One door closed means another door opens spells the same sentiments for Zimbabwe small scales mining story, when the government has been closing down industries through its indigenization policies pushing masses from their comfort zones (employment) into mining. I have mixed feelings surrounding the exposure I got from the artisanal gold mining, a lot of progress has been made to give many livelihoods and we have been robbed much as society that should be progressing going with the trends of other countries are doing like Rwanda. I’m going to give an account of how many are making a living out of gold up its supply chain to the market, revealing the milestones, the braving activities our fellow brothers and sisters are facing daily, detesting activities we shy off, the lives we are losing, environmental hazards they are exposing us, environmental liabilities they are leaving for the future generations to rehabilitate and opportunities that are available to business people.
These are as good as the lottery gamblers; these are nomadic guys who spend their day pacing up and down anywhere they think a lump of gold is waiting for them. Gold detectors miners’ teams often comprise of three people plus their sponsor or detector owner. At a given time one is carrying the back pack of food supplies while the other two will be exchanging the duty to pace up and down the fields carrying a detector and the other carrying a shovel. When you see these guys doing their routines, you might mistake them for landmine searching personnel, pointing everywhere just to pick the signal. It may take weeks to months until they can pick a signal of their windfall, once they pick a signal, they start digging getting directions with the help detector, and they can hit a lump of gold as big as a kg, equivalent to US$50 000. The news of their spoils will spread as fast as wind, across the country as the team becomes big spenders in town and masses of people move in to the spot to try their luck. These hits has often resulted in the birth of new mines, surfacing of land ownership wrangles, and some sleeping areas come to life with commuter omnibuses starting to ply the new route, women coming to sell food and other wares to artisanal miners trying their luck there. In most cases police and army were deployed in these areas barring people to try their luck as the land is declared pre owned by some government bosses. The activities of the gold detectors guys know no boundaries as long their cue are directing them somewhere, graves in some areas have been dug up, and game parks not been spared.
Noisy milling infrastructure has been set up across the country, with most of them working around the clock. Gold ore is mined from surrounding areas by ferried by trucks to the millers, it takes days in some areas to get the chance to have their ore crushed. At the mill they will be heaps of ore of different textures and colours, once the turn of the heap to go under the hammer, a team of wheelbarrow man employed by the miller start moving the ore to dynamo driven hammer reducing everything to soil texture enough to be driven down the pipe using water into a drum that will trap the mud with gold utilizing the quality that gold is heavy. The mud will be made available to the artisanal miners and some gold trapping mats to further extract the gold utilizing the magic qualities of mercury. Millers often supply artisanal miners with gold rich ores with mining equipment like compressors, water pumper and even loans of supplies for a repayment of being the preferred miller. Millers make their money from charging the milling of ore per hour and the huge return is got from further extraction of gold from the residue that passed the drum available to artisanal miners through the use of tanks explained below. There are also small millers who use smaller machines like bow mills, which is more like a rotating drum with short put sport like iron balls, when the drum is rotated the iron balls collide with the ore fed into the drum reducing it to soil sizes such that gold can be exhumed using mercury. A hammer mill is also available to crush, a grain like grinding mill used to crush the ore.
When I first heard of German shafts, I thought the guys were mistaking them for Boer activities because less is documented in Zimbabwean curriculum history on Germans activities. There are a lot of abandoned German shafts around Zimbabwe which are very rich but dangerous to work in. These shafts go as deep as 1000 meters with tunnels connecting to it. I have heard in some of the connecting horizontal tunnels are laid railway tracks once used by the Germans. What is attractive about the German shafts is most of the gold is alluvial, mining gold in its form, there is no need to use mercury to bring the gold together, they mine a gold stone.
These are the risk takers, the people many today call Makorokoza, and these establish their own pits or shafts with the hope to dig into a gold belt. A gold belt is a layer of familiar soil composition to them or ore often following a fault, from there a soil sample is taken to geological testing the percentage compositing of gold or a test to predict the yield of gold and as well see if it’s worthwhile to exhume the ore. The miners use touches to light the dark shafts, dynamites are used to blast rigid ore so that it can be carried outside. Makorokoza are very patient, brave people with a lot of faith, I like give credit where it’s owed, and these men go for weeks into months for many to find a belt, which can be 40 to 50 meters deep with pick and shovels. Sometimes they will have reached the ground water levels and they have to have a water pump draining the water, and a compressor to improve aeration. The ore extracted will be then ferried to the mill for crushing to extract gold reef.
The return of the millers come from the further process the bulk of the debris that will pass the gold trapping drum available to the miners, it is said the milling process only collects 40% of the gold in the ore and the 60% remains available to the millers through the tank process. On mills excavators are seen moving the fast collecting residue away from the mill to a distance heaps where the refined ore is later transferred to tanks. The tons of residue is stored in tanks for few months under the subject to cyanide which help further extraction of gold from the ore, seeping down the tank and react with carbon sheets laid at the bottom of the tank. The carbons are then taken of electrolysis to collect the refined gold ready to be sold.
These are the prominent flashy guys in town, or big money spenders often known of sporty cars. Gold buyers as the name convey, are the financially liquid men who buy gold from the artisanal miners through the use of intermediates called runners or gofers. Gofers are supposed to have saleable assets like a car to stand as collateral with the buyer, the gofer will cede the car ownership papers to an equivalent amount of money from the buyer to go buy gold from the bush at a lower price from the artisanal or illegal miners. The runner will use a small digital scale to buy raw gold sometimes, not burnt under oxygen and exposed to nitric acid. The runner will then take the gold to the main gold buyer to sell at a premium, despite the gold this time will have to go through the nitric acid removing impurities and the fire.
These are players whom I cannot pen off without mentioning because of their significant role they play to support the activities of gold miners. Chemical industrials suppliers provide a wide range of dangerous chemicals to miners like cyanide, nitric acid and silver mercury while gold buyers are supplied with d oxygen gas bottles used to purify the gold or they say to dense so that they can weigh and pay for the gold. Explosives make to greater part of the sales value traded under the chemicals department as daily, blasting is done underground making way for ore to be accessible to the miners. Transporters with haulage trucks, tippers, dumpers, tractors and even light vehicles are making a significant business from the miners ferrying the miners, equipment and ore. Engineering technicians are adding a good weight to see our miners through servicing and repairing machinery like compressors, generators, water pumps and vehicles. Last but not least safety clothing suppliers have contributed enough to be mentioned though most of the artisanal miners do not consider safety precautions much in their operations.
