From Marikana to London. The Anti-Blackness of Mining Finance

On the 16th of August 2012, thirty-four striking mineworkers were shot dead by police forces in Marikana in South Africa during a strike against Lonmin, a British mining company. The massacre was reminiscent of the days of apartheid, and while the ‘rainbow nation’ narrative of post-apartheid South Africa had long been under pressure, what happened in Marikana represented a definite point of rupture. How could this take place under a government led by the African National Congress – the former liberation movement? This thesis takes the Marikana massacre as its point of departure, but in order to understand how it could happen, I ask whether there are pieces of the puzzle to be found outside the spatial and temporal boundaries of contemporary South Africa. Given that Lonmin has its main listing on the London Stock Exchange, the connection between the mining sector in South Africa and the finance sector in London appeared as one such missing piece of the puzzle. Based on 14 months of fieldwork in London, Cape Town and Johannesburg, this thesis presents an ethnography of mining finance, based on participatory observation and interviews with investment bankers, fund managers and mining specialists within the field of mining finance. However, going beyond the contemporary connection to mining finance in London, there is a longer historical trajectory of this connection that goes back to the late 19th Century and the early establishment of the mining industry in South Africa. This historical connection is probed to ask whether the Marikana massacre carries in it particular traces of this past – a past that, rather than passing, accumulates. What I found drawing on my ethnographic material of contemporary mining finance as well as by carrying out a historical comparison, is, firstly, that mining finance can be seen to operate on the basis of what I term ‘blindsight’. This term is employed to analytically capture the fact that financial investments into mining are made in a manner that are, allegedly, blind to ‘race’, but which nonetheless re-entrench historically produced patterns of racialized capital accumulation. Secondly, my ethnography also shows the complex temporalities of mining finance, which I describe and analyse as ‘extractive temporalities’. Far from being straightforward linear temporalities concerned only with the future accumulation of profits, extractive temporalities contain contradictory relations to the past and future. These temporalities are