First Story of the Gweja Soldier — Gladys Makuya
I am a widow, and I live with my 8-year-old son. When my husband passed, the responsibility of the household fell on me alone: feeding a child, keeping a roof over our heads, finding school fees. There was no one else to carry this. So, when I discovered the gweja soldiers, the artisanal gold miners working the riverbanks near my home, I did not hesitate. I joined them, not because it was easy, but because it was the only door open to a woman like me.
This work is hard on the body and hard on the spirit. The gold does not sit on top of the earth waiting for us; it is buried deep, wrapped in rock and water that we must clear with our own hands and simple tools. We rise before the sun, around 6am, and we do not stop until the light is gone. It can take three days of digging, hauling, and washing sand before we find enough gold to sell. A single day’s find is often almost nothing. And the risks are real, the ground shifts, mud slides, rocks give way without warning. Still, we go back the next morning, because this river is the only provider we have.
Before we met the SHINE Collab, this labour was invisible. No one asked how a widow feeds her child from a riverbed, or what it costs a woman’s body to dig for gold every day. SHINE gave us language for what we already knew in our bones, that we are not just miners scraping by, we are women sustaining our families and, in doing so, sustaining our land. Through SHINE, I have come to see my relationship to this river differently. We no longer mine the way others do; we do not poison the water with mercury or cyanide, because we know that water is life for us, for our children, for the cattle and the crops downstream. Protecting this river is not separate from feeding my son; it is the same struggle.
Climate change has made our work harder, the rains are less predictable, the dry seasons longer, and the river itself changes in ways our grandmothers never had to plan for. SHINE’s spaces are helping me understand that what we face at this river is connected to something much bigger: a global system that has always undervalued both women’s labour and the natural world we depend on. I no longer feel like my struggle is small or isolated.
I hope to keep learning inside SHINE’s ecofeminist spaces, how other women artisanal miners across Africa are organising, protecting their land, and demanding dignity. I want to carry these lessons back to the river, to the other women digging beside me, so that our collective can grow stronger, our environment can stay protected, and our children can inherit a river that still gives life.
