In a country at war, where hunger is driving young men underground, artisanal shafts are caving in one after another.
The tunnels began to give way on Saturday, September 19, at a gold mine in northern Sudan, close to the Egyptian border. All night, miners dug through the rubble with bare hands and little else. By Sunday morning the toll was in: at least ten dead and twenty-one injured pulled from the shafts. According to Arab News, the site lies in the Awny area.
The information comes from two survivors who spoke to AFP without giving their names, fearing for their safety. One of them stresses a detail that says a great deal: rescue work is being carried out by the miners themselves, with almost no equipment. The cause of the collapse is unknown, and the authorities had not commented at the time of reporting.
A few days earlier, West Kordofan had suffered an even deadlier disaster. At the al-Zaraa site near al-Nuhud, shafts dug almost side by side dragged one another down. Counts range from at least 70 confirmed dead to 82 according to sources within the Rapid Support Forces, which control the region, with some fifty wounded and people still trapped underground. One survivor said the shafts were packed so tightly that each one brought down its neighbor. The Sudan Doctors Network spoke of negligence and a total absence of basic safety rules.
Two accidents in seven days are not a matter of bad luck. Sudan is Africa’s leading gold producer, but most of the metal comes from informal workings that employ more than two million people, armed with picks and patience, with no shoring and no inspection. The war between the army and the RSF, which began in April 2023, did the rest: close to 20 million Sudanese face acute food insecurity, and gold remains one of the few wages within reach. Men go down because the surface no longer offers them anything.