White ants and mining: reading degrowth in South Africa

South Africa has an abandoned mines problem. These mines pose serious risks to lives and the environment and raise questions of what degrowth may look like in parts of the Global South that are confronting legacies of racial and migrant labour exploitation while also facing post-extractivist futures. Any attempt at a just transition to degrowth in South Africa will not only have to grapple with the economy’s continued dependence on the mining sector, but also address the deep injustices caused by this sector and the informal/illegal economy of precarious labourers that shadows it. Given the centrality of mines, their undergrounds, and their racialised labour systems to the modern South African nation and its literary cultures, this article turns to the nation’s literature to investigate the relationship between social and environmental justice and degrowth. Taking a transhistorical approach, the article explores the way artisanal, informal, illegal, and migrant labour marks the various forms and genres of South African mining literature, from the late nineteenth-century diamond rush compound novels to the speculative fiction of a ‘Rainbow Nation’ encountering economic precarity and environmental collapse in the twenty-first century.