Treasure Hunting in Tanzania as a Chronopolitical Practice

Abstract

In Morogoro, Tanzania, people regularly embark on treasure hunting expeditions, usually near places or buildings associated with German colonialism. In recounting their attempts to find buried wealth, treasure seekers describe their practice as anticipatory, framed by an anxiety about being “behind” (nyuma) in terms of access to prospecting technologies when compared to foreigners (wageni). Based on ethnographic participation in two treasure hunting expeditions, I propose that treasure hunting is a chronopolitical act, an intervention into time that constructs alternative futures beyond state and market logics. Treasure seekers rely on their experiences with detection tools, spiritual practice, and postcolonial history to help them locate buried treasure. As a contemporary social practice, treasure hunting bridges indigenous, vernacular, and outsider knowledge about technology to reorder postcolonial time and recuperate a degree of agency over an economic future potential. Drawing on ongoing science and technology studies (STS) scholarship about the underground and about technology in African contexts, I demonstrate that treasures, as imagined and precious entities, exemplify forms of value that precede materialization. I conclude by suggesting that STS scholarship could attend to underground matter whose value is shaped by persistent intangibility and indeterminacy.

Introduction

A few days before leaving for Germany, I was pulled aside by Alex, a forty-something-year-old man whom I had met while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Morogoro, Tanzania. We had quickly become friends over conversations about religious diversity. As a Mluguru and Rastafarian, Alex occupied a marginal position in Tanzanian society, which in turn informed his curiosity about foreigners (or wageni in Kiswahili), and shaped his warm and welcoming demeanor. ¹ Alex had a request: “Would you be able to ask Germans whether their elders had left behind any information or maps about buried treasures in the mountains?” He also encouraged me to gather any powerful substances (dawa) that I could bring back from Germany, which he could use to ward off the spirits and large snakes that protected these treasures.

This conversation marked the beginning of my participation in several treasure hunting expeditions in the mountainous region of Uluguru, home to the Waluguru community of Tanzania. Over the years, Alex and his group of avid treasure seekers have collected oral histories from elder Waluguru and maps from old German books. They have explored the area and marked out several locations where treasures are said to be buried. When treasures are discovered, a seeker would usually sell them to a network of local buyers who would then bring them to larger cities like Dar es Salaam to find prospective buyers. Other seekers would keep their treasure, hoping to benefit from the power that they grant in bestowing wealth. In this essay, I pay ethnographic attention to practices of treasure hunting in the mountains of eastern Tanzania. Practices of treasure hunting in Tanzania also contribute to emerging discussions in science and technology studies (STS) about the underground as a site of epistemological contestation. My analysis of treasure, understood as valuable possessions left behind by a past society, excavates temporal critiques about postcolonial development, often framed as debates among treasure seekers about access to prospecting technologies such as metal detectors and global positioning system (GPS) trackers. At the invitation of Alex and his companions, I accompanied two expeditions in 2018 to look for German treasures scattered and concealed in the mountains. Many people in Morogoro recount that the Germans, who colonized Tanganyika in the 1880s, left the country in a hurry when they lost the First World War. Treasure seekers like Alex surmised that, in their frenzy, the Germans must have abandoned tools, household items, and precious gems for future retrieval. These objects, left behind and buried, are the focus of our quests.

During these expeditions, treasure seekers constantly talk about time, describing treasures as objects left behind by a past society that still present possibilities for future wealth. In these discussions, technology becomes a temporal marker of difference. For instance, the colonial Germans were remembered as possessing advanced technologies that they brought to East Africa through missionaries and colonial administration. A Mluguru elder once proudly showed me a rusty iron box in his possession that would have been filled with hot charcoal to press clothes. The handle of the iron featured a slender carved cockerel whose comb had been chipped. “This,” he said, “was an example of German technology [during colonial times].” During treasure hunting expeditions, treasure seekers similarly identified geoprospecting equipment as a marker of temporal difference between themselves and foreigners, or wageni, a term used to describe any outsiders to a community. Waluguru treasure hunters lament their lack of access to crucial prospecting technologies such as metal detectors, ground scanners, and GPS location trackers, deemed to be in European or Chinese possession, describing their own temporal location as being “behind” (nyuma) other nations. Rather than understand technologies as mere tools, I discuss how treasure seekers view technologies as a form of cultivated power that requires a certain kind of embodied experience. Such power may include substances such as incense or bones, or spiritual practices like incantations, meditation, and dreaming. One of these other techniques for treasure seeking includes my own participation and the potential power that I bring as a foreigner (mgeni). In anthropology, it is common to conceive of the self as an instrument for research. Ethnography is itself partly a process of self-cultivation and attunement to places and people who make up the focus of anthropological study. In this context, I was simultaneously positioned as an instrument for ethnographic research (by myself), and for treasure hunting (by Alex and his companions). As I elaborate below, my involvement in treasure hunting became possible because Tanzanian seekers came to view me—through global processes that racialize Black and Asian bodies in Tanzania (Sheridan 2018)—as an instrument for retrieving treasures.

