Childhood and Work at the Neoliberal Age: Ethnography of Child Work in Artisanal and Small-scale Mining in the Katanga province (DRC)

This paper aims at analyzing the work activities carried out by children in artisanal and small-scale mining in Katanga, DRC, in the wake of the evolution of representations of work, masculinity, family and childhood since the reforms of the Congolese mining sector promoted by the institutions of Bretton Woods. Katanga has been the industrial flagship of the Belgian Congo organized around the mining town of Lubumbashi during the colonial period and also after the independence of the country. The “union minière du Haut-Katanga” created by Belgians and nationalized after with the name of “Gécamines” has had a decisive impact on the structuration of the collective imagination on work, masculinity, family and childhood in this area of the country, which contains an infinite geologic potential and, as such, is strongly connected to global flows of raw materials exploitation. What is the impact of the reforms of the mining sector encouraged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund according to the ideals of schooling, nuclear family and father as the main breadwinner, the ones that have been promoted by the Gecamines during several decades? More specifically, what are the effects of these measures on socialization processes of youth and what are the consequences of those transformations on intergenerational dynamics? These questions that deal with the evolution of representations of childhood, work and family will be the main focus of our paper, which presents the results of a collective socio-anthropological research about child work in artisanal and small scale-mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Katanga province).