Uprooted

There is only one word to describe a ride into the splendour of the eastern jungles of Chimanimani in Manicaland Province – green. Yes; Green Like Me Garden, one might want to add – shades of Wallace ‘Winky D’ Chirumiko and his self-appointed ‘Di Big Man’ mantra. There is really no telling.

For the road network in Chimanimani is maze after labyrinthine maze of green wattle tree after tall green wattle tree. The road leading to the frontier town from Chipinge has enough wattle trees to make you wonder whether you are a wattle tree too. And yes, the sharp curves as the road meanders its way around the mountains are dangerous, with ravines plunging straight from the edge of the road and settling where the eye cannot see.

There are heart-stopping tales of vehicles straying off the lanes and flying into the deep, and – looking down at the dot that is the mangled remains of an unlucky commuter omnibus – somehow the knowledge that all the passengers made it out of their ordeal unscathed does not exactly sound like good news. There is this gnawing warning that wants you out of there right now; more so after having to stop and help some workers from Chimanimani Municipality who had lost control of their truck and careened off the road and into the river below. How they made it out with just a few scratches is anybody’s guess.

Having to navigate one’s way around the mountains is really nauseating. But then you look to the other side of the road; the mountain side, with its dizzying gum trees and, of course, wattle trees – whose heights stretch to the foot of the skies – lining up the way as if in tribute to passing transport. Wow – the terrain is really one for the cameras; even when you steal a look beyond the precipice, to the Chimanimani Mountains proper, which define the border with Mozambique – they look like a scene plucked out of The Lord of the Rings.

A coruscating waterfall cascades from 30m atop the mountain, most of it staying hidden behind the dense camouflage; banana fields punctuating the rolling wattle tree and gum tree epic – the drive from Chimanimani to Kurwaisimba near the border is one picturesque speech of sign language. The language of a green Zimbabwe.

Proceeding northwards past the shops at Kurwaisimba, the scenic music suddenly stops – and the bad news start.

It is while crossing over a bridge that warning signs start flashing; the water below is an ominous colour of red earth, evidence of serious land degradation going on somewhere upstream; and upstream is where we are going. The sudden transition is shocking – one moment there is green everywhere, and you can hardly see the way in front of you; the next you are standing on a stretch of scarred bare red land, with a network of rivulets going in all directions. A freshly uprooted wattle tree lies among endless dried stubs, like abandoned bones in a killing field. Mud-filled ditches are the punctuation marks on this sad plain, and if you are not careful, you will literally sink into oblivion. A mud-plastered young man – stripped to his last undergarment – saunters towards a muddy pool, which is supported by interwoven logs.

On this denuded patch, there is a lot of naked and half naked muddy flesh around, busying itself on the rich gold fields hidden out of the view of the naked eye, about 60km to the east of Chimanimani town.

Welcome to Mbare, the disorderly gold fields where most youth from the area around Kurwaisimba in Chimanimani and beyond spend their time and energy while looking for the golden fortune.

“Vanhu vauraya nyika ava,” remarked Sergeant Lewis Motsi, who is all too familiar with these surroundings which he used to patrol in recent years.

The gwejas (illegal gold miners) are so ruthless to the environment that they can even divert the normal course of a river and channel it towards wherever chitofu (gold ore) is offering rich rewards. And if the haphazard panning continues unabated in the area, there could be no more forest to talk about in the area surrounding Kurwaisimba Business Centre.

Police in Chipinge are pulling all the stops to stem the looming disaster, but; in the absence of reliable resources like the all-terrain arctic cat and enough manpower to keep the marauding gwejas from destroying the vegetation, they have very little, if any, say on the massacre of plant life in the greatly elevated heights of Mbare, Glen Call, Ross Commomn, Charles Wood and Tarkar.

