‘Forgotten and forsaken’, Marange’s displaced start trekking back home
THE curse of diamonds still trolls hundreds of families that were displaced from the Marange fields and resettled on Arda Transau, a desolate 12,000 hectare farm in Manicaland province. Government identified the farm for resettlement more than a decade ago after allocating vast swathes of relocatees’ ancestral land to several diamond miners.
Swamped by crippling poverty and despair, some of them have already disposed of their houses as they trek back to Marange and other places, investigations have revealed.
The numbers of those that are retracing footsteps is still small, but a harbinger to a huge swell in the future, considering that there is near unanimity among residents that life at Arda Transau has become unbearable.
Surface diamonds
Close-to-the surface diamonds were discovered in the sprawling Marange fields around 2006, and thousands of illegal miners descended on the area, eking out the gems for sale to middlemen coming from as far afield as Antwerp in Belgium.
Three years later, a fierce security operation involving soldiers, the police and national intelligence cordoned off the diamond fields and granted mining licences to several investors, most of which entered into joint ventures with the government through the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) and one with the army.
The miners that took root in Marange included Anjin Investments, a joint venture between Anhui Foreign Economic Construction (AFEC) and the Zimbabwean army, Marange Resources, which was wholly owned by ZMDC, Jinan—another Chinese investor—Mbada Diamonds, Diamond Mining Company DMC), Kusena and Gye Nyame.
The mining areas became highly securitised, so families living close by had to move.
According to local pressure groups such as the now defunct Chiadzwa Community Development Trust, over 1 300 families were moved to Arda Transau between 2010 and 2011 to give the mining companies enough legroom.
A total of five companies were involved in the relocations, with Anjin leading at around 1000 households, Marange Resources (44), Mbada Diamonds (102), Jinan (129) and DMC (40).
And the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC), which took over from the former Marange diamond firms, only managed to relocate 20 families when, in late 2016, the late former president Robert Mugabe kicked out most of the miners for multi-billion diamond leakages.
Each family was moved into a four-roomed match-box house, with a few exceptions where the houses were bigger.
They were given extra land for subsistence farming.
The relocation did not take into account the size of the family, which had an average of six members.
In one case that caused a big stir, 89-year-old Willard Kaiboni Kambeni was given a sevenroomed house to share with his 14 wives, 80 children and 20 grandchildren.
The relocatees received a blanket US$1 000 compensation each, with no valuations having taken place on the houses and other structures they had built over generations in Marange.
Just under 12 years after the relocations started, the people of Arda Transau cannot stand it anymore.
Going back
“People are disposing their houses and going back to Marange.
“Almost everyone is thinking of going back to Chiadzwa (the specific area in the diamond fields from which they were forced off),” said Donaldson Masvaure, who chairs the Arda Transau Relocation Development Trust (ATRDT).
The trust was formed in 2013 to represent the rights of the displaced people.
Investigations supported by Information for Development Trust (IDT) — a non-profit organisation promoting investigative journalism in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa — have revealed that, so far, more than 20 Arda Transau families have sold their homesteads at prices ranging from US$7 000 to US$10 000.
Numerous other families have since publicly or secretly placed their properties up for sale, while other residents of Arda Transau who were interviewed confessed that they were waiting to see how those that went out first would fare.
In the area relocated by Anjin, for instance, homeowners are advertising the sale of their houses on various platforms that include social media — such as the