Relational Displacement and the Colonial Legacies of Copper Mining in the Kalahari Copperbelt Region of Botswana

Abstract

Displacements are understood as having wide-ranging impacts on livelihoods and community access to resources. Using interviews and oral histories of farmers displaced by a copper mine in Botswana, the research described here demonstrates that displacement not only changes lived experiences of those who are displaced, but also has broad relational impacts by dispersing displaced people's family members and neighbors, disenfranchising farmers from their cattle and land, shifting the ways that human-wildlife conflict plays out, and creating a new and disruptive relationship between cattle farmers and the mining industry. Postcolonial and Indigenous scholars have long written about human-animal kinship and ongoing colonial and capitalist relations that weave (sometimes disparate) communities closer together or further apart. The work described here demonstrates that this knowledge allows for a clearer understanding of how displacement impacts the material and relational worlds of people and nonhumans displaced by the disruptive forces of resource development.

Keywords

displacement copper mining relationality nonhumans

Introduction

“As life-enhancing entanglements disappear from our landscapes, ghosts take their place.”—Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Ghosts)

Critical displacement studies have reiterated the wide-reaching livelihood and household level impacts that displacement has on families and individuals. Extractive industry displacements in particular have been linked through accumulation by dispossession (Barney, 2009; Carmody and Taylor, 2016; Cavanagh, 2018; Kesselring, 2018), where people are excluded through new systems of land control and management, and subsequently incorporated into capitalist production (Harvey, 1997). The displacement case described here centers around land accumulated in the Toteng region in the Ngamiland District of Botswana through market-driven international investment in the Kalahari copper deposits. Accumulation in Toteng was enabled by government ownership of all mineral resources that allows for quick acquisition of land by private companies. This is an example of primitive accumulation where the violent dispossession of a group of people through actions of the state shift ownership of the means of production (Harvey, 2005; West, 2016), which in this case included the earth, farms, and fodder that sit above sought-after copper ore.

However, this research does not take a descriptive and material approach to these displacements, although that is an important piece of this story. Instead, it investigates the changing relationships that characterize the experience of displacement. Based on cattle farmer stories of experience and memory of displacement from the Toteng copper mining region collected over 2019 and 2020, copper mining displacements of cattle pastoralists in Botswana show how displacement has impacted farmers or subsistence users and their relations. More specifically, by attending to the relational elements of displacement, this research seeks an understanding of displacement using empirical and oral histories that highlight the impacts of displacement and resource extraction on interspecies, social relationships, and land tenure arrangements. How do relationships to family, land, and nonhuman animals change through displacement, and how are people's life-worlds reassembled in lived experience? By life-world, I refer to Achille Mbembe (2001: 15) as he defined the “set of material practices, signs, figures, superstitions, images, and fictions that, because they are available to individuals’ imagination and intelligence and actually experienced, form what might be called ‘languages of life’” that are “not only the field where individuals’ existence unfolds in practice; it is where they exercise existence—that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death.” It is these life-worlds that are twisted and transformed by the U.S. and Canadian copper companies in Toteng, re-shaping lives and relational worlds the owners will never know. They remove the life-enhancing entanglements referenced in the epigraph and have left behind ghosts in the Kalahari Desert: cattle carcasses and homestead ruins (Tuck and Ree, 2013).

Displacement context & methodology

The Boseto and Zone 5 copper mines that displaced farmers from 2011–2015 are adjacent to a group of villages located in the Ngamiland District in Botswana—Toteng, Sehitwa, and Bothathogo (Figure 1). The BaHerero and Ovambanderu farmers that make up much of the population in this area arrived as refugees of the Herero and Namaqua genocide waged by Germany in the early 20^th century (Hitchcock, 2017; Nielsen, 2017). Their languages (mHerero and mBanderu) are not nationally recognized—in school, parliament, or on the radio. Rather, they have been forced to assimilate by using Setswana, English, and conforming to longstanding Tswana political tradition in the kgotla (court) system.

Figure 1.

Map of Botswana by author.

BaHerero and Ovambanderu are traditionally pastoralists and often their dominant source of livelihood is livestock rearing (Magole, 2009). In the village of Toteng, the primary access point to the Zone 5 mine, cattle pastoralism has historically been a primary source of livelihood occurring in a large export economy of Botswana beef. Shifts in land tenure for copper mining development have resulted in changes in community management of rangelands and natural resources (Basupi et al., 2017). Since most land in Botswana is lease held and owned by the dominant Tawana tribe (effectively, the government) farmers are in a precarious position of the leases being forfeited, which often results in them moving to areas with communal grazing.

Botswana has largely avoided Structural Adjustment Programs because of its successful state-controlled diamond mining industry (Odysseos, 2011), made possible, in part, because of this land tenure structure as well as government ownership of mineral rights that are handed over to international companies for extractive resource development. Land policy is an obvious pathway to economic and social development within Botswana, but that comes with visceral consequences for those wrapped up in spaces of capital interest. The displacement from the Toteng region is thus not a singular event in the country. Elsewhere in Botswana, a government-led displacement of San Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) for obfuscated reasons gained international attention from human rights organizations like Survival International (Sapignoli, 2018).

