Cartography and the Political Imagination. Julie MacArthur

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      On the eve of the gold rush, the district had already witnessed a shift from indirect colonial influence to a more interventionist agricultural policy.⁵⁰ State compulsion had dramatically increased the land under cultivation through clearing bush lands and included extensive trenching to prevent soil erosion. For many African farmers, mining trenches symbolized the physical cutting off of landholdings and thus further provoked fears of land alienation. Prospectors dug trenches up to forty feet deep along prospective reefs, with only “a few shillings” paid in compensation to the local populations affected.⁵¹ Lord Lugard described the region as “over-run by Europeans digging enormous pits and trenches all over the place, among the villages and in the cultivation, and pegging out the whole countryside as an earnest of future operations.”⁵² The haphazard, extensive, and “blind” manner in which individual European miners pegged off claims and dug trenches became the main focus of early resistance.

      COUNTERMAPPING THE MINERS: UPROOTING PEGS AND DEBATING MORALITY

      In its earliest forms, resistance to mining reflected the threat posed not only to individual land rights but also to moral communities. Concerns over pegging and the moral corruption of local communities manifested in countermapping resistance strategies and gendered discourses of corruption and civility.