Across Sudan’s vast expanses, artisanal miners toil relentlessly in search of gold-bearing veins. Their labour drives them into suffocating depths and twisting tunnels where even stale air struggles to reach. In the darkness, a sudden glimmer of light or a fleeting breath of air may feel like salvation—yet all too often, they are omens of disaster. That thin draft whispering through fractured rock is no miracle but a death knell, signalling the imminent collapse of a shaft. In an instant, the mine becomes a mass grave for dozens of workers—sometimes as many as fifty at once, as in the June 2024 tragedy at the Al-Hiwaid mine on the outskirts of Haya in eastern Sudan.
Overlapping claims often trigger fatal cave-ins — the state may authorise a single site for multiple investors, leaving miners vulnerable to both physical and legal collapse.
Miner Mohammed Abdalla
“Such disasters happen when shafts intersect, explained miner Mohammed Abdalla, who works in Sudan’s eastern desert.
When two teams unknowingly dig from opposite ends, the clash rarely comes with fists; rock and sand collapse before words are ever exchanged. Underground boundaries are not marked by maps or fences but dictated by the stubborn presence of gold.
Abdalla, a shaft owner near Haya, told Atar that overlapping claims often trigger fatal cave-ins. The state may authorise a single site for multiple investors, leaving miners vulnerable to both physical and legal collapse. Beyond bureaucratic overlap, other causes abound: neglect of occupational safety standards, lack of resources for protective measures, absence of training, unstable geology, and unsafe extraction methods. Each accelerates the miner’s descent into danger.
The question of land
Native administrations lease mining parcels on the state’s behalf, but in eastern Sudan leaders insist the land belongs to them outright.
By mandate, the Sudanese Mineral Resources Company claims to uphold occupational safety standards. But its oversight ends at the gates of the gold markets. Artisanal mining remains a free-for-all in which the state collects revenue without assuming responsibility. Shaft permits are not issued by government ministries but by native administrations, who claim ancestral ownership of land. This stands in direct contradiction to Sudanese land laws (1970, 1984, 1994), which assert state ownership of highland berms, alluvial plains, and lands beyond private holdings.
In practice, however, native administrations lease mining parcels to small-scale diggers on the state’s behalf. When large-scale foreign companies are involved, the state enforces its will through law, and, at times, through force. Communities have been violently evicted, as in the As-Sulaimaniya dispute with a Russian mining company in northern Sudan. Elsewhere, deals have been struck between locals and companies under state supervision. In eastern Sudan, however, native leaders insist the land belongs to them outright, not merely by state delegation.
Chief Mohamed Ali Ibrahim of the Amrar tribe in Turtayib, River Atbara, told Atar that they hold deeds dating back to 2007, recognised by Haya locality authorities. He described a revenue-sharing model in which landowners receive 25 per cent, investors 25 per cent, and workers 50 per cent, with localities taxing ventures arbitrarily but offering little in return. The government’s involvement rarely extends beyond stamping partnership contracts.
This lax oversight has left 80 per cent of Sudan’s gold production, driven by artisanal mining, outside formal regulation, despite Sudan’s ratification of the 1981 ILO Convention on Occupational Safety and Health. In theory, Sudanese labour law reflects the convention’s provisions. In practice, artisanal miners operate in a legal vacuum, beyond the reach of the Ministry of Labour, workplace inspectors, or labour courts.
From farming to the pits
Shaft allocations vary by region, custom, and negotiation.
In Wadi al-Allaqi, near the Egyptian border in Red Sea State, mine owner Hubb-al-Din Hamid told Atar that miners often arrive from distant agricultural states: Al-Jazirah, Al-Gadarif, Kordofan, Darfur, abandoning farming to pursue gold. Small groups of nine or ten workers labour in ten-day rotations, hammering rock with chisels or hiring mechanical diggers. Output is divided: digger owners take 25 per cent, shaft owners 25 per cent, and workers the remainder. Most agreements are oral, upheld by custom rather than written contracts.
Stones are transported to souq al-tawahin (grinding markets), such as Al-Matar and Al-Ansari in Wadi al-Allaqi. Sometimes miners strike out into the wilderness, discover new shafts, and only afterwards secure receipts from local authorities. Crucially, these receipts bypass Form 15, the standard federal tax form, meaning state revenue collection begins only when ore reaches official markets. The Sudanese Mineral Resources Company’s role is confined to taxing stone at those points of sale.
Workers without a union
Contracts are oral, enforcement nonexistent, and the Ministry of Labour is absent.
– Mahjoub Kanari, unionist
“Contracts are oral, enforcement nonexistent, and the Ministry of Labour is absent,” said veteran trade unionist and labour rights advocate Mahjoub Kanari, who has worked with miners in Haya.
“Workers endure harsh natural conditions without protection. They cannot form unions, though their demands: improved work environments, industrial safety standards, wage regulation, medical services, are legitimate.”
Kanari has called for grassroots organisation through worker representatives and volunteers, gathering data and pushing for a dedicated miners’ union. Without such protections, miners remain exposed to lethal risks: no safety equipment, no rescue teams, scarce air pumps.
Between 2019 and 2025, Sudanese media documented numerous collapses across the country, leaving scores entombed underground, their bodies unrecovered.
In February 2019, a collapse in Al-Gadarif killed 13. In South Darfur, eight artisanal miners died in a shaft in Agbash. In 2021, two miners perished in Um Gujja, South Kordofan, after a collapse. At the time, the Sudanese Mineral Resources Company denied reports that more than 20 young men were trapped under the rubble.
In 2022, a cave-in at Sabeeha mine, Red Sea State, claimed 11 lives. Each tragedy underscores a grim truth: Sudan’s gold boom is built on unmarked graves.
