Unstable Grounds

In the Witwatersrand, once the world’s richest goldfields, abandoned mines now lure zama zamas who risk death in unstable tunnels searching for remaining ore. 
Drawing on over twenty-five years of field research, Rosalind C. Morris’s award-winning Unstable Ground explores the worlds gold made possible and the profound costs it inflicted on those living in its shadow.
From the vantage of mine closures, Morris traces the industry’s history – from today’s ruined landscapes, sinkholes, cyanide-laced tailings and ongoing protests and violence, through the rise and fall of the gold standard and the cyanide revolution. 
She reveals how gold built vast social worlds, remade lives and sometimes destroyed them over 150 years. Viewed from the margins, the book recasts South Africa’s history, exposing the incomplete struggle against apartheid amid global economic shifts.
Blending immersive ethnography, incisive history, personal testimony, political analysis and literary readings, Unstable Ground is an ambitious, poetic work that unearths gold’s enduring legacy: a history born of empire and persisting as a dangerous, speculative mirage.