Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium” and “issue 5”

Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium” and “issue 5″write a paragraph and a multiple-choice question based on the article named”Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium” and “issue 5”write a paragraph and a multiple-choice question based on the article named"TAfrica and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium" and "issue 5".Africa and the Nuclear World:Labor, Occupational Health, and theTransnational Production of UraniumGABRIELLE HECHTDepartment of History, University of MichiganWhat is Africa’s place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government reporton nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any“nuclear activities.”1 Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent ofworld uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants inEurope, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers inuranium mines were “exposed to higher amounts of internal radiationthan . . . workers in any other segment of the nuclear energy industry.”2What, then, does it mean for a workplace, a technology, or a nation to be“nuclear?” What is at stake in that label, and how do such stakes vary bytime and place?In both political and scientific discourse, an apparently immutable ontologyhas long distinguished nuclear things from non-nuclear ones. The distinctionhas seemed transparent, fixed, and incontrovertible—ultimately a matter offission and radioactivity. Scholarship on the history, culture, and politics ofthe “nuclear age” has also assumed the self-evidence of “nuclear” things. Noone questions whether bombs and reactors are “nuclear,” even while bitterbattles rage over their political, military, or moral legitimacy.Acknowledgments: My biggest debts are to Paul Edwards and Bruce Struminger for their manycontributions. Useful comments also came from Soraya Boudia, Geoff Eley, Kenneth Garner,Michelle Murphy, Martha Poon, Christopher Sellers, Matthew Shindell, and the reviewers of thisjournal, as well as audiences in Minneapolis, Toronto, Eindhoven, Stony Brook, San Diego, andMadison.1 Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Safeguards and the International Atomic EnergyAgency, OTA-ISS-615, Apr. 1995, App. B.2 D. A. Holaday, “Some Unsolved Problems in Uranium Mining,” in, International AtomicEnergy Agency, International Labour Organisation, and World Health Organization, RadiologicalHealth and Safety in Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1 (InternationalAtomic Energy Agency, 1964), 51.Comparative Studies in Society and History 2009;51(4):896–926.0010-4175/09 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 2009doi:10.1017/S001041750999017X896Beyond these clear-cut cases, however, the category of the “nuclear” hasnever been defined by purely technical parameters. Like other master categoriesthat claim global purview, the “nuclear” both inscribes and enacts politics ofinclusion and exclusion. Neither technical function nor radiation sufficed tomake African nations and their mines “nuclear” in geopolitical terms. Such outcomes,I have suggested elsewhere, were closely tied to the political economyof the nuclear industry, with profound consequences for the legal and illegalcirculation of uranium and other radioactive materials and for the global institutionsand treaties governing nuclear systems.3 Here, I argue that the historicaland geographical contingencies affecting the “nuclear” as a category have alsohad significant consequences for the lives and health of mineworkers. I focuson African uranium miners, whose labor has fueled atomic weapons andnuclear reactors around the world for over six decades. That these peoplehave been ignored both in histories of the nuclear age and by Africanistsspeaks to mutually reinforcing assumptions about Africa’s place, and lack ofplace, in a highly technological world. Challenging such assumptions requiresthat we enter that world via its technologies.The essay thus explores the nuclear world in Africa, and Africa in the nuclearworld.4 I identify three moments of global imperception in the making andlegitimation of knowledge on radiation hazards: moments when Africanpeople and workplaces went unaccounted for in “global” scientific knowledgeproduction. (“Global,” here, refers above all to the aims and claims of knowledgeproducers.5) I juxtapose these moments with three uranium histories, situatedin Madagascar, Gabon, and South Africa, which analyze the laborarrangements and regimes of perceptibility that produced such global imperceptions.The production and dissolution of nuclear things in African places,I argue, occurred in the friction between the transnational politics of knowledgeand (post)colonial power, between abstract prescriptions and embodied, instrumentalizedpractices. Radiation infiltrated workers’ bodies; sometimes,however, it also opened political possibilities.63 Gabrielle Hecht, “Nuclear Ontologies,” Constellations 13, 3 (Sept. 2006): 320–31; and“Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the Making ofthe IAEA,” in John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, eds., “Global Power Knowledge: Science, Technology,and International Affairs,” special issue of Osiris 21 (July 2006): 25–48.4 For broader debates, see Jean-Franc¸ois Bayart, “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,”African Affairs 99 (2000): 217–67.5 I draw inspiration here from Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge,History (University of California Press, 2005); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in theNeoliberal World Order (Duke University Press, 2006); Geoff Eley, “Historicizing the Global, PoliticizingCapital: Giving the Present a Name,” History Workshop Journal 63 (2007): 156–88;Antoinette Burton. “Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History,” HistoryWorkshop Journal 64 (2007): 323–28.6 In this and other ways, we might think of radiation as “imperial debris”; see Ann Laura Stoler,“Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruin and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, 2: 191–219.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 897My core premise is that uranium mines are not born nuclear, in part becausethe “nuclear” is not merely about radiation. Instead, I treat the nuclear as ahighly contingent technopolitical product of historical circumstances. Beforeattending to my main argument, let me explain what this means by surveyingwhat I call “nuclear exceptionalism” and briefly discussing a few key concepts.N U C L E A R E X C E P T I O N A L I SMIn the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the grip of atomic bombs onglobal imaginaries derived strength through assertions of exceptionalism. Proponentsand opponents alike portrayed nuclear weapons as fundamentallydifferent from any other human creation by virtue of their apocalyptic potential.As discourse, nuclear exceptionalism spanned spatial and temporal scales. On amicro scale, fission—the physical process that powered atomic bombs—meantsplitting atoms. This deliberate rupture of nature’s building blocks propelledclaims to a corresponding, macro-scale rupture in historical time: the“nuclear age.” Geopolitical status became proportional to atomic weaponscapacity. Nuclear nationalism in Britain and France allayed anxieties aboutthe loss of empire and U.S. imperialism, while in India it promised a postcolonialreordering of global power.7 Even for states that did not aspire to atomicweapons, nuclear energy could symbolize the zenith of modernity. Anti-nuclearmovements, meanwhile, also engaged in nuclear exceptionalism by highlightingthe dangers posed by human-made radioactivity, dangers unprecedentedin their longevity and scope. Nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island andChernobyl came to symbolize the nadir of modernity. Morality-talk furthermagnified the stakes of exceptionalist assertions, depicting nuclear things assalvation or depravity.Yet nuclear exceptionalism went well beyond rhetoric—it was materializedin objects, systems, and practices. It depended on sophisticated marshalling ofscientific knowledge, technologies of measurement and control, institutions,social networks, imagery, and more. It needed national and internationalatomic energy agencies, which built new systems of financing and accountabilityfor nuclear endeavors, separate from other governance institutions. It reliedon disciplines such as health physics, whose very epistemology was predicatedon isolating radiation from other health hazards. It required instruments such asdosimeters, which measured radiation in people, and Geiger counters, whichmeasured radiation in places. And it thrived on the countless articles,movies, novels, and images that came to constitute “atomic culture.”8 As the7 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after WorldWar II (MIT Press, 1998); Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science,Secrecy and the Postcolonial State (Zed Books and St. Martin’s Press, 1998).8 There is a range of scholarship on these themes: M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: AmericanScience and the Survivors at Hiroshima (University of Chicago Press, 1994); John Krige, “ThePeaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,”898 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Talliances among (and within) such formations of power varied across time andplace, so too did the effectiveness of nuclear exceptionalism, and indeed thevery meaning and material substance of the “nuclear.”This, then, is why I refer to the nuclear as a technopolitical outcome of historicalprocesses. Politics shape its technologies, but its technologies also shapeits politics. Materiality matters tremendously. Enough atomic explosions reallycan destroy the planet; radiation exposure really can cause cancer. But as countlessworks in science and technology studies have shown, material realitiesemerge from complex networks in which the social and the technical are inseparablyintertwined.9 In the domain of occupational exposures, for example,instruments, labor relations, scientific disciplines, expert controversy, and layknowledge combine to create what Michelle Murphy has called “regimes ofperceptibility”—assemblages of social and technical things that make certainhazards and health effects visible, and others invisible.10 Here I putMurphy’s concept in dialogue with Anna Tsing’s notion of “friction,” a metaphorfor the creative and destructive power generated by universal aspirationsas they travel along changing axes of inequality.11 The notion of frictioncalls attention to the unevenness with which knowledge travels, thealways-local circumstances that change its content along the way, and thematerial consequences of its motion. Regimes of perceptibility in Africanuranium mines, I argue, emerged from the friction between universalizingHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, 1 (2008): 9–48; Itty Abraham, “The Ambivalence ofNuclear Histories,” in John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, eds., “Global Power Knowledge: Science,Technology, and International Affairs,” special issue of Osiris 21 (July 2006): 49–65; JosephMasco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2006); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Cultureat the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Pantheon Books, 1985); SpencerWeart, Nuclear Fear: A History ofImages (Harvard University Press, 1988).9 For a more extended discussion of technopolitics, see Hecht, Radiance of France. Other worksthat explore these themes include: Donald A. Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociologyof Nuclear Missile Guidance (MIT Press, 1990); Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelite,and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press, 1997); Bruno Latour, Reassemblingthe Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005);Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (University of CaliforniaPress, 2002).10 Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: EnvironmentalPolitics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006). For how suchissues relate to radiation exposure, see Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens afterChernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002). For exploration of “historical ontology” in relationto occupational and environmental health debates, see Christopher Sellers, “The Artificial Nature ofFluoridatedWater: Between Nations, Knowledge, and Material Flows,” in Gregg Mitman, MichelleMurphy, and Christopher Sellers, eds., “Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in ModernEnvironments,” Osiris 19 (2004): 182–200; as well as other contributions to that special issue. Seealso Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental HealthScience (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).11 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton UniversityPress, 2005).A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 899claims to, or denial of, nuclearity and particular imperial histories, with consequencesfor occupational exposures, their legibility, and workers’ changing politicaloptions.Consider a question that deeply concerned some of the people who appear inthis essay: does exposure to radon gas cause cancer? Uranium atoms decay intoradon, which in turn decays into other elements known as its “daughters.”These decays release radioactive alpha particles, which miners inhale. Determiningcausality via accepted scientific practice demands isolating the effectsof radon exposure—deciding whether illness in uranium miners comes onlyfrom radon exposure, or also from other contaminants. There is also the questionof deciding what constitutes a radiation effect. Lung cancer? Geneticmutations? Epidemiologists and geneticists respond differently. When do“effects” occur? Is lung cancer thirty years after the victim’s last exposure an“effect”? Labor lawyers and mining corporations offer different answers.Regardless of perspective, all these questions ultimately required knowinghow much radiation mineworkers absorb. Before the 1980s, personaldosimetry—giving each worker a film badge or a dosimeter pen—onlydetected the external exposures produced by gamma rays emitted by radioactiverocks. Such instruments did not detect the alpha radiation emitted byinhaled radon daughters. In many places, mine managers also feared personaldosimetry would scare workers by alerting them to an otherwise invisibledanger. Ambient dosimetry could accommodate the heavier instrumentsrequired to “capture” radon daughters. Less personally intrusive, it involvedinstalling instruments throughout the mine and averaging out their readings.But averages did not account for the experience of men assigned to “hotspots”: spots far from air intakes, where reduced ventilation meant elevatedradon-daughter levels and higher temperatures—the kind of place where, forexample, white foremen stationed black workers in South African mines.The scientific (and apparently presentist and delocalized) question ofcausality—“does radon cause cancer?”—is thus also, always, a historical andgeographical question. It has no single, abstract answer above and beyondthe politics of expert controversy, labor organization, capitalist production,or colonial difference and history. That answers depend on the frictionbetween these, however, is only visible at the technopolitical margins ofnuclearity.12G L O B A L IMP E R C E P T I O N S , IIn 1963, at the first international conference on “Radiological Health and Safetyin Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials,” in Vienna, Duncan Holaday of12 As one reviewer was kind enough to point out, this point resonates strongly with the argumentmade by the editors and contributors in Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds., Anthropology at theMargins of the State (School of American Research Press, 2004).900 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tthe U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) reported on early results from his study ofradon exposure in U.S. uranium miners. He framed his remarks like this:“Among workers in the nuclear energy industry, uranium miners constitute aunique group, in that the effects of exposure to excessive amounts of radonand its daughters were observed and studied long before the fission ofuranium was discovered. As a group, they are exposed to higher amounts ofinternal radiation than are workers in any other segment of the nuclearenergy industry.”13 Holaday’s audience, specialists on radiological exposurefrom twenty-four countries and five international organizations, probablyfound this statement unremarkable. They all knew about studies from theearly twentieth century showing high incidence of lung cancer among Czechradium/uranium miners. In the historical context of struggles to regulateradon levels in American uranium mines, however, two things stand out:first, Holaday’s alignment of uranium miners with other nuclear workers,instead of with other miners; and second, his insistence that these minerswere more vulnerable to radiation exposure than any other nuclear worker.The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) did not officially accept eitherof these premises in the 1960s. From a legal standpoint, digging uranium oreout of U.S. soil did not count as a nuclear activity until much later.Created in 1946, the AEC immediately fostered a massive uranium boom byoffering monetary rewards for ore strikes. In response, prospectors and smallmining consortia dug hundreds of mines on the Colorado Plateau. They soldtheir ore to the AEC, the sole legal purchaser and consumer. But when AECscientists and others began expressing concern about miners’ radiationexposure, the agency refused to accept regulatory responsibility. Using argumentsthat would be echoed decades later by the South African Chamber ofMines, it insisted that uranium mines fell under the ordinary jurisdiction ofstate and federal agencies rather than the special, nuclear provisions of theAtomic Energy Act. The AEC delegated the task of regulating radon levelsto state regulators, the PHS, and other federal agencies, none of which had sufficientexpertise, infrastructure, or authority to implement or enforce standards.Some mine operators voluntarily upgraded their ventilation systems to decreaseradon exposure, but many did not. After bitter jurisdictional battles, a nationwideexposure standard finally passed in 1967, but several more yearselapsed before it became enforceable. Dozens of former miners died fromlung cancer and other diseases as a result of their exposures.14 Lawsuits13 Holaday, “Some Unsolved Problems,” 51.14 Peter H. Eichstaedt, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans (Red Crane Books,1994); Robert Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes what We Know and Don’t Knowabout Cancer (Basic Books, 1995); Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin inthe American West (Routledge, 1998); J. SamuelWalker, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulationin a Changing Environment, 1963–1971 (University of California Press, 1992).A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 901against the federal government failed to win compensation for miners and theirfamilies. In 1990, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act finally madeuranium miners from the early Cold War era eligible for “compassionate payments,”in recognition of their contributions to U.S. national security, providedthey could prove via medical tests and administrative histories that they hadacquired a radiation-related illness. Only then did U.S. uranium miningbecome uncontestedly nuclear work.Holaday’s insistence on the nuclearity of uranium mining may have reflectedthe contested status of U.S. mines in 1963, but to French members of his audiencein Vienna he had only stated the obvious. The Commissariat a` l’EnergieAtomique (CEA) had taken such nuclearity for granted from its inception. Itmonitored all manner of radiation in French uranium mines itself, with thesame labs and equipment used in reactors and other “nuclear” workplaces.CEA experts had presented their first miner-exposure data five years earlier,at a 1958 Geneva conference on peaceful uses of atomic energy. By contrastto the U.S. AEC, French papers in Geneva and Vienna blared out nuclearity.They described in painstaking detail how CEA experts set maximum permissiblelevels, measured radon and radiation, and tracked exposures for eachworker, presenting images of dosimeters, film badges, and the iconic lead-linedsuits worn to work in highly radioactive environments.The CEA had configured the nuclearity of French uranium mines by turningradiation and radon into objects of exceptional workplace control. Dosimetry—calculating the radiation dose absorbed by people—formed the core of this configuration.In 1962, the CEA had amassed thirty-five thousand radon samples,compared to the PHS’s six thousand.15 While the PHS measured only alpharadiation emitted by radon, the CEA also measured gamma radiation emittedby rocks; to this end, miners (like reactor workers) wore dosimeter pens orfilm badges.16 CEA radiation protection experts emphasized their “exceptionalpolicing role,” which (at least in principle) gave them hierarchical power overmine superintendents whenever they found exposures in excess of maximumpermissible levels.17 By contrast, PHS scientists took measurements under15 F. Duhamel, M. Beulaygue, and J. Pradel, “Organisation du controˆle radiologique dans lesmines d’uranium franc¸aises,” 63; and D. A. Holaday and H. N. Doyle, “Environmental Studiesin the Uranium Mines,” 19; both in: International Atomic Energy Agency, International LabourOrganisation, and World Health Organization, Radiological Health and Safety in Mining andMilling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1 (International Atomic Energy Agency, 1964).16 D. Mechali and J. Pradel, “Evaluation de l’irradiation externe et de la contamination internedes travailleurs dans les mines d’uranium franc¸aises,” in, International Atomic Energy Agency,International Labour Organisation, and World Health Organization, Radiological Health andSafety in Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1 (International AtomicEnergy Agency, 1964): 373.17 Robert Avril et al., “Measures Adopted in French Uranium Mines to Ensure Protection of Personnelagainst the Hazards of Radioactivity,” in Proceedings of the Second United Nations InternationalConference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Held in Geneva, 1–13 September1958, Vol. 21: Health and Safety: Dosimetry and Standards (United Nations, 1985), 63.902 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tthe sufferance of mine operators, and only after agreeing not to inform minersabout their purpose. In France, dosimetry conferred social power on a new classof experts, turning uranium mineshafts into nuclear workplaces. Dosimetricresults legitimated and extended that power; in 1958 the radiation protectiondivision proudly declared, “There has not been one instance of over-exposure.”As proof, it provided the quantities of radon inhaled by mine personnel in eachof the “mining divisions in Metropolitan France.”18Decades later, interviews with former French uranium miners suggest thatespecially at first, radiation monitoring practices were unevenly implemented.Workers remember early mineshafts with little ventilation, and places that madethe needles on their dosimeters fly instantly off the scale. Working conditionsquickly became the focus of labor union demands. By the early 1960s, Frenchminers had their own version of what made their work nuclear, and made theirown set of demands based on that nuclearity.19 Unsurprisingly, conference