ALL THAT GLITTERS: ILLEGAL GOLD MINING IN GHANA Chapter Two–Laying the groundwork
After South Africa, Ghana is the second largest gold producer in Africa, and over the last eight to nine years, thousands of people from China have streamed into Ghana, once famously known as the Gold Coast, in search of that yellow, glittery metal that human beings appear to go universally crazy over. Some estimate that Ghana has at least 1.75 billion ounces of gold in reserves. Many of the Chinese pouring into Ghana came from a particular area of their nation called Guangxi Province in Shanglin County, where an age-old tradition of gold mining exists and where local gold resources have dried up. Although Shanglin’s miners went looking for other gold-rich areas of China, e.g. Xinjiang and other provinces, the government came down hard on unscrupulous mining, and private operations were banned. Seeking other sources of gold outside China, the miners focused on Ghana’s rich resources, and behold, a mass exodus from China was born.
But Ghanaian law prohibits small-scale mining by non-citizens. For that reason alone, not to mention overstayed visas, the Chinese miners in Ghana have been engaged in illegal activity. The Guardian UK takes credit for bringing the story of massive illegal Chinese mining in Ghana to the forefront, revealing the appalling pits inflicted on the landscape in an accompanying video featuring Afua Hirsch. Other accounts emerged of Chinese miners being ambushed by Ghanaian armed robbers looking for cash and gold, Chinese miners using pump-action shotguns for protection, and at least two murders involving a Chinese man and a Ghanaian police officer.
Beginning May 2013, the Ghana government, via the military and special forces, launched a crackdown on the Chinese illegal immigrants and their operations. The picture was not pretty. Their cash and equipment were confiscated or looted, excavators and other machines were set alight, and the Chinese illegals were roughed up quite a bit and unceremoniously ejected from their mining camps and ultimately the country. In early June, 169 of them were arrested or detained. Ultimately the Chinese deportations from Ghana numbered in the thousands.
My Inspector Darko Dawson novels take social and/or economic issues in Ghana and make them the background for a murder or two (or three). This “gold-backed” turmoil in Ghana is tailor-made for Darko (and for me): conflict, social upheaval, greed, the search for riches in the midst of poverty, strong murder motives, and unlike the backdrop of prior novels Wife of the Gods and Children of the Street, real instances of distressing homicide. Having decided on that topic for the fourth Darko Dawson novel, Gold of the Fathers (tentative title), off I happily go to Ghana to research it, right? Well, not quite that simple. Before making a final determination about the trip, I had to research how I was going to do the research. It was important to make the right contacts–particularly with law enforcement, which was intimately involved with the Chinese debacle. Before I left for Ghana, I reached out to a good friend of mine at Accra’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID), a division of the Ghana Police Service (GPS).
He pointed me in the right direction: I needed to get in touch with the director of GPS Public Affairs. I arrived in Accra early September and wasted no time in seeking him out. He gave me permission to visit with and talk to the crime officer in Obuasi, the mining town referred to in my last post.
NEXT: The pockmarked landscape–seeing the mines for myself.