My participation in these treasure hunting practices coincided with ongoing feuds between the Tanzanian government and foreign multinational corporations in the mining industry. Talk of the feuds filled the airwaves, bus stands, lunch stalls, and bars. Social media and the local newspapers brimmed with supportive commentary for the Tanzanian president, John Pombe Magufuli, who assumed the position of defender of Tanzania's natural resources from foreign pillaging. Scholars have examined these confrontations as an emergent form of resource nationalism, which in Tanzania was also infused with populist and patriotic rhetoric (Poncian 2019). Against this political backdrop, some treasure hunters made comparisons between treasures and precious metals, and their risk of being “stolen” by foreign seekers, including myself. I therefore also situate treasure hunting within these larger political forces to examine how contestations over buried wealth are also expressions of anxiety about the dwindling capacity of ordinary Tanzanians to manage the future—what scholars in STS and anthropology have called the politics of anticipation (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009; Groves 2017).

In these conversations, the practice of treasure hunting emerges as a chronopolitical act, a technique for rearranging the relations between the treasure hunters themselves and an anticipated economic future. I borrow the term “chronopolitical act” from Afrofuturist scholar Kodwo Eshun (2003) to describe interventions into perceived temporal logics that confine people like Alex and other treasure seekers to a linear, developmental time with no future. Building on Alfred Gell's (2020) analysis of time, which describes how people navigate and experience time through various social framings such as calendars and rituals, I propose that treasure hunting offers an alternative social framing of time. This framing of time structures the gradual experience of moving from colonial to postcolonial time in ways that open—for the treasure seekers—greater possibilities for a comfortable future (ustawi). The labor of treasure hunting, therefore, is also the work of mediating “divergent representations, techniques, and rhythms of human and non-human time” among colonial ruins (Bear 2014, 6; see also Munn 1992).

The notion that time is actively made, rather than simply measured, kept, or planned, is pervasive throughout social life in East Africa. The Kenyan philosopher John S. Mbiti (1970, 23) underscores this point in his analysis of time among the Akamba and Gikuyu. Instead of treating time as a commodity or a resource, something that could be spent or wasted, Mbiti observes that time is made and elaborated out from the present, continuously extending into a “potential” future that has not yet occurred. There is therefore a sense of the indefinitely long and inevitable future that must be made in the present (see also Wiredu 2021, 669-70). “When foreigners, especially from Europe and America, come to Africa and see people sitting down somewhere without, evidently, doing anything, they often remark, ‘These Africans waste their time by just sitting down idle,’” writes Mbiti (1970, 25). But this understanding comes from a conception of time as a resource. “Those who are seen sitting down are actually not wasting time, but either waiting for time or in the process of ‘producing’ time,” he added (original emphasis). Mbiti's account of an East African conception of time resonates with my experiences of treasure seeking in Morogoro. I elaborate below on how treasure seekers view their practice as active time-making for building prosperity and well-being.

In contrast to these emphases on time, often the very matter of treasures is left open to speculation and conjecture. Treasures may include gold coins, precious jewels, and occasionally, purportedly rare metals such as “red mercury,” a rumored substance of omnipotence. ² Treasures are an epistemic thing, material entities or processes that “embody what one does not yet know,” which nonetheless structure practices for constituting objects of inquiry (Rheinberger 1997, 28). They persist as intangible and indeterminate matter, and it is these qualities that motivate and structure their finding, and which render them real and valuable. If one of the goals of the ST&HV Special Issue on Underground STS in which this article appears is to understand how the underground “comes to be through interlinked political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific practices and processes” that go beyond materiality (Kinchy, Phadke, and Smith 2018; Weszkalnys 2015; see also Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014), then treasures offer a crucial example of a resource whose value is determined by its potential and potency of becoming material. Treasures are, in other words, the ultimate example of an underground matter that gains value from social processes of meaning-making about mining that combine various forms of knowledge about the underground, including indigenous, vernacular, and foreign (wageni), to (re)claim past wealth from what seekers deem is a disappearing future of economic security.

“Tanzania is Not Grandma's Field!” Resource Nationalism and Treasure Hunting

In 2017, when I arrived in Tanzania to begin research, newspapers and social media were rife with commentary about ongoing feuds between the Tanzanian government and foreign multinational companies in the mining industry. Under John Pombe Magufuli, who was president of Tanzania from 2015 to 2021, the government embarked on several drastic changes in the mining sector that scholars have called “resource nationalism.” The Tanzanian government enacted laws and policies that would empower the state to intervene in the industrial exploitation of natural resources with the purpose of directing benefits toward local and national communities, often justified by populist and patriotic appeals (Wilson 2015).

