Mountain of gold



·    But is anyone getting any richer?

A man holding a fleck of gold.



A gram of gold sells for K500.



A woman breaking stones.

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The miners use rudimentary tools to extract the gold.

Inside one of the old tunnels in the mountain.

Men carrying the stones down the mountain.

Panning for gold.

 

JACK ZIMBA

A MAN shows me a tiny yellowish speckle in the palm of his hand. It is so tiny that I have to pull his hand to my face in order to have a good look at what he is holding. It sparkles.

“That is gold,” he tells me, his own eyes sparkling with excitement.
Next to him, his colleague is meticulously swirling a small bowl containing muddy water and a shiny glob of mercury dancing in the middle.
I had driven 40km north of Petauke Town to the newly-created Lusangazi District, branched off onto a winding bush track deep into a lash forest and reached a dead end at the foot of a mountain. The mountain is called Sasali, but perhaps more aptly, it should be called Mountain of Gold.
For indeed in the belly of this mountain, which rises some 200m, is gold; some say, a lot of gold.
The mountain is now attracting droves of men and women prospecting for gold and dreaming to become rich. The prospectors come from the nearby villages and beyond.
The prospectors have set up camp at the base of the mountain, living precariously in makeshift shelters made of polythene sheets and sticks.
There is loud music blaring from speakers at makeshift taverns, food cooking at restaurants and shops displaying basic commodities as residents of this temporary community go about their daily business, digging for gold.
The road leading to Sasali is now busy with traffic, mostly motorbikes laden with merchandise, for this place has also now become a thriving market for traders.
James Mwale is headman of nearby Nyakulanda village. He also keeps an eye on the activities here on behalf of Chief Sandwe, in whose chiefdom the mountain lies.
The 80-year-old headman says the number of people seeking gold has swelled over the past few months because of hunger, following a series of poor harvests in the area.
“But is your community benefiting?” I ask him.
“No. Not really,” he says.
He says Government needs to come and help the community mine the gold, for they lack equipment. The miners use rudimentary tools such as hoes, picks and shovels.
“If the government wants to help people in this area, they are supposed to give us a bulldozer and an excavator, so that they can open up this mountain and people can just come and pick without the risk of death, than what it is now,” he says.
Previously, the people here used to get the gold from the soil by panning, but then they discovered that there is more gold in the rocky part of the mountain, but extracting it is more difficult.
The miners have formed a cooperative and claim to have documents from Government allowing them to mine, but nothing looks formal.
In fact, Lusangazi district commissioner Gerald Phiri says the activities at Sasali are illegal and the safety of the miners cannot be guaranteed.
“When things are illegal, safety cannot be guaranteed,” he says.
None of the men and women I saw had any protective clothing.
The cooperative also ensures that there is no child labour at the site, although I did see two young boys working.
Morris Tembo is the vice-chairman of the Sasali Gold Mining Cooperative.
He says the lives of the people here could change with government help by providing the miners with tools.
Morris has also mastered the mountains in this area and knows where all the old tunnels are located.
Yes, these prospectors are a century late.
Gold mining at this site is said to have started as early as 1912 by the Europeans. And they left telling evidence of their activities - tunnels bored into the mountain.
Some of the tunnels are said to be half a kilometer long, but nobody can tell for certain.
I enter one of the tunnels led by Morris, lighting our way with torchlight from our mobile phones, but soon we are repelled by a suffocating smell of bat urine.
“There are four mountains here, and I have checked all of them,” Morris tells me excitedly. “They all have tunnels.”
He started digging for gold here in 2017.
But Morris now fears that in future, this site might be given to a big foreign investor (there is a Chinese company that lays claim to the site, according to the district commissioner, and they already have a presence on a nearby mountain).
“We fear losing this mine because it is a source of income for many families,” he says.
According to Morris, there are about 600 people making a living here, and more on the other side of the mountain. More are still coming.
Edward Phiri is a new comer on the gold fields. He came in January, and is now sure he has struck gold already.
He has dug a small trench on the side of the mountain, next to an old tunnel entrance, and is chipping away at a rock with a hoe. He thinks he has found a belt rich with gold.
Edward dreams of making enough money to build houses and send his children to school.
The mountain has also attracted gold hunters from other provinces, like Isaac Ng’andwe, who has 100 bags filled with stones that he wants to transport to Petauke for crushing.
He has an experience in gold mining from other areas in the country.
“There is still a lot of gold in this mountain,” he tells me. “The Whiteman only got a little out of this mountain.”
A gram of gold is sold for K500 on site, but in Petauke town, it fetches K650.
But the men and women here have to break their backs to get just a gram of the precious mineral.
For many, K500 is all the amount they will earn for the whole month for all the digging and crushing.
Leonard Tembo and his wife Selina have been digging for gold here for the past three years, but have nothing to show for their hard labour.
Leonard is squatting outside their plastic home, breaking the stones with a hammer, while his wife is preparing a frugal meal of nshima and vegetables. Beside her, the couple’s eight months old daughter.
Leonard has only managed to buy a bicycle and a cow out of the earnings from gold.
We climb to the top of the mountain and find more century old evidence of the mining activity here – deep trenches and an air vent so deep that it resembles a bottomless abyss.

There are more people digging at the summit. But taking the stones down to the base of the mountain is a daunting and dangerous undertaking.

The face of the mountain is steep. I have to recline my body at an angle in order to balance. Climbing is hard, getting down is not easy either.
And yet like mules, the men descend the mountain gingerly, carrying heavy sacks of stones on their shoulders.
That this is a hazardous area to work is not without doubt.
Not too long ago, a huge mass of earth collapsed into a pit, luckily everyone had cleared the area before it detached.
But the mountain does keep a dark history.
It is said that once before independence, more than 10 people got buried alive in a gold pit.
Back at the base of the mountain I meet Rachel Mwanza and Elizabeth Ngulube, two women making an income by selling to the miners.
Rachel sells buns, while Elizabeth sells kachasu – a potent home-made spirit.
“There is good business here because there are more people here than in my village,” says Rachel.
Elizabeth says a 20-litre container of kachasu only lasts a day. She makes about K300. She has been selling here since 2017
There is even an open air butchery where one can buy a piece of fresh meat for as little as K2.
But for others like Joan, the hardship that living on the mountain presents is too much to bear. She is wreathing and crying as she sits in the back of a pick-up back to town. She underwent an operation two years ago and now the harshness of life here has reignited the pain.
When I ask her if she would be returning, she simply wags her head.
Recently, Government announced that all the districts in Eastern Province have gold deposits.

But in his address to the nation two weeks ago, President Edgar Lungu said it was regrettable that the discovery of gold and other precious minerals has resulted in “unlicenced mining, unsafe mining practices where people have been buried alive and criminal activities while scrambling of this precious mineral.” 

He said Government has declared gold a strategic resource and established the ZCCM Gold Company Limited to spearhead and manage the gold mining value chain in a formal and structured manner.
“This measure will ensure that, we exploit this natural resource in a sustainable manner and transform our country’s economic fortunes,” he said.