{"id":130509,"date":"2022-10-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nursingstudybay.com\/2022\/10\/20\/africa-and-the-nuclear-world-labor-occupational-health-and-the-transnational-production-of-uranium-and-issue-5\/"},"modified":"2022-10-20T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T00:00:00","slug":"africa-and-the-nuclear-world-labor-occupational-health-and-the-transnational-production-of-uranium-and-issue-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/africa-and-the-nuclear-world-labor-occupational-health-and-the-transnational-production-of-uranium-and-issue-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium” and “issue 5”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium” and “issue 5″
\nwrite 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”
\nwrite 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".
\nAfrica and the Nuclear World:
\nLabor, Occupational Health, and the
\nTransnational Production of Uranium
\nGABRIELLE HECHT
\nDepartment of History, University of Michigan
\nWhat is Africa\u2019s place in the nuclear world In 1995, a U.S. government report
\non nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any
\n\u201cnuclear activities.\u201d1 Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of
\nworld uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in
\nEurope, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in
\nuranium mines were \u201cexposed to higher amounts of internal radiation
\nthan . . . workers in any other segment of the nuclear energy industry.\u201d2
\nWhat, then, does it mean for a workplace, a technology, or a nation to be
\n\u201cnuclear\u201d What is at stake in that label, and how do such stakes vary by
\ntime and place
\nIn both political and scientific discourse, an apparently immutable ontology
\nhas long distinguished nuclear things from non-nuclear ones. The distinction
\nhas seemed transparent, fixed, and incontrovertible\u2014ultimately a matter of
\nfission and radioactivity. Scholarship on the history, culture, and politics of
\nthe \u201cnuclear age\u201d has also assumed the self-evidence of \u201cnuclear\u201d things. No
\none questions whether bombs and reactors are \u201cnuclear,\u201d even while bitter
\nbattles rage over their political, military, or moral legitimacy.
\nAcknowledgments: My biggest debts are to Paul Edwards and Bruce Struminger for their many
\ncontributions. Useful comments also came from Soraya Boudia, Geoff Eley, Kenneth Garner,
\nMichelle Murphy, Martha Poon, Christopher Sellers, Matthew Shindell, and the reviewers of this
\njournal, as well as audiences in Minneapolis, Toronto, Eindhoven, Stony Brook, San Diego, and
\nMadison.
\n1 Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Safeguards and the International Atomic Energy
\nAgency, OTA-ISS-615, Apr. 1995, App. B.
\n2 D. A. Holaday, \u201cSome Unsolved Problems in Uranium Mining,\u201d in, International Atomic
\nEnergy Agency, International Labour Organisation, and World Health Organization, Radiological
\nHealth and Safety in Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1 (International
\nAtomic Energy Agency, 1964), 51.
\nComparative Studies in Society and History 2009;51(4):896\u2013926.
\n0010-4175\/09 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 2009
\ndoi:10.1017\/S001041750999017X
\n896
\nBeyond these clear-cut cases, however, the category of the \u201cnuclear\u201d has
\nnever been defined by purely technical parameters. Like other master categories
\nthat claim global purview, the \u201cnuclear\u201d both inscribes and enacts politics of
\ninclusion and exclusion. Neither technical function nor radiation sufficed to
\nmake African nations and their mines \u201cnuclear\u201d in geopolitical terms. Such outcomes,
\nI have suggested elsewhere, were closely tied to the political economy
\nof the nuclear industry, with profound consequences for the legal and illegal
\ncirculation of uranium and other radioactive materials and for the global institutions
\nand treaties governing nuclear systems.3 Here, I argue that the historical
\nand geographical contingencies affecting the \u201cnuclear\u201d as a category have also
\nhad significant consequences for the lives and health of mineworkers. I focus
\non African uranium miners, whose labor has fueled atomic weapons and
\nnuclear reactors around the world for over six decades. That these people
\nhave been ignored both in histories of the nuclear age and by Africanists
\nspeaks to mutually reinforcing assumptions about Africa\u2019s place, and lack of
\nplace, in a highly technological world. Challenging such assumptions requires
\nthat we enter that world via its technologies.
\nThe essay thus explores the nuclear world in Africa, and Africa in the nuclear
\nworld.4 I identify three moments of global imperception in the making and
\nlegitimation of knowledge on radiation hazards: moments when African
\npeople and workplaces went unaccounted for in \u201cglobal\u201d scientific knowledge
\nproduction. (\u201cGlobal,\u201d here, refers above all to the aims and claims of knowledge
\nproducers.5) I juxtapose these moments with three uranium histories, situated
\nin Madagascar, Gabon, and South Africa, which analyze the labor
\narrangements and regimes of perceptibility that produced such global imperceptions.
\nThe production and dissolution of nuclear things in African places,
\nI argue, occurred in the friction between the transnational politics of knowledge
\nand (post)colonial power, between abstract prescriptions and embodied, instrumentalized
\npractices. Radiation infiltrated workers\u2019 bodies; sometimes,
\nhowever, it also opened political possibilities.6
\n3 Gabrielle Hecht, \u201cNuclear Ontologies,\u201d Constellations 13, 3 (Sept. 2006): 320\u201331; and
\n\u201cNegotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the Making of
\nthe IAEA,\u201d in John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, eds., \u201cGlobal Power Knowledge: Science, Technology,
\nand International Affairs,\u201d special issue of Osiris 21 (July 2006): 25\u201348.
\n4 For broader debates, see Jean-Franc\u00b8ois Bayart, \u201cAfrica in the World: A History of Extraversion,\u201d
\nAfrican Affairs 99 (2000): 217\u201367.
\n5 I draw inspiration here from Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge,
\nHistory (University of California Press, 2005); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the
\nNeoliberal World Order (Duke University Press, 2006); Geoff Eley, \u201cHistoricizing the Global, Politicizing
\nCapital: Giving the Present a Name,\u201d History Workshop Journal 63 (2007): 156\u201388;
\nAntoinette Burton. \u201cNot Even Remotely Global Method and Scale in World History,\u201d History
\nWorkshop Journal 64 (2007): 323\u201328.
\n6 In this and other ways, we might think of radiation as \u201cimperial debris\u201d; see Ann Laura Stoler,
\n\u201cImperial Debris: Reflections on Ruin and Ruination,\u201d Cultural Anthropology 23, 2: 191\u2013219.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 897
\nMy core premise is that uranium mines are not born nuclear, in part because
\nthe \u201cnuclear\u201d is not merely about radiation. Instead, I treat the nuclear as a
\nhighly contingent technopolitical product of historical circumstances. Before
\nattending to my main argument, let me explain what this means by surveying
\nwhat I call \u201cnuclear exceptionalism\u201d and briefly discussing a few key concepts.
\nN U C L E A R E X C E P T I O N A L I SM
\nIn the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the grip of atomic bombs on
\nglobal imaginaries derived strength through assertions of exceptionalism. Proponents
\nand opponents alike portrayed nuclear weapons as fundamentally
\ndifferent from any other human creation by virtue of their apocalyptic potential.
\nAs discourse, nuclear exceptionalism spanned spatial and temporal scales. On a
\nmicro scale, fission\u2014the physical process that powered atomic bombs\u2014meant
\nsplitting atoms. This deliberate rupture of nature\u2019s building blocks propelled
\nclaims to a corresponding, macro-scale rupture in historical time: the
\n\u201cnuclear age.\u201d Geopolitical status became proportional to atomic weapons
\ncapacity. Nuclear nationalism in Britain and France allayed anxieties about
\nthe loss of empire and U.S. imperialism, while in India it promised a postcolonial
\nreordering of global power.7 Even for states that did not aspire to atomic
\nweapons, nuclear energy could symbolize the zenith of modernity. Anti-nuclear
\nmovements, meanwhile, also engaged in nuclear exceptionalism by highlighting
\nthe dangers posed by human-made radioactivity, dangers unprecedented
\nin their longevity and scope. Nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and
\nChernobyl came to symbolize the nadir of modernity. Morality-talk further
\nmagnified the stakes of exceptionalist assertions, depicting nuclear things as
\nsalvation or depravity.
\nYet nuclear exceptionalism went well beyond rhetoric\u2014it was materialized
\nin objects, systems, and practices. It depended on sophisticated marshalling of
\nscientific knowledge, technologies of measurement and control, institutions,
\nsocial networks, imagery, and more. It needed national and international
\natomic energy agencies, which built new systems of financing and accountability
\nfor nuclear endeavors, separate from other governance institutions. It relied
\non disciplines such as health physics, whose very epistemology was predicated
\non isolating radiation from other health hazards. It required instruments such as
\ndosimeters, which measured radiation in people, and Geiger counters, which
\nmeasured radiation in places. And it thrived on the countless articles,
\nmovies, novels, and images that came to constitute \u201catomic culture.\u201d8 As the
\n7 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World
\nWar II (MIT Press, 1998); Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science,
\nSecrecy and the Postcolonial State (Zed Books and St. Martin\u2019s Press, 1998).
\n8 There is a range of scholarship on these themes: M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American
\nScience and the Survivors at Hiroshima (University of Chicago Press, 1994); John Krige, \u201cThe
\nPeaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,\u201d
\n898 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nalliances among (and within) such formations of power varied across time and
\nplace, so too did the effectiveness of nuclear exceptionalism, and indeed the
\nvery meaning and material substance of the \u201cnuclear.\u201d
\nThis, then, is why I refer to the nuclear as a technopolitical outcome of historical
\nprocesses. Politics shape its technologies, but its technologies also shape
\nits politics. Materiality matters tremendously. Enough atomic explosions really
\ncan destroy the planet; radiation exposure really can cause cancer. But as countless
\nworks in science and technology studies have shown, material realities
\nemerge from complex networks in which the social and the technical are inseparably
\nintertwined.9 In the domain of occupational exposures, for example,
\ninstruments, labor relations, scientific disciplines, expert controversy, and lay
\nknowledge combine to create what Michelle Murphy has called \u201cregimes of
\nperceptibility\u201d\u2014assemblages of social and technical things that make certain
\nhazards and health effects visible, and others invisible.10 Here I put
\nMurphy\u2019s concept in dialogue with Anna Tsing\u2019s notion of \u201cfriction,\u201d a metaphor
\nfor the creative and destructive power generated by universal aspirations
\nas they travel along changing axes of inequality.11 The notion of friction
\ncalls attention to the unevenness with which knowledge travels, the
\nalways-local circumstances that change its content along the way, and the
\nmaterial consequences of its motion. Regimes of perceptibility in African
\nuranium mines, I argue, emerged from the friction between universalizing
\nHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, 1 (2008): 9\u201348; Itty Abraham, \u201cThe Ambivalence of
\nNuclear Histories,\u201d in John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, eds., \u201cGlobal Power Knowledge: Science,
\nTechnology, and International Affairs,\u201d special issue of Osiris 21 (July 2006): 49\u201365; Joseph
\nMasco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton
\nUniversity Press, 2006); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb\u2019s Early Light: American Thought and Culture
\nat the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Pantheon Books, 1985); SpencerWeart, Nuclear Fear: A History of
\nImages (Harvard University Press, 1988).
\n9 For a more extended discussion of technopolitics, see Hecht, Radiance of France. Other works
\nthat explore these themes include: Donald A. Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology
\nof Nuclear Missile Guidance (MIT Press, 1990); Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelite,
\nand Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press, 1997); Bruno Latour, Reassembling
\nthe Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005);
\nTimothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (University of California
\nPress, 2002).
