Hot-spot Marampa
Robert Jan Pijpers · 2024
This chapter picks up where the previous chapter ended: the point at which London Mining arrives in Marampa and reopens the colonial-era DELCO mines in 2006. It provides important social, economic, and political background to the chiefdom and introduces London Mining - to be considered an exemplar of global extractive capitalism - and the economic and political circumstances of its arrival. It further examines the chiefdom’s contemporary experience of boom and bust, of style and ‘hot waters’, thereby presenting Marampa as a layered landscape of accelerated yet ambiguous change. Scrutinizing and building on concepts such as growth poles, mining enclaves, and resource frontiers, it advances the idea of mining environments as ‘hot spots’. This concept enables the foregrounding of the multiplicity of actors, interests, and tensions at play in large-scale mining environments globally, which typically become evident in tangible and often tense encounters and negotiation processes.