Distinct from the displacement of San from the CKGR, the displacement discussed here was carried out and negotiated largely by two copper companies—Discovery Metals Limited and Cupric Canyon Capital—with logistical support from the Tawana Land Board. The Tawana Land Board moved the leases from farmers to the companies beginning in 2010 when the mine began clearing farmers’ land prior to negotiation, as some respondents shared. Subsequent community meetings were directed by Discovery Metals Limited and the compensation assessment committee was comprised of government officials and representatives from the copper company. Discovery Metals Limited fully acquired seven farms and partially acquired three farms beginning in 2011 (Figure 2). Four farmers reported refusing the compensation amount that was offered, indicating it was much less than what they paid to lease their farms. One reported paying 1.7 million BWP (around 155,500 USD) and was offered 50,000 by the company, which they described as an insult and not enough money to pay for litigation. Farmers also reported that the assessment process of their farms was not transparent. Due to the small amount of compensation, many farmers failed to buy farms elsewhere unless they had income from other business. Instead, since many farmers depended on livestock rearing as their main source of livelihood they had to move to nearby communal areas. This first wave of displacements impacted seven farms and up to one-hundred people prior to a multiple-year decommissioning of the project beginning in 2014 when Discovery Metals Limited sold the operation to Cupric Canyon Capital.

Figure 2.

Farms partially acquired by DML (DML-PA), fully acquired (DML-AQ), and fully acquired by Khoemacau (KHC-AQ). Colors indicate phases of a multiple-year development plan for the region. Source: Tawana Land Board, Maun, Botswana.

The U.S.-owned and Botswana-based Cupric Canyon Capital and their subsidiary Khoemacau purchased the mine and acquired two additional farms (Figure 2). Similarly, to the initial wave of displacements, farms were acquired through the Tawana Land Board and compensation was given by the copper companies with no alternative options. The specific amount of compensation for each farm was unavailable unless farmers reported how much they received. The original title deeds that farmers held were long-term leases with multiple decades remaining. Both copper companies stated that the farms they were acquiring were directly on top of the copper belt. Farmers that attempted to resist the displacement were met with the mine using their land anyways or insistence from the land board that they accept compensation and move.

With the assistance of a local research assistant, I collected twenty-four semi-structured interviews with seventeen male cattle farmers, two widows, and seven farmer's wives from September 2019 through March 2020. I also conducted six oral histories with farmers that were audio-recorded with the interviewee's permission and transcribed verbatim. We identified people to interview through snowball sampling and records obtained through the Tawana Land Board. We recorded interviews under trees at people's cattle posts or new land (if they had it), at their old land, at their friend's houses, their place of work, or in my car to escape the intense heat of the Botswana sun. Interviews were transcribed by myself and translated by my research assistant if they were in mHerero, mBanderu or Setswana. Following transcription, I analyzed the interviews in MaxQDA using an iterative coding process, building on a series of codes based on interview notes. I then took a grounded theory approach in the analytical software. Of the people interviewed, five were able to find new land, five were only partially displaced from their land, eleven moved to communal areas, and three found no new land or communal area to move to. Outside of a few wealthy lawyer and businessperson outliers, many farmers that were displaced grew up on these farms. They knew and loved the places where their parents were buried, where they had invested their labor in their livestock and the land.

This research centers the memories people have of displacement—of the relocation process itself, of the old land, and of where they relocated to. For the oral histories, we conducted landscape walks, as the landscape harbors memories and memorials that can prompt rushes of memory or erase them (Gold and Gujar, 2002; Kosek, 2006; Legg, 2007); these reminders exist across space, such as landscape formations (Basso, 1996) or memorials that serve to make permanent certain memories over others (Johnson, 2005). In remembering, places can become imaginary spaces in which memory becomes creative and nostalgic, but forgetful of certain actions, such as memories associated with violence (Legg, 2007), displacement (Brockington and Igoe, 2006), and other forms of erasure. The interviews, landscape walks, oral histories, and resultant memories demonstrate the deeply personal impacts of displacement. At the same time, I recognize that public memories are shaped by internal power struggles within communities, where some versions of knowledge and stories are given privilege over others, such as, in this case, the knowledge of men (Hamilton and Shopes, 2008; Spivak, 1988).

Additionally, as a settler, I am outside of the epistemologies and ontologies that shape relationality for Indigenous and African people and scholars in much deeper, life-worlding ways than multispecies assemblage theories I discuss below. I have come to these theories through the academy rather than living and breathing them. I use them here to argue specifically towards anticolonial displacement studies, because displacement is fundamentally about land relations and farmers emphasized their shifting connections to their relations in interviews. I am not innocent (Tuck and Yang, 2012) as a Western researcher and can therefore not conduct decolonial research without repatriating life and land. However, I can critique oppressive extractive industry development and the displacements it drives that are often hidden from consumers, and I do that as I examine my own complicity.

While oral history as a practice was promoted by movements around decolonization, feminism, and civil rights, the method itself and resulting descriptions are necessarily re-presentations where the researcher mediates between the original speaker or person being interviewed and the audience for which the research was intended (Hamilton and Shopes, 2008). In this research, this mediation began during interviews and oral histories where the translations provided by my research assistant were sometimes on-the-spot and sometimes lost. For example, the word ‘compensation’ in Banderu is translated roughly as ‘to wipe one's tears away.’ I am echoing the long-known sentiment that meaning and memory are sometimes lost-in-translation. With inspiration from Cadena’s (2015) careful interrogation of translation, the conclusions I draw were composed with partial connections to my research assistant, the people we interviewed together, and the composition of transcripts that we both produced. In the results, I use quotes from people we interviewed to represent direct memories, knowledge, and insights of the relation-making and -breaking experiences of copper mining displacements, to share stories from ‘point-zero’ of the displacement (Gahman, 2020). Many farmers I spoke with volunteered that this story of life and death through their displacement needs to be told, and I hope to do them justice.