\n10 Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental
\nPolitics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006). For how such
\nissues relate to radiation exposure, see Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after
\nChernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002). For exploration of \u201chistorical ontology\u201d in relation
\nto occupational and environmental health debates, see Christopher Sellers, \u201cThe Artificial Nature of
\nFluoridatedWater: Between Nations, Knowledge, and Material Flows,\u201d in Gregg Mitman, Michelle
\nMurphy, and Christopher Sellers, eds., \u201cLandscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern
\nEnvironments,\u201d Osiris 19 (2004): 182\u2013200; as well as other contributions to that special issue. See
\nalso Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health
\nScience (University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
\n11 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University
\nPress, 2005).
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 899
\nclaims to, or denial of, nuclearity and particular imperial histories, with consequences
\nfor occupational exposures, their legibility, and workers\u2019 changing political
\noptions.
\nConsider a question that deeply concerned some of the people who appear in
\nthis essay: does exposure to radon gas cause cancer Uranium atoms decay into
\nradon, which in turn decays into other elements known as its \u201cdaughters.\u201d
\nThese decays release radioactive alpha particles, which miners inhale. Determining
\ncausality via accepted scientific practice demands isolating the effects
\nof radon exposure\u2014deciding whether illness in uranium miners comes only
\nfrom radon exposure, or also from other contaminants. There is also the question
\nof deciding what constitutes a radiation effect. Lung cancer Genetic
\nmutations Epidemiologists and geneticists respond differently. When do
\n\u201ceffects\u201d occur Is lung cancer thirty years after the victim\u2019s last exposure an
\n\u201ceffect\u201d Labor lawyers and mining corporations offer different answers.
\nRegardless of perspective, all these questions ultimately required knowing
\nhow much radiation mineworkers absorb. Before the 1980s, personal
\ndosimetry\u2014giving each worker a film badge or a dosimeter pen\u2014only
\ndetected the external exposures produced by gamma rays emitted by radioactive
\nrocks. Such instruments did not detect the alpha radiation emitted by
\ninhaled radon daughters. In many places, mine managers also feared personal
\ndosimetry would scare workers by alerting them to an otherwise invisible
\ndanger. Ambient dosimetry could accommodate the heavier instruments
\nrequired to \u201ccapture\u201d radon daughters. Less personally intrusive, it involved
\ninstalling instruments throughout the mine and averaging out their readings.
\nBut averages did not account for the experience of men assigned to \u201chot
\nspots\u201d: spots far from air intakes, where reduced ventilation meant elevated
\nradon-daughter levels and higher temperatures\u2014the kind of place where, for
\nexample, white foremen stationed black workers in South African mines.
\nThe scientific (and apparently presentist and delocalized) question of
\ncausality\u2014\u201cdoes radon cause cancer\u201d\u2014is thus also, always, a historical and
\ngeographical question. It has no single, abstract answer above and beyond
\nthe politics of expert controversy, labor organization, capitalist production,
\nor colonial difference and history. That answers depend on the friction
\nbetween these, however, is only visible at the technopolitical margins of
\nnuclearity.12
\nG L O B A L IMP E R C E P T I O N S , I
\nIn 1963, at the first international conference on \u201cRadiological Health and Safety
\nin Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials,\u201d in Vienna, Duncan Holaday of
\n12 As one reviewer was kind enough to point out, this point resonates strongly with the argument
\nmade by the editors and contributors in Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds., Anthropology at the
\nMargins of the State (School of American Research Press, 2004).
\n900 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nthe U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) reported on early results from his study of
\nradon exposure in U.S. uranium miners. He framed his remarks like this:
\n\u201cAmong workers in the nuclear energy industry, uranium miners constitute a
\nunique group, in that the effects of exposure to excessive amounts of radon
\nand its daughters were observed and studied long before the fission of
\nuranium was discovered. As a group, they are exposed to higher amounts of
\ninternal radiation than are workers in any other segment of the nuclear
\nenergy industry.\u201d13 Holaday\u2019s audience, specialists on radiological exposure
\nfrom twenty-four countries and five international organizations, probably
\nfound this statement unremarkable. They all knew about studies from the
\nearly twentieth century showing high incidence of lung cancer among Czech
\nradium\/uranium miners. In the historical context of struggles to regulate
\nradon levels in American uranium mines, however, two things stand out:
\nfirst, Holaday\u2019s alignment of uranium miners with other nuclear workers,
\ninstead of with other miners; and second, his insistence that these miners
\nwere more vulnerable to radiation exposure than any other nuclear worker.
\nThe U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) did not officially accept either
\nof these premises in the 1960s. From a legal standpoint, digging uranium ore
\nout of U.S. soil did not count as a nuclear activity until much later.
\nCreated in 1946, the AEC immediately fostered a massive uranium boom by
\noffering monetary rewards for ore strikes. In response, prospectors and small
\nmining consortia dug hundreds of mines on the Colorado Plateau. They sold
\ntheir ore to the AEC, the sole legal purchaser and consumer. But when AEC
\nscientists and others began expressing concern about miners\u2019 radiation
\nexposure, the agency refused to accept regulatory responsibility. Using arguments
\nthat would be echoed decades later by the South African Chamber of
\nMines, it insisted that uranium mines fell under the ordinary jurisdiction of
\nstate and federal agencies rather than the special, nuclear provisions of the
\nAtomic Energy Act. The AEC delegated the task of regulating radon levels
\nto state regulators, the PHS, and other federal agencies, none of which had sufficient
\nexpertise, infrastructure, or authority to implement or enforce standards.
\nSome mine operators voluntarily upgraded their ventilation systems to decrease
\nradon exposure, but many did not. After bitter jurisdictional battles, a nationwide
\nexposure standard finally passed in 1967, but several more years
\nelapsed before it became enforceable. Dozens of former miners died from
\nlung cancer and other diseases as a result of their exposures.14 Lawsuits
\n13 Holaday, \u201cSome Unsolved Problems,\u201d 51.
\n14 Peter H. Eichstaedt, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans (Red Crane Books,
\n1994); Robert Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes what We Know and Don\u2019t Know
\nabout Cancer (Basic Books, 1995); Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in
\nthe American West (Routledge, 1998); J. SamuelWalker, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation
\nin a Changing Environment, 1963\u20131971 (University of California Press, 1992).
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 901
\nagainst the federal government failed to win compensation for miners and their
\nfamilies. In 1990, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act finally made
\nuranium miners from the early Cold War era eligible for \u201ccompassionate payments,\u201d
\nin recognition of their contributions to U.S. national security, provided
\nthey could prove via medical tests and administrative histories that they had
\nacquired a radiation-related illness. Only then did U.S. uranium mining
\nbecome uncontestedly nuclear work.
\nHoladay\u2019s insistence on the nuclearity of uranium mining may have reflected
\nthe contested status of U.S. mines in 1963, but to French members of his audience
\nin Vienna he had only stated the obvious. The Commissariat a` l\u2019Energie
\nAtomique (CEA) had taken such nuclearity for granted from its inception. It
\nmonitored all manner of radiation in French uranium mines itself, with the
\nsame labs and equipment used in reactors and other \u201cnuclear\u201d workplaces.
\nCEA experts had presented their first miner-exposure data five years earlier,
\nat a 1958 Geneva conference on peaceful uses of atomic energy. By contrast
\nto the U.S. AEC, French papers in Geneva and Vienna blared out nuclearity.
\nThey described in painstaking detail how CEA experts set maximum permissible
\nlevels, measured radon and radiation, and tracked exposures for each
\nworker, presenting images of dosimeters, film badges, and the iconic lead-lined
\nsuits worn to work in highly radioactive environments.
\nThe CEA had configured the nuclearity of French uranium mines by turning
\nradiation and radon into objects of exceptional workplace control. Dosimetry\u2014
\ncalculating the radiation dose absorbed by people\u2014formed the core of this configuration.
\nIn 1962, the CEA had amassed thirty-five thousand radon samples,
\ncompared to the PHS\u2019s six thousand.15 While the PHS measured only alpha
\nradiation emitted by radon, the CEA also measured gamma radiation emitted
\nby rocks; to this end, miners (like reactor workers) wore dosimeter pens or
\nfilm badges.16 CEA radiation protection experts emphasized their \u201cexceptional
\npolicing role,\u201d which (at least in principle) gave them hierarchical power over
\nmine superintendents whenever they found exposures in excess of maximum
\npermissible levels.17 By contrast, PHS scientists took measurements under
\n15 F. Duhamel, M. Beulaygue, and J. Pradel, \u201cOrganisation du contro\u02c6le radiologique dans les
\nmines d\u2019uranium franc\u00b8aises,\u201d 63; and D. A. Holaday and H. N. Doyle, \u201cEnvironmental Studies
\nin the Uranium Mines,\u201d 19; both in: International Atomic Energy Agency, International Labour
\nOrganisation, and World Health Organization, Radiological Health and Safety in Mining and
\nMilling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1 (International Atomic Energy Agency, 1964).
\n16 D. Mechali and J. Pradel, \u201cAssessment de l\u2019irradiation externe et de la contamination interne
\ndes travailleurs dans les mines d\u2019uranium franc\u00b8aises,\u201d in, International Atomic Energy Agency,
\nInternational Labour Organisation, and World Health Organization, Radiological Health and
\nSafety in Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1 (International Atomic
\nEnergy Agency, 1964): 373.
\n17 Robert Avril et al., \u201cMeasures Adopted in French Uranium Mines to Ensure Protection of Personnel
\nagainst the Hazards of Radioactivity,\u201d in Proceedings of the Second United Nations International
\nConference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Held in Geneva, 1\u201313 September
\n1958, Vol. 21: Health and Safety: Dosimetry and Standards (United Nations, 1985), 63.
\n902 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nthe sufferance of mine operators, and only after agreeing not to inform miners
\nabout their purpose. In France, dosimetry conferred social power on a new class
\nof experts, turning uranium mineshafts into nuclear workplaces. Dosimetric
\nresults legitimated and extended that power; in 1958 the radiation protection
\ndivision proudly declared, \u201cThere has not been one instance of over-exposure.\u201d
\nAs proof, it provided the quantities of radon inhaled by mine personnel in each
\nof the \u201cmining divisions in Metropolitan France.\u201d18
\nDecades later, interviews with former French uranium miners suggest that
\nespecially at first, radiation monitoring practices were unevenly implemented.
\nWorkers remember early mineshafts with little ventilation, and places that made
\nthe needles on their dosimeters fly instantly off the scale. Working conditions
\nquickly became the focus of labor union demands. By the early 1960s, French
\nminers had their own version of what made their work nuclear, and made their
\nown set of demands based on that nuclearity.19 Unsurprisingly, conference presentations
\nby the CEA\u2019s radiation protection division did not discuss these alternate
\nproductions of nuclearity. Here, however, I call attention to another
\nabsence, lurking in the reference to metropolitan France.
\nAMB AT OMI K A , S O U T H E R N MA D A G A S C A R , 1950S \u2013 1960S
\nFrom the mid-1950s onward, CEA radiation protection experts published a
\nsteady stream of papers on their exposure-monitoring programs in uranium
\nmines. None of these, however, included data from CEA-owned mines
\noutside the metropole. The first of these mines to produce significant quantities
\nof uranium were open-cast quarries of uranothorianite ore in the Androy desert
\nin southern Madagascar. Launched in 1953, when Madagascar was still under
\nFrench colonial rule, these operations were considerably more rudimentary
\nthan metropolitan mines. Run by a dozen or so French geologists, metallurgists,
\nand mining engineers, they often could not pay for themselves. Dedicated radiation
\nprotection experts did not figure in their budgets. In the metropole the
\nnuclearity of uranium mines may have seemed self-evident, but in Madagascar
\nit remained as fractured and lumpy as the rocks that emerged from the quarries.