“Our greatest disadvantage is that there is absolutely no place from which we can surprise the panning outlaws where they cannot espy us beforehand,” said Constable Maria Janhi of Changadzi Support Unit, who was on patrol at the Mbare gold fields when The Outpost visited the area recently.

“And when they see us they simply disappear in the forest, or climb further up the mountains until everyone grows tired of mountain climbing.”

Her colleague, Cst Lukias Mugovera of ZRP Chipinge Urban concurred, saying the only window of success is during the first days of deployment, before the coppers’ faces become an all too familiar threat around the fields of fortune.

“In the early days of deployment, we made several arrests because the panners could not tell the difference between us and their colleagues,” said Cst Mugovera.

“But as we carried more and more raids, we became recognisable, and arrests dropped drastically. Now, even when we cordon the area off for the whole day, they still come at night. You can hear them digging in the witch hours, and they leave at the break of dawn.”

They actually made a slogan about this cat and mouse game in the first days; the police officers would shout across the river at their enemies; “Gweja haulume nhasi (You won’t get anything today)!”

And the gweja would shout back in reply, “Officer, hamurare (You won’t sleep, officer)!”

But why won’t the cops not surprise the diggers at night then?

“These people know their places so well,” replied Cst Janhi. “And we don’t. The latent danger will be in us falling in the muddy ditches they dig and then abandon, after filling them with soft mud. A person could disappear altogether if he falls into such pits. Most of them are very deep.”

Besides, when the land degraders feel the heat, they flee to the most inaccessible parts beyond the Chimanimani Mountains, called Musanditevera – literally translating to Do Not Follow Me – a place so named in tribute to the tragic deaths of some gold panners who died of starvation in the caves in which they were trapped by the Cyclone Eline rains of January 2000.

It is a small wonder then that the panners are highly suspicious of new faces prowling around ‘their’ premises; as was the case when this reporter tried to get their side at Glen Call – they all cowered at his approach before retreating and finally disappearing altogether, merging with the adjacent forest. One of them only stopped after noticing a flashing camera and shouted.

“Muri kuda kutitora mafoto chete here (Do you just want to take pictures of us)!”

I replied I wanted to talk to them.

“Ngatitaurei muri ikoko (You can talk from there)!” He perched himself on a dead tree trunk, ready to bolt if I so much as moved my hand in his direction.

The distance between us was a good 30 or so metres, but it had to suffice, for such is the suspicion on new faces around. Hardlife Majoka, as the panner said his name was, has been in the illegal gold mining business since 2004, and he said he could not imagine any other future for himself that was far from the dangers of gold panning.

“I don’t think I’m good at anything else,” the 24-year-old said. “After school, I tried formal employment in the surrounding farms, but the pay was so poor I couldn’t afford to sustain myself with it.

“So I came to the fields in 2004, and I have been here ever since.”

Majoka said they understood that what they were doing to the environment was criminal, but he argued that the youth in the area had no other means to eke a decent living.

Another panner who refused with his name said, in diverting the normal flow of water in a river, they would build a dam using rocks and tree trunks in the direction they wanted the water to flow. They even dig canals to harness the water gushing out of springs from the foot of the mountains; and they do this without a care whatsoever about what happens to the floral grandeur of River Rusitu’s catchment area.

At the police district headquarters in Chipinge, the district commander, Chief Superintendent Ndofandaedza Jaboon is clueless as to how to crack the gweja puzzle in Chimanimani, save for the company that currently hold the mining rights in the area to act.

“Or the responsible authorities could re-issue mining licences to the panners like they did in the past, with laid down rules that forbid them from butchering the forests.

“But as things stand, we can only heave a sigh when the gwejas hear that an opening has been found in the Chiadzwa diamond fields, or other such place where they flock en masse, temporarily giving us a reprieve.”

The courts are not helpful either, as they stand accused of offering negligible fines to gold mining offenders, or letting them go free altogether – and they return straight from the courthouse to the gold fields.

All the while, the forest keeps disappearing - the Musanditevera way.