Several key changes attracted the most attention, including the decision of the Tanzanian government to withdraw large-scale mining licenses from gold-rich areas and reallocate them to some 5,000 small-scale miners. The government also streamlined mining processes by setting up buying centers where prices and tax collection were better monitored and controlled (Materu 2019). New laws mandated an increase in government shareholding of mining companies and banned exports of raw gold and copper, requiring that they be processed locally prior to export. The government argued that these laws ensured that processing and refining activities would be built within the country, keeping wealth in Tanzania, creating jobs, and encouraging the development of the manufacturing industry (Huggins and Kinyondo 2019; Nyamsenda 2018; Poncian 2019; Roder 2019). Throughout this time, Magufuli also spoke publicly at rallies, alleging that multinational corporations have “robbed” Tanzania (The Guardian 2017). These efforts reached their symbolic culmination with the construction of a 24-kilometer-long wall around a tanzanite mine to surveil and securitize the outflow of the stone, costing approximately USD22 million (Ng’wanakilala 2017).

Many ordinary Tanzanians, including Alex and his companions, enthusiastically discussed and approved of Magufuli's “bulldozing” style of politics. It was time, Alex remarked, that the world stopped treating Tanzania like their own backyard [shamba la bibi], an evocative expression in Kiswahili that translates to “Tanzania is not grandma's farm!” As the feud between the Tanzanian government and multinational corporations wore on, one of the larger companies, Acacia Mining, threatened to halt its operations, which would lead to worker layoffs and a loss of foreign direct investment (Reuters 2017). I asked Alex whether he thought the sanctions were having a negative impact on miners’ livelihoods. Alex denied this and said that it would be better for the multinational companies to leave Tanzania. When I asked whether Tanzanian companies or the government would have enough funds to build mining operations, Alex drew a direct comparison with treasure hunting. “Without these mining companies, we won’t have the technology for digging. But Tanzanians will still dig. We will dig slowly with shovels but what we find is ours,” he said.

Alex's support for the Tanzanian state is nonetheless qualified. During my second expedition in 2018, many of the treasure seekers had grown skeptical of the government's mining policies. Mogela, a businessman selling plant seedlings, warned us to be careful not of the “mzuka” or dangerous spirits that often guard treasures in the mountains, but of government spies who are on the lookout for new mining prospects. He recounted a story about a fellow treasure hunter who stumbled onto some green tourmaline gemstones. He collected the gem-bearing rock to show his friends, who had planned to return to mine the area. When they returned, however, the government had erected a fence and deployed guards, who told them that they were trespassing and would be shot if they did not leave. Alex and his companions interpreted this encounter as confirmation that the promised benefits from changes in the mining sector would never appear. “The government is talking about contracts, contracts, contracts [mikataba] but we don’t even know what is in them,” Joni said, referring to the new agreements between the Tanzanian state and several mining companies.

Many people like Joni and Alex are no longer confident that they would benefit from the promises of development offered by international organizations or the state. Many of them lament that they experience development as a continuous deferment (see also Li 2017). Alex explained his motivation for treasure seeking, saying “I am tired of waiting for development [maendeleo], it never comes no matter what we do.” For Joni, treasure seeking becomes a way through which they challenge the “temporal dispossession” of development promises, where “incremental time” toward a future seems increasingly impossible (Smith 2011, 21). Treasures, however, offer a potential for temporal repossession. Finishing his thought, Alex framed it this way: “I am tired of waiting for development [maendeleo], it never comes no matter what we do. So I look for treasure, it is the only thing I can do instead of wait.” The labor of finding treasure could short-circuit the imposed timeline of development, allowing him to secure future wealth immediately. In this way, treasure hunting manifests as certain “expectations of modernity,” to borrow from James Ferguson (1999). It is to this anticipation of treasure's powerful and potential quality that we turn to next.

The Practice of Treasure Hunting

Treasure hunting, which some might relegate to the realm of the quixotic and fictional, is a surprisingly popular practice around the world. In England alone, the year 2024 marked a record high with 1,446 treasure discoveries, which included Viking coins and Roman toiletry (BBC News 2025). In the Netherlands, stories like the ones Alex tells, in which German soldiers buried jewelry and other valuables before retreating, continue to attract people to small villages in search of treasure (BBC News 2023). Stories about treasure finds have consistently made headlines in Colombia, Thailand, the United States, and elsewhere (Mead 2020; Neimark 2020; Parker and Herrero 2022; The Economist 2003). Despite treasure hunting's diverse occurrences, little ethnographic attention has been paid to this practice and the techniques and technologies that it employs. Some cultural anthropologists have investigated the sociotechnical processes that transform underground matter such as sapphires and silver into elements for (e)valuation, exploitation, and exchange in the global market (Ferry 2021; Samarawickrema 2020; Walsh 2004). These studies turn up disputes about ownership, profiteering, labor, and the global circulation of value, while showing how extractive industries consolidate racial, economic, and environmental inequalities (Arboleda 2020; Yusoff 2018). Anthropologists who have examined treasure hunting practices study them as part of the larger phenomena of mining (Baker-Médard 2012; Bryceson et al. 2012; Slaney 2019; Taussig 2010). This relationship between mining and treasure hunting, discussed earlier in the context of Tanzania's resource nationalism, also exists for Alex and his companions.