presentationsby the CEA’s radiation protection division did not discuss these alternateproductions of nuclearity. Here, however, I call attention to anotherabsence, lurking in the reference to metropolitan France.AMB AT OMI K A , S O U T H E R N MA D A G A S C A R , 1950S – 1960SFrom the mid-1950s onward, CEA radiation protection experts published asteady stream of papers on their exposure-monitoring programs in uraniummines. None of these, however, included data from CEA-owned minesoutside the metropole. The first of these mines to produce significant quantitiesof uranium were open-cast quarries of uranothorianite ore in the Androy desertin southern Madagascar. Launched in 1953, when Madagascar was still underFrench colonial rule, these operations were considerably more rudimentarythan metropolitan mines. Run by a dozen or so French geologists, metallurgists,and mining engineers, they often could not pay for themselves. Dedicated radiationprotection experts did not figure in their budgets. In the metropole thenuclearity of uranium mines may have seemed self-evident, but in Madagascarit remained as fractured and lumpy as the rocks that emerged from the quarries.Expatriates saw their work as nuclear because it fed their nation’s atomicenergy program. The tricolor French flag flying over the central camp reaffirmedthis, as did yearly trips home where talk and images of reactors andatom bombs enabled them to visualize their contribution to the “radiance ofFrance.”20 Visions of reactors and bombs did not, however, transfix Tandroy18 Ibid.19 Philippe Brunet does an excellent job analyzing this history in his book, La nature dans tousses e´tats: Uranium, nucle´aire et radioactivite´ en Limousin (Presses Universitaires de Limoges,2004).20 Robert Bodu, “Compte-rendu de mission a` Madagascar,” Direction des Recherches et ExploitationsMinie`res, Mars 1960, Coge´ma archives, accessed 1998 and 2000; Hecht, Radiance ofFrance.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 903or Betsileo mineworkers. The former miners and mill workers I spoke with in1998 knew neither the purpose of their ore nor the existence of reactors andbombs. When I explained, they laughed and shook their heads. “You crazyvazahas [white foreigners],” said one man. “Why do you want this stuff?”21Another, thinking of the region’s recently opened sapphire mines (where mytranslator sometimes worked), shrewdly asked what sapphires were usedfor.22 In their eyes, I was just another foreigner interested in rocks.The time of vatovy (the local term for uranium ore) was indeed exceptionalfor the Tandroy who lived through it, but that exceptionalism had little to dowith radiation, or with things that their French supervisors considerednuclear. It had a lot to do with value, especially wages, and the investmentsand business opportunities that they made possible. Fanahia worked in themines for thirteen years. “I bought 50 zebu [cattle],” he said, “and abicycle . . . and a cart, and a radio, and a watch that I ordered fromFrance. . . . I did some trading in watches. I would order them from Besanc¸onand resell them to other men who worked with the vatovy.”23 Above all, vatovyexceptionalism had to do with the arduous task of breaking rocks with jackhammers,and the backbreaking work of loading rocks into wooden carts. Mahataworked in the quarries with his father and two brothers, until his father fell on apneumatic drill and lost a leg. “We tell our children, you must guard the zebu carefully,because the work we did to get them was painful.We broke our legs and ourfeet doing that. So the zebu that are there must be well guarded. Because you, youaren’t able to do that hard work. . . . Better to guard the zebu than to workthere.”24 Tales of rock slides and lost body parts abounded.Radiation was not totally absent from Tandroy memories, but it appearedindirectly: nested in needles, displaced into dosimeters, yoked to discipline,and merged with medical monitoring. Some workers, for example, usedGeiger counters on a daily basis, to sort rocks into “good and bad piles.”2521 Author’s interview with Mahata, Tsilamaha, Madagascar, 16 Aug. 1998. Interviews withTandroy and Betsileo mineworkers were conducted with the aid of translators M. Abdoulhamideand Georges Heurtebize. Quotations that appear in italics indicate the words of the intervieweeas related by the translators; insertion of the first person is mine, and replaces the translators’ useof the third person.22 Author’s interviews with Fanahia and Itirik, Andolobe´, Madagascar, 13 and 14 Aug. 1998;translator: M. Abdoulhamide. Although I did not know it at the time, such questions had theirobverse in northern Madagascar, where miners speculated that sapphires were used in bombs.See AndrewWalsh, “In theWake of Things: Speculating in and about Sapphires in Northern Madagascar,”American Anthropologist 106, 2 (2004): 225–37.23 Fanahia interviews, op. cit. Such investments strategies contrast with the “daring consumption”that Andrew Walsh describes for some young men working in the 1990s in the sapphireminingtown of Ambondromifehy, in “ ‘Hot Money’ and Daring Consumption in a Northern MalagasySapphire-Mining Town,” American Ethnologist 30, 2 (2003): 290–305. The people I interviewedwere, necessarily, long-term inhabitants of the region with deep social networks thatbolstered and justified such investments; I do not know how migrant workers spent their wages.24 Mahata interview, op. cit.25 Fanahia interview, op. cit.904 G A B R I E L L E H E C H TThe needle on the counter told the whole story: “When there is vatovy, theneedle goes to 500 or higher.”26 The presence of vatovy—unmediated byradiation—made the needle jump. For French managers, radiation connectedthe Geiger counters used for radiometric rock sorting and the dosimeters wornby employees to measure their external exposures.27 For workers, however,dosimeters seemed disconnected from Geiger counters, less instruments ofwork than objects of discipline. “If you didn’t wear them, you were out. Theykept track of that,” said Joseph Ramiha.28 “It was the boss who put them onus. He fixed them on our clothes,” remembered a woman who had worked inone of the mills.29 Those who remembered wearing dosimeters often linkedthem to illness and doctors. Some stories resemble radiation rumors from elsewhere,complete with fears of sterility: “Yes, we asked why they were puttingthem on and the boss said there was sickness inside, there was gas. . . . Yes, hesaid what kind of sickness but we didn’t understand anything about that. . . .Yes, we were worried . . . [the boss] said that maybe there was sickness inthere. There were others who said that you couldn’t have children with the sicknessfrom vatovy.We were afraid at first, but then there was nothing.”30 If womenremained fertile, perhaps there was no danger after all.In the Androy, the application of the CEA’s prescriptions for radiation monitoringwas uneven at best, and depended entirely on individuals. Mines andmills operated by private contractors—colonial concessionaires who soldtheir ore to the CEA—did not use dosimeters at all. Fanahia worked in bothtypes of mines and remembered this well: “At the CEA they had them, butnot elsewhere.”31 At the CEA mines, meanwhile, some supervisors tried toexplain radiation hazards to their employees, but others did not bother. Onereport portrayed Tandroy and Betsileo workers as irredeemably uncivilized,so primitive that they would not even benefit from a job-training program. Ifpeople could not understand radiation, then surely its hazards would remaininexplicable.32Nor did CEA facilities always heed metropolitan injunctions to designprocesses with the goal of minimizing exposure. One CEA metallurgist, visitingAmbatomika for a few weeks to help with the milling process, bemoaned26 Author’s interview with Jeremy Fano, Tranomaro, Madagascar, 18 Aug. 1998; translator:M. Abdoulhamide.27 Antoine Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs de l’uranium franc¸ais. II: Le Temps des conqueˆtes(Editions Thierry Parquet, 1992), 323.28 Author’s interview with Joseph Ramiha, Tranomaro, Madagascar, 12 Aug. 1998; translators:M. Abdoulhamide and Georges Heurtebize.29 Author’s interview with group of women, Madagascar 1998, anonymity requested.30 Ibid.31 Fanahia interview, op. cit. This contrast was remarked upon by visiting CEA personnel aswell: Robert Bodu, “Compte-rendu de mission a` Madagascar,” ix–4.32 Marc Edmond Morgaut, “Mission a` Madagascar pour le Commissariat a` l’Energie Atomiquedu 11 au 21 novembre 1958,” Coge´ma archives.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 905the crude methods used to dry the wet ore concentrates emerging from themills: “Concentrates are spread out in the sun on big sheets of corrugatedmetal and turned over periodically by a worker . . . this procedure is clearlyarchaic, long, and above all dangerous because the worker is exposed to dustand radiation.”33 This visitor’s mandate did not, however, include measuringspecific worker exposures, let along mitigating them.CEA production managers did not discuss exposures either. Tales of inclementweather and technical woes filled the pages of their activity reports.They devoted almost no space to radiation exposure. They clearly knew thatsome jobs, such as packing uranothorianite concentrates for shipment toFrance, presented significant exposure hazards.34 But they did not report onthe processes for distributing or collecting dosimeters, nor did they providetables of dosimeter readings. Reports only invoked exposures indirectly,when accounting for production slowdowns resulting from moving overexposedworkers to less radioactive sites.Such absences speak to the fragility of Madagascar’s ties to the nuclearitythat infused metropolitan uranium production. Of the three hazards signaledby metropolitan radiation experts—radon, dust, and gamma rays—managersin the Androy only made external gamma exposures perceptible. Measuringlevels of radon and dust; estimating the long-term exposures of individualworkers to these contaminants; weighting those exposures according to CEAformulas; plugging all the weighted exposures into an equation in order toderive the total monthly exposure for each employee—all that was wellbeyond the technical capacity or expertise of managers in the Androy, operatingfar from the CEA’s infrastructural support. So dosimeters were distributed,gamma doses tracked just long enough to determine whether job rotationwas required that month, and there the monitoring ended. By 1967, people,equipment, and quarries were all exhausted. The CEA packed its bags andwent home.Even for CEA experts, the nuclearity of Androy mines was brittle and intermittent.Threads of geological and metallurgical nuclearity ran through the consultantswho visited occasionally to advise managers about prospecting or oretreatment. These experts noticed high radiation levels in passing, but thoselevels did not shape design choices as they had in French mines. In Madagascar,job rotation occurred in response to a single month’s dose, not as part of systematicallytracking long-term exposures. Radiation monitoring did notempower a distinct class of experts there. Exposures made cameo appearancesin activity reports, but I found no evidence that anyone had compiled cumulativenumbers to produce scientifically legible data sets. We can only speculate33 Bodu, “Compte-rendu de mission a` Madagascar.”34 Y. Legagneux, “Rapport d’Activite´ du Service ‘Expoitation,’” May 1955, p. 21. CEA-DREM,Mission de Madagascar, Division du Sud. Coge´ma archives.906 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tabout the reasons. Perhaps the numbers themselves instantly became imperialwaste, discarded as soon as they were produced. If the raw numbers did make itto France, perhaps they became waste there, consigned to accumulate dustbecause no one thought they mattered. Maybe metropolitan radiation researchersdid not trust the numbers because they had