28 killed in Angola landslide at illegal gold mine

A landslide ripped through an illegal gold mine in Angola’s Bengo province, killing at least 28 people and exposing the deadly cost of a mining boom that has raced ahead of regulation. Four people were rescued from the site in Kifula, in the commune of Canacassala, municipality of Nambuangongo, northwest of Luanda, before Civil Protection and Firefighters ended search operations.

The dead were reported to be between 16 and 45 years old, a span that points to how informal mining draws in teenagers, adults and entire households looking for income where formal jobs are scarce. Local reports said 13 members of the same family were among the dead, a devastating sign of how poverty and unemployment can turn one collapse into a household tragedy. A later update said two people were still missing at that point, underscoring how recovery efforts continued to reveal the scale of the loss.

The disaster lands at a fragile moment in Angola’s economic shift. The government has been pushing to diversify beyond oil and diamonds and into minerals such as gold and copper, but the Bengo collapse showed how that strategy can deepen exploitation when extraction happens outside the law. Angola is also preparing to open its first gold refinery in Luanda’s Viana Industrial Park, a facility expected to process about 20 kilograms of gold a day, a symbol of formal industrial ambition that sits far from the unregulated pits where the dead were working.

That gap between official planning and the reality on the ground is widening as the diamond sector comes under pressure from falling prices and competition from lab-grown stones. Angola has targeted 17 million carats of diamond production by 2027, even as diamond sales revenue fell 14% in the first half of 2025 despite higher export volumes. The country generated about $1.8 billion in rough-diamond sales in 2025, a reminder that mining remains central to the economy even as the risks are borne by the poorest workers.

The Bengo collapse is likely to intensify pressure on the Ministry of the Interior, the National Agency for Mineral Resources, Endiama and Sodiam to tighten enforcement around illegal pits, improve worker protections and bring emergency response capacity closer to remote mining zones. It also fits a wider pattern: in July 2024, another illegal gold-mine collapse in Huila Province killed a 31-year-old prospector and injured five others in Cuvango. For Angola’s resource strategy to deliver opportunity instead of new forms of exploitation, the dangers hidden in informal mining will have to be confronted directly.