Cabo Delgado: Artisanal Miners, Local Communities Left High and Dry

📅 Published: August 26, 2025

Curated by AllZimNews.com

This stands in stark contrast to commercial concessions, including, according to the Ministry, “currently fourteen companies with mining contracts to exploit various resources, 90 companies who are carrying out prospecting activities, and 45 companies with exploration licenses, of which nine are in the production phase. ”
Recent land grabs from two artisanal mining associations by yet another powerful coalition between mining companies and a government-linked entity indicate that any assistance to artisanal miners may still be a long way off.

One afternoon, in a village yard in ruby-rich Namanhumbir, a spread-out village of about 6,000 inhabitants close to the capital Montepuez in Cabo Delgado, three men reminisce about their scars. 39-year-old Júlio César Machava, short and thin, says that, up to 2014, he wasn’t an artisanal miner – garimpeiro, they say here – but a food and drinks seller.

He had been providing cooldrinks, beer and cooked food to fellow villagers who were digging for rubies in the area, when, on a certain fateful day in that year, security men working for MRM Gemfields (headed in Mozambique by prominent governing Frelimo party member Raimundo Pachinuapa) destroyed his stall.

The act was part of a full-blown attack on the garimpeiros who, according to the mining company, were intruding on MRM Gemfields mining concession land.

The attackers didn’t distinguish between garimpeiros and others, says Machava.

The nacatanas – machetes, their nickname – also raped his wife. “I had come back from buying merchandise when on the road I heard there were problems in the area.

I dropped my food stuffs, and carefully approached my stall.

Then I saw nacatanas raping my wife.

As I was thinking about what to do, I was grabbed and beaten too.

They burned my stall, my merchandise, my generator, speakers, DVDs, pots and cake tins.

I became an artisanal miner that day.

Ever since I have prospected for rubies in Macaria, for aquamarine, and tourmalines in Ocua de Ouro. ”
Jacinto Armando Baquite (31), from the same village, doesn’t know exactly when he became a garimpeiro, but he has been one for as long as he was old enough to work; his strong and tall appearance fits someone digging deep holes in tough, dry land all day long. “There was never any other job.

And you don’t need experience to do it, you just need to take the risks.

Nacatanas and police, detention, or getting buried in the pits when they cave, landslides, diseases. ”
A third man in the yard, Isidro Luciano Cemente (31), saw his friend, one of four with whom he started out as a garimpeiro, killed by nacatanas who had captured the four. “I was tortured, they tied me to a tree and beat me.

My left arm was badly broken.