not collected the datathemselves.Whatever the case, Malagasy radiation exposures did not appear in CEAradiation protection publications. Today, there appears to be no way torecover the cumulative exposures of Malagasy uranium workers. We doknow that because of their thorium content, these ores emitted exceptionallyhigh levels of gamma radiation (over twice that of pitchblende, very high-gradeuranium ore). A 1976 IAEA manual on radiological safety, coauthored by oneof the CEA’s radiation protection experts, mentioned this in passing, whiledescribing the hazards posed by gamma radiation in uranium mills: “In somecases, concentrate of pitchblende has been reported to give rise to radiationfields up to 40 mR/h. . . . Readings of up to 100 mR/h have been reported forconcentrates of uranothorianite mixed in the Malagasy Republic. . . .”35 Thisreference to the radioactivity of the rocks, rather than the exposures of thosewho had sorted and milled them, reflected the regime of nuclear perceptibilitythat governed Malagasy uranium. CEA radiation-protection experts tookaccount of the ores’ high radioactivity levels only when the rocks entered themetropolitan processing plant. That was where they acquired their fullnuclear significance, where their radioactivity seemed high by comparison toother ores, where extra precaution was required in handling them. Those radiationreadings were the ones whose scientific value got traction, the ones that—nearly a decade after the mines themselves had shut down—made it into aninternational manual prescribing safe labor practices. Users of this manual inthe late 1970s probably did not wonder about who mixed those uranothorianiteconcentrates, what levels of radon (and the equally hazardous thoron producedby the thorium in the rocks) might have accumulated around piles of ore,whether workers had been adequately monitored, how such dosimetric readingsmight have affected international data sets, or what follow-up studies of workerhealth might have revealed.Following the CEA to Madagascar suggests that nuclearity came in differenttechnopolitical registers. The geological nuclearity of uranothorianite did notautomatically translate into occupational nuclearity for Malagasy workers, orepidemiological nuclearity for their exposure data. More robust assemblagesof instruments and expertise might have extended the fragile regime thatmade different forms of exposure perceptible. Additional, or different circuits35 An mR/h is a unit that measures the radioactivity level of a substance. It signifies milli Roentgensper hour. International Atomic Energy Agency, Manual on Radiological Safety in Uraniumand Thorium Mines and Mills (International Atomic Energy Agency, 1976), 9.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 907of knowledge might have generated the friction and translations that wouldhave made Malagasy uranium production more nuclear, and its workersmore visible. The imperceptibility of exposures, the absence of friction andtranslation, and the consequent long-term invisibility of Malagasies as radiationworkers: all of these emerged within geographically and temporally specificcolonial and postcolonial circuits of power.This does not mean, however, that we can gesture grandly at “colonialpower” to explain the unevenness of nuclearity. The geographic and temporalspecificities of these circuits of power matter tremendously to what was renderedperceptible, to whom, when, and with what physiological and politicalresults. To understand this, we must enter other circuits.G L O B A L IMP E R C E P T I O N S , I IIn September 1974, the CEA and the International Labor Office (ILO) hostedan international symposium on “Radiation Protection in Mining and Milling ofUranium and Thorium” in Bordeaux, France. Co-sponsored by the WorldHealth Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the conferencetook stock of work on the occupational health of uranium miners, methodsof monitoring exposures, and international differences in the maximumpermissible levels of radon, dust, and gamma radiation.Two decades had passed since the International Commission on RadiologicalProtection (ICRP) had issued its first guidelines on maximum permissiblelevels (MPL) of radon in mines. As with all ICRP guidelines, these weremerely advisory; the commission had no enforcement power.36 National regulatorybodies had to translate ICRP recommendations into mandatory standards.Still, the commission’s legitimacy was considerable; the United Statesand France developed their own formulations for maximum permissiblelevels, but most other places based their MPLs on the methods outlined inICRP texts.Nevertheless, controversy visibly flourished at international conferences likethe one in Bordeaux. There was widespread acceptance of the “fundamental”occupational exposure limit of 5 rems, the maximum amount of radiationworkers could absorb in any given year. But how should this generic numbertranslate into specific MPLs for different types and sources of radiation?The data informing this translation were disciplinarily heterogeneous:36 The ICRP was started in 1928 as a group of physicists and radiologists trying to figure outhow to limit their own occupational exposure to radiation. After World War II its membershipgrew and its aims broadened. By the mid-1950s, the ICRP was issuing recommendations on permissibledoses for externally and internally absorbed radiation in all manner of occupations. Foran insider history, see Roger Clarke and Jack Valentin, “A History of the International Commissionon Radiological Protection,” Health Physics 88, 4 (2005): 1–16. For an insider history of radiologicalstandards in the United States, see J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose: A History of RadiationProtection in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2000).908 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tepidemiological studies on the correlation between exposure and lung cancer,lab experiments that exposed rats to radon, autopsies of dead miners, lung functiontests, and more. They were also empirically heterogeneous: there werestudies of uranium miners per se, but also epidemiological studies of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki victims, research on “non-nuclear” dust exposures related todiseases like pneumoconiosis, and so on. Experts disagreed about the relativesignificance of these data, and even their legibility. American epidemiologistsdid not think French experiments exposing rats to radon said much about radoneffects in people. French health physicists thought that the ongoing U.S. PHSstudy measured radon levels inaccurately. As Henri Jammet of the CEA notedin his opening remarks in Bordeaux, even within the ICRP itself “there werepassionate discussions.” This had led to “apparent, and sometimes real differences”in workplace norms in different international organizations andcountries.37 Such divergences could be extremely difficult to assess, becausethey often stemmed from differences in the objects and tools of measurement.The French, for example, calculated and weighted cumulative exposures fromthree hazards (radon, dust, and gamma radiation), rather than assuming thatonly radon mattered, as was standard in U.S. mines. The Americans, meanwhile,measured the concentration of radon daughters directly because thedaughters (rather than pure radon) were what caused tissue damage. Measuringdaughters directly required expensive, complex instruments, which partlyexplained why the PHS scientists had relatively few data points and thus, byFrench standards, poor dosimetric accuracy. The French, along with theICRP, believed that in most mines a relatively simple formula could translateradon gas values into daughter concentrations. And so on.The 1974 Bordeaux conference was one of many sites in which such disagreementsplayed out. Discussions there did not bring closure to the controversies(some aspects of which persist today). They did, however, enable Frenchexperts to argue at length for the superiority of their approach to radiation monitoring.Given the March 1974 announcement of a massive expansion ofFrance’s nuclear power program, there could not have been a more fortuitoustime to display dosimetric mastery.Most striking for my purpose here, one of the longer presentations at the conferencewas offered by Massan Quadjovie, an official in the Gabonese government’sDirection des Mines. His audience included delegates not only fromNorth America and Europe, but also from India, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Turkey,Zambia, and Zaire—all potential customers for the CEA’s instrumentation37 Henri Jammet, “Les proble`mes de protection pose´s dans l’extraction et le traitement del’uranium et du thorium,” in, International Labour Office, Radiation Protection in Mining andMilling of Uranium and Thorium (from a symposium organized by the International LabourOffice and the French Atomic Energy Commission, in cooperation with the World Health Organizationand the International Atomic Energy Agency, Bordeaux, France, 9–11 Sept. 1974) (InternationalLabor Office-Geneva, 1976), 3–10. All translations from the French are my own.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 909and training programs. Listening to Quadjovie, they might well have concludedthat operations in Gabon offered a model exemplar of French dosimetricpractice.According to Quadjovie, film badges to measure gamma exposures were distributedand collected monthly, then sent to the CEA’s lab in France whichreported the results back to the Compagnie Minie`re d’Uranium de Franceville(COMUF), the company operating the mines. In underground operations,radon was measured via ambient sampling. Both gamma and radon resultswere recorded on each employee’s exposure chart. If any “abnormal results”occurred, “an investigation is immediately conducted to determine the causesof the anomaly and take the necessary measures.” Quadjovie dutifully admittedto some imperfections in the system: “Obviously this type of control impliesthat one can trust the personnel, each employee being responsible for hisfilm badge. There are still some cases of forgetfulness, or of imaginative useof the film. Sometimes the badge is lost or put into an environment that isnot representative of the working environment. One must therefore take allthese anomalies into account when compiling the results, and periodicallyrun checks at the worksite.”38 Unlike their Malagasy counterparts, then, Gaboneseworkers were not completely invisible in the international space of knowledgeproduction. Making them visible, however dimly, enabled the Gabonesestate to display regulatory competence. Doing so at an international conference,in turn, helped CEA experts display the meticulousness and portability of theirapproach. Visible workers, finally, could shoulder the blame for any failures.Still, Gabonese dosimetric results did not make it into the international scientificliterature any more than Malagasy ones had. To perceive them, we mustlook in Gabon, and go back in time to the first decade of uranium productionat the COMUF.MOUNANA, E A S T E R N G A B O N , 1960S – 2000SThe COMUF was a joint venture between the CEA and Mokta, a miningcompany with long colonial experience. Launched in 1957, the site began producingore four years later. Xavier des Ligneris, the first director, had previouslyrun CEA uranium mines in France. In Gabon he tried to follow theCEA’s prescriptions directly, treating radiation as separate from other healthand safety issues in the workplace. Anticipating the need for gamma, radon,and dust monitoring, for example, he requested a technician solely dedicatedto radiation protection. Although he left the development of all other healthand safety guidelines to his managers, he personally wrote and signed thosepertaining to gamma rays, radon, and dust. The newly independent government38 Massan Quadjovie, “Mesures techniques et administratives de