When Altayeb Alhadi was just six years old, his father died after a well collapsed in his village in White Nile state, south-central Sudan. Two months later, and his mother also died, leaving the five children in the family as orphans. As the eldest of the siblings, it was Altayeb’s responsibility to find work and help the family survive.
At 14, he travelled hundreds of kilometres from his home in Galli village to seek work in the north, where gold mines dot the landscape, so he could feed his siblings and keep them in school. Some relatives were already working in the area although they had found jobs in restaurants and other services rather than underground extraction,” Ayateb’s uncle Alhadi Hamid told Al Jazeera. The boy initially worked in transport and other jobs, but when he heard lucrative stories from miners in the area, he began to search for gold in the surrounding mountains.
Altayeb died in an air strike attributed to the Egyptian military at a gold-mining site near Jabal Al-Aigdat in Sudan’s Red Sea region on October 10, which killed at least 72 miners, a few months after he began working at the site. We suddenly heard a loud sound of bombardment, and we ran. It was too chaotic with people running in all directions and many attacks taking place within a few minutes,” a fellow miner told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity.
We tried to help him and took him to a safer place near a mountain. He died within hours. … We couldn’t believe how quickly things could happen.” Altayeb worked alongside about 15 young men and children, using basic tools to extract gold from the rocks. The miners worked night and day, taking the material they gathered to nearby mills for processing.
Proceeds from any gold found were shared, but earnings depended on the amount of gold recovered and individual agreements. On productive days, the group could earn more than $100, the miner said. If the gold percentage in the well wasn’t good, we would change locations.
When we found a gram or less, we sold it and shared the profit, which was about $100,” Altayeb’s former colleague said. For young people supporting relatives, even irregular earnings in these dangerous gold mines can seem preferable to unemployment. Altayeb told his siblings 10 days before his death that he would soon return home, his sister Rogaia Alhadi told local media.
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