Relationality & displacement

This case study contributes a relational approach to understanding displacement from disruptive forces of resource development by focusing on shifting connections between humans, the land, and nonhumans. Relationality has been theorized and practiced by Indigenous scholars (see Brooks, 2018; Simpson, 2017; TallBear, 2019; Todd, 2016), postcolonial scholars (Mbembe, 2001), and more recently through relational philosophies of multispecies assemblages like those of Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. These reasonings of relationality are distinct but intersect in their disruption of the separatist logic of coloniality (Macklin, 2020), their emphasis of connections between humans, nonhumans, and material things and processes, and their resistance to oppression. Understanding displacement as relational shows the ways that the connections of displaced people and their networks shift, how bad relations carry with them an imprint of colonial processes, and how relations that remain, persist, and survive through violent forced removal resist the primary goals of dispossession.

The process of resettlement “seeks to render people and space more governable,” through rearrangements of capital and land (Rogers and Wilmsen, 2020). Displacement forces new regimes of control over land and access to resources through long-standing political tools and infrastructures, such as eminent domain and state ownership of mineral rights. Pathways to displacement are differentiated based on the primary displacing actor, such as the government or private industry, as well as the mode of compensation. In Botswana, international copper politics interact with small-scale and subsistence cattle production through processes of spatial, temporal, and economic displacement by which people are rendered governable in the process of resettlement. What follows are brief descriptions of the ways space and time are used to understand displacement, followed by how theories of relationality coincide with experiences of displacement and its associated shifting life-worlds.

Space—land (and sometimes water) is the limiting factor in every displacement. The social and material qualities of land, their evolution through the displacement process, and how people experience that evolution have varied and multiple effects. Three main qualities of land, indicated by Tania Li, show how displacement is intricately tied up in place. (1) Land holds different value and meaning for different actors—it can be a home, a source of food, or an opportunity to commodity markets depending on whether you grew up on that land, are a farmer, or a prospective mining company. (2) The materiality of land makes it stationary and specific to that place, “you cannot roll it up and take it away.” And finally, (3) inscription devices assemble it for a specific resource depending on an actor's goals (Li, 2014), which differs across different types of displacement drivers as well as for whom the land initially belonged to.

Temporal displacements occur when people are displaced through time via a loss of pasts and futures that are no longer accessible to them (Askland, 2018). This can occur through displacement in place or “involuntary immobility” (Lubkemann, 2008), and in addition to physical displacement. Temporality of experience requires we pay attention to the many different time scales that certain types of development and their associated displacements are imbricated in. Tsing et al. (2017, eds.) ask how many types of time are, in this case, experiences of development wrapped up in? On the slow geological scale, there is the formation of copper ore, which is directly opposed to the rapid boom and busts of the copper market that fluctuate with the global economy (Tsing et al., 2017). The latter has been termed an extractive pace, where constantly shifting time agendas shift with the global economy and local conditions (Kesselring, 2018). Fluctuating timescales of family history begin to overlap with the extractive pace, changing human relationships to family, friends, neighbors, work, land, and the nonhumans wrapped up in each of those. Nixon (2011) points out that the “past of slow violence is never past,” impacts and changes that arise during displacement live on—in memory, as industrial particulates from past exposures to pollution, and in new material realities.

A multitude of temporal and spatial conditions can be found through using and understanding “assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, [and] inhuman” (Haraway, 2015). Assemblages can be used to understand how people, nonhumans, and their myriad of connections move differently through the places and histories that displacements are involved with. As Tsing (2015: 8) notices, “life seems to have gotten more crowded, not only with… ecological histories, but also with international relations and capitalist trading practices.” These interweaving webs of activity create complex lifeways for humans and nonhumans alike. However, extractive colonialism and dispossession exist because of colonizers who want land and resources (Brooks, 2018; Simpson, 2017). While these drivers may be simple, they are violent; their mitigation and management strategies remain inadequate; and they have impacts that reverberate across networks, such as those of displaced farmers. Dispossession reverberates. It is expansive and goes beyond physical land loss to spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and political severing from hubs of networked relationships (Simpson, 2017).

Of networked relationships, kinship and human-animal relations are paramount and their relational shifts have been studied and written about by Indigenous scholars for decades (Daigle, 2016; Todd, 2016). Anthropologist and Indigenous scholar Zoe Todd describes ways of being “that acknowledge to be human is to exist in relation, & that to be in relation is to be caught up in the existence…of many other beings, existences, relations” (Todd, 2020). To be in life-enhancing relation with other beings is to be incompatible with international mining companies that displace communities for extraction and production. By preferencing mining over (primarily) subsistence cattle production, the government of Botswana is altering, severing, and replacing life-worlds of cattle farmers and their families, an enduring legacy of colonialism.