radioprotection dans lesexploitations d’uranium de Mounana,” Radiation Protection in Mining and Milling of Uraniumand Thorium (International Labor Office-Geneva, 1976), 141.910 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Thad many other things to worry about, and quickly issued a stamp ofapproval.39Getting workers to wear the dosimetric film badges according to prescriptionwas less straightforward. At first they did not wear the films regularly enough.Operations managers repeatedly issued warnings that films were “absolutelyobligatory,” and sanctions would ensue for non-compliance.40 Then workersapparently wore the films too much: directives began warning employees notto take their films outside the workplace. Film distribution became the responsibilityof supervisors, who keyed them to timecards.41Des Ligneris expected that enforcing correct procedures would automaticallycontrol exposures. But it did not. It could take up to eight weeks to obtainresults back from the CEA lab that processed the films. This lag time,coupled with the inherent unpredictability of the ore body, meant that spikesin external exposures continued.42 Once underground mining started, radonadded to his anxieties: the average concentrations of radon in the stopes regularlyexceeded MPLs, sometimes by a factor of twelve.43 Many employees consistentlyexceeded their annual exposure limits, sometimes in less than eightmonths. All the surveillance in the world could not stop the inexorable—andaleatory—course of radioactive decay in the stopes. Nor could high exposuresbe easily attributed to African incompetence. For one thing, ambient samplingof radon meant that good results did not depend on individuals wearing instrumentscorrectly. For another, European employees also charted high readings.Reports did not always indicate the difference in African and Europeanexposures, but when they did the amount of overexposure seemed comparable.44 Many more African workers got overexposed, however, reflecting thepolitical economy of labor.Radon turned labor management into a calculus of exposure. Employeesworked in high-level shafts until they had reached or exceeded their annual39 Xavier des Ligneris to Secre´taire Ge´ne´ral, 8 July 1961; Xavier des Ligneris, “Consignes Relativesa` la Protection Contre les Dangers dus a` la Radioactivite´,” Mounana, 5 May 1961; approuve´par le Directeur des Mines du Gabon, Libreville, 1 June 1961, COMUF archives, Mounana,accessed 1998.40 Pierre le Fur, Note de Service 072bis, 3 Sept. 1964, COMUF archives.41 Henri Pello, Service Exploitation, Note d’organisation, “Stockage et distribution des filmdetecteurs de radioactivite´,” 26 Sept. 1966, COMUF archives.42 Xavier des Ligneris, “Rapport—Controˆle des radiations,” HR/AP n8 2076, 5 Jan. 1968,COMUF archives.43 Xavier des Ligneris, “Rapport—Controˆle des radiations,” HR/AP n8 2076, 5 Jan. 1968;Xavier des Ligneris, “Rapport—sur le controˆle des risques radioactifs. Fe´vrier 1968,” YT/AP n82169, 21 Mar. 1968, COMUF archives.44 See, for example, Xavier des Ligneris: “Rapport—Controˆle des radiations,” HR/AP n8 2076,5 Jan. 1968; “Rapport—sur le controˆle des risques radioactifs. Fe´vrier 1968,” YT/AP n8 2169, 21Mar. 1968; “Reference: Votre UF/JL/JF29/68,” HP/MB n8 210/69, 27 Jan. 1968; and “Rapport surle controˆle des risques radioactifs. Mois de Mai 1968,” YT/LR n8 2275, 20 June 1968, COMUFarchives.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 911limit, at which point they were moved to workplaces with lower radiationlevels. In and of itself, job rotation would have been familiar to des Ligneris:one high-grade shaft in France had registered such high gamma levels that individualworkers could only work there for four hours every two weeks.45 At thatlevel of exposure, and in the metropole where mine operators could get quickturnaround on dosimetric results, rotation could be planned in advance. Internalradon exposures were less predictable than external gamma exposures,however, and tougher to control. Furthermore, Mounana ore was of lowergrade, which meant that the mine ran on a tighter budget. By 1967, productionhad fallen well behind schedule.46All this made des Ligneris anxious, especially because there were otherlimits to how well job rotation could address the problem of over-exposure.As the mine got deeper and radiation levels increased, management feared itwould run out of skilled workers. Continually hiring new personnel offeredone solution, since new hires were assumed to be radiation virgins. But ittook time and effort to train new workers, canceling out the exposure benefitsfrom labor turnover.47 To address the problem, des Ligneris finally decided tomake some costly upgrades to the ventilation system. This worked, at least temporarily,and from March to May 1968 radon levels decreased significantly.In the meantime, however, corporate headquarters called for a change in leadershipat Mounana. As a CEA man, Xavier des Ligneris’s mining career hadfocused entirely on uranium ore. His expertise had been key to finding andmapping the deposit, drafting the initial mining plan, and building a strong prospectingteam. He had also fostered a tight articulation between Mounana’s productionprogram and the CEA’s nuclear fuel requirements. But Mokta hadexpressed displeasure with des Ligneris’s direction for some time. It wantedsomeone less concerned with the nuclear dimensions of his work, and betterattuned to budgetary constraints. In mid-1968, Mokta sent one of its own toreplace him: Christian Guizol.48Gabonese employees remembered Guizol as a hard, uncompromising man.His “severity” prompted complaints that, “It’s South Africa at Mounana;blacks at the bottom and whites on top.”49 When gamma exposures climbedback up in late 1968, Guizol—deeming his predecessor soft on discipline—blamed the workers for not wearing films correctly. He tightened disciplinaryand surveillance measures around film use, and placed test dosimeters in theshafts to compare with the ones worn by workers. Test results disappointed45 Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs, 96.46 J. de Courlon to Xavier des Ligneris, 10 Mar. 1967, COMUF archives.47 Ibid.48 Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs, 213; and author’s interview with Christian Guizol, Paris,26 Feb. 1998.49 Author’s interviews with Juste Mambangui and J.-M. Male´kou, Mounana, Gabon, 16 July1998; Franc¸ois Mambangui, Libreville, Gabon, 31 July 1998.912 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Thim: they matched worker badges. Radon levels also climbed back up:seventy-eight workers registered overexposure in November 1969.50So Guizol reconfigured the calculus of exposure. Rather than intensifyingjob rotation, as des Ligneris had done, he raised the MPLs. He had noticedthat the ILO’s 1968 radon guidelines, which used a different formula to calculatetotal exposure, ended up being less restrictive than the 1959 French guidelinesused by the COMUF. After a few numerical gymnastics, Guizol wrote areport that justified the equivalent of a three-fold increase in radon MPLs andaligned these with ILO guidelines. The new levels, he remarked bluntly, were“more advantageous” to the company.51 The effect was immediate. As ofMarch 1970, not a single worker registered overexposure.52No wonder, then, that Quadjovie could report complete success with theCOMUF’s radioprotection program in 1974. His Bordeaux paper offered asanitized account of the switch in MPLs, making no mention of the overexposuresthat prompted the switch. Indeed, he may not have known about them:I found nothing in the COMUF archives to suggest that Gabonese state officialsever actually inspected radiation, radon, or dust in the mines.53Not long before Guizol raised the MPLs, Marcel Lekonaguia began to questionhis working conditions. In the mid-1960s he became a shift boss in theshafts, in charge of blasting. Company guidelines specified that workersshould wait fifteen minutes after the blast before returning to the workplace.54Lekonaguia probably did not know that French radiation protection guidelinesspecified a waiting period of at least thirty minutes, to let the dust settle and togive the ventilation system time to evacuate the extra radon released by blastingrocks apart. What he did know, all too well, was that “after the blast, there’s alot of dust. . . . It is the dust that wasted us . . . you swallow it, you breathe it.”Protective gear did not help: “Those little masks, they didn’t hold up well.They’re made of paper . . . if it gets a little wet—paf!”—the mask woulddissolve. That, he insisted, was how he developed the cough, and assortedother ailments, that would plague him for the rest of his life.Lekonaguia also thought about the film badges, especially the tight disciplinethey incarnated. “They said this film here, you must always keep it. At theend of the month, they check them, they send them to see if the men reached50 Ch. Guizol, “Rapport sur le controˆle des risques radioactifs. Mois de De´cembre 1969,” YT/scn8 0118/70, 9 Feb. 1970, COMUF archives.51 Ibid.52 Ch. Guizol, “Rapport sur le controˆle des risques radioactifs, Mois de Mars 1970,” YT/scn8 0184/70, 27 Apr. 1970, COMUF archives.53 The COMUF granted me free access to its archives when I visited in 1998. These were not atall organized, however, which made it impossible for me to find complete records on any singletopic. Thus, though I did not find records of state inspections, I cannot state conclusively thatnone took place.54 “Consigne pour la distribution et l’emploi des explosifs,” COMUF, Exploitation de Mounana,n.d. (ca. 1959), COMUF archives.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 913[the limit]. The results, they don’t give them to people.”55 All he ever learnedwas whether he had reached some limit that would prompt job rotation. Henever found out what the numbers were, how close to the limit he had come,how much he had accumulated over time, or even what the limit meant.What, he wondered, was all the secrecy about?His brother, Dominique Oyingha, became convinced that the company andits doctor, Jean-Claude Andrault, were hiding something. And the state wasin on it. “Uranium caused many deaths, but the COMUF didn’t want to recognizethat,” he told me. “Nor did the state, because this was the big company ofthe territory, whose secrets couldn’t come out . . . so as not to scare theworkers.”56 Only independent, external expertise could be trusted. Oyinghatook his brother to the Congo for tests. He knew there had once been auranium mine there, and he hoped Congolese doctors might help. Apparentlythe doctors immediately guessed from Lekonaguia’s health condition that heworked at the COMUF.The two men returned to Mounana and confronted Andrault. The minedoctor scoffed: “Are you crazy? . . . Who told you that uranium made peoplesick?” Oyingha laughed as he remembered this response. He respected, evenloved, the doctor for the hospital he had set up. Andrault offered freemedical care to everyone in the region, not just to COMUF workers, andthat was precious beyond measure. But everyone had their limits, andOyingha did not expect the doctor to acknowledge the possibility of occupationaldisease. He threatened Andrault: “I said, ‘my friend, you are myfriend, we have known each other for a good bit of time, but let me tell youthat the sickness that my brother suffers from, it comes from uranium. Andif you don’t want the news to spread . . . [so that] your workers don’tbecome afraid, take proper care of my big brother. If he dies, I’m comingafter you.’”57 The COMUF granted Lekonaguia sick leave. But he wanted permanentleave and compensation. The company refused, insisting that Lekonaguiareturn underground if he wanted to draw his paycheck. In 1970, the twobrothers filed a complaint with the state social security office in Libreville.This produced only a perfunctory inquiry, after which the company agreed tomove Lekonaguia to the open pit.58Undeterred, Lekonaguia asked for his