UC Davis

This dissertation, Zama Zama: Afterlives of Extraction in South Africa and Lesotho, provides an analysis of violence, risk, injury, and death inside and above South Africa's derelict and abandoned gold mines. Through in-depth multi-sited ethnography with South Africa's artisanal gold miners, or "Zama-Zama's," and the friends, family members, and caregivers they left behind in rural villages in Lesotho, my research explores how vernacular theories of violence, extraction, circulation, care, work, fugitivity, illness, injury, and sovereignty are emerging from the ruins of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts.