Red Cross volunteers and local officials say more than 100 miners were killed when an artisanal gold pit caved in on August 18, 2026, at Zamboye, a village in the Nana-Mambéré prefecture of the western Central African Republic. The government has put the official toll at 49 — a count local sources say falls well short of the real number as crews dig through unstable earth for the missing.

Days later, harrowing footage of the collapse spread online and brought the scale of the disaster into focus. In video from the site, the ground gives way at a sprawling open pit worked by hundreds of artisanal miners, swallowing people where they stood. Other clips show mud-covered workers, men and women, lifting a body out of the hole, with others milling across the site and several shouting for help.

Several people were still missing and others remained pinned beneath the debris, said Bertrand Be Yangué, a member of the Zamboye youth council, who expected the toll to climb as the search went on. “Finding them alive would be a miracle,” Yangué said. The community had been left devastated, he added, with young men and women dying at a site they had traveled to in the hope of providing for their families.

Roger Bana Nzala travelled overnight from Bouar to Zamboye after learning his brother was in danger, and went home without the body. “We weren’t able to find our brother; he is still in the ground, he is buried in the ground,” he said. “In the end, we are forced to return empty-handed.”

How the Ground Gave Way

The slide appears to have started when several of the underground tunnels being worked by miners gave way, according to a statement from the Baboua public prosecutor. Investigators are trying to establish the cause of the collapse, identify the victims and determine whether anyone should face criminal liability. Zamboye sits about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the town of Baboua, near the Cameroonian frontier.

Cedric Mbango, who mines at the site, called the collapse catastrophic and said the ground beneath the workings simply gave way. Rescuers and villagers recovered 30 bodies in the hours after the cave-in, said Souleymane Bi, deputy mayor of the sub-prefecture, who called for outside assistance to reach those still buried. Crews were still looking for trapped colleagues, said Florian Gaguende, a miner who survived, though the prospect of finding anyone alive “is getting slimmer.”

A Search Slowed by Scarce Gear

How many people were inside the workings when the ground moved remains unknown. Gervais Ganagoroh, a local Red Cross volunteer involved in the relief effort, said more than 100 bodies had been recovered, a figure a senior official at a local mining association also confirmed. Several survivors were critically injured and taken to a hospital in Baboua, and the search continued on August 19.

On August 20, Ganagoro said the organisation could not say how many people were still buried. “We continue to find bodies,” he said, adding that more than 10 had been recovered that Thursday morning alone. “Every hour, bodies are being discovered, increasing the number of victims.”

There were no modern safety standards or heavy equipment at the mine, where crews worked with hand tools and improvised structures. Reaching anyone still alive was slowed by the site’s remoteness and by the lack of specialized rescue gear. Jérémie Ngbiri, a miner at the site who lost his brother and a friend in the collapse, said on August 20 that “The rescue effort is being organised, but it is not up to the task,” and said he saw some victims suffocate as people tried to rescue them. Tractors and other heavy machinery had been brought in for the recovery, according to local reporting in the Central African Republic — a method that risks crushing survivors trapped below.

Fixing a formal toll was still difficult, Laurent Ngon Baba, an elected official in Baboua, said on August 19. Mines Minister Rufin Benam-Beltoungou visited the site that day and set the official count at 49, with seven injured miners taken to a hospital in Baboua. Authorities then barred access to the mine on Thursday, August 20, closing the site and suspending the search because the pit kept collapsing and heavy rains had flooded its lower sections.

Security around the closed Zamboye site has since been reinforced, according to an August 21 update, with the reinforcements including personnel from a Russian paramilitary group.

The dead spanned three countries. The Mines Ministry listed 34 Central Africans, 13 Cameroonians and two Chadians among the 49 victims in the official count. Grégoire Mvongo, governor of Cameroon’s eastern region, said on public broadcaster CRTV that his administration was coordinating closely with Central African officials on the aftermath, and Cameroon said its hospitals were ready to take in any wounded who crossed the border.

In a statement posted by his ministry on August 20, Benam-Beltoungou expressed condolences to victims’ families and warned miners about the dangers of unsafe mining practices. Cameroon’s Mines Ministry said the same day that both Cameroonian and Central African miners were believed to be among the dead, and that it had sent a team to assess the situation along the border.

A Pattern of Deadly Collapses

The Zamboye disaster ranks among the deadliest mining accidents in recent years, and it comes after a string of smaller collapses. Dozens died in June in a comparable cave-in at the Be-Mbari gold site, which also sits along the frontier between the Central African Republic and Cameroon. A landslide at a mine in Ngourroum, in the west of the country, killed seven people in the middle of March, and another 20 died in February in Gordi, in the northeast. Mining accidents have killed at least 40 people in the country in 2026.

Small-scale, informal extraction occupies several thousand people in the Central African Republic, largely beyond government control. Protective gear is rare, and the accidents often kill. Researcher Aicha Pemboura, writing for the Central Africa Observatory on Organised Crime and Violence Project, has noted that the country regulates artisanal mining on paper, yet many miners and traders work without permits, dig in off-limits areas or move their gold outside official channels. Tens of millions across sub-Saharan Africa work in the sector, which fills the void left by weak formal economies even where the practice is criminalized.

Blame, Politics and Regulation

Martin Ziguélé, who heads the Movement for the Liberation of the Central African People, said the government bears direct responsibility for the repeated tragedies. Evariste Ngamana, the Central African Republic government spokesman, offered condolences to the victims’ families and said authorities were pressing to deliver relief and assistance.

In Cameroon, opposition leader Maurice Kamto, who finished second to President Paul Biya in the 2018 election, condemned those who grow rich from illegal mineral extraction, saying they show no concern for the destitute workers who labor at unregulated sites without safety measures. Cameroon adopted a new mining code in 2023 and is counting on iron, diamonds, gold, bauxite and cobalt to develop its economy. Oversight of the gold sector has been tightened there after officials found a gap between declared exports and the imports logged by receiving countries, notably the United Arab Emirates, and the government says more than 200 companies mine there without a permit or authorization.