'Mimi ni Mama na Mimi ni Baba' : A Feminist Political Economy of the Women Working on the Gravel Frontiers of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

This thesis examines the role of women in informal limestone gravel aggregate mining, which supplies the urban infrastructure development of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Situated atop a vast coastal limestone deposit, the city has become a frontier of urban mining and a contested site of dispossession between formal and informal mining. Yet the women who work on these frontiers, manually crushing limestone into building materials, are made invisible in development narratives. Their productive labour in mineral resource extraction, together with their social reproductive labour as breadwinners and caregivers, is extracted alongside limestone as a foundational link in local and global production networks. Drawing on six months of ethnographic research, this thesis contributes to the feminist political economy literature on social reproduction in the context of extractivist patriarchal capitalism, employing it as a lens through which to critically interrogate the emergence of the industry...Show moreThis thesis examines the role of women in informal limestone gravel aggregate mining, which supplies the urban infrastructure development of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Situated atop a vast coastal limestone deposit, the city has become a frontier of urban mining and a contested site of dispossession between formal and informal mining. Yet the women who work on these frontiers, manually crushing limestone into building materials, are made invisible in development narratives. Their productive labour in mineral resource extraction, together with their social reproductive labour as breadwinners and caregivers, is extracted alongside limestone as a foundational link in local and global production networks. Drawing on six months of ethnographic research, this thesis contributes to the feminist political economy literature on social reproduction in the context of extractivist patriarchal capitalism, employing it as a lens through which to critically interrogate the emergence of the industry as a response to multiple, intersecting regimes of dispossession that shape the historical and contemporary development of Dar es Salaam. In doing so, it demonstrates that these gravel frontiers are terrains of both extraction and exclusion, sedimented by institutions that dispossess artisanal miners of their land, labour, and livelihoods, thereby disproportionately impacting the women whose productive and reproductive labour is depleted to absorb the consequences. It critiques the structural conditions that exploit and exclude these women while looking beyond narratives of marginality, demonstrating that the artisanal mining of gravel aggregates is also evidence of the agency of the women who are central to the material (re)production of the city. Ultimately, the objective of this thesis is to reframe the narratives of urban development by foregrounding the women on the gravel frontiers of Dar es Salaam.Show less

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'Mimi ni Mama na Mimi ni Baba' : A Feminist Political Economy of the Women Working on the Gravel Frontiers of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania