What Local Gold Extraction Tells Us about a Globalized Mining Economy
By Diana Ayeh. When I first came to Houndé in 2016, the town of 150,000 inhabitants in southwestern Burkina Faso already had a certain gold-rush atmosphere. Not only was the landscape in and around Houndé marked with indications for future extraction, the construction of the first industrial gold mine in the urban municipality was also accompanied by the arrival of new actors and ideas that made extraction feasible.