Petitions called for its cancellation and Wright and Lomu were attacked on social networks and in the media. Viewers claimed the show was racist, portrayed locals in outdated colonial stereotypes, and exploited impoverished Ghanians for money and ratings. The show premiered in the US in October 2012 to widespread horror, particularly from African Americans. Good job discovery channel youve made a reality show about the rape and theft of african natural resources #junglegold #kinglepoldâ Angelo Sylvester December 15, 2012 In a surreal scene, Lomu jumps in the car with a gold bar he says is worth $75,000, before a masked man runs out of the jungle firing a machine gun, steals the gold and runs off.
In the final episode of the seven-part series, the struggling pair are offered the chance to work on a large-scale operation for a rich Ghanaian, if they can raise $15,000. “At the moment I jumped in, he was right over and was going to push his head underwater. A fight breaks out and martial arts-trained “angry George”, as he was nicknamed, strangles the man until he passes out.īut Wright doesn’t regret fighting back. In one of the show’s most-watched episodes, an excavator for Lomu and Wright is tearing up cocoa trees when an angry farmer approaches with a machete. We didn’t think it would make us look cool - and it certainly didn’t.” “We were like, ‘we’ll show them the failures, the terrible, horrible stuff. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh there’s a camera, we’ll act like this,’” said Wright. It may have been their worst nightmare, but it made gripping TV. They forfeited the cash and moved to a less profitable site. The chief warned that if they fought the miners, they would be killed. The Mormons and their production team had paid a village chief $12,500 to mine a large plot of land, but they arrived to find it packed with Chinese miners. There were reports of armed robberies in Chinese mining camps as locals and foreign rivals fought for land. It described how miners were regularly killed or injured thanks to unsafe practices, with 150 dying when one unlicensed mine flooded, and how cyanide, lead and mercury, used to extract gold - then dumped in rivers - poisoned communities. The Mormon miners submitted a proposal to Raw TV, the British company that produced the program, and waited.īy this time, Ghana’s mining industry was in chaos, with Al Jazeera reporting on the dangers of illegal mining, fuelled by “widespread corruption”. It looked like their foray into mining was over - until they stumbled across Discovery’s Alaskan mining reality show, Gold Rush. The following year, they tried again, on the land of a Ghanaian Mormon bishop. They found almost no gold, sinking the last of their cash into the failed enterprise.
Villagers set up roadblocks and demanded hundreds of dollars. They toiled for 18 hours a day, travelling two hours from a nearby village to the mine, living in a mud hut and battling with storms, broken equipment and constant delays. In 2010, they and a friend, Wally Macias, invested in a small operation and took turns flying out to work there. They say they’ve learnt from their catastrophic, ratings-winning sojourn in West Africa.Ĭlean-cut Lomu and Wright were working together in Utah’s declining real estate industry when they heard Ghana was experiencing a modern-day gold rush and attracting overseas miners, mainly Chinese, to try their luck. Scott Lomu and George Wright, hapless heroes of Discovery’s Jungle Gold, finally had to flee the country by plane to escape arrest and the armed militia who seemed to be pursuing them.īut the optimistic, God-fearing pair are now back in the game, trying their hand at mining in Guyana, on South America’s Caribbean coast, posting hair-raising videos on Instagram. And one of their original crew had taken his own life. Within one season, they were being accused of racism, exploitation, destroying the environment and even murder. WHEN two Mormons from Utah signed up to star in a reality show about gold mining in Ghana, they had no idea what they were getting into.
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