Mineworkers are an important sector in the political economy of colonial and postcolonial Africa. In some areas, mining introduced wage labour. The miners in South Africa and elsewhere shaped the formation of African labour studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Miners are in the economic sector that attracts the most foreign capital and that lends itself to production systems familiar to Europeans. Industrial mining appears to draw upon ‘universal’ (i.e., European) processes of labour deployment and control. Mining impacts on the state in varied and numerous ways. It encouraged colonialists to intervene in the African home in ways that agricultural production would not allow, except in cases of mass relocations such as the Gezira project (Sudan) and the Office du Niger (Mali). With mining, the state ‘imagined’ that it could change the intricacies of African family life to push Africans into the ‘modern’ nuclear family. Policymakers felt that the conjugal family, with a male breadwinner and one housewife, was the key to social stability and a bulwark against working-class radicalism.