Abstract
Some books are better read from the end. Such is the case of historian Gabrielle Hecht’s spectacular opus on African uranium: its conclusive methodological appendix gives detailed information on the tour de force that underlies the book’s research. Based on 138 interviews and the analysis of about 50,000 pages of archives collected in nine countries on four continents (and sometimes saved from termites), the book was 15 years in the making. The appendix provides illuminating insights on the difficulties and serendipities that any researcher on uranium and other nuclear topics may encounter.
In her book, Hecht analyzes the significance of African uranium after the Second World War on two different scales. The first part of the book critically engages with the constitution of a global uranium market by using Michel Callon’s framework on market devices: how was such a strategic material transformed into a tradable commodity? And what was the role of African countries in this development? By drawing on public and corporate archives (e.g., Rio Tinto’s Rössing mine in Namibia), Hecht makes a convincing case for the absolute conventionality of uranium prices, flows and trading contracts, and their absolute sensitivity to political influence – whether it be in the context of the Cold War or decolonization struggles. The second part of the book dissects the local consequences of uranium mining in Madagascar, Gabon, Namibia and South Africa, with a specific emphasis on workers’ health. Those very good case studies convey a plurality of voices and points of view, not eschewing the silenced voices and contaminated bodies of the African mine workers.
Hecht’s theoretical argument seeks to bring together the global uranium trade with local mining practices (each topic could have been the subject of a stand-alone book) by showing how they express and respond to uranium’s contested and shifting ‘nuclearity’. Nuclearity is a ‘techno-political category’ (p. 14) that distributes and classifies things, people and situations according to their perceived ‘nuclear’ ontology. Hecht demonstrates that African uranium has been, in various times and places and depending on social and political actors’ strategies, either treated as a nuclear material, or as a most banal ore, with huge political, economic and public health implications. Sensitive to the specificities of space and time, the book’s STS approach avoids the twin pitfalls of naturalizing/objectifying uranium; or endowing it with the kind of chthonian agency, that a vital materialist approach might have pursued. In this, Hecht’s approach is thoroughly political and convincing.
I have two slight reservations about this important and stimulating book. The volume’s structure and chapter numbering and naming are somewhat confusing: a clearer frame would have been helpful to make sense of the high density of information. Second, the conclusive chapter is frustrating, as it does not conclude anything really. We do not know, in the end, what to make of the heuristic power of ‘nuclearity’ but arguably this is precisely in the nature of its innate open-endedness – and its threat.