\nExpatriates saw their work as nuclear because it fed their nation\u2019s atomic
\nenergy program. The tricolor French flag flying over the central camp reaffirmed
\nthis, as did yearly trips home where talk and images of reactors and
\natom bombs enabled them to visualize their contribution to the \u201cradiance of
\nFrance.\u201d20 Visions of reactors and bombs did not, however, transfix Tandroy
\n18 Ibid.
\n19 Philippe Brunet does an excellent job analyzing this history in his book, La nature dans tous
\nses e\u00b4tats: Uranium, nucle\u00b4aire et radioactivite\u00b4 en Limousin (Presses Universitaires de Limoges,
\n2004).
\n20 Robert Bodu, \u201cCompte-rendu de mission a` Madagascar,\u201d Direction des Recherches et Exploitations
\nMinie`res, Mars 1960, Coge\u00b4ma archives, accessed 1998 and 2000; Hecht, Radiance of
\nFrance.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 903
\nor Betsileo mineworkers. The former miners and mill workers I spoke with in
\n1998 knew neither the purpose of their ore nor the existence of reactors and
\nbombs. When I explained, they laughed and shook their heads. \u201cYou crazy
\nvazahas [white foreigners],\u201d said one man. \u201cWhy do you want this stuff\u201d21
\nAnother, thinking of the region\u2019s recently opened sapphire mines (where my
\ntranslator sometimes worked), shrewdly asked what sapphires were used
\nfor.22 In their eyes, I was just another foreigner interested in rocks.
\nThe time of vatovy (the local term for uranium ore) was indeed exceptional
\nfor the Tandroy who lived through it, but that exceptionalism had little to do
\nwith radiation, or with things that their French supervisors considered
\nnuclear. It had a lot to do with value, especially wages, and the investments
\nand business opportunities that they made possible. Fanahia worked in the
\nmines for thirteen years. \u201cI bought 50 zebu [cattle],\u201d he said, \u201cand a
\nbicycle . . . and a cart, and a radio, and a watch that I ordered from
\nFrance. . . . I did some trading in watches. I would order them from Besanc\u00b8on
\nand resell them to other men who worked with the vatovy.\u201d23 Above all, vatovy
\nexceptionalism had to do with the arduous task of breaking rocks with jackhammers,
\nand the backbreaking work of loading rocks into wooden carts. Mahata
\nworked in the quarries with his father and two brothers, until his father fell on a
\npneumatic drill and lost a leg. \u201cWe tell our children, you must guard the zebu carefully,
\nbecause the work we did to get them was painful.We broke our legs and our
\nfeet doing that. So the zebu that are there must be well guarded. Because you, you
\naren\u2019t able to do that hard work. . . . Better to guard the zebu than to work
\nthere.\u201d24 Tales of rock slides and lost body parts abounded.
\nRadiation was not totally absent from Tandroy memories, but it appeared
\nindirectly: nested in needles, displaced into dosimeters, yoked to discipline,
\nand merged with medical monitoring. Some workers, for example, used
\nGeiger counters on a daily basis, to sort rocks into \u201cgood and bad piles.\u201d25
\n21 Author\u2019s interview with Mahata, Tsilamaha, Madagascar, 16 Aug. 1998. Interviews with
\nTandroy and Betsileo mineworkers were conducted with the aid of translators M. Abdoulhamide
\nand Georges Heurtebize. Quotations that appear in italics indicate the words of the interviewee
\nas related by the translators; insertion of the first person is mine, and replaces the translators\u2019 use
\nof the third person.
\n22 Author\u2019s interviews with Fanahia and Itirik, Andolobe\u00b4, Madagascar, 13 and 14 Aug. 1998;
\ntranslator: M. Abdoulhamide. Although I did not know it at the time, such questions had their
\nobverse in northern Madagascar, where miners speculated that sapphires were used in bombs.
\nSee AndrewWalsh, \u201cIn theWake of Things: Speculating in and about Sapphires in Northern Madagascar,\u201d
\nAmerican Anthropologist 106, 2 (2004): 225\u201337.
\n23 Fanahia interviews, op. cit. Such investments strategies contrast with the \u201cdaring consumption\u201d
\nthat Andrew Walsh describes for some young men working in the 1990s in the sapphiremining
\ntown of Ambondromifehy, in \u201c \u2018Hot Money\u2019 and Daring Consumption in a Northern Malagasy
\nSapphire-Mining Town,\u201d American Ethnologist 30, 2 (2003): 290\u2013305. The people I interviewed
\nwere, necessarily, long-term inhabitants of the region with deep social networks that
\nbolstered and justified such investments; I do not know how migrant workers spent their wages.
\n24 Mahata interview, op. cit.
\n25 Fanahia interview, op. cit.
\n904 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nThe needle on the counter told the whole story: \u201cWhen there is vatovy, the
\nneedle goes to 500 or higher.\u201d26 The presence of vatovy\u2014unmediated by
\nradiation\u2014made the needle jump. For French managers, radiation connected
\nthe Geiger counters used for radiometric rock sorting and the dosimeters worn
\nby employees to measure their external exposures.27 For workers, however,
\ndosimeters seemed disconnected from Geiger counters, less instruments of
\nwork than objects of discipline. \u201cIf you didn\u2019t wear them, you were out. They
\nkept track of that,\u201d said Joseph Ramiha.28 \u201cIt was the boss who put them on
\nus. He fixed them on our clothes,\u201d remembered a woman who had worked in
\none of the mills.29 Those who remembered wearing dosimeters often linked
\nthem to illness and doctors. Some stories resemble radiation rumors from elsewhere,
\ncomplete with fears of sterility: \u201cYes, we asked why they were putting
\nthem on and the boss said there was sickness inside, there was gas. . . . Yes, he
\nsaid what kind of sickness but we didn\u2019t understand anything about that. . . .
\nYes, we were worried . . . [the boss] said that maybe there was sickness in
\nthere. There were others who said that you couldn\u2019t have children with the sickness
\nfrom vatovy.We were afraid at first, but then there was nothing.\u201d30 If women
\nremained fertile, perhaps there was no danger after all.
\nIn the Androy, the application of the CEA\u2019s prescriptions for radiation monitoring
\nwas uneven at best, and depended entirely on individuals. Mines and
\nmills operated by private contractors\u2014colonial concessionaires who sold
\ntheir ore to the CEA\u2014did not use dosimeters at all. Fanahia worked in both
\ntypes of mines and remembered this well: \u201cAt the CEA they had them, but
\nnot elsewhere.\u201d31 At the CEA mines, meanwhile, some supervisors tried to
\nexplain radiation hazards to their employees, but others did not bother. One
\nreport portrayed Tandroy and Betsileo workers as irredeemably uncivilized,
\nso primitive that they would not even benefit from a job-training program. If
\npeople could not understand radiation, then surely its hazards would remain
\ninexplicable.32
\nNor did CEA facilities always heed metropolitan injunctions to design
\nprocesses with the goal of minimizing exposure. One CEA metallurgist, visiting
\nAmbatomika for a few weeks to help with the milling process, bemoaned
\n26 Author\u2019s interview with Jeremy Fano, Tranomaro, Madagascar, 18 Aug. 1998; translator:
\nM. Abdoulhamide.
\n27 Antoine Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs de l\u2019uranium franc\u00b8ais. II: Le Temps des conque\u02c6tes
\n(Editions Thierry Parquet, 1992), 323.
\n28 Author\u2019s interview with Joseph Ramiha, Tranomaro, Madagascar, 12 Aug. 1998; translators:
\nM. Abdoulhamide and Georges Heurtebize.
\n29 Author\u2019s interview with group of women, Madagascar 1998, anonymity requested.
\n30 Ibid.
\n31 Fanahia interview, op. cit. This contrast was remarked upon by visiting CEA personnel as
\nwell: Robert Bodu, \u201cCompte-rendu de mission a` Madagascar,\u201d ix\u20134.
\n32 Marc Edmond Morgaut, \u201cMission a` Madagascar pour le Commissariat a` l\u2019Energie Atomique
\ndu 11 au 21 novembre 1958,\u201d Coge\u00b4ma archives.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 905
\nthe crude methods used to dry the wet ore concentrates emerging from the
\nmills: \u201cConcentrates are spread out in the sun on big sheets of corrugated
\nmetal and turned over periodically by a worker . . . this procedure is clearly
\narchaic, long, and above all dangerous because the worker is exposed to dust
\nand radiation.\u201d33 This visitor\u2019s mandate did not, however, include measuring
\nspecific worker exposures, let along mitigating them.
\nCEA production managers did not discuss exposures either. Tales of inclement
\nweather and technical woes filled the pages of their activity reports.
\nThey devoted almost no space to radiation exposure. They clearly knew that
\nsome jobs, such as packing uranothorianite concentrates for shipment to
\nFrance, presented significant exposure hazards.34 But they did not report on
\nthe processes for distributing or collecting dosimeters, nor did they provide
\ntables of dosimeter readings. Reports only invoked exposures indirectly,
\nwhen accounting for production slowdowns resulting from moving overexposed
\nworkers to less radioactive sites.
\nSuch absences speak to the fragility of Madagascar\u2019s ties to the nuclearity
\nthat infused metropolitan uranium production. Of the three hazards signaled
\nby metropolitan radiation experts\u2014radon, dust, and gamma rays\u2014managers
\nin the Androy only made external gamma exposures perceptible. Measuring
\nlevels of radon and dust; estimating the long-term exposures of individual
\nworkers to these contaminants; weighting those exposures according to CEA
\nformulas; plugging all the weighted exposures into an equation in order to
\nderive the total monthly exposure for each employee\u2014all that was well
\nbeyond the technical capacity or expertise of managers in the Androy, operating
\nfar from the CEA\u2019s infrastructural support. So dosimeters were distributed,
\ngamma doses tracked just long enough to determine whether job rotation
\nwas required that month, and there the monitoring ended. By 1967, people,
\nequipment, and quarries were all exhausted. The CEA packed its bags and
\nwent home.
\nEven for CEA experts, the nuclearity of Androy mines was brittle and intermittent.
\nThreads of geological and metallurgical nuclearity ran through the consultants
\nwho visited occasionally to advise managers about prospecting or ore
\ntreatment. These experts noticed high radiation levels in passing, but those
\nlevels did not shape design choices as they had in French mines. In Madagascar,
\njob rotation occurred in response to a single month\u2019s dose, not as part of systematically
\ntracking long-term exposures. Radiation monitoring did not
\nempower a distinct class of experts there. Exposures made cameo appearances
\nin activity reports, but I found no evidence that anyone had compiled cumulative
\nnumbers to produce scientifically legible data sets. We can only speculate
\n33 Bodu, \u201cCompte-rendu de mission a` Madagascar.\u201d
\n34 Y. Legagneux, \u201cRapport d\u2019Activite\u00b4 du Service \u2018Expoitation,\u2019\u201d May 1955, p. 21. CEA-DREM,
\nMission de Madagascar, Division du Sud. Coge\u00b4ma archives.
\n906 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nabout the reasons. Perhaps the numbers themselves instantly became imperial
\nwaste, discarded as soon as they were produced. If the raw numbers did make it
\nto France, perhaps they became waste there, consigned to accumulate dust
\nbecause no one thought they mattered. Maybe metropolitan radiation researchers
\ndid not trust the numbers because they had not collected the data
\nthemselves.
