Burying Futures: Artisanal Mining Deaths and the Politics of Negligence in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

In the gold‐mining town of Kwekwe, central Zimbabwe, injury and death are a constant presence. Collapsing shafts, sudden explosions, gang fights, and neglected health infrastructure characterize the everyday lives of the town's impoverished residents. This article, based on ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023 in Zimbabwe's artisanal and small‐scale mining regions, examines how young miners, their families, and township communities navigate a landscape where untimely deaths and near misses shape political subjectivity and reveal broader modes of state power. By examining how the state and its local enforcers respond to devastation in impoverished communities—and how these communities endure and interpret such recurring losses—the article shows that negligence is not just an absence but an active political repertoire. It contributes to anthropological debates on crisis, necropolitics, and state sovereignty in mineral‐extraction frontiers by showing how authority persists less through outright domination than through calibrated neglect: a mode of rule in which timely intervention is withheld, and the state reemerges selectively during moments of injury, death, or mourning to absorb loss as a political occasion.