Sudanese Awadiya Ahmed suspects that a pile of mining tailings near her home in a remote village in northern Sudan was behind the birth of Talb, her youngest child, blind and paralyzed.
In recent years, an increasing number of miners flocked to the village of Bant in the Nile River State, north of Khartoum, in which Ahmed lives, in search of gold, making the village a site to dispose of their waste laden with toxic chemicals such as mercury, which is used to extract gold.
“His four siblings were born in good health, but only Taleb was born after the spread of the karta (gold-mining waste),” said Ahmed, whose baby, Talb, was lying beside her, unable to move.
The national or traditional gold mining sector is spread in most parts of Sudan, and employs more than two million people who produce about 80 percent of the total amount of gold extracted in the country. The secession of oil-rich South Sudan from Sudan contributed to the spread and prosperity of traditional mining, especially in light of the Sudanese suffering from difficult economic conditions and international sanctions under the rule of ousted President Omar al-Bashir, who was overthrown by the army in April 2019 following massive popular protests.
Chemical pollution from gold mining poses health risks to mining communities and those residing near places where mining is active.
According to the World Health Organization, exposure to mercury poses a threat to the nervous, digestive and immune systems of humans, and may be fatal. However, mining is a source of quick profit and attracts a large number of people suffering from difficult living conditions in one of the poorest countries in the world. In Bant, a village with a population of about eight thousand people, many villagers, including Ahmed, noticed the emergence of many cases of newborn deformities and abortions of women after the spread of mining activity.
In a house next to Ahmed’s house, Awad Ali, carrying his 8-year-old daughter, said, “Nafisa (his daughter) was born very naturally and slept normally, and when she was three, she became unable to move or speak.” For his part, Al-Jaali Abdel Aziz, a community activist in the village of Bant, said, “Five years ago, with the spread of the disease, deformed births and abortions began to appear,” noting that in the year 22 deformed children were born.
Leave farming for gold
A report issued in January by a group of Sudanese researchers showed that about 450 thousand tons of gold mining tailings filled with mercury are spread in the area in the Nile River State.
Samples of blood, urine, drinking water, and soil in several parts of the state showed high levels of mercury traces, according to the report. The Sudanese researcher in the field of environment, Saleh Ali, stressed that getting rid of this waste needs “specialists and specific treatment, and this should be done away from places of residence and water sources.”
In Bant, desperate miners are often seen trying to extract the precious metal from the heaps of karat, hoping to ease the pressure on their families as a result of the political and economic turmoil in Sudan.
The military coup carried out by the commander of the Sudanese army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, on October 25, deepened the economic crisis in the country, especially after the international community suspended some financial aid to the country, which is witnessing a sharp rise in the rate of inflation accompanied by a crisis in the availability of foreign exchange.
At a mining site, about 50 kilometers from the village of Bant, Muhammad Issa was mixing mercury with sand in a large metal bowl, hoping to separate the gold from other metals. Issa said he left agriculture and herding in North Kordofan state in the center of the country in search of the yellow metal.
“That’s how people do it here,” added the 25-year-old, holding his bare hands, a mercury-filled mixture.
‘Destruction of the environment’
In 2019, the transitional government of Sudan, which was dissolved by the military coup, issued a decision banning the use of mercury after protests against its use in gold mines in the Kordofan region. But the decision was only implemented in a limited way, and the miners continued to carry out their activities in isolated, remote areas, according to a professor at Sudan’s Nilein University, Saleh Ali Saleh. The state company that oversees mining activities in Sudan declined to comment.
Sudan is one of the largest producers of gold in the African continent, as its production reached 30.3 tons of gold in the first half of 2021 alone, according to official statistics. Gold revenues for the treasury of the Government of Sudan amounted to 720 million dollars during the first quarter of 2022, according to the foreign trade report issued by the Central Bank of Sudan. With the activity still booming, Saleh expressed concern about the health and environmental impacts of conventional mining.
“Traditional mining has destroyed the environment in various regions of Sudan, even the desert, with the physical damage caused by the deep pits left by the miners,” he told AFP. “It is difficult to control this activity and now traditional miners have moved from using primitive methods to heavy machinery,” he added.