What are orpailleurs?

It literally means "one who pans gold," (or=gold) in French. It is a term used for gold miners in Francophone Africa who work in small private mining organizations rather than huge corporations.

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That's the correct spelling. It's the French term for illegal independent gold mine workers. Small gold mining operations are actually really common. Even though most of the gold mining in the world is done by very large corporations, there are many independent often illegal miners. The ones you mentioned, the "orpailleurs" are those who work in the French speaking African countries. In Ghana, they're referred to as Galamseys and in Brazil they're called Garempeiros. there are between 20,000-50,000 independent gold mine workers in the world, which is quite a lot. In November 2009, an illegal mine in Ghana collapsed and 18 workers out of which 13 were women were killed. That's the danger of those sorts of illegal mines. Of course, this risk exists in larger ventures as well, but this was to date the biggest catastrophe in Ghanaian gold mining.

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