Water from a polluted river in Ghana was so thick and discoloured that an artist was able to use it as paint to depict the environmental devastation caused by the illegal gold mining that has spread like wildfire in the resource-rich West African state. Mercury is increasingly being used to extract gold by miners digging on a massive scale in forests and farms, degrading land and polluting rivers to such an extent that the charity WaterAid has called it “ecocide”. Communities along the river – one of the biggest in Ghana – lamented to Apeti that the water was “once so clean that you could see the fish and crocodiles that lived in it”, but it had been transformed “into a yellowish-brown body of water”.
