Le travail des enfants dans les mines artisanales du Katanga (RDC). Interdépendances et capacité d’action

How can one understand that Sub-Saharan African children are currently devoting themselves to dangerous and tenuous activities, such as artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM)? Could child miners be considered as victims, entangled in the neoliberal flow of raw materials or could their trajectories result from choices progressively made? Children’s agency will be the main focus of this article which presents the results of a collective socio-anthropological research about «child labour» in artisanal and small scale-mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Katanga province). This paper aims to grasp the mining activities of children at the crossroad of different spheres of social relations in which the children are included (relationships at work, with the family, with the development world, and with the local community). From this viewpoint, the article describes how children mining activities can contribute to collective dynamics or if on the contrary, they overcome them.