While conducting research for this essay, I was surprised to see how my own experiences of treasure hunting in Morogoro were mirrored across Tanzania. I found references to the practice by both Tanzanians and others in archived blogs, Instagram and YouTube videos, and old Twitter posts. A huge majority of these accounts describe experiences in the northern Usambara Mountains. I also found two recollections written by a researcher (Gerrets 2016, 2019) working in the Usambara region, which provide some of the more detailed accounts of treasure hunting in Tanzania. Our experiences were strikingly similar. Both our accounts describe treasures as remnants of German colonialism and their protection by spirits or powerful beings. Treasures were precious not only for their value (gemstones, gold, and mercury were often mentioned) but also for their power to bring fortune and wealth to their finders.

I first learned about these treasures from Alex, who told me that they were buried below several old German colonial buildings, including an old administrator's house and a church located on a mountain plateau overlooking the city of Morogoro. Alex said that when the Germans left Tanganyika after several lost battles in the First World War, they had to flee immediately. In their haste, they left many of their possessions behind. Another treasure seeker, Joni, said that his grandparents used to say that they were astounded by how little the Germans took with them when they departed Morogoro. They must have left valuables, maps, and technologies that they had brought to East Africa throughout German colonization from 1885 to 1918. ³ Many people think that the Germans hid or buried their ornaments, money, gadgets, and housewares in sacred groves or in secret chambers underneath buildings where they lived, administered, and prayed, so they could return in the future to retrieve them. German spirits and Luguru ones guarded these treasures. Joni shared a story of a German colonial officer who solicited the help of a Luguru healer (mganga) to help him seal treasures in a rockface. It was not sufficient to simply dig them up. Permission had to be granted by the guardian spirits, often through dreaming, incantation, meditation, and other ritual practices.

In Morogoro, people use the words malikale and hazina to refer to the valuable objects hidden or buried underground, sometimes in caves and under old buildings. Treasure seekers insist that they were not looking for precious metals or gems (madini) but for valuable artifacts such as plates (sahani), pots (vyungu), kettles (birika), and bottles (vyupa) that are encrusted with gold and gems or contain precious artifacts. When asked how treasures were different from minerals, people often highlight the residual character of treasures, defining them as valuable and powerful objects left behind by others, whereas minerals are merely considered “natural wealth” or mali asili (the Kiswahili word for natural resources). Treasures often possess certain powers. Hazina, the Kiswahili word for treasure, also circulates in the Indian Ocean as a word that references the power contained in an object or person (see Graeber 2012, 36-37). Hence, Alex explained that treasures disrupt cellular networks, so that when a mobile phone has no service, it can mean that there is treasure nearby. These treasures may also be hot to the touch, change the color of water, or emit smoke or odors. Treasure seekers look for these signs when on the hunt. Indeed, the powers held by treasures are so mysterious that people often do not know what to do with them. “I don’t have the skills to use these treasures, but others do, and they are willing to pay a lot of money for them,” Alex remarked. Has anyone found any treasures? I asked Alex and his companions. In response, they told me stories about treasures that their friends have found. One even shared a pixelated photo on his flip phone. Covering the screen with his hands to enhance visibility, he showed me a photo of a gold-colored canister covered in mud. I squinted and could see several letters written in the Fraktur font, an old and commonly used German typeface.

Treasures are therefore examples of what Ann Stoler (2008, 192) calls “imperial debris,” residues, and remnants of empire that represent the “protracted imperial processes that saturate the subsoil of people's lives.” They perdure in an uncertain and invisible existence, prolonging psychological and social wreckage. The question of what to do with buried treasures is often answered not only by digging up but also by activating people's anticipatory notions of wealth. Colonial debris is transformed by treasure seeking into potential postcolonial futures that exceed the economic rationalities of the Tanzanian state, or those of multinational corporations and international organizations. In other words, even as treasure hunting facilitates a logic of extraction and accumulation, it remains a chronopolitical act that refuses the overdetermined temporalities of development. To paraphrase Carol Greenhouse (1996, 82), the positions that treasure hunters in Tanzania take vis-à-vis time are cultural propositions about the distribution of agency—human, historical, and geological—across social space. Those who act in the present on an underground layered through (post)colonial history are therefore making normative claims about their own capacity to shape their futures.

