The Mountain Remembers: Why Mining Christmas Pass Would Betray a Million People and the Earth Beneath Them
Mutare sits in a bowl, ringed by mountains, entered by driving down Christmas Pass as if descending into a great green hollow. For millennia those slopes — and the ancient trees that armour them — have held the soil back from the city below. Now open-cast gold mining is stripping the Murahwa range bare. This journal makes the case, in the language of science and geography, that no quantity of gold is worth what a bare mountain will one day send down onto a city of a million.
I Grew Up in the Bowl the Mountains Guard
Let me begin not as an analyst but as a daughter of Mutare. I grew up beneath these mountains — Murahwa’s Hill and the long green wall of Christmas Pass — in a city that sits, quite literally, in a hollow. You enter Mutare by driving down the pass; the road descends as though into a great bowl, and the town lies at the bottom of it, ringed on almost every side by high ground. As children we felt the closeness of those slopes, sometimes claustrophobic, always protective. And in the rainy season we knew the mountains’ other face: the famous electric storms that ride the Eastern Highlands, storms that still take lives along that range almost every year.
What we understood, without needing a textbook, is that we lived at the mercy — and under the mercy — of those slopes. When the great rains came, it was the mountain’s skin of ancient trees and deep-rooted vegetation that held the soil in place and kept it from sliding down into the streets and homes below. We felt lucky to be cradled by mountains. We felt luckier still that they were clothed — that their forests were old enough, and their roots deep enough, to hold the whole hillside together through every storm. That covering was never decoration. It was the load-bearing wall of the entire city, and none of us thought we would ever have to argue for keeping it.
Open-cast gold mining has come to the Murahwa range above Mutare. To reach the gold, miners strip away the vegetation and topsoil and cut into the steep mountainside. Civil-society and community groups say the company involved, Culverhouse Investments, was told by the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) in a letter dated 30 March 2026 to stop new excavation and rehabilitate the site by 30 April — and that heavy machinery and fresh digging have continued well past that deadline.
The danger is not abstract, and it is not far off. A fact-finding report warned that the stripped, steepened slopes above Toronto suburb and Hillcrest School are now at immediate and escalating risk of mudslides and debris flows in the rainy season — that a single heavy downpour could bring the mountain down onto homes, a school, and the water supply of a city. This journal writes to explain, in the plainest science, why that warning must be believed.
Why This Particular Mountain Cannot Be Mined Safely
Every slope on Earth is a quiet negotiation between two forces: gravity, forever pulling material downhill, and cohesion — the grip of roots, soil structure, and rock — forever holding it in place. Geologists call the tipping point the factor of safety. Above one, the slope holds. Below one, it fails. Christmas Pass is a place where three separate factors push that number toward the edge all at once.
How a Mined Slope Comes Down — Step by Step
A landslide above a city is not a bolt from the blue. It is the last step in a sequence that can be read in advance — which is why this journal calls it predictable, not possible. Here is the chain the science lays out.
The World’s Ledger of Mines and Mountains That Fell
This is not a hypothetical fear dressed as science. The graveyards exist. Around the world, the combination of extraction, stripped or destabilised slopes, and heavy rain has buried communities again and again. Each entry below is a place that made the trade Christmas Pass is being asked to make — and paid it in lives.
| Disaster | What happened | Human toll |
|---|---|---|
| Aberfan, Wales · 1966 | A colliery spoil tip — mine waste piled on a hillside above a village — saturated with rain and flowed down onto a primary school and homes. | 144 dead, including 116 children |
| Brumadinho, Brazil · 2019 | A mining tailings dam collapsed, releasing a wave of mud that engulfed the site and communities below in minutes. | ~270 dead |
| Cyclone Idai, Manicaland · 2019 | Extreme rainfall on vulnerable Eastern Highlands slopes triggered landslides and debris flows across Chimanimani and Chipinge — Mutare’s own province. | 1,000+ across region; hundreds in Zimbabwe |
| Hpakant jade mine, Myanmar · 2020 | A steep mine-waste slope collapsed into a water-filled pit after heavy monsoon rain, burying informal miners. | ~170+ dead |
| Regis. across Africa | Boterekwa (Midlands) and mountain ranges in Makaha, Mudzi have already suffered severe gold-mining degradation — the same pattern, closer to home. | ecosystems lost; risk rising |
Read that ledger and one truth becomes undeniable: the school at the foot of the slope is the recurring victim. Aberfan lost a generation of children because mine waste sat above a school and the rain came. Christmas Pass has Hillcrest School and the Toronto community sitting in exactly that geometry. We are not speculating about a new kind of disaster. We are watching the setup for a very old and very well-documented one.
