Landslide at artisanal goldmine kills 100+ in Central African Republic

On Tuesday afternoon, the ground gave way beneath Zamboye, a small village in western Central African Republic, swallowing more than a hundred people in an instant. The collapse happened at an artisanal goldmine where men and women were working in underground tunnels when the earth simply failed. Footage circulating on social media captured the moment: a wall of sand descending on the miners, burying them where they stood. By Wednesday, when aid workers and local officials began accounting for the dead, the number had already exceeded one hundred.

Zamboye sits about fifty kilometers from Baboua, near the Cameroonian border, in a region where small-scale mining has become a desperate livelihood for thousands. The collapse itself was caused by the failure of several underground tunnels that miners had been excavating. A miner named Cedric Mbango, who was at the site, described it simply: the ground completely collapsed and buried people. He called it catastrophic. A local prosecutor's statement confirmed that many others remained trapped beneath the debris, though the full scope of the disaster was still unclear as rescue operations began.

Gervais Ganagoroh, a Red Cross volunteer coordinating relief efforts, told the Associated Press that more than one hundred bodies had already been recovered. A senior official from a local mining association confirmed the figure to Reuters. Authorities in Cameroon's Eastern region identified at least three of their own citizens among the dead, and the governor said his government was working closely with Central African counterparts to manage the aftermath. But the actual number of people who had been underground when the tunnels collapsed remained unknown, leaving rescuers uncertain whether they were searching for survivors or simply retrieving remains.

The retrieval operation itself presented a grim calculus. Heavy machinery—tractors and other equipment—was being deployed to move the massive volume of sand and earth that had collapsed. But using such machinery risked crushing anyone still alive beneath the weight. Bertrand Be Yangué, a member of the Zamboye youth council, acknowledged this terrible arithmetic when he said that finding survivors alive would be a miracle. He spoke of the miners as young men and women who had come to the mines hoping to save their families from despair, only to perish in the attempt. He warned that the death toll would almost certainly rise as the rescue effort continued.

Artisanal mining—small-scale, often informal extraction operations—is widespread across Africa, driven by unemployment and the absence of other economic opportunity. Despite regulations that technically criminalize such operations, they persist because they offer a way for able-bodied people to earn something from abandoned or unused mine sites. The work is dangerous. Safety standards are minimal or nonexistent. This year alone, Central African Republic had already recorded at least forty deaths from various mining incidents before Tuesday's collapse. The Zamboye disaster, then, was not an anomaly but an extreme expression of a chronic condition: the desperation that pushes people into unsafe work, and the indifference that allows those conditions to persist.