The Uncertain Position of the Foreigner

During my trip in Germany, Alex sent me a message on WhatsApp reminding me to ask people about what they know about treasures scattered across the Tanzanian mountains. “Maybe,” Alex typed, “a German mganga [healer] might know how to properly retrieve the treasures.” In Frankfurt am Main, I asked several friends who in turn asked their grandparents if they knew anything about hidden treasures in Tanzania. Many of the older Germans I spoke to were not aware that Tanzania was once a German colony and others did not have any information about buried treasures. When I returned, I delivered this disappointing news to Alex, who nonetheless remained determined to find other ways. He now wanted me to accompany his group on an expedition.

In the world of treasure hunting, perceptions about outsiders and outsider knowledge are complex. In parallel with political discourse about Tanzania's natural and national resources, treasure seekers often view outsiders with suspicion because they are often equipped with various tools and technologies that would enable them to retrieve treasures before many Tanzanians can. An elderly treasure seeker who used to work as a guide recalled a story of being hired by a German tourist to go on a hike to see families of Colobus monkeys (wabega) near Bondwa peak. The elder noticed that the German visitor had brought many devices with him: a GPS receiver, binoculars, and books containing detailed maps and drawings. The next day, the elder received a call from one of his friends who lived in a village across the valley. The friend was angry and accused the elder of betrayal. The friend complained that the elder had led his German companion to a site where treasures were buried. There was now only a large hole in the ground, a sign that treasures had been taken by the hiker. His neighbors had reported seeing a white man walking through the forest at night, swinging his flashlight and looking through night vision goggles. They charged that the German hiker had returned in the darkness so that he could secretly steal the treasures.

Joni shared another story. He recounted that an Omani businessman had bought some land in the foothills where he planned to build a house. They saw the businessman bring in a cement mixer, shovels, steel rods, bricks, and wheelbarrows. After many years had passed, the construction remained incomplete; there were only four walls, holes for windows, and no roof. Joni and his friends were curious and one day decided to enter the construction site to see if the Omani businessman had abandoned it. To their surprise, they found a large hole dug into the ground. The walls, Joni explained, concealed the fact that the Omani man was digging up treasure. Once the treasure was found, the site was abandoned and the Omani left with his newly found riches.

As a Chinese Malaysian, I was not immune to suspicions of stealing despite Alex vouching for me. After I agreed to join the expedition, the group of treasure seekers to which Alex belongs mandated that I first be vetted through a community meeting. Huddled into a windowless room, a committee of older men and Alex's treasure-seeking companions gathered to interrogate me. The committee asked about my upbringing, my parents, my faith, and my ethnographic research. During the meeting, I promised not to reveal any privileged information about treasure locations, the techniques for unearthing them, or to take any pictures of the treasure sites. In this essay, I follow a form of discretion common among treasure seekers: we talk about our expeditions but avoid disclosing exact locations or the techniques used by others.

Underlying these stories is a suspicion toward “foreigners,” often those who have historical colonial relations with Tanzania. The foreigner is also usually marked by their possession of advanced technology for digging and piercing underground, such as ground scanners, construction tools, and GPS location trackers. Despite a general suspicion of wageni, treasure hunting practices bridge different indigenous, vernacular, and outsider knowledges. Stories about finding treasure invoke a German colonial past, access to Western or Chinese technologies, and multifaith spiritual practices. ⁴ Simultaneously, these stories contain crucial details about guardian earth beings, or what Robyn d’Avignon (2020) calls “spirited geobodies” who protect the treasures. These earth beings draw specifically on Luguru concepts. For example, treasure sites are marked by tree groves, considered a sacred site for spirits (mitsimu). They are also guarded by large snakes whose unpredictable behavior can threaten human life (see Brain 1983). Treasure-seeking practices and their stories appear to bring Luguru cultural concepts to bear on encounters with colonial and foreign ideas and technologies.

My own position as a foreigner (mgeni) may have raised some skeptical eyebrows among the committee, but it was my very access to outsider knowledge and spiritual practices, such as Buddhist meditative practice, that made me potentially useful. Despite not having access to key prospecting technologies, Alex is certain that there were other ways of accessing the treasures. These involved getting information from dreams and healers and using one's own powers to make the treasures appear. We are familiar with STS scholarship, which seeks to scramble the “modern Constitution” (Latour 1993, 29) that sorts spiritual practices and technological ones into the distinct categories of nature and culture. Yet there is a tendency in many of these works to attribute earth beings, gods, demons, and spirits to the purview of indigenous or local cosmologies, often in opposition to nation-state projects rooted in Enlightenment ideas of secular rationality (see, for instance, d’Avignon 2020; De la Cadena 2015). Many of the treasure seekers, however, adhere to a Bloorian position that treats Luguru, German, and Malaysian spiritual power with impartiality and symmetry (see Bloor 1976). To Tanzanian treasure seekers, treasures are potentially protected by spirited geobodies of German and Luguru origin, who may be appeased through the practice of Buddhist meditation. By incorporating Luguru and other knowledge systems into their attempts to find treasure, treasure hunters do not confront Euro-American conceptions of technology by offering a local deviation informed by indigenous practice. Rather, they propose an alternative universal one, where tools and techniques for unearthing valuable underground matter can incorporate different sensory registers, spiritual practices, and detection tools (see Soto Laveaga and Gómez 2018), as I show in the next section.

