With mud spattered over a dress that looks like a selection from the cheap Chinese imports so readily available in Zimbabwe today, Griffin Chawatama (32) bends over a home-made metal bowl, sifting through the crushed rock for gold flakes.
His wife, Elina, uses a pestle to pound pieces of rock from a pile next to a collapsible dwelling structure at the nameless but fast-spreading township outside the chrome-mining town of Shurugwi, about 290km south-east of Harare.
Chawatama is one of hundreds of illegal gold panners engaged in a cat-and-mouse battle with the police since descending in Shurugwi last May after their homes and informal business kiosks were razed by bulldozers in the government’s controversial urban clean-up campaign.
The clean-up exercise, codenamed Operation Murambatsvina, was condemned by the United Nations as a violation of human rights. It is said to have left at least 700Â 000 people without shelter or means of livelihood.
Opportunities
But Chawatama says Murambatsvina opened up new opportunities for him panning gold.
“I have never looked back since I arrived here a year ago,” he says, a wide grin of satisfaction deeply etched on his sun-burnt face. “Police hunt us, but staying put has been worth the effort.”
And this, he says, is why the frequent arrests and detention by police for panning gold have been worthwhile.
Not even six months after he began panning gold along the valleys and ravines fanning out of Boterekwa Gorge here, Chawatama was able to raise enough money to pay off the bride price for his wife — a feat he had failed to achieve in the 10 years he worked as an informal trader in Shurugwi town.
“In the cities there are no jobs, but all that one needs to start working for themselves as a gold panner is a pickaxe, a shovel and a pan — it almost sounds unbelievable!” he says, unconcerned about the damage his illegal activities are doing to the Boterekwa Gorge — one of the most scenic areas in Zimbabwe.
Plaques erected by Zimbabwe’s former white colonial rulers decades ago still stand, announcing to visitors the breath-taking views lying ahead in the gorge, made famous in song by the late local musical great Simon Chimbetu.
“Welcome to scenic Shurugwi,” one of the plaques declares somewhat defiantly. But soon this could become an unbefitting epithet as hordes of desperate villagers and jobless youths from the cities continue gnawing with their pickaxes at the huge swathes of natural beauty that is Boterekwa in search of gold.
Not so scenic
The gold panners have defaced the surrounding hills and valleys with hazardous pits in search of the precious metal, which they all believe is the only means to protect themselves and their families from an economic crisis described by the World Bank as the worst in the world outside a war zone.
Initially, the diggers raked the hill slopes and the ravines for abandoned gold mines that had become uneconomic for big mining firms to continue operating.
They then turned to burrowing into hill slopes, and when that option was exhausted, they shifted to digging their own pits into the ground in search of gold. Pits dug to dizzying depths to enter a maze of tunnels are scattered about hazardously in the formerly lush indigenous forests that surround Boterekwa itself and Shurugwi town.
“It’s sheer hard work,” says Wallace Masimba (40), who came to the site two years ago. “Often, success depends on luck. If you hit a rich vein, you can go retire to your home.”
Yet Masimba readily admits that no one ever goes back once he has enjoyed the touch of the yellow metal dug from these pits.
Survival
Acute food shortages and economic hardships that critics blame on repression and problematic policies by President Robert Mugabe’s government appear to have transformed these villagers and youths into daredevils who will never leave the pits where they risk life and limb in search of a means of survival.
International food agencies estimate that three-quarters of the 12-million Zimbabweans will require food aid this year, while conservative estimates put unemployment in the Southern African country at more than 70%.
Of the about 30% of Zimbabweans lucky to hold a formal job, more than half say their salaries are not enough to feed their families because of runaway inflation, which in May surged to 1Â 193,5%, the highest in the world.
But 40-year-old Joseph Muyambo, who migrated from his home in Chipinge several hundred kilometres to the east to come and dig for gold in Shurugwi, says that besides the economic hardships, the irresistible lure of gold is also to blame for the growing number of panners here and elsewhere in the country.
Muyambo explains: “Once you start this panning business, you can never go back. The urge to make one more last dig from where you hope to uncover all the wealth of the earth is what keeps you going.”
Government
The government has, at best, been lethargic in its dealing with illegal gold panners, although the authorities seem very much aware of the environmental degradation caused by the uncontrolled digging of pits and tunnels by the panners.
A recent report by a special parliamentary committee noted how the rudimentary mining methods of panners, lack of shelter and sanitary facilities at the panning site near Boterekwa are a serious health and environmental hazard.
But the forex-starved Harare administration has been more concerned with trying to lure gold panners from selling the mineral to black-market traders and instead channel it to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which could sell it and earn desperately needed hard cash for the country.
The central bank even imported a processing plant from China with the hope that the illegal gold panners could take their mineral to the plant for processing before selling it to the government.
However, the plant broke down after a few months, providing a perfect excuse for gold panners to turn their backs on state buyers.
“Even when the plant was operating, there was unnecessary bureaucracy involved in getting paid,” says Chawatama, explaining why he and his colleagues have resorted to selling gold to unregistered buyers.
So, in the end, it is back to square one: the illegal panners continue damaging the environment digging for gold, which they sell on the black market, depriving the country of badly needed foreign currency. — ZimOnline