African postcolonial scholars have long recognized such legacies and celebrated diverse ways of being in the world, particularly on the African continent (Ogunyankin, 2019). Both African postcolonial scholars and Indigenous scholars have called for the need to go beyond Western descriptions of modernity and hegemony in reshaping protocols and policies (Ogunyankin, 2019). However, displacement takes place in specific locations with long histories and therefore, in distinct ways on the African continent. African postcolonialism is characterized by material and epistemological worlds that exist in relation to persisting political economies of inequality after colonization (Ogunyankin, 2019), where Africans have been defined by the west as “other” and all that the west is not (Mbembe, 2001). In other words, while postcolonial theory insists colonialism has an enduring legacy on the African continent, it disavows these colonial master narratives and celebrates multiplicity. This approach decenters the stories of dispossession that consider subjugation through colonialism and capitalism as all-encompassing and through the process overlook life-sustaining relations that remain and occur in parallel with the violence of dispossession (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Heynen and Ybarra, 2021; McKittrick, 2013; Salih and Corry, 2021).

Postcolonial relationalities and explorations of non-Western postcolonial worlds can thus shift critical displacement studies away from colonial master narratives and towards recognizing the evolving wide-reaching experiential impacts of displacement for nonhuman, social, and economic relations in the face of settler-state led extractive industry development. Achille Mbembe uses the concepts of entanglement and displacement, for example, to describe how inequality persists in postcolonial African countries, taking as a starting point the distinctive temporalities and subjectivities that define shifting life-worlds. Relations shape these life-worlds. They can be bad relations that disrupt or life-enhancing that remain, sustain themselves, and center joy, family, and access. These can only be understood through positionalities and ontologies that shape relationality for Indigenous and African people, in this case the BaHerero Ovambanderu farmers displaced by the copper mines.

In the subsequent results sections, I build on the theoretical framework described here to show that empirically, relations shift through displacement and are as wide-ranging to include distant familial relations, friendships, domestic and wild interspecies relationships, and land tenure arrangements, as well as introduce new relations to copper ore and foreign miners. Elsewhere, displacement has been explored relationally by Byrd et al. (2018) who argued that dispossession translates people, land, and nonhumans into value form through processes of financialization and abstraction that reduce life-worlds to capital relations. Abstractions of dispossession within extractive industry overshadow the ways that displacement disrupts, maintains, and shifts farmer life-worlds and the human and nonhuman relations they are connected to.

Results: changing relations of displacement

Results of the qualitative analysis indicate there are three main areas where farmers experienced relational impacts from land dispossession. (1) The rearranging of their nonhuman relations; specifically, their connection to the nonhuman environment, including land, access to water, their kinship with and ability to raise livestock, and their interactions with wildlife. (2) Their social relations and worlds that include relationships with their family members who they often shared a farm with, and their neighbors. And, (3) the shifting economies and land tenures defined by their new relationship to the mine. The impacts described below are overlapping and intersectionally compounding—they are not siloed and interact in varied ways. For example, many farmers had to face finding new land with little money as well as dealing with lost and dying cattle. Others were mourning the loss of a loved one, while simultaneously looking for new sources of livelihood and income. What follows is an exploration of the ways networked relations shifted for cattle farmers when a copper mine acquires their land.

Rearranging nonhuman relations

For people across Botswana, interactions with their nonhuman environments have historically been and continue to be life-defining relations. Cattle have been a source of passion, community, and have even shaped political hierarchies for people of Botswana for centuries. Farmer narrations of their displacement often focused on cattle and intersected with drought, human-wildlife conflict, and foods they relied on. The significance of such a nonhuman connection is often missed in displacement studies that focus on livelihood impacts of development, rather than relational impacts, because the emphasis is on “development” that occurs within a particular ontology of life—typically one that centers western ideas of modernity. While livelihood is still important in the research presented here, quality of life is not necessarily always determined by how much money someone makes, despite the discursive ubiquity of “GDP per capita” to determine if someone has all of their needs met. This research trend mirrors the trend in development that transformed farmer relationships to cattle in Botswana, beginning right before Independence, when cattle began their techno-economic transformation to beef, where they would be produced for the global market (Livingston, 2019). This transformed relationships to food, shifted problems of malnutrition to ones of obesity and hypertension; to each other, where political and racial elite had the upper hand in commercial production; and to their animals, away from a “time when humans thanked [them] for the gift of their flesh” (Livingston, 2019: 37). This is an important context in which the cattle farmers of the Toteng region were displaced. They had assimilated into production of beef to be sold to the Botswana Meat Commission, but were not competitive at a corporate scale, did not engage in feedlot practices, and still maintained interspeciated kinships marked by the slaughter of a cow for special occasions. Thus, relationality shows what connections not only give life or take life away by centering the relationships that matter, but those that transform into hybrid forms.

Cattle play both a traditional subsistence and modernizing role in Botswana. Since Independence and the growth of the beef industry for export to Europe, cattle production has expanded to become economically viable for most farmers, industrial for few. While most respondents have not scaled up production to be industrially viable, they all engaged in both subsistence and market-based beef production. This production is not just a livelihood but a way-of-life; it is culturally defining, where a cow slaughter accompanies important celebrations. All respondents mentioned their cattle, emphasizing that this is where their specialization lies, the reason they needed land to begin with. Farmers often equated livestock with life, “We ended up losing our livestock… We have lost our way of life.” As their leases were taken from them to be given to the copper companies they described losing their land and in the process, their cows becoming lost or dying from a myriad of causes: in the tailings waste pit at the mine; because of the drought that followed them through their displacement; from increased human-wildlife conflict with lions or elephants; or as they wandered astray, towards the old farm, after cattle had been relocated themselves. The loss of their cattle led to impoverishment: “Now we are impoverished…I’ve lived all my life depending on cattle until now, and now the money [the mine is] giving us… I can't even afford to fuel the vehicle. Cattle are dying in the lake. At the ranch the cattle wouldn't die this way.” Farmers had structured their entire lives around these creatures—with losing their land, as the preceding quotes exemplify, they lost their cattle and their ways of life. This is a result of complex cattle (and beef) social and economic relations that exist locally as well as through global connections, colliding and rupturing with the introduction of copper production. For the Toteng farmers, cattle and what they needed for their survival were significant relations that shifted with shifting land tenure.

