On <i>jerabos</i> and <i>kpo fire</i> : extractive violence and environmental resistance on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Niger Delta

Industrialized mining and oil drilling have engendered profound infrastructural and environmental violence throughout Africa in the twentieth century. Rapacious resource extraction has resulted in toxic wastelands, land dispossession, and jeopardized well-being. As ways of resisting extractive violence and longstanding environmental dispossession, some communities have made attempts to repossess and ‘legitimize’ the natural resources in their localities through practices of artisanal extraction. Drawing from examples of jerabos mining waste dumps on the Zambian Copperbelt and kpo fire crude oil refining in the Niger Delta, this article conceptualizes these artisanal practices as a form of environmental resistance to pervasive extractive violence. Through ethnographic, archival, and newspaper sources, we analyze the politics of environmental resistance in extractive geographies, focusing on how communities interact with, respond to, and resist infrastructural violence. Adopting an historical approach, the article shows the interdependencies and tensions between industrial and artisanal forms of resource extraction. While artisanal extraction emerged as a form of environmental resistance, it ultimately deepens the environmental crisis in these localities. We contribute to debates in political ecology and the environmental humanities by deconstructing artisanal mining and oil drilling as forms of environmental resistance to global capitalist extractivism.