Unstable Ground

The Witwatersrand in South Africa was once home to the richest goldfields in the world. Today it is dotted with abandoned mines, and informal miners known as zama zamas enter them in an illicit and often deadly search for ore. Rosalind C. Morris asks what gold has done to people and what it has made them do. Her book draws on field research carried out around these mines over more than twenty-five years.

Unstable Ground starts from the closure of South Africa's gold mines and works backward. Morris begins in the present and descends into the pasts that produced it, tracing the social worlds that gold made possible and the lives it remade, and sometimes undid, across a century and a half. Her descriptions of mining among the ruins anchor the account.

By viewing the industry from its margins, Morris sets it against the cyanide revolution, the end of the gold standard, recurrent sinkholes, and the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue today. In doing so she recasts the history of South Africa and its unfinished effort to move beyond apartheid amid changes in the global economy. She presents a history born of imperial aspiration that survives as a speculative mirage.

The book weaves together ethnography, history, personal testimony and political thought, along with close readings of South African literary texts. It has won the 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award, the 2026 Lionel Trilling Book Award from Columbia College, and the 2026 AES Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society.