Techniques and Tools of Treasure Hunting

We started our expedition before the crack of dawn. I held tightly onto Alex as we rode his motorcycle up to the meeting point, some 1,000 meters above the city. The unpaved trail was still muddy from overnight rains, and the back wheel kept slipping into the open clefts carved by running water. It would have taken us two hours to hike to Morningside, and so Alex decided that we should take the motorcycle up to maximize daylight. Morningside is the name of a dilapidated German house built in 1911, now used as a shed for small, informal maize fields (Figure 1). The floors of the house had large holes in them, holes from which treasures had already been retrieved. From Morningside, Alex, Joni, and I trekked into the forest, crossing several other dug holes, some of which looked recent because the forest undergrowth had not yet reclaimed them. Some of these holes contained scattered animal bones, what Joni called “medicine” or “dawa,” powerful substances that must sometimes be offered or used to appease the guardian spirits. We had also brought our own offerings: a box of incense imported from Pakistan and some candles.

Figure 1.

The German house built in 1911 at Morningside in the Uluguru Mountains of eastern Tanzania. Photo by the author, 2018.

As we climbed higher into the mountains, the homesteads and farms disappeared and we were soon surrounded by large trees, vines, and huge pandanus groves. We stopped in a clearing where Joni indicated the location of buried treasure. He explained that he was led to this place by an old woman who visited his dreams. He did not recognize the woman and described her as being wrapped in colorful kanga cloth. In Joni's dream, she came to the front door of his house and pointed to a black and white photograph of a particular forest area. Joni and Alex walked many times across the mountains looking for this site and one day recognized a grove of trees from the photo in Joni's dream, where the woman had pointed. “It's here, she was pointing to the treasure here,” Joni said. We stood on a large flat rock shaded by another bigger rock that protruded over a gentle stream, surrounded by fallen trees that looked like they had collapsed in a flood some years before.

I expressed some skepticism at first. Alex then began to point out other signs in the landscape to convince me, saying that these signs further confirmed that we were standing on buried treasure. He taught me to notice certain shapes and symbols on the rocks in our surroundings. He described each scrutable sign: two large boulders rose out from the undergrowth like an arrow pointing at our location; several feet away was a thicket of trees, another sign of treasure. There was also a faint shape of a skull on a rock face next to us. These signs (alama) were not obvious at first, but they became clearer once Alex revealed them. He stressed that it required a certain degree of visual “enskilment” (Grasseni 2007) to know how to interpret these copresent signs, which together confirmed the existence of treasure. Alex and Joni described this as a kind of sensorial knowledge. “You see your dreams, you see the lines in the rocks, and the other signs that emerge when you perform a ritual [tambiko],” Alex explained.

It was time to retrieve the treasure. Alex lit a few incense sticks and placed candles on the rock, explaining that this ensured that we would not be cursed [logwa]. I noticed dried wax on the surfaces and realized this was not the first time someone had tried to propitiate the forces that guarded these treasures. They both now looked at me and gestured that it was my turn to lead the next part. At the vetting meeting, I was asked about my Buddhist meditation practice and the men agreed that it was worth trying if I had powers to retrieve the treasure. “Is there an incantation?” Alex asked. I recited the opening lines of a reverence chant to the Buddha in Pali but the group found this too difficult to pronounce. I then offered a shorter one that I was familiar with. We all chanted “Om Mani Padme Om” and then sat in silence. As fragrant smoke swirled around us, I kept half an eye out for a sign that the treasure was slowly revealing itself to us.

Alex and Joni talked incessantly about ground scanners, metal detectors, and GPS trackers that would help them locate more treasures. They asked if there was an app they could download onto their smartphones, which they could use to detect treasures underground. They researched the prices of detection devices on the internet and asked me to check prices back in Malaysia. At the end of my fieldwork, Alex and his group collected enough money to buy a metal detector and they asked if they could give that money to me to purchase the device when I went back to Malaysia.

Even though the treasure seekers found other ways, such as meditation, to unearth treasure, they still recognized the power that devices and detectors grant to their users. They constantly complained about foreign visitors (wageni) who carried their binoculars and GPS location tracking devices with them, viewing these technologies as better at finding treasures but a type of cheating. “How can we compete with them when we don’t have these technologies?” Joni grumbled. I soon realized that there were two schools of thought among the treasure seekers of Morogoro. One camp, the one which Alex belonged to, agreed that having access to detection tools would give them an advantage but felt that the more spiritual ways would work just as well. The other camp is more skeptical of these supernatural methods. Mogela, the businessman who sells seedlings, keeps a keen eye on anyone exploring the forest for treasures from the vantage point of his shop near the forest. He told me that our meditation sessions were a waste of time. Appeals to the occult (mambo ya siri) had worked in the past, and almost all these treasures had already been found and taken, he explained. The remaining ones required more powerful tools, such as metal detectors and machines that can blast through rock. “But this is something we can never do because when it comes to technology, we are behind [tuko nyuma],” Mogela explained.

In these conversations and throughout my participation in the expeditions, treasure seekers frame time as a technical problem. They explained their inability to reach buried treasure as being “behind” (nyuma) in terms of having the skills and tools required to find treasure, which also located them “behind” in temporal terms. The treasures themselves are marked temporally as past technological power, taking on a mysterious and potent quality as remnants of colonial technological advancement. Additionally, treasure seeking anticipates fortune and power as a response to a constantly deferred promise of development. The sociologist Chris Groves (2017, 2) understands anticipation as a capacity to incorporate projected future states into present practices by shaping or modulating a group's activity. In other words, anticipation is experienced materially and affectively as a type of agency, distributed unequally, to intervene in time. Anticipation structures the way that Mogela, Alex, and Joni argued about whether advanced prospecting technologies or spiritual power are sufficient for intervening in time through the unearthing of treasure. Technologies for prospecting and unearthing treasures offered the seekers greater agency to connect a future of possible wealth to a present that lacked meaningful development. Treasure seeking therefore offers an alternative social framing of time, where the continuous unfolding of time into the future could be interceded and remade (see also Bear 2016). It is a chronopolitical act that intervenes in imposed constructions of time from which people like Alex feel excluded. Debates about (access to) technologies are therefore integral, on the one hand, to struggles over how to bring a future world into being, and on the other hand, to assuaging doubts about whether the treasure seekers have the capacity to do so.

Mogela was not the only one to use temporally inflected words such as “nyuma” or “behind” to describe their relations to technology. Alex and Joni described Tanzania's infrastructural projects such as the high-speed train being constructed between Dar es Salaam and Morogoro as bringing “modern” technologies to Tanzania (Komba and Joseph 2025). The Kiswahili word for modern (kisasa) easily evokes contemporaneity, with “sasa” denoting “now.” To become modern in Kiswahili therefore is to become coeval with “now,” to collapse the future into a general present (Mbiti 1970; Nielsen 2014). When Alex and Joni aspire to own modern detection technology, they often express this as wanting coeval access (see Fabian 2014), or to catch up, with technologies “of the now” (teknolojia ya kisasa) already possessed by foreigners (wageni).

However, Mogela retorted, owning advanced technologies would not be sufficient for finding treasure. “Even if we had ground scanners, we won’t know how to use them,” Mogela said. Technology was more than just the “right tools for the job” (see Clarke and Fujimura 1992). Instead, it required the right kinds of knowledge, experiences, and social relations for it to work effectively. “Technology is not power,” Alex maintained, “With meditation, you have both the power and the tool.” Joni agreed and added that it was sometimes a question of what kinds of power work for unearthing the treasure, “You need to find the right power to open up the treasure.” Alex then gestured to me, “This is why Bwana Jia is here. We want to see if he has the right power.”

This discussion resonates with several recurrent themes in studies of technology in African contexts. As noted by historian of science Chakanetsa Mavhunga (2017, 4), social science studies of technology in Africa tend to treat technology as incoming objects that originate outside the continent, a process inherent in the language of “technology transfer” that informs many development projects in Tanzania. Instead, technologies must often undergo various processes of ingenious and aesthetic reinventions to purpose-fit them for specific environments and communities (see also Nur 2020; Ruamcharoen 2024), whereby tools, vehicles, and instruments from the Global North must be reworked and resignified to adapt their original ethnocentric designs to African contexts for them to be workable.

My own participation in the expeditions was one of the ways that Alex and Joni contested the idea that technology transfer alone would resolve their economic hardship. To be sure, Alex and his companions understood the potential and power that accompany devices such as GPS trackers and ground scanners, but they hoped that my Buddhist practices might offer an alternative. By being asked to participate in treasure hunting and to experiment with my own meditative practices, my abilities were seen as another possible instrument for finding these treasures. By making use of my meditation practice, Alex and the treasure hunters of Morogoro refused an overdetermined relation between the possession of advanced tools and a capacity to shape the future.