Cattle had their own memories of the land, as one farmer described their return journeys to the old farm after being relocated: “We intentionally delayed [relocating] because we had livestock. It wasn't easy because the livestock were accustomed to the old land and could go astray. Livestock of those who moved earlier were coming back to the old land.” Cattle that returned to their old land travelled at minimum twenty kilometers across roads and developments carved out of primarily savanna woodland desert by the mining companies and their contractors. Most of them were not found again and died through the causes previously mentioned. The co-experiences of memory of home-lands and (im)mobility impacts after displacement for cattle and farmers represents intersections of oppression across socio-economic and species boundaries (Joyce et al., 2015). Through the displacement, hierarchies of power are carried out by the government and copper company that subjugate humans and more-than-humans based not just on the physical space they occupy but on discrimination of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and species (Gillespie and Collard, 2015). The intimate connections cows have with the lifeways of humans resulted in their own displacement and ultimately death—an important consideration of the wide-reaching impacts and changing relations of mining-induced displacement. Displacement studies often overlook the impact of various forms of migration on nonhuman relations, outside of studies focusing specifically on wildlife conservation displacements. The example of shifting life-worlds for cattle themselves is just one way that experiential impacts are more wide-reaching than colonial master narratives suggest.

Fundamentally life-giving water and rain are important to the long-standing lifeways of cattle pastoralism and are critical for the growth of grazing pastures in the desertous, savannah-woodland landscape of the Kalahari Copperbelt. One farmer described that what he missed about his old farm was “the structure of the soil, the grass itself, how it [caught]… the rain.” Rain provides a critical release following seasonal periods of very dry heat for Batswana and their livestock, as well as the country's high numbers of wildlife that rely on the seasonal rains for food and water. The vast majority (78.4% of approximately two million people) of Batswana live in rural areas, where rain and interactions with animals they rely on and coexist with define daily life (Kolawole, 2014). In particular, the BaHerero and Ovambanderu farmers of Toteng and surrounding areas use a grazing method that relies on small groups of kinsmen and seasonal fluctuations in water where they move closer to Lake Ngami during the dry season and back to their boreholes during the wet season. The leased land that they were displaced from and have used since the early twentieth century is where their boreholes were and allowed for this seasonal and sustainable grazing (Magole, 2009).

When people recalled their old land, they not only remembered the structure of the land itself, its productivity, or the grasses that fed their livestock, they also remembered the water—how it fed their livestock and their family. They connected their old land to a time when there was no water crisis, when their borehole was productive and provided sweet (not salty) water for their livestock to drink. As one farmer described: “These days we are living a difficult life. Our cattle are dying due to water scarcity.” The material impacts farmers and their families experienced due to relocation were compounded by environmental pressures, particularly the multiple-year drought that resulted in cattle dying across the district of Ngamiland. “Some of [our cattle] are stuck in the mud [at Lake Ngami] because we don't have boreholes. We don't have land we can take them to.” As farmers were displaced from their land and boreholes, shifts in precipitation (as shown in historical data) were concurrent with erasures in the farmer's ability to continue using their traditional, seasonally designed grazing system. At the time of interview, Botswana was in the middle of a multiple-year extreme drought. This fact literally makes history greener and inevitably shapes memory of past land (and rain) to be sweeter. However, as Mutopo and Chiweshe (2014) point out, land grabs are also water grabs (Livingston, 2019). Water is an especially important resource for this landscape—where rains are seasonal and there are multi-decadal oscillations of drought and ample rain (Wolski et al., 2012). It is not surprising then, that water so often played into their memory of the old land, where the availability of sweet water was equated to the health of their livestock and themselves, a literal life-giving relation. Farmers and their cattle's relationship with water exemplifies relations that are not simply material, but temporal and scalar—occurring at climatic scales of time and space as well as at the hyperlocal scale of a droplet of water.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) and interactions are persistent relations for people and biodiversity conservation in Botswana (Buchholtz et al., 2020). However, the ways that HWC manifests can shift with shifts in land tenure and drought. Ten farmers described HWC as increasing due either to the presence of the mine before farmers were displaced or at their new land. Open water pits, such as the tailings waste pit, attract elephants, especially during drought. This became a problem for farmers prior to relocating and for those that hadn’t relocated at the time of interview, as elephants knocked down their fences causing their livestock to go astray, or stepped on their cattle after they got stuck in the mine's tailings pit, as indicated by a farmer: “Our cattle got stuck in [the tailings pit], and elephants would step on them into the mud, due to competition for water at the mine.” Additionally, five respondents described now having difficulties with lions eating their livestock at their new land, where they are located closer to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. “I am nowhere now. From this farm I went to other people's lands, somewhere close to the [game reserve] and my cattle got killed by lions, they are finished.” When elephants, lions, and drought interact with displacement—the story often ends with cattle and often, the cattle's end. However, human-wildlife connections have historically been fraught through disrupted crops and infrastructure making this relation one that is carried through displacement.