\nWhatever the case, Malagasy radiation exposures did not appear in CEA
\nradiation protection publications. Today, there appears to be no way to
\nrecover the cumulative exposures of Malagasy uranium workers. We do
\nknow that because of their thorium content, these ores emitted exceptionally
\nhigh levels of gamma radiation (over twice that of pitchblende, very high-grade
\nuranium ore). A 1976 IAEA manual on radiological safety, coauthored by one
\nof the CEA\u2019s radiation protection experts, mentioned this in passing, while
\ndescribing the hazards posed by gamma radiation in uranium mills: \u201cIn some
\ncases, concentrate of pitchblende has been reported to give rise to radiation
\nfields up to 40 mR\/h. . . . Readings of up to 100 mR\/h have been reported for
\nconcentrates of uranothorianite mixed in the Malagasy Republic. . . .\u201d35 This
\nreference to the radioactivity of the rocks, rather than the exposures of those
\nwho had sorted and milled them, reflected the regime of nuclear perceptibility
\nthat governed Malagasy uranium. CEA radiation-protection experts took
\naccount of the ores\u2019 high radioactivity levels only when the rocks entered the
\nmetropolitan processing plant. That was where they acquired their full
\nnuclear significance, where their radioactivity seemed high by comparison to
\nother ores, where extra precaution was required in handling them. Those radiation
\nreadings were the ones whose scientific value got traction, the ones that\u2014
\nnearly a decade after the mines themselves had shut down\u2014made it into an
\ninternational manual prescribing safe labor practices. Users of this manual in
\nthe late 1970s probably did not wonder about who mixed those uranothorianite
\nconcentrates, what levels of radon (and the equally hazardous thoron produced
\nby the thorium in the rocks) might have accumulated around piles of ore,
\nwhether workers had been adequately monitored, how such dosimetric readings
\nmight have affected international data sets, or what follow-up studies of worker
\nhealth might have revealed.
\nFollowing the CEA to Madagascar suggests that nuclearity came in different
\ntechnopolitical registers. The geological nuclearity of uranothorianite did not
\nautomatically translate into occupational nuclearity for Malagasy workers, or
\nepidemiological nuclearity for their exposure data. More robust assemblages
\nof instruments and expertise might have extended the fragile regime that
\nmade different forms of exposure perceptible. Additional, or different circuits
\n35 An mR\/h is a unit that measures the radioactivity level of a substance. It signifies milli Roentgens
\nper hour. International Atomic Energy Agency, Manual on Radiological Safety in Uranium
\nand Thorium Mines and Mills (International Atomic Energy Agency, 1976), 9.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 907
\nof knowledge might have generated the friction and translations that would
\nhave made Malagasy uranium production more nuclear, and its workers
\nmore visible. The imperceptibility of exposures, the absence of friction and
\ntranslation, and the consequent long-term invisibility of Malagasies as radiation
\nworkers: all of these emerged within geographically and temporally specific
\ncolonial and postcolonial circuits of power.
\nThis does not mean, however, that we can gesture grandly at \u201ccolonial
\npower\u201d to explain the unevenness of nuclearity. The geographic and temporal
\nspecificities of these circuits of power matter tremendously to what was rendered
\nperceptible, to whom, when, and with what physiological and political
\nresults. To understand this, we must enter other circuits.
\nG L O B A L IMP E R C E P T I O N S , I I
\nIn September 1974, the CEA and the International Labor Office (ILO) hosted
\nan international symposium on \u201cRadiation Protection in Mining and Milling of
\nUranium and Thorium\u201d in Bordeaux, France. Co-sponsored by the World
\nHealth Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the conference
\ntook stock of work on the occupational health of uranium miners, methods
\nof monitoring exposures, and international differences in the maximum
\npermissible levels of radon, dust, and gamma radiation.
\nTwo decades had passed since the International Commission on Radiological
\nProtection (ICRP) had issued its first guidelines on maximum permissible
\nlevels (MPL) of radon in mines. As with all ICRP guidelines, these were
\nmerely advisory; the commission had no enforcement power.36 National regulatory
\nbodies had to translate ICRP recommendations into mandatory standards.
\nStill, the commission\u2019s legitimacy was considerable; the United States
\nand France developed their own formulations for maximum permissible
\nlevels, but most other places based their MPLs on the methods outlined in
\nICRP texts.
\nNevertheless, controversy visibly flourished at international conferences like
\nthe one in Bordeaux. There was widespread acceptance of the \u201cfundamental\u201d
\noccupational exposure limit of 5 rems, the maximum amount of radiation
\nworkers could absorb in any given year. But how should this generic number
\ntranslate into specific MPLs for different types and sources of radiation
\nThe data informing this translation were disciplinarily heterogeneous:
\n36 The ICRP was started in 1928 as a group of physicists and radiologists trying to figure out
\nhow to limit their own occupational exposure to radiation. After World War II its membership
\ngrew and its aims broadened. By the mid-1950s, the ICRP was issuing recommendations on permissible
\ndoses for externally and internally absorbed radiation in all manner of occupations. For
\nan insider history, see Roger Clarke and Jack Valentin, \u201cA History of the International Commission
\non Radiological Protection,\u201d Health Physics 88, 4 (2005): 1\u201316. For an insider history of radiological
\nstandards in the United States, see J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation
\nProtection in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2000).
\n908 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nepidemiological studies on the correlation between exposure and lung cancer,
\nlab experiments that exposed rats to radon, autopsies of dead miners, lung function
\ntests, and more. They were also empirically heterogeneous: there were
\nstudies of uranium miners per se, but also epidemiological studies of Hiroshima
\nand Nagasaki victims, research on \u201cnon-nuclear\u201d dust exposures related to
\ndiseases like pneumoconiosis, and so on. Experts disagreed about the relative
\nsignificance of these data, and even their legibility. American epidemiologists
\ndid not think French experiments exposing rats to radon said much about radon
\neffects in people. French health physicists thought that the ongoing U.S. PHS
\nstudy measured radon levels inaccurately. As Henri Jammet of the CEA noted
\nin his opening remarks in Bordeaux, even within the ICRP itself \u201cthere were
\npassionate discussions.\u201d This had led to \u201capparent, and sometimes real differences\u201d
\nin workplace norms in different international organizations and
\ncountries.37 Such divergences could be extremely difficult to assess, because
\nthey often stemmed from differences in the objects and tools of measurement.
\nThe French, for example, calculated and weighted cumulative exposures from
\nthree hazards (radon, dust, and gamma radiation), rather than assuming that
\nonly radon mattered, as was standard in U.S. mines. The Americans, meanwhile,
\nmeasured the concentration of radon daughters directly because the
\ndaughters (rather than pure radon) were what caused tissue damage. Measuring
\ndaughters directly required expensive, complex instruments, which partly
\nexplained why the PHS scientists had relatively few data points and thus, by
\nFrench standards, poor dosimetric accuracy. The French, along with the
\nICRP, believed that in most mines a relatively simple formula could translate
\nradon gas values into daughter concentrations. And so on.
\nThe 1974 Bordeaux conference was one of many sites in which such disagreements
\nplayed out. Discussions there did not bring closure to the controversies
\n(some aspects of which persist today). They did, however, enable French
\nexperts to argue at length for the superiority of their approach to radiation monitoring.
\nGiven the March 1974 announcement of a massive expansion of
\nFrance\u2019s nuclear power program, there could not have been a more fortuitous
\ntime to display dosimetric mastery.
\nMost striking for my purpose here, one of the longer presentations at the conference
\nwas offered by Massan Quadjovie, an official in the Gabonese government\u2019s
\nDirection des Mines. His audience included delegates not only from
\nNorth America and Europe, but also from India, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Turkey,
\nZambia, and Zaire\u2014all potential customers for the CEA\u2019s instrumentation
\n37 Henri Jammet, \u201cLes proble`mes de protection pose\u00b4s dans l\u2019extraction et le traitement de
\nl\u2019uranium et du thorium,\u201d in, International Labour Office, Radiation Protection in Mining and
\nMilling of Uranium and Thorium (from a symposium organized by the International Labour
\nOffice and the French Atomic Energy Commission, in cooperation with the World Health Organization
\nand the International Atomic Energy Agency, Bordeaux, France, 9\u201311 Sept. 1974) (International
\nLabor Office-Geneva, 1976), 3\u201310. All translations from the French are my own.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 909
\nand training programs. Listening to Quadjovie, they might well have concluded
\nthat operations in Gabon offered a model exemplar of French dosimetric
\npractice.
\nAccording to Quadjovie, film badges to measure gamma exposures were distributed
\nand collected monthly, then sent to the CEA\u2019s lab in France which
\nreported the results back to the Compagnie Minie`re d\u2019Uranium de Franceville
\n(COMUF), the company operating the mines. In underground operations,
\nradon was measured via ambient sampling. Both gamma and radon results
\nwere recorded on each employee\u2019s exposure chart. If any \u201cabnormal results\u201d
\noccurred, \u201can investigation is immediately conducted to determine the causes
\nof the anomaly and take the necessary measures.\u201d Quadjovie dutifully admitted
\nto some imperfections in the system: \u201cObviously this type of control implies
\nthat one can trust the personnel, each employee being responsible for his
\nfilm badge. There are still some cases of forgetfulness, or of imaginative use
\nof the film. Sometimes the badge is lost or put into an environment that is
\nnot representative of the working environment. One must therefore take all
\nthese anomalies into account when compiling the results, and periodically
\nrun checks at the worksite.\u201d38 Unlike their Malagasy counterparts, then, Gabonese
\nworkers were not completely invisible in the international space of knowledge
\nproduction. Making them visible, however dimly, enabled the Gabonese
\nstate to display regulatory competence. Doing so at an international conference,
\nin turn, helped CEA experts display the meticulousness and portability of their
\napproach. Visible workers, finally, could shoulder the blame for any failures.
\nStill, Gabonese dosimetric results did not make it into the international scientific
\nliterature any more than Malagasy ones had. To perceive them, we must
\nlook in Gabon, and go back in time to the first decade of uranium production
\nat the COMUF.
\nMOUNANA, E A S T E R N G A B O N , 1960S \u2013 2000S
\nThe COMUF was a joint venture between the CEA and Mokta, a mining
\ncompany with long colonial experience. Launched in 1957, the site began producing
\nore four years later. Xavier des Ligneris, the first director, had previously
\nrun CEA uranium mines in France. In Gabon he tried to follow the
\nCEA\u2019s prescriptions directly, treating radiation as separate from other health
\nand safety issues in the workplace. Anticipating the need for gamma, radon,
\nand dust monitoring, for example, he requested a technician solely dedicated
\nto radiation protection. Although he left the development of all other health
\nand safety guidelines to his managers, he personally wrote and signed those
\npertaining to gamma rays, radon, and dust. The newly independent government
\n38 Massan Quadjovie, \u201cMesures techniques et administratives de radioprotection dans les
\nexploitations d\u2019uranium de Mounana,\u201d Radiation Protection in Mining and Milling of Uranium
\nand Thorium (International Labor Office-Geneva, 1976), 141.
\n910 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nhad many other things to worry about, and quickly issued a stamp of
\napproval.39
\nGetting workers to wear the dosimetric film badges according to prescription
\nwas less straightforward. At first they did not wear the films regularly enough.
\nOperations managers repeatedly issued warnings that films were \u201cabsolutely
\nobligatory,\u201d and sanctions would ensue for non-compliance.40 Then workers
\napparently wore the films too much: directives began warning employees not
\nto take their films outside the workplace. Film distribution became the responsibility
\nof supervisors, who keyed them to timecards.41
\nDes Ligneris expected that enforcing correct procedures would automatically
\ncontrol exposures. But it did not. It could take up to eight weeks to obtain
\nresults back from the CEA lab that processed the films. This lag time,
\ncoupled with the inherent unpredictability of the ore body, meant that spikes
\nin external exposures continued.42 Once underground mining started, radon
\nadded to his anxieties: the average concentrations of radon in the stopes regularly
\nexceeded MPLs, sometimes by a factor of twelve.43 Many employees consistently
\nexceeded their annual exposure limits, sometimes in less than eight
\nmonths. All the surveillance in the world could not stop the inexorable\u2014and
\naleatory\u2014course of radioactive decay in the stopes. Nor could high exposures
\nbe easily attributed to African incompetence. For one thing, ambient sampling
\nof radon meant that good results did not depend on individuals wearing instruments
\ncorrectly. For another, European employees also charted high readings.
