This may be the most lead polluted place on Earth. Is there any hope?
The site of a former lead and zinc mine in Kabwe, Zambia. Thirty years after the closure of the mine, the land remains highly contaminated — and artisanal miners continue to work here, exposing themselves daily to dangerously high levels of lead.
Tommy Trenchard for NPR
By Julie Bourdin / Photos by Tommy Trenchard
In a soft, faltering voice, her large brown eyes staring absently ahead, Winfrida Besa repeats "A-B-C-D" over and over as she tries to sing the ABCs. With her thin, hollow face and slight frame, 7-year-old Winfrida looks much younger than she really is.
"Winfrida doesn't go to school. She would just leave the classroom and wander off, and we worry she would get lost," sighs her grandfather, Bobby Besa, 60. The little girl was born "normal," he says, but soon she was exhibiting a constellation of disturbing symptoms that are familiar to residents of Kabwe, Zambia. The diagnosis came after blood testing at the local clinic: Lead poisoning.
This city of almost 300,000 people, 80 miles north of Zambia's capital of Lusaka, was identified by a 2022 U.N. report as a "sacrifice zone" — one of the most polluted places on the planet. Between 1906 and 1994, Kabwe was home to Broken Hill, one of the world's largest lead and zinc mines. For decades, highly toxic lead particles were blown across town, carried by the wind and the waterways, contaminating the soil in courtyards, playgrounds and on dirt roads where speeding trucks raise plumes of dust.
