate figure. Bambouk and Boure were the sources, for example, of Mansa Musa's apparently astonishing pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, where he transported so much gold that the price on Cairo markets dropped markedly for years afterwards. Numismatic analysis of coins put into circulation in the Mediterranean world suggest that much of the gold currency of North Africa had its origin in African gold rather than central European gold (Messier 1974).