We left the tarred highway just past the outskirts of Bulawayo and headed towards Fort Rixon. It was a trip that seemed short on the map—just about 50 kilometres—but as the road narrowed into thick bushland and the occasional dust trail, we soon found ourselves swallowed by silence.
By Rudairo Mapuranga
For long stretches, there were no houses, no shops, no signs of community. The only notable structure we passed was a small police station, standing solitary in the middle of nowhere, like a checkpoint to forgotten potential.
I wasn’t there on official business, just tagging along with colleagues to check out a mining project in the area. But what I saw has stayed with me. It challenged something deep within me as a Zimbabwean who writes about mining every day but rarely steps into spaces like these.
In that forest, in what many might dismiss as “the middle of nowhere,” the ground is alive. Hidden among the trees was a busy, developing mine site. There were about seven Chinese nationals and a similar number of Zimbabweans on-site. From what I could see, this wasn’t your typical makeshift makorokoza operation—it was organised and structured. A decline shaft was being constructed. Rails were being laid. It was clear: this was a serious investment. Real money was going to be made.
And yet, as we stood there, watching this hive of activity, a disturbing thought crept into my mind: does anyone in government know what’s happening here? Do the mining inspectors come out this far? Do they even have the means to reach this place where roads demand off-road vehicles and where cellphone networks barely exist? And more importantly—who owns this?
This isn’t a story about illegal mining. It’s not even about corruption in the conventional sense. It’s about our absence. It’s about how, as Zimbabweans, we are not where we should be. We sit in Harare, in Gweru, in Mutare, in Bulawayo, comfortable in our city offices, scrolling through headlines about gold smuggling and illicit financial flows. We complain about the lack of opportunity. We say we’re being sidelined. But here, in the bush—where the real work is being done—we are ghosts.
We’ve left our forests to the Chinese and the makorokoza.
These forests—once dismissed as wilderness—are now hubs of opportunity. The Chinese are living there. The makorokoza have built lives there. They wake up every day and work with purpose. And meanwhile, we’ve convinced ourselves the money isn’t there. We say mining is for the well-connected. We say we can’t do it because we didn’t go to school for it. But the truth is, we don’t even try.
What struck me most wasn’t the sight of the rough-looking Chinese and Zimbabwean miners. It was the silence. The complete lack of a “presence” in any structured, sustainable way. Where are the young Zimbabwean entrepreneurs? Where are the geologists, the small-scale license holders, and the community cooperatives? Where are we in our own forests?
We need to change the narrative. We need to stop waiting for capital injections from overseas, for government schemes that never come, for donor-funded programs that benefit everyone except us. The wealth is there—right under our feet. The difference is that some are willing to live in tents, to endure the heat, to take the risk, while the rest of us only see forests and danger.
We speak often about the value chain, about formalising the sector, about beneficiation and exports. But what value chain are we part of if we are not present at the source? What beneficiation are we doing when we don’t even own the pickaxe?
Our children should be learning not just chemistry and economics, but geology and shaft development. We need to teach them that wealth isn’t in stock markets alone—it can also come from mastering what lies beneath our forests. We should be introducing them to the tools of extraction, to the economics of processing, to the ownership of resources. Instead, we teach them to wait for opportunities in the city.
The road to Fort Rixon is not paved. It will punish your car. It will make you question whether anything worthwhile could lie beyond the next turn. But in that roughness is something pure. Something unclaimed. Something deeply Zimbabwean.
And it’s being taken, quietly.
By people who saw the forest not as a barrier, but as a beginning.
So let us stop blaming those who go there. Let us stop calling them invaders when we have chosen to be absent. Let us find our way back—not in anger, but in conviction.
Because what we think is missing in our economy is not actually gone. It’s waiting for us. In the bush.
