You are sitting on a gold mine.

Sitting on a gold mine

I have heard this said many times over in the years that I have enjoyed working, with many others, at the House of Fun ~ that is Zimbabalooba.

After all this time I have finally come to actually experience what it is to be sitting on a gold mine, in real life, rather than in the imagination of others

It is hot and dusty and that's just for starters!

The gold mine is in a place called Makaha. There is nothing in Makaha that would tempt anyone to live there , except gold. And gold there is. The saying here is " Mari iri pasi ". Money is in the ground. It is also in the dust. l have just met some woman sweeping the road, and panning the dust they collect, in the hope of finding some gold in the dust. The fact that they are doing it tells me they must have had some success.

There is no shortage of dust. There are huge mine dumps arising around the chinese mining operations; where they are taking down whole hills to process out the gold that is in them. A man who drives one of the 40 ton ore trucks, that are accomplishing this task, told me the chinese mining operation sends tons of gold to Harare on a monthly basis.

Another gold saying I remember from the Westerns of my youth is " There's gold in them there hills ". Here in Makaha them hills are coming down while the dumps are going up.

These dumps are all around us, the hills that have stood for thousands of years are being dismantled and turned into smaller dump hills with no vegetation to cover them. More dust; gold-less dust. Last night I watched a blood-red full moon rise over the errie glow of the chinese mine that runs all night.

The chinese mining areas are fenced off. What used to be communal land, where people ekked out a living with their goats and small farms, was given to this massive mining operation by order of the government. On the other side of the fence homestead owners are digging up their fields determined to find the gold that is " pasi"; underground. Finding the bands of ore, known here as belts, is the secret to having a new house and a car; where a hut now stands.

This is truely the wild west. The horses have been replaced by motorbikes and admittedly there are no gun fights in these dusty streets but knife fights are frequent. The motor bikes are an intriguing story. They are all chinese and come from an assembly plant across the border in Mozambique. The parts are shipped from China to a convenient spot in rurual Mozambique, close to the Zimbabwean border. Once assembled they are extremely mobile and there are numerous trails that a rider can take with his new bike into Zimbabwe.

Once in Zimbabwe the bike can be sold to makorokoros, artisanal miners, who are earning dollars by going into the earth and digging out those belts of gold ore. Every successful makorokoro in Makaha is riding one of these Zongshens or Ricos . They can accessorise with LED lights and a beat box so that they can be seen and heard as they cruise down the dusty roads after a shift in the tunnels that have been carved out under this dry and barren place.

Ironically, while above ground it is all thorn scrub and dry as a bone, twenty metres into the earth there is lots of water, too much for a gold mine. So the first step is to pump out the water and keep it out. That's how I came to be in Makaha. I am an investor. My good friend Green who is also the artist's hand behind most of the Zimbabalooba print designs is Mozambican and has an association with gold going back to his origins in a place called Tete, a town on the Zambezi river. There is gold in them there hills around Tete, too.

Zooming out a little to the general mining landscape in Zimbabwe, there is a massive boom in mining and particularily gold mining. Where it used to be monopolistic and heavily restricted to government and friends, it is now open season. One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is the 2030 deadline by which time the powers that be have promised to kick the habit of the US dollar. The ZIG is the new Zimbabwe currency and the latest attempt to grow up and have our own money, instead of using old Uncle Sam's. The G in ZIG stands for Gold and when it was launched recently the Reserve Bank announced that it was backed by 2 tons of gold. Strangely, one of these tons was safely stashed in a secret location somewhere other than Zimbabwe, or so the public was informed.

Back to the 2030 deadline the ZIG needs some more gold behind it and there is plenty of that in the ground. So the goverment has done a 180 degree turn allowing unofficially a national digging competion to see how much gold we can find before 2030.

In 2025, 46 tons of gold was dug out of the ground, that was 10 tons more than 2024 and all of that increase came from small scale or artisanal mining. That's what our team are doing here. Makorokozas or gwedzas are informal miners, artisinal is certainly not what they would call themselves, but the government has warmed to that term. No former experience is required just get started and learn by your mistakes if you survive long enough. A head lamp is the only essential piece of equipment. No helmet, no overalls, no boots, into the hole in the ground they go. In our case the hole becomes a shaft descending 20 metres into the earth until it hits a belt of ore and that becomes a tunnel that follows the belt for 30 metres, on a gradual decent going ever deeper with each day of digging.

The tunnel is shored up with trees, not timber beams, but chopped up trees brought in from a forest near the Mozambican border. When a rock is encountered dyanamite is used to remove it and the tunnel continues following the ore belt, ever deeper. With the water as a constant presence a pump runs continuously keeping the tunnel from being submerged. At any time there is the chance of the tunnel collapsing and so the skills of the tunnel team in shoring up the earth are directly proportional to their own survival. Many young men are leaving the school room for the life of a miner where hard and dangerous work reaps relative wealth way beyond their peers.

These young men working on our shaft have come from Nyanga in the highlands, 150 km north east from here. They rode into town on their chinese motor bikes having covered that distance on dirt roads and tracks, across country that a car would not pass on.

Going back to that ten tons of gold, the ore that comes out of our mine may hold between 2 grams and 10 grams of gold per ton. The extraction process involves crushing the ore and flushinging the resulting " sand" with water. The water carries the lighter material away and leaves the gold on the carpet. There are better ways but this process is gold extraction 101. It is the common practice in the artisinal sector which is what we are discussing here. It gives a recovery rate of about 40 % meaning 60 % of the gold gets away. Let's say on average the yield is 40% of 5 grams which is generous. That is 2 grams per ton so how much earth is being moved by the mokorkozas of Zimbabwe to give up ten tons of gold in a year? Five million tones of ore. That is the amount of ore but to get to the ore one needs to dig out a lot earth and rocks.

Zimbabweans are an industrious bunch of people and they are digging up the country. Just think what the enviromental impact of all this digging might be. It is something I hadn't considered, at first, but now that I am sitting on a gold mine I am seeing things from a different perspective. The other problem is I personally am not making any money, so far, from this enterprise. Some of the other participants might be, and that is the truth of this story. You have to be sitting on a gold mine to make any money from it, or other people will.

In the second episode, I will tell you what I am doing about this. I can assure you it is not sitting on the gold mine; yesterday the temperature in Makakah was 39 degrees and there is no shade in Makakah. I have another plan and I am hoping it might work. Even if it is just to get the money back so that we can put it into the gold mine I am still sitting on!

~ Zimbabalooba ~