New research examines how ‘calibrated neglect’ shapes political life in Zimbabwe’s gold-mining regions

In Kwekwe, a gold-mining city in central Zimbabwe, death is a constant presence. Young miners are killed when shafts collapse or flood. Others die in explosions or gang violence. Many more endure injuries and health problems associated with dangerous working conditions.

When people die, families and neighbors often organize to retrieve bodies, raise money for funerals and support the bereaved. Then, the state appears with condolences, coffins, donations, police operations or promises of reform.

In a new article in American Anthropologist, former associate research scholar and lecturer in the Program in African Studies Melusi Nkomo calls this pattern “calibrated neglect.” It describes a form of governance in which dangers go unaddressed, while the state selectively reappears after injury, death or public outrage.

“I asked how political authority operates when a state repeatedly tolerates known dangers and repeatedly withholds protection from those who face them, and how young miners and their families make sense of losses they have learned to expect,” Nkomo said. He is now an affiliated researcher in the Department of Geography at University of Zurich. “I also wanted to know why loss and suffering on this scale, unrelenting as they are, so seldom lead people to organize in resistance or protest.”

Nkomo conducted ethnographic research between 2019 and 2023 in Zimbabwe’s artisanal and small-scale mining regions, primarily in Kwekwe, where he grew up. He spent time with miners and their families as well as undertakers, nurses, police officers and local officials, moving between mine shafts, homes, clinics and funerals. He found that state intervention often came after, rather than before, disaster. “State and ruling-party officials appear after the fact, bringing coffins and condolences to funerals or launching police raids that blame the miners themselves,” he said. 

Nkomo argues that these belated and selective interventions are themselves a form of political authority. In the meantime, residents take on much of what the state leaves undone, collecting money via WhatsApp to pay for retrieving bodies from flooded shafts and to help grieving families with burial costs. “Residents recognize the neglect and criticize it quietly, yet they depend on the same officials when someone dies, and that dependence blunts grievance before it becomes organized,” Nkomo said.

The relationship is also economically contradictory: The state depends on the miners it polices. In 2019, according to Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe figures reported in the Zimbabwean press, artisanal and small-scale miners supplied about 63 percent of the gold delivered to the government. For Nkomo, that dependence helps illuminate the cycle he observed: the state relies on miners’ labor while failing to address many of the dangers surrounding it.

The findings also bear on African politics more widely. “They add a question of timing to debates about the state, namely when a government chooses to act and whom it reaches,” Nkomo said. “In Zimbabwe, people judge today’s neglect against the provision they came to expect after independence, and the ruling party governs within that memory, arriving after each disaster with donations and promises it rarely keeps.”

Nkomo is now expanding the research into a book, “Rule by Neglect.” Zimbabwe will be one of its central cases as he develops his concept of calibrated neglect into a broader account of how political authority can be sustained not only through intervention, but also through the selective withholding of protection and assistance until after a crisis occurs.

The study “Burying Futures: Artisanal Mining Deaths and the Politics of Negligence in Zimbabwe” was published in the journal American Anthropologist on September 22, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.70120