Golden Dreams
KB Mpofu
6 October to 10 November 2022
Zimbabwe's Inflation rate accelerated to 280% in September 2022 amid general increases across categories of goods and services, especially food. Droughts have led to failed harvests and Zimbabwe, once a net exporter of food and known as the "bread basket of Africa" has been importing grain from Ukraine
Zimbabwe is a mineral and resource rich country in which the politics of extraction have played a pivotal role in the failure of successive governments to provide for its people. The gold in its ground has sustained Zimbabweans for countless generations, dating back long before colonial times, when it was used to pay tributes to kings and to barter with traders along the east coast of Africa. Today, it continues to sustain Zimbabweans who exchange it for their more mundane every day needs
The country's currency has continued to plunge even after Zimbabwe's central bank launched gold coins this year as legal tender in an effort to stabilise the economy. KB Mpofu’s photographs of unofficial, small-scale gold miners in Zimbabwe show us the logical human reaction to a crisis of this scale. KB Mpofu’s photographs of “Mokorokoza” (artisan gold panners) in Zimbabwe were taken between 2019 and 2020. In 2022 Zimbabwe’s central bank launched gold coins as legal tender in an effort to stabilise the economy. In March 2023 the news organisation Al Jazeera began broadcasting a documentary about an extensive and lucrative gold smuggling operation implicating the highest levels of Zimbabwean government and its religious leaders. Later this year, President Ed Mnangagwa faces a general election and there are reports that religious groups, church groups and pastors around the country and in the diaspora have been enlisted in his re-election campaign.
The photographs, taken in temporary villages built up around abandoned gold mining sites around Zimbabwe, show the effects of some of the country’s most pressing economic and political issues and the logical human reaction to crises of this scale. Time seems to have stopped here. The earth is dry, the pits and mineshafts barren. The miners use rudimentary and re-purposed equipment and the only signs of modernity are their battery operated headlamps. The symbol of the cross appears as a looming premonition of the coming alliance between church and state - an allusion to these sites as places of pilgrimage for people who have come from all over the country in the hope of finding salvation in the ground.
Dreams of treasure mean different things to different people. Here, the dreams are those of people for whom treasure, even in its ultimate form – gold, means nothing less than the next day’s meal, their own survival and the survival of their families. From all walks of life and from all over the country they come to these abandoned pits and defunct mine shafts, commuting by bus, taxi or bicycle with dreams of finding treasure in twenty-metre deep holes in the dirt.
Mpofu’s choice to shoot in black and white adds a quality of timelessness: “I have always loved black and white photography for its sense of longevity. Small scale gold mining has been around long before colonisation. The miners sold their goods to Portuguese traders on the coast of Mozambique or used it to pay tribute to their kings.”