Our treasure hunting expeditions were also, crucially, settings where treasure seekers and I navigated emergent Asian and African encounters that are markedly different from the 20th century (Monson and Rupp 2013; Sheridan 2022; Siu and McGovern 2017). During the time of the treasure hunting expeditions, President Magufuli had occasionally emphasized the importance of China's growing presence and cooperation with Tanzania, which most Tanzanians welcomed and noted in the many infrastructural projects that featured Chinese characters on construction machinery. Alongside China, many other Southeast and East Asians were present among Morogoro's 200,000 inhabitants. I was sometimes mistaken for the visiting Korean pastor who ministered at the Calvary Assemblies of God Church, or for the Japanese development worker who makes frequent visits to the mountains. Conversely, I was once stopped by immigration officials who thought I was a Chinese national and who asked to verify my residence permit while ignoring the white American woman walking with me. ⁵ These distinct experiences capture an ambivalence with which Tanzanians view Chinese presence, in the context of a long history of Chinese diplomatic “friendship” with Tanzania, and amid persisting economic inequities and extraction by Chinese companies that increasingly resemble Euro-African relations of the postcolonial period (Sheridan 2018). My presence as a Malaysian Chinese in Tanzania located me in an intermediary position within a global economy of racialized labor, where Southeast and East Asians gradually replace white expatriates in factories and mines while being perceived as “not real whites” (Haruyama 2023). As several scholars have observed, the British historically turned to the Chinese as a “racial solution” (Cheng 2013, 149, original emphasis) to quell the Black rebellions of the 19th century that jeopardized transnational commodity supply chains (see also Lowe 2015, 34-36).

Today, Asians take up this intermediary role in a global racialized economy of labor as purveyors of skills and technologies that are ostensibly more suited and readily available to Africans—a role that offers a “revised temporal framework” for enacting a South–South politics not overdetermined by colonialism (Gupta et al. 2018). My involvement in the treasure hunting expeditions invoked the possibilities of these ambivalent, emergent futures. My racial identity positioned me as a prospective source of collaboration, yet it also subjected me to suspicion that I might steal treasures found due to my access to more sophisticated technologies. Given my Buddhist upbringing, I was also perceived to possess a different type of access to spiritual power that would help Alex and his companions access these guarded treasures. In short, my racial identity enabled me to become a collaborator among Tanzanian treasure seekers within a global economy that sees Asians as (new) colonial players in Africa.

Conclusion: Chronopolitical Treasure Hunting

The vetting committee was not the only party suspicious of my participation in Alex's treasure hunting expeditions. I was also myself incredibly suspicious. Do these treasures really exist? Was I a tool, in both senses of the word? Could this have been an elaborate prank, a way to expose an anthropologist's gullibility for a quixotic quest? I pondered over this question many times, and realized that it was difficult even for me to discern if all the treasure seekers themselves did think there were treasures to be found. What struck me during the expeditions, however, was the inordinate amount of time we spent sitting next to dug-out holes and impassable rock, telling stories about treasures that had been found by others. These were stories about people who became very rich from selling their treasures, people who suffered misfortune because they had failed to properly appease a guardian being, and people whose treasures conjured strange events so their finds were quickly abandoned or returned.

The anthropologist Sandra Calkins (2016) observed that an essential aspect of artisanal gold prospecting in Sudan is the creation of new social spaces for young men, away from the influence of male elders. Could treasure hunting be a pretext for male bonding outside of the social structures of towns and villages? When I discussed this with an Ethiopian-German political scientist colleague, he suggested that it could well be both. ⁶ Due to the social pressure on young men to find work and earn money, treasure hunting offered the perfect opportunity to socialize away from neighbors, relatives, and family in ways that were not perceived as a waste of time because they were all working toward possible, future wealth. Seen this way, the existence of treasures permitted the men to bond over the challenges of uncertain futures, an attempt at making, rather than wasting, time. Treasure hunting therefore bridges East African conceptions of time described by John Mbiti (1970) and the socioeconomic pressures to chase after productive time through secure employment.

This essay examined how treasures, as colonial debris, are transformed into potential postcolonial futures that fall beyond the economic rationalities of the Tanzanian state, multinational corporations, and international organizations. Treasure hunting is at once a practice of recovering historical matter; of refusal of the overdetermined temporalities of development; and of anticipation of alternative futures. It is a chronopolitical act that imagines and constructs possible temporalities of progress beyond those offered by the state. This essay calls for STS scholarship to pay attention to practices of extraction as technological and temporal interventions, where the underground becomes a site for contesting the distribution of capacity to effect time. Being unknown objects of incredible value and, sometimes, of magical powers, treasures prompt STS scholars to consider chronopolitics as actions that intervene in time to produce value. This article highlights how subsequent STS studies of the underground could begin to examine projects of extraction that may never come to be. In other words, treasures are an instance of a thing that is valuable prior to its materiality, not unlike extraplanetary metals or cryptocurrency. Focusing on the anticipatory practices that construct the underground as a place to derive future fortune despite its immateriality or indeterminacy would also help scholars think more carefully about time as epistemological and social intervention, particularly as mining in digital or outer space becomes popular as a source of unrealized wealth.