Eating Dust: Toxic Air and Parasitic Relations of Gold Mining in DR Congo

Abstract

Since the late 2000s, artisanal and small-scale gold miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have incorporated mechanized ball mills in their workflow. With finely ground rock dust escaping from the hinges of these mills, these same miners are increasingly exposed to pulmonary damage as pulmonary diseases move from the underground to the air above the mines. On the one hand, the lack of infrastructure and exposure to multiple volatiles makes it difficult to understand the underlying mechanism that produces silicosis. On the other hand, miners also recover dust-borne waste and transform it into tailings. Drawing from Michel Serres's notion of a parasite, this ethnographic account challenges extractive histories from the ambiguous vantage point of rock dust. Tracking from a silicosis-based regime under colonial rule to more recent human–machine–dust assemblages, this article uncovers not a history of flows but rather one of parasitic interruptions, unexpected agencies, and uneven dispersions.