\nReports did not always indicate the difference in African and European
\nexposures, but when they did the amount of overexposure seemed comparable.
\n44 Many more African workers got overexposed, however, reflecting the
\npolitical economy of labor.
\nRadon turned labor management into a calculus of exposure. Employees
\nworked in high-level shafts until they had reached or exceeded their annual
\n39 Xavier des Ligneris to Secre\u00b4taire Ge\u00b4ne\u00b4ral, 8 July 1961; Xavier des Ligneris, \u201cConsignes Relatives
\na` la Protection Contre les Dangers dus a` la Radioactivite\u00b4,\u201d Mounana, 5 May 1961; approuve\u00b4
\npar le Directeur des Mines du Gabon, Libreville, 1 June 1961, COMUF archives, Mounana,
\naccessed 1998.
\n40 Pierre le Fur, Note de Service 072bis, 3 Sept. 1964, COMUF archives.
\n41 Henri Pello, Service Exploitation, Note d\u2019organisation, \u201cStockage et distribution des film
\ndetecteurs de radioactivite\u00b4,\u201d 26 Sept. 1966, COMUF archives.
\n42 Xavier des Ligneris, \u201cRapport\u2014Contro\u02c6le des radiations,\u201d HR\/AP n8 2076, 5 Jan. 1968,
\nCOMUF archives.
\n43 Xavier des Ligneris, \u201cRapport\u2014Contro\u02c6le des radiations,\u201d HR\/AP n8 2076, 5 Jan. 1968;
\nXavier des Ligneris, \u201cRapport\u2014sur le contro\u02c6le des risques radioactifs. Fe\u00b4vrier 1968,\u201d YT\/AP n8
\n2169, 21 Mar. 1968, COMUF archives.
\n44 See, for example, Xavier des Ligneris: \u201cRapport\u2014Contro\u02c6le des radiations,\u201d HR\/AP n8 2076,
\n5 Jan. 1968; \u201cRapport\u2014sur le contro\u02c6le des risques radioactifs. Fe\u00b4vrier 1968,\u201d YT\/AP n8 2169, 21
\nMar. 1968; \u201cReference: Votre UF\/JL\/JF29\/68,\u201d HP\/MB n8 210\/69, 27 Jan. 1968; and \u201cRapport sur
\nle contro\u02c6le des risques radioactifs. Mois de Mai 1968,\u201d YT\/LR n8 2275, 20 June 1968, COMUF
\narchives.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 911
\nlimit, at which point they were moved to workplaces with lower radiation
\nlevels. In and of itself, job rotation would have been familiar to des Ligneris:
\none high-grade shaft in France had registered such high gamma levels that individual
\nworkers could only work there for four hours every two weeks.45 At that
\nlevel of exposure, and in the metropole where mine operators could get quick
\nturnaround on dosimetric results, rotation could be planned in advance. Internal
\nradon exposures were less predictable than external gamma exposures,
\nhowever, and tougher to control. Furthermore, Mounana ore was of lower
\ngrade, which meant that the mine ran on a tighter budget. By 1967, production
\nhad fallen well behind schedule.46
\nAll this made des Ligneris anxious, especially because there were other
\nlimits to how well job rotation could address the problem of over-exposure.
\nAs the mine got deeper and radiation levels increased, management feared it
\nwould run out of skilled workers. Continually hiring new personnel offered
\none solution, since new hires were assumed to be radiation virgins. But it
\ntook time and effort to train new workers, canceling out the exposure benefits
\nfrom labor turnover.47 To address the problem, des Ligneris finally decided to
\nmake some costly upgrades to the ventilation system. This worked, at least temporarily,
\nand from March to May 1968 radon levels decreased significantly.
\nIn the meantime, however, corporate headquarters called for a change in leadership
\nat Mounana. As a CEA man, Xavier des Ligneris\u2019s mining career had
\nfocused entirely on uranium ore. His expertise had been key to finding and
\nmapping the deposit, drafting the initial mining plan, and building a strong prospecting
\nteam. He had also fostered a tight articulation between Mounana\u2019s production
\nprogram and the CEA\u2019s nuclear fuel requirements. But Mokta had
\nexpressed displeasure with des Ligneris\u2019s direction for some time. It wanted
\nsomeone less concerned with the nuclear dimensions of his work, and better
\nattuned to budgetary constraints. In mid-1968, Mokta sent one of its own to
\nreplace him: Christian Guizol.48
\nGabonese employees remembered Guizol as a hard, uncompromising man.
\nHis \u201cseverity\u201d prompted complaints that, \u201cIt\u2019s South Africa at Mounana;
\nblacks at the bottom and whites on top.\u201d49 When gamma exposures climbed
\nback up in late 1968, Guizol\u2014deeming his predecessor soft on discipline\u2014
\nblamed the workers for not wearing films correctly. He tightened disciplinary
\nand surveillance measures around film use, and placed test dosimeters in the
\nshafts to compare with the ones worn by workers. Test results disappointed
\n45 Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs, 96.
\n46 J. de Courlon to Xavier des Ligneris, 10 Mar. 1967, COMUF archives.
\n47 Ibid.
\n48 Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs, 213; and author\u2019s interview with Christian Guizol, Paris,
\n26 Feb. 1998.
\n49 Author\u2019s interviews with Juste Mambangui and J.-M. Male\u00b4kou, Mounana, Gabon, 16 July
\n1998; Franc\u00b8ois Mambangui, Libreville, Gabon, 31 July 1998.
\n912 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nhim: they matched worker badges. Radon levels also climbed back up:
\nseventy-eight workers registered overexposure in November 1969.50
\nSo Guizol reconfigured the calculus of exposure. Rather than intensifying
\njob rotation, as des Ligneris had done, he raised the MPLs. He had noticed
\nthat the ILO\u2019s 1968 radon guidelines, which used a different formula to calculate
\ntotal exposure, ended up being less restrictive than the 1959 French guidelines
\nused by the COMUF. After a few numerical gymnastics, Guizol wrote a
\nreport that justified the equivalent of a three-fold increase in radon MPLs and
\naligned these with ILO guidelines. The new levels, he remarked bluntly, were
\n\u201cmore advantageous\u201d to the company.51 The effect was immediate. As of
\nMarch 1970, not a single worker registered overexposure.52
\nNo wonder, then, that Quadjovie could report complete success with the
\nCOMUF\u2019s radioprotection program in 1974. His Bordeaux paper offered a
\nsanitized account of the switch in MPLs, making no mention of the overexposures
\nthat prompted the switch. Indeed, he may not have known about them:
\nI found nothing in the COMUF archives to suggest that Gabonese state officials
\never actually inspected radiation, radon, or dust in the mines.53
\nNot long before Guizol raised the MPLs, Marcel Lekonaguia began to question
\nhis working conditions. In the mid-1960s he became a shift boss in the
\nshafts, in charge of blasting. Company guidelines specified that workers
\nshould wait fifteen minutes after the blast before returning to the workplace.54
\nLekonaguia probably did not know that French radiation protection guidelines
\nspecified a waiting period of at least thirty minutes, to let the dust settle and to
\ngive the ventilation system time to evacuate the extra radon released by blasting
\nrocks apart. What he did know, all too well, was that \u201cafter the blast, there\u2019s a
\nlot of dust. . . . It is the dust that wasted us . . . you swallow it, you breathe it.\u201d
\nProtective gear did not help: \u201cThose little masks, they didn\u2019t hold up well.
\nThey\u2019re made of paper . . . if it gets a little wet\u2014paf!\u201d\u2014the mask would
\ndissolve. That, he insisted, was how he developed the cough, and assorted
\nother ailments, that would plague him for the rest of his life.
\nLekonaguia also thought about the film badges, especially the tight discipline
\nthey incarnated. \u201cThey said this film here, you must always keep it. At the
\nend of the month, they check them, they send them to see if the men reached
\n50 Ch. Guizol, \u201cRapport sur le contro\u02c6le des risques radioactifs. Mois de De\u00b4cembre 1969,\u201d YT\/sc
\nn8 0118\/70, 9 Feb. 1970, COMUF archives.
\n51 Ibid.
\n52 Ch. Guizol, \u201cRapport sur le contro\u02c6le des risques radioactifs, Mois de Mars 1970,\u201d YT\/sc
\nn8 0184\/70, 27 Apr. 1970, COMUF archives.
\n53 The COMUF granted me free access to its archives when I visited in 1998. These were not at
\nall organized, however, which made it impossible for me to find complete records on any single
\ntopic (sample nursing essay examples by the best nursing assignment writing service). Thus, though I did not find records of state inspections, I cannot state conclusively that
\nnone took place.
\n54 \u201cConsigne pour la distribution et l\u2019emploi des explosifs,\u201d COMUF, Exploitation de Mounana,
\nn.d. (ca. 1959), COMUF archives.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 913
\n[the limit]. The results, they don\u2019t give them to people.\u201d55 All he ever learned
\nwas whether he had reached some limit that would prompt job rotation. He
\nnever found out what the numbers were, how close to the limit he had come,
\nhow much he had accumulated over time, or even what the limit meant.
\nWhat, he wondered, was all the secrecy about
\nHis brother, Dominique Oyingha, became convinced that the company and
\nits doctor, Jean-Claude Andrault, were hiding something. And the state was
\nin on it. \u201cUranium caused many deaths, but the COMUF didn\u2019t want to recognize
\nthat,\u201d he told me. \u201cNor did the state, because this was the big company of
\nthe territory, whose secrets couldn\u2019t come out . . . so as not to scare the
\nworkers.\u201d56 Only independent, external expertise could be trusted. Oyingha
\ntook his brother to the Congo for tests. He knew there had once been a
\nuranium mine there, and he hoped Congolese doctors might help. Apparently
\nthe doctors immediately guessed from Lekonaguia\u2019s health condition that he
\nworked at the COMUF.
\nThe two men returned to Mounana and confronted Andrault. The mine
\ndoctor scoffed: \u201cAre you crazy . . . Who told you that uranium made people
\nsick\u201d Oyingha laughed as he remembered this response. He respected, even
\nloved, the doctor for the hospital he had set up. Andrault offered free
\nmedical care to everyone in the region, not just to COMUF workers, and
\nthat was precious beyond measure. But everyone had their limits, and
\nOyingha did not expect the doctor to acknowledge the possibility of occupational
\ndisease. He threatened Andrault: \u201cI said, \u2018my friend, you are my
\nfriend, we have known each other for a good bit of time, but let me tell you
\nthat the sickness that my brother suffers from, it comes from uranium. And
\nif you don\u2019t want the news to spread . . . [so that] your workers don\u2019t
\nbecome afraid, take proper care of my big brother. If he dies, I\u2019m coming
\nafter you.\u2019\u201d57 The COMUF granted Lekonaguia sick leave. But he wanted permanent
\nleave and compensation. The company refused, insisting that Lekonaguia
\nreturn underground if he wanted to draw his paycheck. In 1970, the two
\nbrothers filed a complaint with the state social security office in Libreville.
\nThis produced only a perfunctory inquiry, after which the company agreed to
\nmove Lekonaguia to the open pit.58
\nUndeterred, Lekonaguia asked for his medical file. Andrault refused, citing
\nprofessional secrecy. No surprise there: \u201cThe doctor, he\u2019s just a lawyer for the
\nCOMUF.\u201d The more the COMUF resisted, the more Lekonaguia and his family
\n55 Author\u2019s interview with Marcel Lekonaguia, Mounana, Gabon, 21 July 1998.
