Have Your Yellowcake and Eat it: Men, Relatedness, Risk and ‘Hidden Danger’ in a Namibian Uranium Mine.

THIS PRESENT THESIS concerns the lives of young men living in Swakopmund, Namibia: the ‘uranium capital of the world’. The price of uranium on the international market depends in many ways on emotion and global sentiment – the way that geographically distant persons feel about nuclear things has an impact on the price-per-barrel of this radioactive sand. As such, changes in international regard for uranium and its associated industries – for example nuclear weapons or energy – have a deep impact at a local level, in places of extraction such as Swakopmund. This work is a study of men’s relationships with others in the context of uranium mining; the geology of uranium inspires a deeper understanding of men’s actions and feelings whilst also priming the notion of uranium as an actor itself.

It is the first such work to explore a Namibian city located outside of the north of the country. It is focussed primarily on men, and especially on issues of relatedness
and intimacy, questioning the forms that these take in Swakopmund as a city in which financial imbalance is exceptionally pronounced and also highly racialised, skewed in favour of European (white) settlers. Everyone in Swakopmund comes from elsewhere – with the exception of a very small minority – leaving behind the direct influence of the extended family. Away from extended kinship networks persons are, more-or-less, able to build the relationships that they want to, rather than following the wishes of their families. At the time of the fieldwork that this thesis is based on, the global price of uranium was significantly low, meaning that locally there were few full-time contracts available, with employment – when present – occurring largely on a temporary or short-term basis.

As such, this dissertation places conceptions of relatedness and intimacy into the context of these global fluctuations, especially in terms of insecurity and risk. Rather than reinforce a notion of male hegemony, this work demonstrates that men are often subject to power structures which are not their own and that they are – more often than might be thought – scared, vulnerable and afraid. More than that, however, uranium is conceptualised as a monster, with various tentacles that reach out in order to grasp, influence and change parts of Namibian society in order to maintain its control over them. Each chapter is an exploration of one such tentacle, following the lines of different relationship types and situations in terms of the uranium industry itself, the home and family, formal and informal work, and friendship.

In conclusion I point out that whilst geographical – and indeed, cultural – distance often hints at an intrinsic incommensurability between those who are ‘here’ and those who are ‘there’, the relationships formed by persons in Swakopmund are often not so geographically bound. A person’s involvement in such an international market as that of uranium is clear evidence of that; uranium connects Swakopmund with those outside. Yet aside from working in industry, men also seek to make a multitude of new kin-connections, some of which remain local and some of which do not. By following the interpersonal and the intersubjective, this work sheds light on the new forms of intimacy and relatedness that manifest in Swakopmund and beyond.