[This article makes sense. When I dealt with black Zimbabweans more than a year ago, I heard them talking about staking claims for Gold. I did not realise it was such a big thing.

Whites at least were able to create a renewable source of income, which they were improving and strengthening all the time. The blacks on the other hand, are digging up a one time resource which they no doubt sell for little profit… and which will eventually run out. The average life time of a Gold mine in South Africa, for example is 75 years… Whereas farming, apart from the fact that you’re feeding yourself… is a renewable form of industry which has many benefits. Now, farms are lying fallow… trees were cut down… Zimbabwe is slowly turning into a desert…

Isn’t it funny… the Whites made tons of forex for the country, fed the nation, employed the blacks… Now the blacks can’t farm… so they dig up what resources they can… Of course… eventually it will still run out… and then they’ll starve anyway… If AIDS doesn’t kill them first… Jan]

From The Financial Mail, 28 January
By Brendan Ryan

Displaced farm workers have founda new livelihood

In Brazil they would be known as garimpeiros but, in Zimbabwe, the hordes of gold miners wielding picks and shovels are called mkorakoza, a Shona word meaning “panner”. It’s estimated there are more than 1m of them countrywide and they produce in total between 400 kg and 600 kg of gold a month. That means the mkorakoza could account for between 25% and 37% of Zimbabwe’s gold output, which was 19,5 t for 2003, according to Gold Fields Mineral Services. Many have been driven into gold panning by Zimbabwe’s land grabs, which have forced hundreds of thousands of farm workers off farms. They can find no other way to make a living and, in inflation-racked Zimbabwe, gold mining pays a lot better than most unskilled occupations, even if there were jobs available. A panner can recover around 2 g of gold a day, from which he will make about Z$140 000 (about R140). That’s what a Zimbabwean farm labourer makes in a month. The result is a 19th-century-style gold rush as the mkorakoza flood – legally and illegally – on to farms in Zimbabwe’s various gold belts. Zimbabwe has extensive gold-bearing zones but the reefs are narrow, geologically complex and erratic in grade, making standard commercial mining operations generally unviable.

The mkorakoza live in tents and “bivvies” made of plastic sheeting or hessian sacks, right next to their mine workings. They get their supplies from – and let their hair down in – shanty towns in the bush near the workings. Apart from the harsh working and living conditions, many risk long-term health problems because they use mercury to form the gold they recover into a crude amalgam for smelting. They are also using technology that dates back to 1886, when gold mining first started on the Witwatersrand. The mkorakoza get their ore crushed by stamp mills. There’s still one stamp mill in Johannesburg. It’s a national monument on a plinth outside the Chamber of Mines building in Hollard Street. Yet these mills are now being made to order by small engineering firms in Zimbabwe. Stamp mills were replaced in the early 1900s by the vastly more efficient ball mills, which are, with significant enhancements, still standard technology in modern gold recovery plants. According to the Zimbabwean operator who showed me around his property on condition of anonymity, stamp mills “are a son of a bitch to maintain because they vibrate like hell. One worker is dedicated full-time to constantly tightening every nut in sight and knocking bits of metal back into the frame that are being shaken out of it.”

The mkorakoza refuse to use ball mills. They prefer stamp mills because they can watch their ore being treated. One miner says: “There’s a mukiwa [Shona for white man] in the ball mill stealing our gold.” In a way he’s right, because some gold is lost as fine particles get trapped in the cracks between the liners of a ball mill. The trapped gold is recovered through clean-up operations when the liners wear down and have to be replaced, which happens every few months. The mkorakoza cannot afford to buy their own stamp mill. These are often owned by the holder of the mining permit for the area being exploited. Frequently, that’s a white farmer who has been kicked off his land and has also turned to gold mining to survive. The mkorakoza brings his ore, usually a ton at a time, to be crushed. He then takes the recovered gold-bearing fraction of the ore and concentrates it further through several stages of panning to isolate the heavier gold particles from the lighter waste material.

With high-grade ore it’s at this stage that the gold becomes visible as a yellow “tail” in the bottom of the pan, standing out against the dark grey of the remaining dense material. The gold-bearing concentrate is then formed into an amalgam using mercury and crudely smelted to produce a form of “sponge gold”, which the mkorakoza sells to Fidelity Printers & Refiners, which buys it on behalf of government. The operator makes his money in two ways. He charges a fee for toll-milling the ore and providing basic services such as a tractor and trailer to haul ore from the workings to the stamp mill. The stamp mill recovers only the coarse gold fraction in the ore. The fine gold fraction is carried through the process by the flow of water but is then trapped in a small slimes dam. That fraction belongs to the operator, who recovers it using the same cyanide process that most modern gold mines use. Depending on grade and geological properties, the mkorakoza recovers 50%-80% of the gold that was contained in his ore. The cyanide tailings treatment process typically yields between 1 g/t and 2 g/t for the operator.

Source: WWW.ZwNews.Com