\n56 Author\u2019s interview with Dominique Oyingha, Mounana, Gabon, 17 July 1998.
\n57 Oyingha interview, op. cit.
\n58 Christian Guizol letter to Directeur Ge\u00b4ne\u00b4ral de la Caisse Gabonaise de la Pre\u00b4voyance Sociale,
\n19 Oct. 1970, Objet: Allocations familiales de M. Lekonaguia Marcel; Christian Guizol letter to
\nDirecteur Ge\u00b4ne\u00b4ral de la Caisse Gabonaise de la Pre\u00b4voyance Sociale, 26 Oct. 1970, Objet: Monsieur
\nLekonaguia; J. C. Andrault letter to Docteur C. Gantin, 27 Oct. 1970, COMUF archives.
\n914 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nbecame convinced that his illnesses were work-related. Over the course of the
\n1970s and 1980s, more and more people from the region went to France as students,
\nsometimes even on training stints sponsored by the COMUF, where they
\nwitnessed anti-nuclear protests. Lekonaguia\u2019s nephew, among others, returned
\nwith confirmation that, \u201cThis product that we\u2019re mining, it\u2019s a toxic product.\u201d59
\nFinally, Lekonaguia decided that if COMUF managers kept rejecting his
\ndemands then he would rebuff theirs. He began refusing to render his film
\nbadges on a monthly basis. He suspected that his diagnosis, along with the
\nchain of causality that linked work to illness, could be read directly from the
\nfilms. One day, he explained as he showed me one of the films, he would
\nfind someone else to read the results. He probably was not alone in this reasoning.
\nIn the mid-1980s, COMUF quarterly radiation protection reports routinely
\nrecorded the numbers of non-returned films. (This statistic had not appeared in
\nearlier reports.) During some months over 25 percent were not returned.
\nMining operations in Gabon were much more extensive than they had been
\nin Madagascar, and lasted much longer (until 1999). Links with France were
\ndenser, more extensive, and more varied. By monitoring radiation separately
\nfrom other workplace dangers, des Ligneris had granted it exceptional status,
\nand made Mounana mines more nuclear than those in the Androy. Important
\naspects of the regime of perceptibility that he had established lasted: rather
\nthan report readings sporadically in the footnotes of productivity tables, as
\ntheir counterparts in Madagascar had done, COMUF managers continued to
\nreport dosimetric results as distinct data, and continued to track both radon
\nand gamma levels for individuals as well as for workspaces. But this regime
\nonly made exposures legible to upper management\u2014not to workers. It produced
\nmanagerial (and, for des Ligneris, technological) data, not health data;
\nthe company\u2019s much-vaunted medical service did not treat them as relevant
\nto its clinical work. The nuclearity of uranium work resided primarily in dosimetric
\ninstruments whose esoteric legibility could only occur in France. That
\nlegibility, furthermore, depended on interpretive systems, such as formulae
\nfor calculating dose accumulations, whose meaning shifted when placed in
\ndifferent global circuits, as when Guizol moved from French to ILO standards.
\nThe Gabonese state, meanwhile, had neither means nor motive to broaden the
\nCOMUF\u2019s production of nuclearity. It had no reason not to rubberstamp the
\nCOMUF\u2019s request for a switch in MPLs, particularly when legitimated by a
\nglobal organization like the ILO.
\nUnlike in Madagascar, however, the spatial and temporal dimensions of
\nGabon\u2019s postcolonial conditions did create spaces in which workers could
\nacquire knowledge and experience outside the boundaries imposed by management.
\nAccess was slow and sporadic, operating through a trip to the Congo or a
\n59 Oyingha interview, op. cit.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 915
\nnephew with a French education. Such friction did produce other interpretations
\nand contexts for the radiation recorded in film badges. But for decades
\nthese modes of perception offered only glimmers of politically significant
\nnuclearity.
\nYet many COMUF workers remained suspicious about their occupational
\nhealth status well after the mine shut down in 1999. In 2001, Gabon passed a
\nlaw creating a state agency to monitor radiation exposure, perhaps thanks to a
\nformer COMUF employee subsequently elected to Parliament.60 Another three
\nyears elapsed before the agency came into existence. Nonetheless, former
\nemployees and Mounana inhabitants evidently still distrusted the state. They
\ncomplained that remediation work focused only on containing loose ore left
\nbehind by the mining activities, and they sought a medical nuclearity for their
\nwork. Inspired by reports of Aghirin\u2019man, an NGO that addressed illnesses in
\nNige\u00b4rien uranium mines, in 2005 a group of Mounana residents formed the Collectif
\ndes anciens travailleurs miniers de Comuf (CATRAM) to advocate for a
\nhealth and environmental monitoring program and a fund to disburse medical
\ncompensation claims.61 The CATRAM joined forces with several French
\nNGOs: a group formed of expatriate COMUF ex-employees, launched in
\n2005 by one of their widows; Sherpa, an association of high-profile legal
\nexperts formed in 2001 to investigate global human rights and environmental
\njustice violations perpetrated by French companies; and most importantly, the
\nCRIIRAD, an independent laboratory created after the 1986 Chernobyl accident
\nto develop nuclear expertise unbeholden to the French state.
\nThese NGOs eventually managed to send a small team of scientists, doctors,
\nand lawyers to Mounana in June 2006. The team took independent environmental
\nreadings and interviewed nearly five hundred former COMUF employees
\nabout their health and work experience. Survey responses echoed narratives
\nI heard from Lekonaguia, Oyingha, and others in 1998. Most reported no
\nformal training on radiation or radon-related risks and no feedback on their
\nmonthly dosimetric readings; they agreed that the Gabonese state had done
\nnothing to monitor working conditions or occupational health; and one
\nformer medical doctor testified that company clinicians had no training in
\nuranium-related occupational health, and that the company\u2019s radiation protection
\ndivision consistently refused to transmit dosimetric readings to the
\nmedical division. The report was released at a much-publicized press
\n60 \u201cLoi no. 11\/2001 du 12 de\u00b4cembre 2001 fixant les orientations de la politique de pre\u00b4vention et
\nde protection contre les rayonnements ionisants,\u201d Hebdo informations, Journal hebdomadaire
\nd\u2019informations et d\u2019annonces le\u00b4gales 451 (23 Feb. 2002): 22\u201323 (Gabon).
\n61 Jules Mbombe Samaki, \u201cMemorandum sur la ne\u00b4cessite\u00b4 de la prise en compte de la Veille sanitaire
\net du de\u00b4dommagement des anciens travailleurs miniers,\u201d private communication, Libreville,
\n25 Apr. 2005. See also reports in the Gabonese press: \u201cLe Collectif des anciens travailleurs
\nminiers interpelle la Comuf,\u201d L\u2019union, 3 Feb. 2006; and \u201cLes anciens travailleurs miniers de la
\nComuf re\u00b4unis en collectif,\u201d L\u2019union, 17 Feb. 2006.
\n916 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nconference in Paris in April 2007.62 The following month, Areva (the secondgeneration
\ncorporate heir to French nuclear fuel cycle operations, and thus the
\nnew parent company for the COMUF) announced that it would install a \u201chealth
\nobservatory\u201d in Mounana.63 It remains to be seen what such an observatory will
\nmake perceptible, and to whom.
\nInvoking nuclearity\u2014insisting on its insufficient recognition\u2014ultimately gave
\nformer COMUF workers access to activists in Niger and France. Configuring
\nnuclearity in medical terms required new networks to extend the boundaries of
\nexisting regimes of perceptibility. Their strength, in turn, depended on how extensively
\nthey could articulate a nuclearity for Mounana. It depended on how successfully
\nthese extended regimes could translate workplace exposures into
\ntechnopolitical claims\u2014complete with independent radiation readings\u2014whose
\npurchase would reach beyond the profoundly unequal relationships among the
\nGabonese state, the mining corporation, and its workers. In this reconfiguration
\ntiming and context made all the difference: at the most basic level, independent
\nscientific expertise and transnational circuits of legal nuclear accountability
\nwere simply not available in the mid-1960s, when the Androy mines closed.
\nClearly much more could be said about recent events in Gabon and their
\ndependence on the production of technopolitical histories, contrasting
\nregimes of perceptibility, and changing transnational legal circuits. I put
\nthese themes aside, however, in favor of a final example of the contingency
\nof nuclear things. Mounana under Guizol may have seemed \u201clike South
\nAfrica\u201d to some. But what do we see if we compare the COMUF to
\napartheid-era uranium producers in South Africa
\nG L O B A L IMP E R C E P T I O N S , I I I
\nA quick glance through the scientific literature could convey the mistaken
\nimpression that South Africans, like the CEA in France, considered uranium
\nmining a fully nuclear task. At the 1958 Geneva conference on atomic
\nenergy they had presented one of only three papers on radiation in mines.64
\nThe paper described the 1956 visit of U.S. AEC experts to South African
\nmines, where they conducted a brief survey of radon and radon daughters.
\nGiven that the AEC refused to monitor radon in American mineshafts, this
\nvisit might seem surprising. But it fit into a larger framework of uranium
\ncooperation between the two nations. South Africa\u2019s famous Witwatersrand
\ngold mines contained abundant quantities of uranium ore, and the United
\n62 Samira Daoud and Jean-Pierre Getti, \u201cAreva au Gabon: Rapport d\u2019enque\u02c6te sur la situation des
\ntravailleurs de la COMUF, filiale gabonaise du groupe Areva-Coge\u00b4ma,\u201d Sherpa, 4 Apr. 2007, http:\/\/
\nwww.asso-sherpa.org\/.
\n63 \u201cL\u2019observatoire de Mounana,\u201d L\u2019union, 1 June 2007.
\n64 S. F. Oosthuizen et al., \u201cExperience in Radiological Protection in South Africa,\u201d in Proceedings
\nof the Second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy
\n(United Nations, 1958), 25\u201331.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 917
\nStates and the United Kingdom had signed contracts to purchase some 10,000
\ntons of it. Lively scientific exchange had ensued among the three nations, as
\nmetallurgists and other experts collaborated on industrial processes to separate
\nthe uranium from the gold.65 Dr. Roy Albert, probably one of the few in the
\nU.S. AEC who had actually wanted his agency to monitor radon, went to
\nSouth Africa as part of such exchanges.
\nThe AEC radon survey found that average levels in South African shafts
\nwere tiny compared to U.S. figures, and only slightly above international
\nlimits. South African scientists attributed these results to \u201chigh ventilation standards\u201d
\nand concluded, \u201cProbably as the result of the stringent safety precautions
\nthe radioactivity in South African mines does not represent a health
\nhazard.\u201d Using Albert\u2019s analysis of Johannesburg hospital autopsy data for
\nminers, the South Africans reported that this analysis did \u201cnot reveal any evidence
\nof increased incidence of lung cancer in miners.\u201d They dismissed
\nAlbert\u2019s recommendation to conduct a more detailed follow-up study,
\narguing that their data suffered only from \u201cthe usual defects common to hospitals
\nall over the world.\u201d66
\nBy emphasizing the ordinariness of their dataset\u2019s defects, these scientists
\ndoubtless hoped to deflect their international audience\u2019s attention away from
\nits racial dimensions.67 Roy Albert himself must have expressed doubt and
\nraised the possibility of including \u201cnatives\u201d in a follow-up study, even if he
\nhimself ended up dismissing that option: his report to the AEC noted that
\nshort employment contracts and high mobility (information which he must
\nhave obtained from his South African hosts) made \u201cthe native population
\nunsuitable for the radon study.\u201d68 Perhaps this unsuitability obviated any
\nmention of the fact that the Johannesburg hospital autopsy series included
\nonly white patients. In pre-civil rights America, this too must have seemed
\nlike a characteristic \u201ccommon to hospitals all over the world.\u201d69
\n65 Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid\u2019s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in
\nthe Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1993); Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence:
\nBritain and Atomic Energy, 1945\u20131952 (Macmillan Press, 1974); Jonathan E. Helmreich,
\nGathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943\u20131954 (Princeton University
\nPress, 1986).
