Masara women join men in search of gold

By NICK OLUOCH

To ordinary people, the heap of waste sand thrown away by miners after taking away the gold is just that – useless sand. But for the women in Masara mines in Migori County, it’s their livelihood.

The women wait patiently as the men get inside the mines, extract the ore, crush it and take away the traces of gold in it. When the men leave, they ‘descend’ on the ‘waste’ sand, crush it and run mercury over it, in the hope of finding little traces of the precious stone.

"This is how we earn our living," says Rose Aoko, one of the women in Masara mines.

Aoko says they hang around the mines where men are working and wait until they are through with the ore before swinging into action.

Every morning, Rose and other women drawn from the neighbouring villagers, leave their homes and accompany their husbands to the mines.

No trace

As the men enter the mines and start digging out the ores and crushing it, the women promptly take their place on the benches near the site and wait.

Sometimes to pass time, they draw water from the nearby rivers to be used in the gold separation process, a task, which earns them Sh100 a day.

As soon as the men are done, the women gather what is left over. Armed with hammers, they then crush the sand into fine form and pour mercury over it.

"You can call it scavenging, but we are actually able to feed our families with the proceeds we get here," Rose says, adding that it is a life they have come to get used to.

A walk across the mines in Masara and one encounters several small groups of women, busy crushing and cleaning the sandy waste.

A few metres from where Rose and her group are working, a group of four women are trying their luck on a big mound of sand thrown away by the miners almost a week ago.

The women are busy carting the sand to a wooden trough, which they use to clean it.

Water is repeatedly run over the sand with their eyes are firmly fixed on the trough to see if they will spot something. Eventually all the washed out but there’s no trace of gold. You can see the frustration in their faces.

Soon, they are at it again, collecting sand and repeating the process all over. After about three hours’ work, they spot a small trace of gold stuck on the mercury. They say it is worth about Sh1, 500, not much given that it will have to be divide among the eleven women who took part in the search, but it’s still something to take home at the end of a day’s work.

"On a good day we get up to Sh500, which is quiet a lot here," an elated Rose says showing me of a small round piece which she says might earn her up to six hundred shillings.

Good price

Unlike their male counterparts, the women cannot go into the mines meaning that they have to get creative if they are to gain from the gold, which is the only source of income in the semi arid area.

Women that cannot own land here and they have to rely on what the men do not need.

Then there is the issue of the one who controls the finance. Rose says that as soon as they have sold gold, most of the husbands disappear into major towns like Migori and Homa Bay and spend the entire money, therefore it’s important that the wife gets another source of income.

As soon as the women get gold, they walk directly to the gold dealer living within the village.

Mary Akinyi is a dealer who lives centrally within the mines. "We pay the miners on the spot, and go to the dealers in Migori and Nairobi," Mary says, adding they remove the traces of mercury to make it pure.

She declines to give out the rate she pays her customers, but says she pays a ‘good price’. Mary says, "There are a number of dealers so you must offer a good offer, but we also have to give a reasonable rate in order to make some profit." She describes the profit as ‘modest’.