The Gold Is Finite. The Damage Is Forever.
Even on the narrow ground of money — the ground the mining case is argued on — the numbers do not favour the pick and shovel. A gold seam is extracted once and gone. The costs it leaves behind compound for generations, and they fall on a whole city rather than a single company’s balance sheet.
Let the Geography Inform the Mining Sector
This journal has argued, entry after entry, for the sovereign right of Zimbabweans to benefit from their own minerals. That argument stands. But sovereignty over resources was never a licence to trade away the safety of a city — and here the science and the national interest point the same way. So we address the Ministry directly, and respectfully, with what the geography insists.
What the Science Asks of the Ministry
- Suspend all mining at Christmas Pass now, pending independent investigation. This is the single measure civil society, residents, and traditional leadership have unanimously demanded. Before the rains, not after.
- Enforce the EMA order that already exists. A rehabilitation directive cannot be allowed to become, in effect, a mining licence. The 30 March cease-order and 30 April rehabilitation deadline must be enforced, not observed in the breach.
- Commission a geotechnical slope-stability and hydrological study before any further activity — factor-of-safety modelling, debris-flow run-out mapping, and water-contamination testing of the Mutare River and Hillcrest boreholes under Section 73.
- Zone the range off-limits. Zimbabwe has vast mining ground elsewhere. A mountain that functions as a city’s flood-and-landslide fortress, and a cultural-heritage and tourism asset, is worth infinitely more standing than mined. Designate it protected.
- Make geography a condition of every steep-slope licence. Let the terrain inform the sector: no open-cast extraction directly above dense settlement on steep, storm-exposed slopes. Human life is worth more than the gold the mountain sits on.
I Choose Her — the Mountain, the Water, the Child at the Foot of the Slope
I have spent this journal’s life arguing for value sovereignty — that Africa should refine, beneficiate, and keep the wealth of her own ground. And precisely because I believe that, I must say clearly where the line falls: sovereignty over the earth’s gifts is not sovereignty to endanger the people the earth also holds. When the two collide — when a seam of gold sits beneath a mountain that shelters a city of hundreds of thousands — I do not hesitate. I choose her. I choose the mountain, the river, the ancient trees, and the child walking to Hillcrest at the foot of the slope. Every time.
Because here is the thing the pick-and-shovel logic forgets: the mountain was doing a job. Long before any of us, before the science books, before the mining claim, that range was holding the rain and the soil back from the bowl below — a fortress of deep time, staffed by roots. To mine it is not to “use an idle asset.” It is to demolish a working flood-defence and landslide-barrier that protects a city, in exchange for a one-time withdrawal that a handful of people will pocket and the whole valley will pay for. No accountant who counted honestly would sign that trade. And in the year of a Godzilla El Niño, of storms sharpening their teeth across a warming world, signing it is not bold. It is reckless.
When we at this institute warn of a coming disaster, understand from whose eyes we are looking. We do not warn from the eyes of human convenience or human greed, which always find a reason to dig. We warn from the Earth’s own eyes — from the long memory of a planet that has shown us, this very year, what she does when pushed: the awakening volcanoes, the shudders along the Ring of Fire, the drifting plates, the floods. The Earth keeps her own ledger, and she balances it without mercy and without appeal. A bare mountain over a full valley is an unbalanced entry in that ledger. She will, in her own time and by her own physics, correct it. Our only choice is whether we hand her the excuse.
So this is my plea, and my warning, to those who hold the pen over Christmas Pass: the gold will still be there in a hundred years, and in a thousand — the Earth is patient with her minerals. But a mountain, once hollowed and bared and sent down onto a school, cannot be rebuilt in a thousand years of trying. Gomo nderedu, asi upenyu ndohwevanhu — the mountain is ours, but the life is the people’s. Chengetedza gomo, rinokuchengetedzawo — protect the mountain, and it will protect you. When it comes to Mother Earth, I choose her, every time — not against us, but for us, because she was our fortress first. Tigashire.
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