Illegal gold mining has contaminated more than 60% of Ghana’s water sources. Now, one seaside town is speaking out.

Words by Nelson C.J. photographs by david nana opoku ansah

The sea that borders the town of Shama, a small fishing community in western Ghana, is muddy brown. From afar, the water’s surface looks coated in dust, like something a strong gust of wind can blow off. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear this is not the case. The water is polluted—and has been for nearly four years.

Since around 2021, Shama and the surrounding sea have borne the brunt of uncurbed illegal mining activities in nearby towns known locally as  galamsey— a derivative of the phrase “gather them and sell.” Shama shares a confluence with the Pra River, a major waterway that cuts across four of Ghana’s 16 regions, including towns Tarkwa Nuasem, Amenfi East, and Aboabo, where a bulk of the country’s illegal mining activities take place. It is at this junction, located just at the edge of Shama’s beach, that the Pra River began bringing pollution into the sea.

Shama isn’t a mining hub. It doesn’t remotely participate in the activity. Even so, it is one of the regions, like many places across Ghana, suffering from what scientists have described as an environmental catastrophe. 

But locals say it wasn’t long since the coastline was a business hub and cultural center that buzzed all day and boasted a sea as blue as the sky. They still recall the many boats that lined the shore, and how the coastline provided a meeting point for the people of Shama. All of that is now gone. Today, the coastline has a solemn deadness to it. Fishing boats are docked, neglected and inactive, and barely anyone goes out to fish. The water is too polluted, and the fish too sick.

“We were hoping it could become a harbor,” Frank Adams Essilfie, a local of Shama, told  Atmos . But in the place of that dream is now a town, grappling with the loss of its identity, robbed of the very thing that had given it life to begin with.

Gathering Shattered Dreams

When Nana Ainoo Bassaw was growing up, the sea defined much of his childhood. Ainoo, now the chairman of the fishermen association in Shama, remembers walking with his mother along the coastline early in the morning. On these walks, Ainoo recalls, the water was so clean that he could see his feet from under it; it was so clean that he could drink it. And for much of life, that was the case. 

Many decades later, Ainoo sits in a small shack just off the sea, looking out at the water he grew up around—unrecognizable. 

On the rivers where illegal mining takes place (Pra River is one of many), miners have built large floaters that line the river banks to carry machines and help miners carry out their activities. They dig to the bottom of the river to extract gold, a process that loosens sediments and contaminating metals and leaks them into the water. The miners also use mercury, a toxic and hazardous element, to separate the soil from the gold. “And it’s not like it’s one person,” local filmmaker Kwesi “Memory” Asime said. “You [can] see hundreds of machines on similar rivers.”

Because these miners are unregulated, they aren’t required and often do not refill the pits they have dug or attempt to rehabilitate the land, leaving forests and sea areas to ruin. Locals like Frank and Ainoo say people are no longer able to swim in the sea. Worst of all, the pollution has made the coastline uninhabitable for the fish, driving them inward where it hasn’t yet reached. This doesn’t bode well for the community, which has long depended on fishing for food and income, either.

One of the major issues, according to Ainoo, is the sharp exodus of young men leaving Shama. “Fishermen now spend nearly a week at sea looking for fish when they would typically only spend a day,” Ainoo said. “Fishermen have to spend 10,000 cedis [$1,000] to fuel their boats for these long fishing trips, which dissuades young people. Now they are moving to other places or learning other skills like bus or cab driving.” 

In a 2018 study about the effects of small-scale illegal mining in rural areas—also the most affected areas in Ghana—researcher Martey Laari identifies high unemployment, water pollution, and infestation from abandoned mining sites as the factors driving unregulated digging. “The major reasons that encourage galamsey were identified as higher short-term income, availability of idle lands, poor cocoa yield, and low price of cocoa,” Laari writes, adding that cocoa, alongside gold, is one of Ghana’s biggest natural resources. “Recommendations from the study include supporting farmers to maintain healthy cocoa farms, land reclamation, and public education, but also facilitating the process to ease acquisition of mining license by the galamsey operators.”

The lack of effective action on any of these recommendations enables a culture of infrastructural negligence, and an administration whose response to Ghana’s environmental problems have been largely insufficient.

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Taxonomy

• Mining Development
• Mining