From the 1930s, a few African bauxite minesâin Guinea, Ghana , Sierra Leone , Mozambique , and later also in Tanzania âbecame part of a worldwide production network of mines, refineries, smelters, and metal-working factories, all of which were controlled by a few interconnected companies. This book focuses on the consequences of this inclusion into the global aluminum chain, which results in cars, airplanes, buildings, electronic devices, cans, and other consumer goods. Around the decade of the 1960s, when most African countries became independent, they did not possess the technical and political knowledge necessary to build up whole states. SĂ©kou TourĂ© , Guineaâs head of state from 1958 until his death in 1984, only counted 12 Guinean citizens with a university degree at the time of independence (TourĂ© 1967: 37) and Guineaâs population was almost entirely illiterate at this time (Shundeyev 1974: 36). Ghana counted 29 law students (studying in the UK) in 1948 (Rathbone 1999: 52ff) .
At the same time, both governments were dependent on the export of a very limited set of raw materials. The revenues of the Guinean government came almost entirely from bauxite mines and a connected refinery (Larrue 1997: 92; Campbell and Clapp 1995: 427), which were conjointly managed by European , North American, and Russian aluminum enterprises. Besides their influence on national politics, these companies created and de facto ruled over company towns with several hundred thousand inhabitants. They also possessed the majority of the bauxite mines in the rest of the world and thereby controlled a great deal of the strings in Africaâs bauxite producing countries that had previously been directly pulled by the colonialists . The political consequences of this new power configuration, and the explication of how this âruleâ was different from former systems of domination, such as colonialism , are the central topic of this book. The simplified picture of almighty Northern companies controlling a poor Southern âdeveloping countryâ is complicated by the fact that these companies were strongly tied to nation states, interconnected with each other, and certainly also connected to the African elite.
Serious challenges in terms of actually putting down my findings in writing included both the long time frameâfrom independence until todayâas well as the different scales in play. The mining companies exercise a controlling influence on their company towns, interact with governments, and are confronted with political and economic developments around the globe, including African social movements . The imperfect solution to this problem of display was to start with a brief description of the global aluminum production and its entanglements with the mentioned African countries in this chapter. In Chap. 2, I will present the conceptual framework of this study. In Chap. 3, the story will zoom back to the situation in the company towns.
Besides the scarce existing academic literature on bauxite mining in Africa, the findings of this book are mainly based upon field research in Guinea (February 2012 and January to April 2014), business literature and articles mainly derived from the internet, as well as research in the archive of Pechiney (now Rio Tinto Alcan ) at the Institut pour lâHistoire de lâAluminium (IHA) in Paris . The most valuable basis of this book was the work of the political economist Bonnie Campbell from the University of Quebec. Apart from her work, most of the literature on African bauxite mining has been written by former politicians, administrators, and managers.
This concerns accounts of the former Guinean minister for mining, Ibrahima Soumah (Soumah 2008), whose opus magnum has lately even been translated into Chinese (Interview with Engineer CBG 6/02/2014), as well as most of the literature on the company towns of Fria and EdĂ©a (Pauthier 2002: 4â5; Grinberg 1994). Soumah was in power from 2000 to 2002, during a time when Guinean politics was in a process of disintegration and did not have much credibility in the eyes of my interviewees (Interview with Former executive Rusal 3/04/2014). Thanks to the IHA, a considerable amount of the literature on the history of Pechiney in Africa has emerged, although most of it has been written by either veterans of Pechiney or French government officials themselves (see Larrue 1991; Laparra 1995) or was almost exclusively based upon accounts of the company. For instance, Jacques Larrue was Administrateur de la France dâoutre-mer, Chef de cironscription and later Inspecteur du travail and thus was part of the (post-)colonial enterprise before he wrote his book on Fria (Laparra 1995: 422). 1 Maurice Laparra was director of the smelter in EdĂ©a before he wrote a book on this topic and later became directeur gĂ©nĂ©ral of Pechiney and president of the Institut pour lâHistoire de lâAluminium (Thaure 2007: 10; see also Grinberg 1994; Institut pour lâHistoire de lâAluminium 2015). As the entire public archives of the regime under SĂ©kou TourĂ© have been destroyed and the remaining documents often remain in sealed cases under the desks of government officials, a good part of Guinean history remains to be written. While my own contribution to the history of Guinean bauxite mining before 1980 remained punctual, developments in the bauxite towns since the 2000s have received much attention in this book, in particular with regard to the eventful recent history of Fria .
Most of the time that I spent in Guinea was dedicated to carrying out more than 150 semi-structured interviews, which were spread equally across the four Guinean bauxite townsâSangaredi , Kamsar , Kindia /DĂ©bĂ©lĂ© , and Fria âand the capital Conakry . This meant that I was constantly moving from one place to another during 5 months of my research. During my stay in Sangaredi in 2012, I was kindly housed in the city center by the bauxite company itself, and received a guided tour of the mines. There, I mostly had contacts with senior officers and expatriates . In 2014, I stayed mostly with the families of workers.
1.1 The Global Production Network of Aluminum
In order to treat the main question of the sociopolitical repercussions of African bauxite mining, it is first necessary to explain how and where aluminum and its raw material bauxite are produced and whic...