medical file. Andrault refused, citingprofessional secrecy. No surprise there: “The doctor, he’s just a lawyer for theCOMUF.” The more the COMUF resisted, the more Lekonaguia and his family55 Author’s interview with Marcel Lekonaguia, Mounana, Gabon, 21 July 1998.56 Author’s interview with Dominique Oyingha, Mounana, Gabon, 17 July 1998.57 Oyingha interview, op. cit.58 Christian Guizol letter to Directeur Ge´ne´ral de la Caisse Gabonaise de la Pre´voyance Sociale,19 Oct. 1970, Objet: Allocations familiales de M. Lekonaguia Marcel; Christian Guizol letter toDirecteur Ge´ne´ral de la Caisse Gabonaise de la Pre´voyance Sociale, 26 Oct. 1970, Objet: MonsieurLekonaguia; J. C. Andrault letter to Docteur C. Gantin, 27 Oct. 1970, COMUF archives.914 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tbecame convinced that his illnesses were work-related. Over the course of the1970s and 1980s, more and more people from the region went to France as students,sometimes even on training stints sponsored by the COMUF, where theywitnessed anti-nuclear protests. Lekonaguia’s nephew, among others, returnedwith confirmation that, “This product that we’re mining, it’s a toxic product.”59Finally, Lekonaguia decided that if COMUF managers kept rejecting hisdemands then he would rebuff theirs. He began refusing to render his filmbadges on a monthly basis. He suspected that his diagnosis, along with thechain of causality that linked work to illness, could be read directly from thefilms. One day, he explained as he showed me one of the films, he wouldfind someone else to read the results. He probably was not alone in this reasoning.In the mid-1980s, COMUF quarterly radiation protection reports routinelyrecorded the numbers of non-returned films. (This statistic had not appeared inearlier reports.) During some months over 25 percent were not returned.Mining operations in Gabon were much more extensive than they had beenin Madagascar, and lasted much longer (until 1999). Links with France weredenser, more extensive, and more varied. By monitoring radiation separatelyfrom other workplace dangers, des Ligneris had granted it exceptional status,and made Mounana mines more nuclear than those in the Androy. Importantaspects of the regime of perceptibility that he had established lasted: ratherthan report readings sporadically in the footnotes of productivity tables, astheir counterparts in Madagascar had done, COMUF managers continued toreport dosimetric results as distinct data, and continued to track both radonand gamma levels for individuals as well as for workspaces. But this regimeonly made exposures legible to upper management—not to workers. It producedmanagerial (and, for des Ligneris, technological) data, not health data;the company’s much-vaunted medical service did not treat them as relevantto its clinical work. The nuclearity of uranium work resided primarily in dosimetricinstruments whose esoteric legibility could only occur in France. Thatlegibility, furthermore, depended on interpretive systems, such as formulaefor calculating dose accumulations, whose meaning shifted when placed indifferent global circuits, as when Guizol moved from French to ILO standards.The Gabonese state, meanwhile, had neither means nor motive to broaden theCOMUF’s production of nuclearity. It had no reason not to rubberstamp theCOMUF’s request for a switch in MPLs, particularly when legitimated by aglobal organization like the ILO.Unlike in Madagascar, however, the spatial and temporal dimensions ofGabon’s postcolonial conditions did create spaces in which workers couldacquire knowledge and experience outside the boundaries imposed by management.Access was slow and sporadic, operating through a trip to the Congo or a59 Oyingha interview, op. cit.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 915nephew with a French education. Such friction did produce other interpretationsand contexts for the radiation recorded in film badges. But for decadesthese modes of perception offered only glimmers of politically significantnuclearity.Yet many COMUF workers remained suspicious about their occupationalhealth status well after the mine shut down in 1999. In 2001, Gabon passed alaw creating a state agency to monitor radiation exposure, perhaps thanks to aformer COMUF employee subsequently elected to Parliament.60 Another threeyears elapsed before the agency came into existence. Nonetheless, formeremployees and Mounana inhabitants evidently still distrusted the state. Theycomplained that remediation work focused only on containing loose ore leftbehind by the mining activities, and they sought a medical nuclearity for theirwork. Inspired by reports of Aghirin’man, an NGO that addressed illnesses inNige´rien uranium mines, in 2005 a group of Mounana residents formed the Collectifdes anciens travailleurs miniers de Comuf (CATRAM) to advocate for ahealth and environmental monitoring program and a fund to disburse medicalcompensation claims.61 The CATRAM joined forces with several FrenchNGOs: a group formed of expatriate COMUF ex-employees, launched in2005 by one of their widows; Sherpa, an association of high-profile legalexperts formed in 2001 to investigate global human rights and environmentaljustice violations perpetrated by French companies; and most importantly, theCRIIRAD, an independent laboratory created after the 1986 Chernobyl accidentto develop nuclear expertise unbeholden to the French state.These NGOs eventually managed to send a small team of scientists, doctors,and lawyers to Mounana in June 2006. The team took independent environmentalreadings and interviewed nearly five hundred former COMUF employeesabout their health and work experience. Survey responses echoed narrativesI heard from Lekonaguia, Oyingha, and others in 1998. Most reported noformal training on radiation or radon-related risks and no feedback on theirmonthly dosimetric readings; they agreed that the Gabonese state had donenothing to monitor working conditions or occupational health; and oneformer medical doctor testified that company clinicians had no training inuranium-related occupational health, and that the company’s radiation protectiondivision consistently refused to transmit dosimetric readings to themedical division. The report was released at a much-publicized press60 “Loi no. 11/2001 du 12 de´cembre 2001 fixant les orientations de la politique de pre´vention etde protection contre les rayonnements ionisants,” Hebdo informations, Journal hebdomadaired’informations et d’annonces le´gales 451 (23 Feb. 2002): 22–23 (Gabon).61 Jules Mbombe Samaki, “Memorandum sur la ne´cessite´ de la prise en compte de la Veille sanitaireet du de´dommagement des anciens travailleurs miniers,” private communication, Libreville,25 Apr. 2005. See also reports in the Gabonese press: “Le Collectif des anciens travailleursminiers interpelle la Comuf,” L’union, 3 Feb. 2006; and “Les anciens travailleurs miniers de laComuf re´unis en collectif,” L’union, 17 Feb. 2006.916 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tconference in Paris in April 2007.62 The following month, Areva (the secondgenerationcorporate heir to French nuclear fuel cycle operations, and thus thenew parent company for the COMUF) announced that it would install a “healthobservatory” in Mounana.63 It remains to be seen what such an observatory willmake perceptible, and to whom.Invoking nuclearity—insisting on its insufficient recognition—ultimately gaveformer COMUF workers access to activists in Niger and France. Configuringnuclearity in medical terms required new networks to extend the boundaries ofexisting regimes of perceptibility. Their strength, in turn, depended on how extensivelythey could articulate a nuclearity for Mounana. It depended on how successfullythese extended regimes could translate workplace exposures intotechnopolitical claims—complete with independent radiation readings—whosepurchase would reach beyond the profoundly unequal relationships among theGabonese state, the mining corporation, and its workers. In this reconfigurationtiming and context made all the difference: at the most basic level, independentscientific expertise and transnational circuits of legal nuclear accountabilitywere simply not available in the mid-1960s, when the Androy mines closed.Clearly much more could be said about recent events in Gabon and theirdependence on the production of technopolitical histories, contrastingregimes of perceptibility, and changing transnational legal circuits. I putthese themes aside, however, in favor of a final example of the contingencyof nuclear things. Mounana under Guizol may have seemed “like SouthAfrica” to some. But what do we see if we compare the COMUF toapartheid-era uranium producers in South Africa?G L O B A L IMP E R C E P T I O N S , I I IA quick glance through the scientific literature could convey the mistakenimpression that South Africans, like the CEA in France, considered uraniummining a fully nuclear task. At the 1958 Geneva conference on atomicenergy they had presented one of only three papers on radiation in mines.64The paper described the 1956 visit of U.S. AEC experts to South Africanmines, where they conducted a brief survey of radon and radon daughters.Given that the AEC refused to monitor radon in American mineshafts, thisvisit might seem surprising. But it fit into a larger framework of uraniumcooperation between the two nations. South Africa’s famous Witwatersrandgold mines contained abundant quantities of uranium ore, and the United62 Samira Daoud and Jean-Pierre Getti, “Areva au Gabon: Rapport d’enqueˆte sur la situation destravailleurs de la COMUF, filiale gabonaise du groupe Areva-Coge´ma,” Sherpa, 4 Apr. 2007, http://www.asso-sherpa.org/.63 “L’observatoire de Mounana,” L’union, 1 June 2007.64 S. F. Oosthuizen et al., “Experience in Radiological Protection in South Africa,” in Proceedingsof the Second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy(United Nations, 1958), 25–31.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 917States and the United Kingdom had signed contracts to purchase some 10,000tons of it. Lively scientific exchange had ensued among the three nations, asmetallurgists and other experts collaborated on industrial processes to separatethe uranium from the gold.65 Dr. Roy Albert, probably one of the few in theU.S. AEC who had actually wanted his agency to monitor radon, went toSouth Africa as part of such exchanges.The AEC radon survey found that average levels in South African shaftswere tiny compared to U.S. figures, and only slightly above internationallimits. South African scientists attributed these results to “high ventilation standards”and concluded, “Probably as the result of the stringent safety precautionsthe radioactivity in South African mines does not represent a healthhazard.” Using Albert’s analysis of Johannesburg hospital autopsy data forminers, the South Africans reported that this analysis did “not reveal any evidenceof increased incidence of lung cancer in miners.” They dismissedAlbert’s recommendation to conduct a more detailed follow-up study,arguing that their data suffered only from “the usual defects common to hospitalsall over the world.”66By emphasizing the ordinariness of their dataset’s defects, these scientistsdoubtless hoped to deflect their international audience’s attention away fromits racial dimensions.67 Roy Albert himself must have expressed doubt andraised the possibility of including “natives” in a follow-up study, even if hehimself ended up dismissing that option: his report to the AEC noted thatshort employment contracts and high mobility (information which he musthave obtained from his South African hosts) made “the native populationunsuitable for the radon study.”68 Perhaps this unsuitability obviated anymention of the fact that the Johannesburg hospital autopsy series includedonly white patients. In pre-civil rights America, this too must have seemedlike a characteristic “common to hospitals