\n66 These were listed as \u201cfactors which influenced cases sent to autopsy by the medical attendants
\n(personal interests and bias, etc.), religious grounds for relatives refusing autopsy, type of cases
\ntreated in the hospital (e.g., special clinics), etc.\u201d Oosthuizen et al., \u201cExperience in Radiological
\nProtection.\u201d
\n67 On apartheid science, see Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility
\nand White South Africa 1820\u20132000 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
\n68 R. E. Albert (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Biology and Medicine), memo to
\nfiles, subject: \u201cMedical Services in the South African Gold Fields and the Shinkolobwe Uranium
\nMine.\u201d NV0727618 in U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Test Site electronic archives.
\n69 For an analysis of how population categories have only recently changed in American medical
\nresearch, see Steven Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (University
\nof Chicago Press, 2007).
\n918 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nSouth African scientists may have thought that this early radon study made
\nfurther research unnecessary, but scientists in the U.S. Public Health Service
\nand at the ICRP remained intrigued by the Witwatersrand shafts. They suspected
\nthat surveying these could help settle a major scientific debate over
\nwhether radiation exposure had any health effects below a certain threshold
\n(as opposed to health effects remaining proportional to exposure no matter
\nhow small the dose). For a decade after the 1958 Geneva paper, PHS and
\nICRP scientists urged their South African colleagues to conduct more extensive
\nresearch.70 Growing condemnation of apartheid had begun to close down
\nopportunities for international research exchanges, so such requests had
\nbecome increasingly rare. Finally, J. K. Basson of the South African Atomic
\nEnergy Board (AEB) agreed to run a pilot study in collaboration with the
\nChamber of Mines. He wrote up the results in a 1971 report, concluding,
\n\u201cThe death rate from lung cancer among White South African miners has
\nnot been increased by radon exposure,\u201d and \u201cAlthough this investigation was
\nundertaken as a pilot study, it appears that no improved results would be
\nobtained by increasing the sample size.\u201d71 A common South African refrain:
\nno problems detected, no further study needed.
\nOnce again, Basson\u2019s study involved only white miners. Once again,
\nBasson\u2019s assertion, \u201cThis study had to be limited to White miners because
\nthe Non-White group . . . comprises mainly unskilled workers who come
\nfrom rural areas and work for intermittent periods varying from a few
\nmonths to 1 1\/2 years before returning to their homelands,\u201d did not raise any
\nAmerican eyebrows. Foreign experts may not have realized that most of the
\nseveral hundred thousand black workers returned repeatedly to the mines: an
\nAfrican mineworker\u2019s total time in the mines could exceed twenty years.
\nYet even if U.S. experts had understood this, for them the omission would
\nhave paled next to Basson\u2019s conclusion, which explicitly addressed American
\ndebates about lowering permissible levels in mineshafts: \u201cAlthough the induction
\nof lung cancer by high concentrations of radon and radon daughters cannot
\nbe questioned, this study has produced no evidence for any effect at the cumulative
\nexposures encountered in South African mines. . . . Consequently there is
\nno support for the proposed decrease of the permissible radon daughter levels
\n. . . as envisaged in the USA.\u201d To make matters worse for the PHS, Basson had
\nsent the report directly to Union Carbide\u2019s uranium operation in Colorado,
\nwhich had forwarded the report to other mining corporations and the U.S.
\n70 For example: C. G. Stewart and S. D. Simpson, \u201cThe Hazards of Inhaling Radon-222 and Its
\nShort-Lived Daughters: Consideration of Proposed Maximum Permissible Concentrations in Air,\u201d
\nin Radiological Health and Safety in Mining and Milling of Nuclear Materials: Proceedings, vol. 1
\n(International Atomic Energy Agency, 1964), 333\u201357.
\n71 J. K. Basson et al., \u201cLung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters in South African Gold\/
\nUranium Mines,\u201d Atomic Energy Board: PEL 209, Pelindaba, Mar. 1971 (English-language
\nabstract).
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 919
\nAEC.72 The report landed late at the PHS. Frantic that it would serve \u201cas
\nammunition to repudiate the PHS data and conclusions,\u201d experts there
\nresponded harshly. They accused the South Africans of \u201cgross underreporting\u201d
\nof lung cancer and urged \u201cthat a competent epidemiologist, above suspicion of
\nany possible conflicts of interest . . . be employed to pursue the problem in a
\ntechnically competent manner, taking all the careful steps and precautions
\nthat he has been trained to take with such difficult data.\u201d73 Reading a classic
\ncapitalist conflict between corporate interests and state regulation into
\nBasson\u2019s data analysis, and panicked that the report might jeopardize their
\nown hard-won standard, PHS scientists apparently did not wonder whether
\nracial exclusion might have also skewed the data.
\nT H E WI TWAT E R S R A N D ( \u201c T H E R A N D \u201d ) , C E N T R A L S O U T H A F R I C A ,
\n1980S \u2013 1990S
\nIn 1980, a young British scientist named Shaun Guy accepted a job with the
\nSouth African Atomic Energy Board\u2019s licensing branch. Moving to South
\nAfrica in the early 1980s was, he later admitted, an odd choice. The apartheid
\nregime was getting steadily more violent and repressive, and the paramilitary
\nwing of the ANC had begun to respond by sabotaging military and industrial
\ninstallations. But Guy had trouble finding good employment at home, so he
\nwent.
\nThe licensing branch was a small division, staffed by two other foreign transplants.
\nSometime around 1976, a few years before Guy\u2019s arrival, they had realized
\nthat South Africa had produced uranium for over twenty years with no
\nregulatory oversight. Their early attempts to rectify this met with strong resistance
\nfrom the mining industry, which insisted that mineshafts (contrary to a
\nstatement in South Africa\u2019s nuclear energy act) did not count as \u201cnuclear\u201d
\ninstallations for regulatory purposes.74 The Chamber of Mines closely
\nguarded its data on radon levels, so the licensing branch had little ammunition.
\n72 R. G. Beverly letter to J. T. Sherman, 25 May 1971, subject: report titled \u201cLung Cancer and
\nExposure to Radon Daughters in South African Gold\/Uranium Mines,\u201d NV0061126; R. D. Evans
\nletter to C. R. Richmond, 2 June 1971, subject: \u201cReport on Lung Cancer and Exposure to Radon
\nDaughters in South African Gold\/Uranium Mines,\u201d NV0061125, Nevada Test Site electronic
\narchives (both letters were given the quoted titles by the archives).
\n73 A. H. Wolff letter to I. Mitchell, subject: \u201cLung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters in
\nSouth African Gold\/Uranium Mines\u201d (no enclosures), 10 June 1971, NV0061124; M. A. Schneiderman
\n(National Cancer Institute) letter to Deputy Helpant Administrator for R&D, Environmental
\nProtection Agency, subject: \u201cReport Concerning White South African Gold Miners and
\nBronchiogenic Cancer,\u201d June 18, 1971, NV0061122; V. E. Archer letter to A. Wolff, 16 June
\n1971, subject: Preliminary Report re: \u201cLung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters in South
\nAfrican Gold\/Uranium Mines (Criticisms of Report),\u201d NV0061123, all in Nevada Test Site electronic
\narchives, which conferred the quoted titles.
\n74 A. J. A. Roux toW. P. Viljoen, 16 May 1979, internal ref. LB\/35\/6\/10, Shaun Guy, \u201cA Review
\nof Files at the Government Mining Engineer Concerning Radiation in Mines and Works,\u201d 26 Aug.
\n1986, 3, Shaun Guy private papers.
\n920 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nSoon after he arrived, Guy decided to poke around: \u201cI went through the library
\nand the archives, contacted people who worked at the AEB who . . . Helped me
\nin getting hold of reports I couldn\u2019t ask for myself. So a lot of this was done
\nunderhand. . . . And there were quite serious security implications. . . . You
\nhad to sign an Official Secrets Act, so some of the stuff I did was illegal.\u201d75
\nGuy ended up with a hoard of documents, including Chamber correspondence,
\nwhich revealed clear problems with radon levels. Buried among these was
\nBasson\u2019s 1971 report.
\nGuy covered his copy of the report with outraged notations. His interpretation
\nof Basson\u2019s impulse to discontinue research (and radon monitoring) differed
\nfrom that of American epidemiologists: \u201cA lot of the senior scientists who
\nwere involved with the Chamber and the surveys and writing the epidemiological
\nassessment from these results were very hostile to the ICRP and their new
\ndose limits. . . . At that time also there was the whole thing of sanctions and this
\nclosing in and basically there was a lot of hostility to outside organizations
\nwhich is a sort of political thing\u2014it\u2019s part of the culture.\u201d76 He also noticed problems
\nmissed by the Americans. Basson had calculated cumulative exposures
\n\u201cby multiplying the number of shifts worked underground on the gold mines by
\nthe estimated radiation levels for each mine on which they worked.\u201d77 This
\nstatement earned a double question mark from Guy. First, Chamber officials
\nhad only measured actual radiation levels in about 10 percent of the mines.
\nSecond, averages were meaningless: even within a single mine radon levels
\ncould vary by several orders of magnitude. Variation had to do with ventilation,
\nand ventilation had to do with race: \u201cIf you know anything about working
\nunderground at that time . . . even in the \u201880s . . . most of the work was done
\nby the black guys who were on the face, the stopes. They tended to be in the
\nareas (what they call the \u2018return airways\u2019) where the air is hotter, right It\u2019s
\nmuch cooler in the intake airways. So . . . white miners were mostly located
\nfor much of the time in the intake airways where their exposure would be
\nless. So if you take the white miners [as] the base line for exposure . . . that\u2019s
\nthe wrong benchmark to take, it\u2019s a biased mark.\u201d78 Digging around in data collected
\nduring the 1950s and 1960s, Guy saw many instances of substantial
\nradon build-up in working shafts, in some spots reaching ten times ICRP
\ndose limits.79
\nThese old data alone could have justified regulatory measures. But the industry
\nhad successfully kept such measures at bay for over thirty years. It was not
\n75 Interview by the author and Bruce Struminger with Shaun Guy, Johannesburg, South Africa,
\n12 July 2004. Guy generously gave me copies of the documents he had collected.
\n76 Guy interview, op. cit.
\n77 Basson, \u201cLung Cancer and Exposure to Radon Daughters,\u201d 12.
\n78 Guy interview, op. cit.
\n79 \u201cResults of Radon Daughter Sampling in Bird Reef,\u201d West Rand Consolidated Mines, Ltd.,
\nMine Office, West Rand, 13 Dec. 1973, Shaun Guy private papers.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 921
\nabout to cave to a small group of foreign upstarts relying on old data. Especially
\nbecause South African uranium production had slumped by the mid-1980s so
\nthat many shafts had reverted to straightforward gold production. If anything,
\nargued the Chamber, nuclear regulation of mines seemed even less justifiable.
\nNevertheless, Guy and his colleagues were not ready to give up.
\nThe Chamber had argued that the mines were less nuclear because they produced
\nless uranium. Yet radon could build up in shafts worked for gold too.
