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Tuesday, October 01, 2024

Women in Africa’s mining industry: A documentary by Aïssatou Fofana

A Togolese woman from the mining industry. Screenshot taken from the video ”African women working in the mining industry on the L’écologiste Infos YouTube channel.

Mining is generally considered a gendered and male-dominated profession. However, many African women now work in this fast-growing industry.

Africa is the world’s most mineral-rich continent. More than 50 percent of the world’s minerals are found in the African subsoils. These resources attract the attention of international mining giants looking to expand into countries where mining is a significant part of the economy.

Aïssatou Fofana, an Ivorian environmental journalist, follows the story of several African women working in this industry as part of her first film documentary. This documentary presents the situation in Côte d'Ivoire and Togo. Rather than succumbing to clichés and preconceived ideas in a field often seen as only for men, the women Aïssatou Fofana interviewed and filmed shared their unique experiences.

In a WhatsApp interview with Global Voices, the filmmaker talks about her experience and reasons for pursuing these women’s stories.

Jean Sovon (JS): Why did you make a documentary on women’s involvement in Africa’s mining industry? How did you become aware of this situation?

Aïssatou Fofana (AF): I made this documentary for an African Union Media Fellowship Programme project. We had to complete our project on one of the various topics proposed under this fellowship. This project could be a documentary, a news article, a radio program, or a podcast….
I chose women working in this industry as we don’t hear much about them in the media, even though they contribute to their country’s socio-economic development. That’s why I focused on this topic in Côte d’Ivoire and Togo.

In the first part of this documentary, women from Côte d’Ivoire’s mining industry talk about their day-to-day work:

JS: What specific challenges do women face in this profession? How are they perceived by their male colleagues and the general public?

AF: The first challenge that springs to mind is the ability to progress in a male-dominated industry. You can appreciate that it is difficult to progress in such an industry, especially when most men have a “traditional” or “patriarchal” vision of women in society, where a woman’s place is in the kitchen or at home, looking after her husband and children. This vision creates friction for women starting a new venture.
The second challenge involves their family. If she is married and has children, she must strike a balance and make arrangements to ensure her work doesn’t interfere with her family life. Having an understanding and open-minded partner makes all the difference in these circumstances! Otherwise, it’s another problem she’ll have to deal with daily.
Limited information exists on this industry, especially on the women working in it, which sparked my interest in this topic. I wanted to make a documentary that sheds some light on what they do, their circumstances, how they deal with these challenges, and how they build careers in this so-called male industry.

JS: What exactly do women do in this industry? Are they engineers or miners?

AF: The women I interviewed in this documentary occupy various positions in their respective mining companies, depending on their areas of expertise. At Côte d’Ivoire’s La Société des Mines d’Ity (Ity Mining Company), Laetitia Gadegbeku Ouattara is Endeavour Mining’s country manager; Carine Kouko is a senior production geologist; Kadidiatou Diarra is a junior exploration geologist, and Marthe Bertine Yavo is a camp and travel manager.
Regarding the women in Togo, Rosine Atafeinam Abalo is a Doctor of Geology and Geotechnics and an investment manager for Togo Invest. Dotse Akouavi Jeannette and Aladouadjo Belam both drive heavy-duty machinery known as dumpers.

In the second part of this documentary, the Togolese women Aïssatou Fofana interviewed tell their stories and the obstacles they had to overcome to break into the mining field and find professional success:

JS: Why do they do this kind of work? Is it better paid than other professions?

AF: During my interviews, these women never mentioned that this was a better-paid profession than others or one that they wanted to do to be rich and have lots of money. They were drawn to this industry and wanted to build a career in it. This motivation and passion influenced their decision, and they did everything possible to get into this industry and progress. So, it wasn’t for financial reasons.
I really couldn’t say whether this industry is better paid than others as I didn’t look at it from this angle. I didn’t even ask that question. What interests me is their career path, the challenges they encountered, how they overcame them, and how they continue progressing in this industry despite their problems.
They never mentioned that this was a poorly paid profession. That said, I can assure you that they are happy with their career choices.

JS: Are the mines where these women work national, foreign, or illegal? Do the women have their own unions?

AF: The mining sites I visited are legally registered. La Société des Mines d'Ity has been in operation since 1991. The Ivorian government is a 10 percent shareholder, la Société des Mines 5 percent, and Endeavour Mining 85 percent. Women also have their own associations. In Côte d’Ivoire, national associations like the Mining Sector Women’s Network ( FEMICI) and He For She Mines Côte d’Ivoire exist. La Société des Mines d’Ity has the Association des Femmes des Mines d'Ity (Association of the Women Miners of Ity or AFEMI). In Togo, there is the national Association des Femmes du Secteur Minier ou en Entreprise du Togo (Association of the Women Miners and Entrepreneurs of Togo or AFEMET), of which Rosine Atafeinam Abalo, one of the women I interviewed, is president.
In Africa, there is the Association of Women in Mining in Africa (AWIMA), a network of national organizations and associations of African women in the mining, oil, and gas industries.
Internationally, the WIN100 Awards reward 100 pioneering women who bring about significant positive changes to ensure the mining industry operates in a responsible, sustainable, and inclusive manner.

JS: What are the companies’ environmental policies?

AF: The mining sites I visited in Côte d'Ivoire and Togo are legally registered and have entry guidelines. For example, La Société des Mines d'Ity has an environmental and sustainable development component in its management policies. We also planted some trees while filming this documentary.

In this rapidly evolving and increasingly internationalized industry, African women are taking their rightful place on equal footing with men.Categories

Written byJean Sovon

Translated byLaura Marie

“Escalation Dominance” . . . and the Prospect of More Than 1,000 Holocausts

Norman Solomon

October 1, 2024
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The mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test in 1954, the largest nuclear weapons test ever conducted by the United States. Photo: NOAA.

Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.

While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”

That was in 1961.

Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.

No longer 100 Holocausts.

More than 1,000 Holocausts.

If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.

What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khruschev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”

What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?

In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.

The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”

But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.

China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Senator William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”

Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion – by Russian military and political elites – of putting nuclear weapons in space.

We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated – ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.

On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”

That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On September 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.

The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.

We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.

Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems – programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.

Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.

And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”

Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.

Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”

Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan – formerly a supreme cold warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”

But such attitudes would be heresy today.

As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”

And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.

The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.

We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.

Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.

A zero-sum view of the world.

A one-way ticket to omnicide.

The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.

Consider what President Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”

That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

And where is this all headed?

Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of senators and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”

In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.

And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.

Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.

The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence – it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states

Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles – or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.

The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”

Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.

The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.

The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.

Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”

The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and General James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”

In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs – they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.

Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.

During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”

I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”

This article is adapted from the keynote speech that Norman Solomon gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC on Sept. 24, 2024.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.