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. Once a net exporter of food and known as the "bread basket of Africa", in recent years the country has been importing grain from Russia and Ukraine.

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 broadcast 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 his first general election since coming to power in 2017 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.

KB Mpofu’s photographs of “Mokorokoza” (artisan gold panners) in Zimbabwe were taken between 2019 and 2020 when the inflation rate in the country hit 838%.

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.”  

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 appears to have stopped here. The earth is sparse and the pits and mineshafts barren and dry. The equipment the miners use is rudimentary and re-purposed, the only signs of modern life are 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.