People in Zimbabwe’s former asbestos mining towns are being left at risk of developing asbestos diseases that the public health system is ill-equipped to diagnose.
Millions of tonnes of uncontained asbestos tailings litter the towns of Zvishavane and Mashava, where the closure of Shabanie Mashaba Mines (SMM) in 2010 has left more than abandoned infrastructure; it has created a slow-moving public health crisis.
Contaminated towns
Zvishavane’s Maglas suburb was once a thriving and affluent mining compound known for its glittering buildings. Today, the shine has faded. The buildings are deteriorating, the roads are potholed and muddy, and poverty is visible everywhere, from cracked walls to a vandalised community hall now overtaken by grass.
Large hills of uncontained asbestos tailings now dominate the town. These vast, unprotected mounds of asbestos waste from mining operations sit just metres from homes, schools and roads, releasing asbestos-containing dust into the air.
There are no warning signs, and as a result, many of the residents are unaware of the risks.
Each year, over 200 000 people die from asbestos diseases worldwide, including asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma. The World Health Organisation says there is no safe level of exposure to any type of asbestos and calls for a global ban.
“The asbestos tailings dumps used to be a no-go area for the public, being fenced and guarded by hired professional guards,” said Gerald Chinembiri, who grew up in the mine and whose father worked there.
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“But with the collapse of the mine, it is now free for all,” he said. “Even fortune seekers have also descended on the tailings, raising dust from the hills.”
The fortune seekers, also known as artisanal miners, are individuals searching the tailings for metals, like gold or nickel, to sell.
A daughter of a former worker said living with the tailings is now the norm.
“No one is safely disposing of them like it used to be in the past,” she said, preferring anonymity for fear of losing the mine house, after years of unpaid salary arrears and a pension for her father that never arrived. Justice Chinhema, the general Secretary of Zimbabwe Diamond and Allied Minerals Workers Union (ZDAMWU), told us that some issues remain around outstanding monies due to ex-workers that the ZDAMWU is trying to help resolve.
Councillor for Ward 8 in Maglas, Zvishavane, Itai Pasira, admitted to the challenges posed by the asbestos tailings.
“On windy days, the settlement is covered by dust and sandstorms from the tailings. And when it rains, the tailings are washed down to the downstream houses,” she said.
Asked about the safe disposal of the tailings, she said it is now difficult since the mine has closed.
“Now that is a challenge. Who will be responsible for disposing of the abandoned tailings?”
The minuscule asbestos fibres, when inhaled, can cause multiple diseases.
But there can be a long latency period between exposure and developing a disease, often of several decades.
The mines’ workforce was made up of many migrant workers, which makes diagnosing and recording asbestos diseases particularly complex.
“Most workers left when the mine closed. Some went back to their rural areas.
“So they could have just fallen sick and died there without knowing they had contracted asbestos-related diseases,” Pasira said.
Mashava mining town, about 50 kilometres from Zvishavane, was also home to asbestos mines, the largest of which was Gaths Mine.
The tailings appear larger than in Zvishavane, with signs of erosion from the water and wind.
One former mine-worker, also concerned about losing his home, said, “I do not know about the health effects… But yes, sometimes plumes of dust come from the tailings.”
The area that’s contaminated by asbestos tailings in Mashava and Zvishavane is enormous.
Desire Runganga, a specialist in mineral economics at the Curtin Institute for Energy Transition in Western Australia, researched the problem in a 2024 paper. He found that there are over 143 million tonnes of tailings, which are “a source of airborne chrysotile asbestos fibre, which is linked to asbestos-related diseases.”
In total, over 2 600km2 of land is potentially contaminated by the asbestos tailings. And it is not confined just to the mine sites; Runganga found that due to erosion and rainfall, tailings material appears to be entering waterways.
There are further risks beyond asbestos exposure to consider. Runganga observed ground subsidence over a stretch of about 2,3 km. Here, surfaces may appear stable but can be weakened underneath, so people or animals walking or moving across the area could fall into collapsed sections, he told us.
The artisanal miners are particularly at risk, but their presence also brings further environmental and safety hazards.
This includes “destabilisation of underground workings, increased collapse hazards, and the disturbance of contaminated materials that can accelerate erosion and runoff into surrounding ecosystems,” Runganga said.
Asbestos disease
At their peak, Zimbabwe’s asbestos mines employed around 7 000 people. They mined white asbestos, or chrysotile asbestos, which makes up over 95% of all asbestos produced worldwide.
While rarer forms of asbestos, including blue asbestos (crocidolite) and brown asbestos (amosite) mined in South Africa are more toxic than white asbestos, other white asbestos mines had found accompanying asbestos diseases, including cancer.
Yet there was a perception inside the country that Zimbabwean asbestos wasn’t harmful. “It was just generally viewed as a benign dust. And that was the common belief,” epidemiologist Mark Cullen said.
Early studies, along with public comments by Turner & Newall, the UK-based company that owned the mines until 1996, said that due to the purity of its asbestos, there was minimal or even no asbestos disease in Zimbabwe’s asbestos mines.