all over the world.”6965 Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa inthe Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1993); Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence:Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952 (Macmillan Press, 1974); Jonathan E. Helmreich,Gathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943–1954 (Princeton UniversityPress, 1986).66 These were listed as “factors which influenced cases sent to autopsy by the medical attendants(personal interests and bias, etc.), religious grounds for relatives refusing autopsy, type of casestreated in the hospital (e.g., special clinics), etc.” Oosthuizen et al., “Experience in RadiologicalProtection.”67 On apartheid science, see Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibilityand White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2006).68 R. E. Albert (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Biology and Medicine), memo tofiles, subject: “Medical Services in the South African Gold Fields and the Shinkolobwe UraniumMine.” NV0727618 in U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Test Site electronic archives.69 For an analysis of how population categories have only recently changed in American medicalresearch, see Steven Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Universityof Chicago Press, 2007).918 G A B R I E L L E H E C H TSouth African scientists may have thought that this early radon study madefurther research unnecessary, but scientists in the U.S. Public Health Serviceand at the ICRP remained intrigued by the Witwatersrand shafts. They suspectedthat surveying these could help settle a major scientific debate overwhether radiation exposure had any health effects below a certain threshold(as opposed to health effects remaining proportional to exposure no matterhow small the dose). For a decade after the 1958 Geneva paper, PHS andICRP scientists urged their South African colleagues to conduct more extensiveresearch.70 Growing condemnation of apartheid had begun to close downopportunities for international research exchanges, so such requests hadbecome increasingly rare. Finally, J. K. Basson of the South African AtomicEnergy Board (AEB) agreed to run a pilot study in collaboration with theChamber of Mines. He wrote up the results in a 1971 report, concluding,“The death rate from lung cancer among White South African miners hasnot been increased by radon exposure,” and “Although this investigation wasundertaken as a pilot study, it appears that no improved results would beobtained by increasing the sample size.”71 A common South African refrain:no problems detected, no further study needed.Once again, Basson’s study involved only white miners. Once again,Basson’s assertion, “This study had to be limited to White miners becausethe Non-White group . . . comprises mainly unskilled workers who comefrom rural areas and work for intermittent periods varying from a fewmonths to 1 1/2 years before returning to their homelands,” did not raise anyAmerican eyebrows. Foreign experts may not have realized that most of theseveral hundred thousand black workers returned repeatedly to the mines: anAfrican mineworker’s total time in the mines could exceed twenty years.Yet even if U.S. experts had understood this, for them the omission wouldhave paled next to Basson’s conclusion, which explicitly addressed Americandebates about lowering permissible levels in mineshafts: “Although the inductionof lung cancer by high concentrations of radon and radon daughters cannotbe questioned, this study has produced no evidence for any effect at the cumulativeexposures encountered in South African mines. . . . Consequently there isno support for the proposed decrease of the permissible radon daughter levels. . . as envisaged in the USA.” To make matters worse for the PHS, Basson hadsent the report directly to Union Carbide’s uranium operation in Colorado,which had forwarded the report to other mining corporations and the U.S.70 For example: C. G. Stewart and S. D. Simpson, “The Hazards of Inhaling Radon-222 and ItsShort-Lived Daughters: Consideration of Proposed Maximum Permissible Concentrations in Air,”in Radiological Health and Safety in Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1(International Atomic Energy Agency, 1964), 333–57.71 J. K. Basson et al., “Lung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters in South African Gold/Uranium Mines,” Atomic Energy Board: PEL 209, Pelindaba, Mar. 1971 (English-languageabstract).A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 919AEC.72 The report landed late at the PHS. Frantic that it would serve “asammunition to repudiate the PHS data and conclusions,” experts thereresponded harshly. They accused the South Africans of “gross underreporting”of lung cancer and urged “that a competent epidemiologist, above suspicion ofany possible conflicts of interest . . . be employed to pursue the problem in atechnically competent manner, taking all the careful steps and precautionsthat he has been trained to take with such difficult data.”73 Reading a classiccapitalist conflict between corporate interests and state regulation intoBasson’s data analysis, and panicked that the report might jeopardize theirown hard-won standard, PHS scientists apparently did not wonder whetherracial exclusion might have also skewed the data.T H E WI TWAT E R S R A N D ( “ T H E R A N D ” ) , C E N T R A L S O U T H A F R I C A ,1980S – 1990SIn 1980, a young British scientist named Shaun Guy accepted a job with theSouth African Atomic Energy Board’s licensing branch. Moving to SouthAfrica in the early 1980s was, he later admitted, an odd choice. The apartheidregime was getting steadily more violent and repressive, and the paramilitarywing of the ANC had begun to respond by sabotaging military and industrialinstallations. But Guy had trouble finding good employment at home, so hewent.The licensing branch was a small division, staffed by two other foreign transplants.Sometime around 1976, a few years before Guy’s arrival, they had realizedthat South Africa had produced uranium for over twenty years with noregulatory oversight. Their early attempts to rectify this met with strong resistancefrom the mining industry, which insisted that mineshafts (contrary to astatement in South Africa’s nuclear energy act) did not count as “nuclear”installations for regulatory purposes.74 The Chamber of Mines closelyguarded its data on radon levels, so the licensing branch had little ammunition.72 R. G. Beverly letter to J. T. Sherman, 25 May 1971, subject: report titled “Lung Cancer andExposure to Radon Daughters in South African Gold/Uranium Mines,” NV0061126; R. D. Evansletter to C. R. Richmond, 2 June 1971, subject: “Report on Lung Cancer and Exposure to RadonDaughters in South African Gold/Uranium Mines,” NV0061125, Nevada Test Site electronicarchives (both letters were given the quoted titles by the archives).73 A. H. Wolff letter to I. Mitchell, subject: “Lung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters inSouth African Gold/Uranium Mines” (no enclosures), 10 June 1971, NV0061124; M. A. Schneiderman(National Cancer Institute) letter to Deputy Assistant Administrator for R&D, EnvironmentalProtection Agency, subject: “Report Concerning White South African Gold Miners andBronchiogenic Cancer,” June 18, 1971, NV0061122; V. E. Archer letter to A. Wolff, 16 June1971, subject: Preliminary Report re: “Lung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters in SouthAfrican Gold/Uranium Mines (Criticisms of Report),” NV0061123, all in Nevada Test Site electronicarchives, which conferred the quoted titles.74 A. J. A. Roux toW. P. Viljoen, 16 May 1979, internal ref. LB/35/6/10, Shaun Guy, “A Reviewof Files at the Government Mining Engineer Concerning Radiation in Mines and Works,” 26 Aug.1986, 3, Shaun Guy private papers.920 G A B R I E L L E H E C H TSoon after he arrived, Guy decided to poke around: “I went through the libraryand the archives, contacted people who worked at the AEB who . . . assisted mein getting hold of reports I couldn’t ask for myself. So a lot of this was doneunderhand. . . . And there were quite serious security implications. . . . Youhad to sign an Official Secrets Act, so some of the stuff I did was illegal.”75Guy ended up with a hoard of documents, including Chamber correspondence,which revealed clear problems with radon levels. Buried among these wasBasson’s 1971 report.Guy covered his copy of the report with outraged notations. His interpretationof Basson’s impulse to discontinue research (and radon monitoring) differedfrom that of American epidemiologists: “A lot of the senior scientists whowere involved with the Chamber and the surveys and writing the epidemiologicalassessment from these results were very hostile to the ICRP and their newdose limits. . . . At that time also there was the whole thing of sanctions and thisclosing in and basically there was a lot of hostility to outside organizationswhich is a sort of political thing—it’s part of the culture.”76 He also noticed problemsmissed by the Americans. Basson had calculated cumulative exposures“by multiplying the number of shifts worked underground on the gold mines bythe estimated radiation levels for each mine on which they worked.”77 Thisstatement earned a double question mark from Guy. First, Chamber officialshad only measured actual radiation levels in about 10 percent of the mines.Second, averages were meaningless: even within a single mine radon levelscould vary by several orders of magnitude. Variation had to do with ventilation,and ventilation had to do with race: “If you know anything about workingunderground at that time . . . even in the ‘80s . . . most of the work was doneby the black guys who were on the face, the stopes. They tended to be in theareas (what they call the ‘return airways’) where the air is hotter, right? It’smuch cooler in the intake airways. So . . . white miners were mostly locatedfor much of the time in the intake airways where their exposure would beless. So if you take the white miners [as] the base line for exposure . . . that’sthe wrong benchmark to take, it’s a biased mark.”78 Digging around in data collectedduring the 1950s and 1960s, Guy saw many instances of substantialradon build-up in working shafts, in some spots reaching ten times ICRPdose limits.79These old data alone could have justified regulatory measures. But the industryhad successfully kept such measures at bay for over thirty years. It was not75 Interview by the author and Bruce Struminger with Shaun Guy, Johannesburg, South Africa,12 July 2004. Guy generously gave me copies of the documents he had collected.76 Guy interview, op. cit.77 Basson, “Lung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters,” 12.78 Guy interview, op. cit.79 “Results of Radon Daughter Sampling in Bird Reef,” West Rand Consolidated Mines, Ltd.,Mine Office, West Rand, 13 Dec. 1973, Shaun Guy private papers.