As Livingston (2019: 47) writes: “[t]he cattle post, the ultimate site of rest and pleasure in Botswana, is also a portal into an older mode of interspeciation and sociality.” A cattle post is a communal, unfenced area; compared to the ranches farmers were displaced from—fenced, leased areas. Cattle roam freely outside of leasehold ranches, such as in cattle posts, until they hit the veterinarian fences that separate wildlife from livestock. These fences are meant to reduce transmission of foot-and-mouth disease so cattle can still suitably be sold on the European beef market. The rest and pleasure of the cattle post is even more true for the ranch, where farmers don't have to worry about their cattle going astray. The ranches that farmers were displaced from provided peace and food for themselves and their livestock: “We stayed on land where we could milk and have sour milk, we could sell the milk and make money. We stayed in a quiet place, there was no noise and so our livestock lived peacefully.” Farmer's relations include the land itself, the water, food, and peace the land provides, the animals that use the land, as well as how the land is treated by them in return. Stewardship of land and land policies often define contemporary land relations and, in this case, resulted in a relational shift when farmer's land was transferred to the mines. Connections to the land and relations that matter to farmers remain through memories and new access to different land for some.

Memories of food, peace, and connections to nonhumans associated with the land and the land itself were primary memories for many displaced farmers and their wives: “We used to lead a good life when we were there. We didn't need anything. We were living well. We used to eat various kinds of food and at our will.” When recalling memories of foods provided by the land respondents became particularly nostalgic. As Legg (2007) has shown, sweet memories such as the abundance of food might override memories associated with hardship and could make present conditions seem less favorable. Some respondents that were displaced from the land connected not having cattle after displacement to not having a quality of life and their (in)ability to feed or take care of their children: “If I wasn't compensated, I could be gathering wild berries, grinding and giving [them] to my children to eat, but now [the farm] is taken.” Others recalled different types of productivity or beauty they missed about the land—gathering wild berries and grasses; trees that they knew; the peace and quiet that came from being away from the village; and their healthy cattle. Respondents would note that “at [the old farm] there is life; there is no hunger,” but rather complete access to sour milk, churned butter, wild spinach, field crops, game, their livestock, and wild foods. Having access to growing or collecting food in rural Botswana is significant as 64.4% of rural residents were below the poverty line in 2010 (Kolawole, 2014). Being unable to access food is stressful, which is perhaps why many respondents noted living more peacefully when they shared their memories of food: “I remember that I used to be relaxed, drinking sour milk. The conditions were really favorable before these mining activities came in.” For some, their removal from the land took away secure access to water and foods, the non-human relations they relied on for survival, and left memories of abundance in their place.

Social relations

Farmers shared land in Toteng amongst large families and groups of friends as a gathering place for special occasions like weddings, funerals, celebrations, and as a place of rest. Social networks grew on the foundation of the land and its associated nonhuman life-worlds, where farmers supported themselves and their kin during and after displacement. Even in the process of relocating, which happened at different times for every syndicate, farmer's neighbors supported each other by sharing their boreholes until they were able to find new land. However, many farmers and their wives hadn't seen each other since moving from the land. One respondent described having not seen their friends or family they shared the land with for the three years since they relocated at the time of interview.

With compensation and no new land, families that formerly comprised syndicates on farms acquired by the copper mines were broken up: “We were living a peaceful Herero life. Like the way we lived alongside [of our neighbors], we were hurt when they relocated because we had family ties. Now we feel that the mine brought inconvenience because it broke us apart.” Individual family members physically dispersed throughout the Ngamiland district and into the adjacent district, Ghanzi, sometimes over 200 kilometers away from each other. Nineteen people ended up dispersing to Maun, the nearest large town to Toteng. Others moved to a nearby cattle post (communal area), Mogapelwa. After displacement, some people reported not having seen the neighbors on adjacent farm syndicates that farmers and their families had grown close to since they had to leave their land. The physical dispersal of farmers and their families is distinct for this displacement when compared to studies of resettlement that place entire villages in a new location because farmers were not provided new land.

Instead, farmers were given only money, which added strain to relationships in addition to physical dispersal. A wife of a farmer motioned to a common sentiment amongst people displaced by the copper mine—that money is easily mismanaged: “Money is like ripe fruit ready to be eaten; like served food; anyone will easily go into the pots. It is like served food; that is how money is.” Often, people said this through a common saying—that money cannot be eaten. Money is not life sustaining food like what they had access to on the farm or what they grew up learning about and had decades of knowledge on how to manage. Stories of mismanagement of money were often connected to critiques of the mine not providing new land or financial education and assistance. (These were among the most common requests for what the mine and the land board could do differently for future displacements.)

Mismanagement often manifested through disagreements. The wiping away of farmer's tears (compensation) was shared amongst members of a syndicate, typically amongst family, which resulted in contentions around finances. For many people, compensation was not enough to buy a new farm and some wondered whether their brother, for example, took more money for himself. Displacement thus not only strained an individual farmer's ability to provide for himself and his family but his relationships with fellow members of his syndicate through disputes over money: “Money is not a joke, it broke relationships.” The introduced financial relation and dispersal of kin shows how dispossession reverberates beyond physical land loss (and compensation) to severing spiritual and emotional relationships to the land and one another (Simpson, 2017).

