Years after the formal mines were shut down, makorokoza are still coming to find their fortunes at different mines around the Midlands province with a devastating effect on the environment.
Armed with hammers and pinch bars, they walk around in threadbare clothes, their faces caked with mud. In their wake they leave heaps of mine dust, uprooted trees and open pits that sometimes stretch into the roads, schools and people’s backyards. They are artisanal miners, makorokoza from mines scattered around Kwekwe.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) defines artisanal mining as: “formal or informal mining operations with simplified forms of exploration, extraction, processing, and transportation. ASM is normally low capital intensive and uses high labour-intensive technology. It includes men and women working on an individual basis as well as those working in family groups, in partnership, or as members of cooperatives or other types of legal associations and enterprises involving hundreds or even thousands of miners.”
In the shadows of the closed mines, modern versions of the gold workers are rising and wreaking havoc on local communities.
One of the mines, Globe and Phoenix Mine in its heyday was the second largest producer of gold in Zimbabwe. The mine produced over 4.2 million ounces of gold before the Zimbabwean government suspended its operations in 2007 due to political and economic instability. A school has been shut down at Globe and Phoenix mine due to environmental degradation by artisanal and illegal miners who continue to dig tunnels under roads, schools, and buildings in the central business district. There are fears that many more public infrastructures and roads could be closed, while the government announced it would conduct a geospatial survey in the area and possibly other parts of the town to avoid total destruction.
Artisanal miners admit that they know that their mining activities are detrimental to the environment. Priscilla Mashinge miner and founder of Women Artisanal Miners Association (WAMA) an organisation that advocates for the rights of women miners was quick to admit miners’ wrongs. “We know that how we mine is very destructive to the environment. Most of us don’t consider the underground pillars we are destroying which in the end will lead to sink holes in the city. We dig holes which we don’t fill up, we cut down a lot of trees and expose our rivers and water sources to mercury. But what other means of survival do we have if we leave artisanal mining?”
Cadrick Kupakuwana of Mayflower mine said that as artisanal miners they don’t have enough resources to effectively follow proper mining procedures. “We mine along river banks and this affects our environment. It’s gotten so out of control that even the government is leaving artisanal miners to their own devices. We are destroying our own national resources and no one is taking ownership to fix the problem,” he said.
Priscilla went on to say that as an organisation they are trying to mobilise themselves so as to make collective efforts to take better care of the environment.
One of the greatest criticisms of artisanal miners is their use of mercury. Mercury is used to recover any gold mixed in concentrates as the gold combines with the mercury to form an amalgam. In Zimbabwe artisanal miners do not use retorts to vaporise the mercury as wood fires are fairly low temperature and they claim the process is too time consuming. According to reports, more than 1,400 tons of mercury per year are released into the environment from over 70 countries and the largest source is artisanal gold mining. Mercury is widely used by Zimbabwe’s artisanal miners with those involved having little knowledge of the dangers of the chemical or of alternative processing methods. Pact 2015 reported that only 46% of miners knew about the health problems related to mercury but 23% of respondents had experienced headaches, dizziness and blurred vision, 12% had experienced skin irritation and sores and nearly 26% reported muscle pain and weakness, all symptoms of mercury poisoning. “The only way that we can do away with mercury is for responsible authorities across nations to make sure that its production is completely banned because of its destructive power on the environment and on people. As long as it is produced, people will continue using it,” said Priscilla.