The liquid metal, once famous for driving Victorian English hatters and mirror makers mad, is used the world over by small-scale miners to pinpoint and isolate gold. It is spread in the mud and mixes with flecks of gold to create an amalgam that is then set aside and burned. Gold is left behind, while the mercury vapours are left to leach into the environment.
Zimbabwe’s Environmental Management Agency has warned it has no methods of cleaning up mercury from the environment.
Mr Makoni said children in the area were abandoning school to join the lucrative but dangerous gold rush. He said that on one afternoon in March this year, he saw two young miners brazenly digging for gold just behind a small church in the area.
“The situation is becoming so dire. And we don’t even know what to do,” he said.
The history of gold mining in Penhalonga dates back more than a century. Over that time, different companies have come and gone and today mining is dominated by small time prospectors who operate illegally. And mercury, they say, is their lifeblood.
“In gold mining, mercury is everything. We use it to extract the gold. But we are not handling it carelessly; mercury is very expensive here. We try to be careful,” said Lovemore Chikuni, a miner in the Penhalonga area.