\nGuy realized that before reaching active shafts ventilation sometimes circulated
\nthrough old workings where radon accumulated. Proving that \u201chot spots\u201d still
\nexisted, however, required new data. The licensing branch managed to enlist
\nhelp from the office of the Government Mining Engineer. Accompanied by
\ntwo GME inspectors, Guy and his colleagues met with the manager at the
\nWest Rand mine in 1986. They slyly proposed to use his mine as a \u201cmodel facility
\nwith regard to testing survey methods.\u201d The manager resisted, but eventually
\nagreed to a short survey provided that it remained \u201clow key [and]
\nconfidential.\u201d He would have to obtain approval from his board for a longerterm
\nsurvey \u201cas it was a \u2018sensitive\u2019 matter given the union \u2018situation\u2019 at
\npresent.\u201d Neither white nor black workers knew about radon; white workers
\ncongregated around intake airways because they were cooler, not to minimize
\nradiation exposure. Indeed, most workers did not know that the ore they sent up
\ncontained uranium in addition to gold.80
\nThe preliminary West Rand survey showed elevated radon levels, up to two
\nto five times the ICRP limits. The licensing branch remarked that this gave
\n\u201ccause for concern since workers appear to have been routinely exposed at
\nthese and higher levels for the last 30 years.\u201d81 Backed by the GME and
\ntheir data, Guy and his colleagues now felt unstoppable. Over the next two
\nyears, they carried out extensive surveys of many Rand mines. The results
\nshowed systemically high radon levels.
\nStill, obtaining data was only the first step toward regulation. The battles
\ncontinued. As the 1980s drew to a close, the institutions of formal apartheid
\nbegan to crumble. Laws were being rewritten, including the Nuclear Energy
\nAct. As a first step in reorganization, the licensing branch achieved independent
\ninstitutional status, becoming the Council for Nuclear Safety (CNS). Nevertheless,
\nthe question of what the new entity would regulate remained a battleground.
\nThe Chamber of Mines fought hard against designating mineshafts
\n80 Shaun Guy, \u201cMemorandum: Meeting at West Rand Consolidated with the Mine Manager, 24
\nFebruary 1986.\u201d LB\/35\/6\/10\/8, Shaun Guy private papers. For a discussion of the \u201cunion situation\u201d
\nthat the manager mentioned, see T. Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men,
\nMines, and Migration (University of California Press, 1994).
\n81 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Licensing Branch, \u201cReport of the Underground Survey for
\nRadon Daughters at West Rand Consolidated Mine, 5 March 1986,\u201d 23 May 1986, p. 5, LB\/35\/1\/
\n13; LB\/35\/6\/10\/8, Shaun Guy private papers. By this point, the South African Atomic Energy
\nBoard had changed its name to the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa.
\n922 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nas \u201cnuclear\u201d workplaces subject to CNS regulation, arguing that radiation protection
\nshould fall under the (less intrusive) purview of the Department of
\nHealth. Radon, insisted the Chamber, was \u201cessentially a health issue and not
\na nuclear energy issue\u201d; no matter how high their exposure, the hundreds of
\nthousands of men laboring in the shafts were mineworkers, not nuclear
\nworkers.82 In a 1995 letter to Parliament, Chamber president A. H. Munro brazenly
\ninvoked \u201cSouth Africa\u2019s transition to full democracy.\u201d He argued, \u201cThe
\nNuclear Energy Act does not provide for public participation, transparency or
\naccountability. Instead it puts extensive power and decision-making responsibilities
\nsolely in the hands of expert authorities. Furthermore, it also makes
\nno provision for making the essential social judgements in respect of acceptance
\nof certain risks in exchange for benefits to society.\u201d Suddenly the
\nChamber invoked the ICRP as an ally: Munro quoted its 1990 recommendations
\nthat, \u201cThe selection of dose limits necessarily includes social judgements
\napplied to the many attributes of risk. These judgements would not
\nnecessarily be the same in all contexts and, in particular, might be different
\nin different societies.\u201d83 Exposure limits could not be universal. Nuclear regulation
\nof mines, Munro insisted, would impede economic and social development
\nin the New South Africa. The Chamber, which had been one of the
\noriginal architects of racial segregation in South Africa, unblushingly
\naccused the CNS of being a \u201cwhite, male organization\u201d with an inadequate
\nunderstanding of development challenges.84 This time around, though, the
\nChamber\u2019s strategies failed. In 1999, the revised Nuclear Energy Act remade
\nthe CNS into the National Nuclear Regulator and granted it the authority to
\nmonitor radiation in mines. This victory was more legal than practical, but
\nthat is a story for another time.
\nIn Gabon and Madagascar, we saw that nuclearity came in different technopolitical
\nregisters: geological, metallurgical, technological, managerial, and
\nmedical. Nuclearity in one register did not automatically translate into
\nanother. The act, and the consequences, of translation changed over time,
\ndepending not only on the assemblages that constituted regimes of perceptibility,
\nbut also on how the global friction generated by their data shifted (or did not
\nshift) the boundaries of those regimes.
\n82 \u201cDraft: South African Energy Policy: Discussion Document: Comment,\u201d 2 Oct. 1995, 1, 11,
\nPapers of the office of the Helpant Adviser on Safety and Environment, Chamber of Mines,
\naccessed privately in May 2004, 8.
\n83 A. H. Munro letter to M. Golding, 2 Mar. 1995, papers of the office of the Helpant Adviser
\non Safety and Environment, Chamber of Mines, accessed in May 2004, 5. For the 1990 ICRP recommendations,
\nsee Annals of the ICRP 21, 1\u20133, esp. pp. 25\u201332.
\n84 D. G. Wymer, \u201cNote for the Record: Meeting between the Chamber and Marcel Golding,
\nCape Town, 7 June 1995,\u201d 14 June 1995, papers of the office of the Helpant Adviser on Safety
\nand Environment, Chamber of Mines, accessed in May 2004, 9.
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 923
\nIn South Africa, however, the very act of generating perceptibility\u2014any sort
\nof perceptibility, associated with any sort of nuclearity\u2014was itself a struggle.
\nEstablishing a credible dosimetric regime required, above all, a new perspective
\non South Africa\u2019s position in global circuits of knowledge production: it
\nrequired the ability to see existing radon surveys as apartheid science, at
\nodds with the norms and findings of globally-sanctioned practices (however
\nunsatisfactory those practices themselves may have been). In effect, Guy saw
\nfirst the imperceptions that South African data generated as they entered
\nglobal circuits, a vision made possible by his own place as a foreign-trained
\nradiation expert with more invested in trusting the ICRP than in upholding
\nthe technopolitics of South African mining. Constructing regimes of perceptibility
\nin the mines meant pushing against the apartheid state, and its forms
\nof capital, via the simultaneous assertion of expertise and of a spatial domain
\nin which that expertise had authority.
\nC O N C L U S I O N
\nUranium mines were at the technopolitical margins of an industry driven by
\nclaims to exceptionalism. Compared to reactors and bombs they appeared
\nbanal and peripheral, more closely allied, both technologically and geopolitically,
\nto other forms of mining than to other nuclear things. And indeed,
\nmany aspects of the stories I have told here do resemble the histories
\nof labor and occupational disease in other mining sectors, such as asbestos
\nor gold mining.85 In some respects, it was precisely the commonplace
\nnature of illegibility and secrecy that enabled radiation exposures to pass
\nunnoticed or unintelligible, whether to global experts or to mineworkers
\nthemselves. Uranium mines had to be made nuclear\u2014they were not born
\nthat way. Turning that nuclearity into forms of politically usable nuclear
\nexceptionalism required material, discursive, technopolitical, global, and
\nlocal work.
\nSo the nuclear world in Africa emerged slowly, jaggedly, from frictions
\nbetween the transnational politics of global knowledge production and the
\nrule and remains of (post)colonial difference. As a form of power distributed
\nin things and inscribed in bodies, nuclearity could make itself felt through
\nabsence as well as presence. Radiation did not, by itself, make uranium
\nmining into nuclear work. It had to be made perceptible and allied to
\nhuman agency. If such perceptibility and alliances marshaled nuclear exceptionalism
\neffectively, radiation could serve as a mechanism for forming,
\nmaintaining, or disrupting power relationships. Dosimetric mastery thus
\nempowered French radiation protection specialists, both in French mines
\n85 For one example among many, see Jock McCulloch, Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians
\n& the State in South Africa (James Currey, 2002).
\n924 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T
\nand in dominant circuits of global knowledge production. In Madagascar,
\nhowever, dosimetry filtered through other experts; it became little more
\nthan a short-term tool for making labor decisions and exerting power over
\ncolonial subjects. For Malagasy mineworkers, radiation remained a mysterious
\nresidue. Their work never became nuclear; their exposures never
\nserved as a resource for postcolonial claims-making. By contrast, Gabonese
\nminers eventually found ways to claim nuclear exceptionalism for themselves,
\nto represent their exposures as the distinctive consequence of globally
\nknown hazards and as (post)colonial injustice, and therefore as politically
\naccountable in global circuits. South African mines show that dosimetry,
\nwhile not sufficient, was nevertheless necessary to the production of
\nnuclearity. Its long absence rendered radiation exposure utterly invisible
\nto mineworkers, a form of colonial violence they did not know they had
\nexperienced.
\nJuxtaposing these various histories illuminates not just the uneven spatial
\ndistribution of nuclearity, but also its uneven temporalities. There was no
\nmoment in global time when the nuclearity of uranium mines became settled
\nand forever mandated. Differences among places had to do with time as well
\nas space, with temporal frictions between mine closures, transnational activism,
\nglobal knowledge production, capital flows, postcolonial politics, the collapse
\nof apartheid, and more. These spatio-temporal juxtapositions, in turn, bring into
\nfocus the double edge of governmentality. Dosimeters established forms of legibility
\nwhose first and sometimes only effect\u2014for workers\u2014was discipline.
\nRecords also carried within them the potential to discipline mine operators:
\nhence managers\u2019 resistance to making, keeping, and revealing them. But that
\npotential required the spatio-temporal extension of perceptibilities to gain
\nmomentum and become usable.
\nMeanwhile, the imperceptions produced by technopolitical marginality continued
\nto ricochet around global circuits, gaining traction not by conspiracy but
\nsimply through the normal processes of transnational science. In the early
\n1990s, for example, an international group of experts conducted a massive
\nre-analysis of data from the eleven existing studies of radon and lung cancer
\nrisk, which covered underground miners in Australia, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia,
\nFrance, Sweden, and the United States. African exposures could not
\nbe reanalyzed, because they had never existed as data in the first place.86 And
\nso the stakes of Africa\u2019s absences from the nuclear world accumulate, both
\nwithin and outside the continent.
\nThe view from the margins challenges the ontological certainties of the
\ncenter. We can readily make this point from a scholarly perspective. But
\nmaking such challenges stick in the practices of the messy world requires
\n86 Jay H. Lubin et al., \u201cRadon and Lung Cancer Risk: A Joint Analysis of 11 Underground
\nMiners Studies,\u201d NIH report 94-3644 (National Institutes of Health, 1994).
\nA F R I C A A N D T H E N U C L E A R W O R L D 925
\ncontinuous work\u2014as Gabonese mineworker advocates, South African nuclear
\nregulators, and others have discovered. In the uranium boom currently in
\nprogress all over the African continent, mine operators and state officials,
\ninvoking the \u201csocial judgments\u201d such as those written into ICRP texts on
\nexposure limits and cited by the South African Chamber of Mines in the
\n1990s, pit the immediate urgency of \u201cdevelopment\u201d against the long-term
\nuncertainties of exposure. The struggle to see Africa in the nuclear world,
\nand the nuclear world in Africa, continues.
\n926 G A B R I E L L E H E C H T