Jane Mucheni, along with many other women, spent twelve days sleeping on the ground beneath a blue tent near Bay Horse Mine, an abandoned gold mine located in Chegutu, approximately 110 kilometers (seventy miles) west of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
The women were waiting for their husbands and sons, who had been reported missing following the September 30 mine collapse, to return, alive or dead.
Before the authorities broke off the effort to free the trapped miners, nine people had perished and twenty-two had been rescued, infuriating the bereaved families of the missing.
“We still have up to 30 people that are underground at the moment,” Daniel Garwe, the acting minister of local government said on Wednesday. “The ground is moving which is threatening the lives of rescue teams. Operations have been stopped for now until a suitable area to enter the ground is established.”
The mothers, including Mucheni, whose sons France, 23, and Tinashe, 17, went missing two weeks ago, a day before Bay Horse collapsed, are horrified over the most recent discovery. The mine region is the quietest it has been in years, and they have not yet been located.
“It’s hard to leave knowing those rocks are pressing down on my children,” Mucheni, a farmer, told Al Jazeera. “We have tried everything, every morning we have prayed [to God] and last week we even had a traditional ceremony to call on our ancestors to help us. Those who have been here with their big cars parked haven’t done anything, doesn’t anyone care?”
Every day, twelve artisanal miners descended the 250-meter trench with crude picks and shovels in hand to look for their fellow miners who were buried. They persisted until the administration canceled the rescue effort in spite of the extreme heat and overpowering scent of human remains.
A risky search for fortune
Mine accidents are not uncommon in Zimbabwe.
In Zimbabwe’s gold-rich regions, many unemployed young men have long earned their livelihoods in unregulated, unsafe mines. The Bay Horse mine, which recently collapsed, was abandoned because artisanal miners had removed its safety pillars in the hopes of discovering gold ore.
The government declared the accident a national disaster, highlighting concerns about mining safety and the effectiveness of rescue efforts in Zimbabwe’s extractive industry. Farai Maguwu, director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) in Harare, describes the gold industry as a “crime scene” plagued by corruption, and artisanal miners, known locally as makorokoza, often work in hazardous conditions.
In the first quarter of 2023, Zimbabwe reported $376.73 million in export earnings, according to the Fidelity Gold Refinery (FGR), a state agency. Although over half of these earnings are attributed to small-scale miners, the FGR noted a 19% drop in deliveries compared to the same period in 2022 due to heavy rains, with 6.19 tonnes in gold deliveries.
However, Maguwu believes this is not a true representation of Zimbabwe’s potential due to illegal exports exceeding three times that amount and smuggling involving high-ranking state officials, as exposed in the Gold Mafia series by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit earlier this year.
Maguwu revealed that the CNRG had submitted several petitions to parliament, recommending regular mine inspections by the Ministry of Mines and the Environment Management Agency. They also sought reforms to enhance safety and reduce illicit financial flows in the mining sector. In response, they received a letter from parliament in 2021 stating that it would consider the recommendations, but nothing further transpired.
“When a disaster such as this occurs, it’s the small-scale miners who take the risk to go down, they don’t have the right rescue equipment and they just burrow in the ground while the politicians don’t seem interested because these are the lives of poor miners, politicians seem to only worry about the gold,” he told Al Jazeera.
A trail of tears
In the search operation, the team also managed to recover six bodies and various decomposing body parts belonging to unidentified individuals. Among the rescuers was Trymore Gavaza, 39, who played a part in retrieving his 28-year-old brother, Tawanda’s body. Tawanda had been trapped amidst large stones.
Though the recovery of his brother provided Gavaza with some comfort, he holds reservations about the mission’s continuity due to what he perceives as inadequate government support.
“The politicians came here and made a lot of promises, but no real equipment was given to help and if the rainy season starts soon nobody will go down,” he explained.
He remembers descending into the 250-meter pit, navigating over a kilometer through a subterranean tunnel. This arduous journey took nearly two hours, as they had to squeeze through narrow spaces created by fallen rocks. Their destination was where multiple bodies were located. It took them five days to discover the remains of a man they believe to be Thomas Pasi, Gavaza’s cousin.
“I’m thankful the other guys found Thomas. Even though the body isn’t the person we knew, the teeth and the hair told me it’s him, I know it’s him,” he said. “We tried to remove other miners, but the dead were trapped just staring at us with their eyes open.”
He claimed that Gavaza had quit his job as a chikorokoza to open his own grocery store in the village with his brother. With their uncle’s assistance, Tawanda had constructed an almost roof-level shop. But Tawanda made one last journey to Bay Horse Mine to make some quick cash to support the last stages of his shop’s construction. It was to be his last voyage.
Mucheni is milling around at the mine gates, unsure of whether to stay or go home, facing the dreadful possibility that she may never see her sons again, or their bodies, either alive or dead.
“If God could just take me, [if] I could die like my sons then it would be better,” she told Al Jazeera. “I have already lost so much, my husband died a long time ago and now I have lost both my children, I can’t go on,” she cries.