Relationships were also strained for some who turned to alcohol or split from their partner for other reasons surrounding conflict brought on by displacement. Seven people I interviewed were concerned about the rise in alcoholism and said that alcohol broke relationships when men used up compensation money partying in Maun: “The thing is, my husband was not okay. He bought those cattle but then due to alcoholism he ended up reselling them again because he is a heavy drinker.” Without new land to once again share amongst themselves, the overall effect of this compensatory process (of wiping one's tears away) was the division of families around money issues and physical departures from one another: “Relationships, marriages were destroyed… some got divorced because of the mine…” Not only did the mine create literal toxins that killed non-human kin of farmers, the cattle dying in the mineral waste of the copper tailings pit, it also influenced toxic relationship dynamics amongst loved ones. Toxins from the mine are both material and relational, moving through each on different scales of time—one as industrially produced chemicals become parts of human bodies (Murphy, 2017) and another with the reordering of intimate relations.

Additionally, decisions on how to split up compensation was always in the hands of the male farmers: “Only the husband was given [money] and [he] would take care of his wife and the children.” Women recalled often not knowing how much they were compensated because their husband or son dealt with finances: “No, [my husband] is the one who knows that; he was the one whose name was in the syndicate; even the amount of money they got; I didn't even see the papers.” Compensation was given primarily to men unless a main shareholder of the farm was a widowed woman, such as one situation where a widow accepted compensation on behalf of her late husband. Because of BaHerero and Ovambanderu gendered hierarchies, the experience of displacement through compensation and no new land was uneven for women when compared to men. Women who were forced to relocate described being more unsafe now, at their new land or location, than they were before on the farm: “The way the surroundings or the landscape were, you could walk in nature and feel relaxed, safe, and free without fear of anything. This side a woman cannot easily walk in the bush alone.” Additionally, respondents described increased interactions between the almost exclusively male population of miners and women who live in Toteng, with the presence of male miners increasing the precarity of being a woman in the village. The presence of the mine restructured social life by introducing a large group of outsiders to the villages and re-emphasized existing gender relations.

Shifting economies

The Zone 5 and Boseto copper project's material conditions are different from other displacements in Botswana through the social hierarchies of local communities and proprietary companies (Bakker and Bridge, 2006). Shifting economies and land tenures for local people were defined by their new relationship to the mine, whether through their displacement or, for other local villagers, through the introduction of miners and secondary industries to the adjacent villages. For the people displaced by the mines, the physical removal of earth for copper production occurred by accumulating their land, often driving them to new geographical areas and economic pursuits. For everyone, on the surface the new mines might be taken as only displacing a few families; however, the mines have reverberating effects not only through displacement but through shifting economies and environmental impacts.

The presence of the mines, the networks of moving people and nonhumans, and shifting economies are enabled by state laws in Botswana, such as state-ownership of mineral rights. Multiple respondents referenced that what was theirs was only on top of the land: “The land underneath isn't ours. Our land is on top.” The state opens up mineral extraction to international investments, for minimal benefits to local farmers who struggled to purchase new land with the compensation given. Status quo development and state land law has thus neoliberalized natural resources and land (Klug, 2017), that formerly played integral parts in significant relationships farmers had with their families and neighbors, cattle-pastoralist traditions, and for some, connections to the land where their parents are buried. This displacement has made material multi-dimensional aspects of land, where there is a literal divide between what is above the land and below it, with the bones of farmer's ancestors buried in the state's legal jurisdiction.

The copper ore beneath the land that farmers knew will quickly become an international relation with a concealed history after its export, where the stories of farmer displacement are hidden from copper consumers. Environmental and social impacts are hidden from consumers of copper (Marx, 1976). Hidden are the interactions of international investment and production of copper in the mining process, and the displacements that have deeply relation-breaking and -making effects. Hidden are also the social relations that are tied up across the farmer communities, Botswana state, and international copper companies. These social relations shape nature through the physical peeling away of earth and extraction of copper ore adjacent to pastoral grazing lands, to make this dry-savannah resource and environment a product of global political economy (Bakker and Bridge, 2006). As one farmer said: “Really the mines they are good in terms of the nation, but they are not good in terms of the land.” As cattle production is replaced with copper production, cattle, their farmers, and their farmer's families are replaced with dust, ore, and internationally-contracted laborers. Through this process the copper mines have brought new geographies of harm through the physical removal of earth and people, and the introduction of new pollutants that have long-lasting effects on the environment and in people's bodies (Nixon, 2011).

Villagers adjacent to the mine, including farmers who were displaced, are incorporated into this international economy through shifting village demographics, needs, and local economies. When I asked about positive things the mine brought to the surrounding villages, respondents often described new developments through secondary industries, such as shops and bars, road improvements, and general ‘urbanization’ of Toteng: “Business is good [in Toteng] and that means it’ll be the first to have a bank.” Often, people mentioned the upliftment or development of the nation more generally, alongside of describing how they had been left behind: “I knew that eventually it would be beneficial for me and the rest of the population of the country.” Livingston (2019) points out that “[i]n development discourse… roads have long been fetishized as the magic amulet that will end poverty, Botswana was no different.” In Botswana, like the United States, a car has become an economic necessity that has unintended consequences, such as an increase in poverty through lack of alternative transportation. Roads are built in political economic contexts that make cars and socio-economic assimilation necessary. For people displaced by the copper mine, this sometimes meant preferencing compensation money for a new vehicle, in lieu of new land, effectively completely altering their economic prospects.

