Six illegal miners die in Mazowe shaft accident in Zimbabwe
Six illegal gold miners were killed and four others seriously injured after a hoist system malfunctioned at Mazowe Mine in Zimbabwe's Mashonaland Central Province, according to ZimEye. The report says the accident happened on July 18, 2025, when the workers were being brought to the surface from a disused shaft.
The source says the miners had entered the shaft the previous evening and were being lifted out with ore when the cable snapped, sending them about 45 meters down. That detail gives the incident a brutally specific shape: the failure occurred during extraction, not while the miners were entering the shaft or working at the bottom.
The injuries to the four survivors were severe, with the report describing fractures, deep cuts and bruising. Although the article does not name the injured miners or say which hospitals treated them, it makes clear that the accident was serious enough to leave them in urgent need of medical care.
Mazowe Mine has been inactive since 2018 and is now under Namib Minerals, according to the report. In its dormant state, the site's abandoned shafts have drawn illegal mining activity, which has repeatedly turned dangerous. That background helps explain why a hoist failure at the mine was so deadly: the infrastructure is old, enforcement has been weak and the environment is already hazardous before any mechanical failure occurs.
The report also notes that a court order issued in February 2024 required the removal of illegal miners from the site, but that enforcement has not been strong. It says a similar hoist failure in April had already killed three other miners. Those points suggest this was not an isolated accident but part of a longer pattern of deadly risk at the same mine.
Illegal mining often combines unstable ground, poor equipment, violence and a lack of formal safety oversight. In this case, the shaft and hoist system appear to have been central to the disaster. The article does not say who owned or operated the hoist, whether the miners were working in groups or whether there were any rescue attempts immediately after the cable snapped.
The report adds that Namib Minerals has warned about police inaction and says it plans to invest heavily in resuscitating operations at Mazowe, Redwing and Jumbo mines. That corporate future is secondary to the immediate story here, but it underlines the tension between abandoned mining assets and ongoing informal extraction.
The confirmed facts are stark: six dead, four badly injured, and a hoist failure at a disused shaft in Mazowe. The deeper story is the persistent danger of illegal mining at inactive sites where every ascent and descent can become fatal.