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 921about to cave to a small group of foreign upstarts relying on old data. Especiallybecause South African uranium production had slumped by the mid-1980s sothat many shafts had reverted to straightforward gold production. If anything,argued the Chamber, nuclear regulation of mines seemed even less justifiable.Nevertheless, Guy and his colleagues were not ready to give up.The Chamber had argued that the mines were less nuclear because they producedless uranium. Yet radon could build up in shafts worked for gold too.Guy realized that before reaching active shafts ventilation sometimes circulatedthrough old workings where radon accumulated. Proving that “hot spots” stillexisted, however, required new data. The licensing branch managed to enlisthelp from the office of the Government Mining Engineer. Accompanied bytwo GME inspectors, Guy and his colleagues met with the manager at theWest Rand mine in 1986. They slyly proposed to use his mine as a “model facilitywith regard to testing survey methods.” The manager resisted, but eventuallyagreed to a short survey provided that it remained “low key [and]confidential.” He would have to obtain approval from his board for a longertermsurvey “as it was a ‘sensitive’ matter given the union ‘situation’ atpresent.” Neither white nor black workers knew about radon; white workerscongregated around intake airways because they were cooler, not to minimizeradiation exposure. Indeed, most workers did not know that the ore they sent upcontained uranium in addition to gold.80The preliminary West Rand survey showed elevated radon levels, up to twoto five times the ICRP limits. The licensing branch remarked that this gave“cause for concern since workers appear to have been routinely exposed atthese and higher levels for the last 30 years.”81 Backed by the GME andtheir data, Guy and his colleagues now felt unstoppable. Over the next twoyears, they carried out extensive surveys of many Rand mines. The resultsshowed systemically high radon levels.Still, obtaining data was only the first step toward regulation. The battlescontinued. As the 1980s drew to a close, the institutions of formal apartheidbegan to crumble. Laws were being rewritten, including the Nuclear EnergyAct. As a first step in reorganization, the licensing branch achieved independentinstitutional status, becoming the Council for Nuclear Safety (CNS). Nevertheless,the question of what the new entity would regulate remained a battleground.The Chamber of Mines fought hard against designating mineshafts80 Shaun Guy, “Memorandum: Meeting at West Rand Consolidated with the Mine Manager, 24February 1986.” LB/35/6/10/8, Shaun Guy private papers. For a discussion of the “union situation”that the manager mentioned, see T. Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men,Mines, and Migration (University of California Press, 1994).81 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Licensing Branch, “Report of the Underground Survey forRadon Daughters at West Rand Consolidated Mine, 5 March 1986,” 23 May 1986, p. 5, LB/35/1/13; LB/35/6/10/8, Shaun Guy private papers. By this point, the South African Atomic EnergyBoard had changed its name to the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa.922 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tas “nuclear” workplaces subject to CNS regulation, arguing that radiation protectionshould fall under the (less intrusive) purview of the Department ofHealth. Radon, insisted the Chamber, was “essentially a health issue and nota nuclear energy issue”; no matter how high their exposure, the hundreds ofthousands of men laboring in the shafts were mineworkers, not nuclearworkers.82 In a 1995 letter to Parliament, Chamber president A. H. Munro brazenlyinvoked “South Africa’s transition to full democracy.” He argued, “TheNuclear Energy Act does not provide for public participation, transparency oraccountability. Instead it puts extensive power and decision-making responsibilitiessolely in the hands of expert authorities. Furthermore, it also makesno provision for making the essential social judgements in respect of acceptanceof certain risks in exchange for benefits to society.” Suddenly theChamber invoked the ICRP as an ally: Munro quoted its 1990 recommendationsthat, “The selection of dose limits necessarily includes social judgementsapplied to the many attributes of risk. These judgements would notnecessarily be the same in all contexts and, in particular, might be differentin different societies.”83 Exposure limits could not be universal. Nuclear regulationof mines, Munro insisted, would impede economic and social developmentin the New South Africa. The Chamber, which had been one of theoriginal architects of racial segregation in South Africa, unblushinglyaccused the CNS of being a “white, male organization” with an inadequateunderstanding of development challenges.84 This time around, though, theChamber’s strategies failed. In 1999, the revised Nuclear Energy Act remadethe CNS into the National Nuclear Regulator and granted it the authority tomonitor radiation in mines. This victory was more legal than practical, butthat is a story for another time.In Gabon and Madagascar, we saw that nuclearity came in different technopoliticalregisters: geological, metallurgical, technological, managerial, andmedical. Nuclearity in one register did not automatically translate intoanother. The act, and the consequences, of translation changed over time,depending not only on the assemblages that constituted regimes of perceptibility,but also on how the global friction generated by their data shifted (or did notshift) the boundaries of those regimes.82 “Draft: South African Energy Policy: Discussion Document: Comment,” 2 Oct. 1995, 1, 11,Papers of the office of the Assistant Adviser on Safety and Environment, Chamber of Mines,accessed privately in May 2004, 8.83 A. H. Munro letter to M. Golding, 2 Mar. 1995, papers of the office of the Assistant Adviseron Safety and Environment, Chamber of Mines, accessed in May 2004, 5. For the 1990 ICRP recommendations,see Annals of the ICRP 21, 1–3, esp. pp. 25–32.84 D. G. Wymer, “Note for the Record: Meeting between the Chamber and Marcel Golding,Cape Town, 7 June 1995,” 14 June 1995, papers of the office of the Assistant Adviser on Safetyand Environment, Chamber of Mines, accessed in May 2004, 9.A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 923In South Africa, however, the very act of generating perceptibility—any sortof perceptibility, associated with any sort of nuclearity—was itself a struggle.Establishing a credible dosimetric regime required, above all, a new perspectiveon South Africa’s position in global circuits of knowledge production: itrequired the ability to see existing radon surveys as apartheid science, atodds with the norms and findings of globally-sanctioned practices (howeverunsatisfactory those practices themselves may have been). In effect, Guy sawfirst the imperceptions that South African data generated as they enteredglobal circuits, a vision made possible by his own place as a foreign-trainedradiation expert with more invested in trusting the ICRP than in upholdingthe technopolitics of South African mining. Constructing regimes of perceptibilityin the mines meant pushing against the apartheid state, and its formsof capital, via the simultaneous assertion of expertise and of a spatial domainin which that expertise had authority.C O N C L U S I O NUranium mines were at the technopolitical margins of an industry driven byclaims to exceptionalism. Compared to reactors and bombs they appearedbanal and peripheral, more closely allied, both technologically and geopolitically,to other forms of mining than to other nuclear things. And indeed,many aspects of the stories I have told here do resemble the historiesof labor and occupational disease in other mining sectors, such as asbestosor gold mining.85 In some respects, it was precisely the commonplacenature of illegibility and secrecy that enabled radiation exposures to passunnoticed or unintelligible, whether to global experts or to mineworkersthemselves. Uranium mines had to be made nuclear—they were not bornthat way. Turning that nuclearity into forms of politically usable nuclearexceptionalism required material, discursive, technopolitical, global, andlocal work.So the nuclear world in Africa emerged slowly, jaggedly, from frictionsbetween the transnational politics of global knowledge production and therule and remains of (post)colonial difference. As a form of power distributedin things and inscribed in bodies, nuclearity could make itself felt throughabsence as well as presence. Radiation did not, by itself, make uraniummining into nuclear work. It had to be made perceptible and allied tohuman agency. If such perceptibility and alliances marshaled nuclear exceptionalismeffectively, radiation could serve as a mechanism for forming,maintaining, or disrupting power relationships. Dosimetric mastery thusempowered French radiation protection specialists, both in French mines85 For one example among many, see Jock McCulloch, Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians& the State in South Africa (James Currey, 2002).924 G A B R I E L L E H E C H Tand in dominant circuits of global knowledge production. In Madagascar,however, dosimetry filtered through other experts; it became little morethan a short-term tool for making labor decisions and exerting power overcolonial subjects. For Malagasy mineworkers, radiation remained a mysteriousresidue. Their work never became nuclear; their exposures neverserved as a resource for postcolonial claims-making. By contrast, Gaboneseminers eventually found ways to claim nuclear exceptionalism for themselves,to represent their exposures as the distinctive consequence of globallyknown hazards and as (post)colonial injustice, and therefore as politicallyaccountable in global circuits. South African mines show that dosimetry,while not sufficient, was nevertheless necessary to the production ofnuclearity. Its long absence rendered radiation exposure utterly invisibleto mineworkers, a form of colonial violence they did not know they hadexperienced.Juxtaposing these various histories illuminates not just the uneven spatialdistribution of nuclearity, but also its uneven temporalities. There was nomoment in global time when the nuclearity of uranium mines became settledand forever mandated. Differences among places had to do with time as wellas space, with temporal frictions between mine closures, transnational activism,global knowledge production, capital flows, postcolonial politics, the collapseof apartheid, and more. These spatio-temporal juxtapositions, in turn, bring intofocus the double edge of governmentality. Dosimeters established forms of legibilitywhose first and sometimes only effect—for workers—was discipline.Records also carried within them the potential to discipline mine operators:hence managers’ resistance to making, keeping, and revealing them. But thatpotential required the spatio-temporal extension of perceptibilities to gainmomentum and become usable.Meanwhile, the imperceptions produced by technopolitical marginality continuedto ricochet around global circuits, gaining traction not by conspiracy butsimply through the normal processes of transnational science. In the early1990s, for example, an international group of experts conducted a massivere-analysis of data from the eleven existing studies of radon and lung cancerrisk, which covered underground miners in Australia, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia,France, Sweden, and the United States. African exposures could notbe reanalyzed, because they had never existed as data in the first place.86 Andso the stakes of Africa’s absences from the nuclear world accumulate, bothwithin and outside the continent.The view from the margins challenges the ontological certainties of thecenter. We can readily make this point from a scholarly perspective. Butmaking such challenges stick in the practices of the messy world requires86 Jay H. Lubin et al., “Radon and Lung Cancer Risk: A Joint Analysis of 11 UndergroundMiners Studies,” NIH report 94-3644 (National Institutes of Health, 1994).A F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 925continuous work—as Gabonese mineworker advocates, South African nuclearregulators, and others have discovered. In the uranium boom currently inprogress all over the African continent, mine operators and state officials,invoking the “social judgments” such as those written into ICRP texts onexposure limits and cited by the South African Chamber of Mines in the1990s, pit the immediate urgency of “development” against the long-termuncertainties of exposure. The struggle to see Africa in the nuclear world,and the nuclear world in Africa, continues.926 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T


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