EnviroPress Reporter
For 18-year-old Thabo Ncube, the sound of machinery grinding at the reopened Sandawana Mine is the sound of a future. Every morning, as the July sun begins to warm the winter air, he joins the stream of men and women walking towards the mine gates.
He is one of the 1 200 locals who secured a job, his first, since Kuvimba Mining House (KMH) breathed life back into the dormant giant.
The US$56 million investment is not an abstract number to him; it’s the feel of real currency in his pocket, the ability to buy seed for his mother’s garden and to dream beyond the confines of his village.
He was at the stakeholder meeting on Sunday, standing near the back, listening intently. When Senator Chief Ngungumbane praised KMH for hiring locals, Thabo felt a surge of pride.
He saw the nods from the fifteen chiefs and felt the collective hope of the community. The promise of a tarred road to West Nicholson sounded like a direct path to a better world.
But later that evening, sitting by the fire with his grandfather, a different story emerged. His grandfather, whose own father had watched the first emeralds being pulled from this ground in the 1950s, was quiet.
“They spoke of moving people,” the old man said, poking the embers with a stick. “They call it ‘development-induced displacement.’ I call it being uprooted.”
He reminded Thabo of the stories from Marange, stories the Chief had bravely mentioned, of new houses built with poor workmanship that cracked and leaked.
“A new house is not a home if it doesn’t hold your memories,” his grandfather murmured. “They promise a solar plant and piped water. We have heard many promises before, carried away on the dust of the company trucks.”
Thabo looks out into the darkness. He can still hear the low hum from the mine. It is the sound of his opportunity, but it is also the sound that might one day force his family from the only land they have ever known.
For Thabo and the people of Mberengwa, the future is a fragile construction of hope and fear, built upon the heavy, lithium-rich soil of their ancestors.