One person partially displaced was briefly employed by the mine, as well as other displaced people's children, improving their outlook of the mine. Others were excited about the employment and development opportunities the mine offered. However, the mine contracted out many smaller companies and employed people primarily from South Africa. While the mine developed housing in Toteng for the miners, restructuring the community, they began operating an open pit mine, restructuring the land as well. The housing development meant tens of miners coming into the village influencing new economies and social relations.

These relational shifts are expected to continue as projections of copper demand for infrastructure, plumbing, and wiring range from 275–300% increase for the period 2010–2050, determined using projections for per capita GDP and levels of urbanization (Elshkaki et al., 2016). With continued copper production will likely come continued and wide reaching spatial and temporal displacements that extend from mineral development patterns over the last two decades. Since the 1990s, copper investment decreased in developed economies and increased in developing economies (Bridge, 2004), furthering the risks associated with foreign mining investment.

Conclusion

In the Kalahari Copperbelt of Botswana, copper-mining-induced displacement had broad relational impacts—with people's family members, neighbors, their cattle, and the land that their livelihoods depended on. Displacement has not only changed the material and relational of humans but of nonhumans they previously held daily interactions with either through altering the subsoil itself, lost cattle that return home, or decreased access to subsistence use of veld products. This story begins to demonstrate the wide-reaching networks and threads that shift with international investment driven mining displacements. This exercise is critical to understanding the real impacts of displacement and recognizing current displacement mitigation strategies as inadequate. It's not only the farmer that was displaced, but his cow that died, the sour milk he can no longer drink, and the decades of cattle pastoralism he can no longer do.

The visceral effects of displacement and the time scales that are carried through displacement through memory and changed relations, on farmer's, their family's lives, and their non-human companions, have been severed, replaced, and dislocated by the copper mine. This is not a new conclusion—decades of work by Indigenous and postcolonial scholars around the world have critiqued the ways that development has impacted relations through time and across space (Todd, 2016). However, this approach could shift critical displacement studies away from maintaining the transformation of farmers into capital relations and towards better understanding the wide-reaching life-world impacts associated with resource development. Uneven experiences of displacement that are examined relationally and on a basis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and species allow for a clearer understanding of complex visceral and life-changing impacts (Elmhirst, 2015; Gillespie and Collard, 2015).

The complex world of postcolonial relations that maintain and shift through displacement show how displacement studies can be anticolonial, a field that is fundamentally about land relations. Present-day settler-state led extractive industry, which includes the North American copper companies financing mineral extraction in Botswana, maintain colonial imprints—land relations within a global field of power that often underwrite one group of people assuming access to another's land (Liboiron, 2020; McMichael, 2017). The land relations that foreground imperialism and extractive conquest of human and more-than-human bodies in Africa are colonial legacies of control in spaces that have been forcefully fought over be Europeans in the past, such as through the Berlin Conference that artificially shaped present-day political boundaries across the African continent. While traditional displacement studies focus foremost on livelihood impacts, a postcolonial relational approach does this in addition to recognizing the wide-reaching experiences of displacement for nonhumans, farmers, and their families to better understand how life-worlds shift or stay the same. Relational displacement studies show the multiplicity of displaced people's lives—the emotional, spiritual, and non-economic physical impacts of displacement, as well as resistance and sustaining relations that occur in parallel with dispossession.

People who were displaced by the mine called their old homes and land their “ruins,” many of which are still there, yet to be taken down or transformed by the mine. Farmers past lives are held in their ruins, for now, and even after they are removed they will be held in their memory. Tsing (2015) describes the reliance on capitalism and the potential of life after capitalist ruin: “Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope--or turn our attention to our sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.” At once, the sites of the copper mine and farmer's ruins are evidence of lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes, and also of promise of modernity—development for Botswana and production of the necessary copper for our modern lives. The two are spatially co-occurring and incompatible through their broad relation-breaking effects and the violence surrounding the copper companies’ and government's material rejection of farmer relations. Life in capitalist ruin might be made more possible with the acknowledgement of these wide-reaching relations and uncovering of the life-enhancing entanglements that turn to ghosts in the shadow of industrial mining development.

Highlights

Copper mining displacements in Botswana have broad relational impacts—with people's family members, neighbors, their cattle, other nonhumans, and the land.

Livestock, particularly cattle, experienced (im)mobility impacts after displacement shown through attempts to return up to forty kilometers back to the land they were displaced from, indicating intersections of oppression across socio-economic and species boundaries.

Farmer's narrations of their experience being displaced always included their cattle, an example of a relational connection that is often missed in displacement studies that center livelihood impacts.

Copper mining displacement strained and reordered intimate and familial relationships through disputes over how to divide compensation, misuse of money, and physical dispersal of loved ones.

Indigenous and postcolonial scholarship allow for better understandings of people's experience of extractive industry development, particular those who have been disenfranchised by colonial tools such as displacement.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This research was completed with the support of a U.S. Fulbright grant. I have ongoing gratitude for Israel Kazapua for assisting me in Botswana, especially during the long, bumpy drives. I am also grateful for the invaluable writing support and feedback from Paul Robbins, Elizabeth Hennessy, and Jules Reynolds.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Fulbright US Student Award.

ORCID iD

Justyn Huckleberry

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