So Cullen and Rabelan Baloyi, an industrial hygienist, visited Mashava and Zvishavane to investigate.
At the time they published their study in 1991, the mining communities were facing a separate health crisis.
With many of the workers coming from rural areas and leaving their families for much of the year, the demand for sex workers in the area soared, and the mining areas became hotspots for HIV.
However, “it wasn’t something you could talk about,” Cullen said.
When it came to the asbestos mines, the mill in Zvishavane had been upgraded in the 1980s, meaning that the conditions were not as unpleasant as other mines that Cullen had toured.
“These mills were actually quite clean, but ‘asbestos clean’ is not good enough, and there was still an incredible amount of exposure,” Cullen said.
They examined industrial hygiene data, workers’ X-rays, and conducted lung-function tests on hundreds of workers. What they found was “an amazing amount of disease” in line with other white asbestos mines.
Cullen said that asbestosis would have been common among the workforce, particularly for those with several years of exposure or who worked in the mills.
Asbestosis, scarring of the lungs from inhaling asbestos fibres, is a form of pneumoconiosis. Common symptoms include breathlessness, chest or shoulder pain, and a persistent cough.
Asbestosis has no cure, can be fatal, and increases the risk of developing cancer.
According to one ex-worker still living near Mashava mine, when the mines were open, both children and workers were given milk every weekday and told, inaccurately, that this would prevent asbestosis.
The risks from asbestos exposure in Zimbabwe are not confined to former mining towns, as Zimbabwe is not one of the over 65 countries that have banned asbestos. It continues to be used across the country, such as in producing asbestos-cement roofing.
However, the healthcare system is not well-placed to accurately diagnose asbestos diseases, which can be difficult to detect without specialist training or equipment.
Persistence Machingauta, the interim president of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA), an association of doctors who work in government hospitals, says Zimbabwean public hospitals do not have the capacity to detect some asbestos-related diseases; they have to rely on private clinics.
“The problem is our government laboratories do not run these samples for tissue biopsy,” which is needed to diagnose mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure. “If you send samples to the public sector, it may take years for one to get back their results,” he said.
Machingauta said medical practitioners do know about these diseases, but it’s about whether they are able to diagnose them. “They may do so if one has a history of working in a mine, but as long as that patient is in a government hospital, it will take a lot of time to determine whether someone has asbestosis,” he added.
Isaac Phiri, the acting director of epidemiology and disease control in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, said that there are legal requirements for mining companies to conduct clinical assessments of their workers.
Phiri saidthe ministry does have the capacity to detect asbestosis and mesothelioma, but that there is no data the ministry could share on asbestos-related diseases in Zimbabwe.
There is no ongoing government monitoring of at-risk workers after they retire or change careers, or for the residents living among the asbestos tailings.
In limbo
What happens next in Zvishavane and Mashava is unclear.
When Turner & Newall sold SMM in 1996, the late businessman Mutumwa Mawere took over. The government then seized ownership in 2004, following ownership and financial disputes with Mawere. By 2010 the asbestos mines ground to a halt after years of declining production.
Since then, residents have been told multiple times that the asbestos mines would reopen.
Mines and Mining Development deputy minister, Caleb Makwiranzou, was reported in May 2026 as saying: “The ministry acknowledges that over two decades of revival efforts, there have been marked failures. There have been investors, but they have failed and there have been some unfulfilled production promises.”
Makwiranzou also said of a new administrator for SMM that his task is to “to develop a commercially viable roadmap” going forward.
After years of inactivity, the cost to reopen the mines would be significant. Meanwhile, the global demand for asbestos is collapsing.
Other white asbestos-mining countries have shuttered their asbestos industries in recent years, including Canada and Colombia. As a result of widespread national bans on asbestos, global asbestos consumption has more than halved in thirty years, down from 2.41 million tonnes in 1994 to 1.2 million in 2024.
Even in those countries importing large amounts of white asbestos, including India and Indonesia, campaigners and workers’ rights groups are increasingly challenging their governments’ policies on asbestos.
We approached the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development to ask about the plans for SMM, and for the asbestos tailings. They did not provide a comment.
The company responsible for generating the majority of the tailings, Turner & Newall, went bankrupt in 2001.
What happens to the asbestos dumps? Rehabilitating the asbestos mines, which would cover the tailings and reduce the health and environmental risks, is one option.
There have also been proposals to commercially mine the asbestos tailings for metals, including magnesium and nickel.
Runganga’s study investigated the opportunities to repurpose the tailings through “carefully managed recovery of other minerals,” the proceeds of which could be channelled back to further rehabilitation.
Such a project would require significant capital investment to begin, and bring its own environmental and safety risks.
Runganga said that “the site should not simply be left as a liability; it requires proper rehabilitation.”
But while the government dithers on what to do next, tens of thousands of people remain exposed to the asbestos dust, and in the dark about the future of their towns.
*This story was produced by Confront, an investigative journalism publication in the UK. The Standard was granted publishing rights.
