By Tendai Marima
Published On 17 Oct 2023
17 Oct 2023
The search team also retrieved six corpses and several decomposing body parts of people yet to be identified. Trymore Gavaza, 39, one of the rescuers, helped recover the body of his brother, 28-year-old Tawanda, who was trapped amid big stones.
That has given Gavaza a bit of solace but he is doubtful that the rescue mission will continue, given what he says is a lack of support from the government.
“The politicians came here and made a lot of promises, but no real equipment was given to help and if the rainy season starts soon nobody will go down,” he explained.
He recalls going down the 250-metre hole and walking more than a kilometre through an underground shaft. It was a nearly two-hour trek, squeezing through crevices of fallen rock just to get to the point where several bodies lay. Five days later they found the body of a man they think is Thomas Pasi, Gavaza’s cousin.
“I’m thankful the other guys found Thomas. Even though the body isn’t the person we knew, the teeth and the hair told me it’s him, I know it’s him,” he said. “We tried to remove other miners, but the dead were trapped just staring at us with their eyes open.”
Gavaza had left life as a chikorokoza to start his own grocery shop in the village with his brother, he said. Tawanda had built a shop with the help of their uncle, close to roof level. But to make some quick cash to finance the final building stage of his shop, Tawanda took one last trip to Bay Horse Mine. It was his final journey.
At the mine gates, Mucheni is milling around, uncertain of whether to stay there or head home with the grim acceptance that she may never see her sons or their bodies, dead or alive.
“If God could just take me, [if] I could die like my sons then it would be better,” she told Al Jazeera. “I have already lost so much, my husband died a long time ago and now I have lost both my children, I can’t go on,” she cries.
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