Apart from South Africa, the African continent has since the early 2000s once again become a land of extraction. In Ghana, where artisanal gold miners are called “galamseys” (galamsayers in English), their number was unknown in 2009, but appears to be 20,000 or 50,000 depending on the source11). In the Sahel (Mali, Niger, Senegal), in Côte d’Ivoire, in the Republic of Congo, gold mining is practiced by part of the population, in competition with Western mining companies.