Digging deep: Residents of the township of Khuma, near the Buffelsfontein mine in Stilfontein, North West, where zama zamas are trapped underground, say they are suffering economically after a police operation shut down illegal mining activity. Photo: Lunga Mzangwe
Hundreds of informal miners were trapped in the shaft of an abandoned gold mine in Stilfontein, after police blocked the exit in November as part of its Operation Vala UmGodi (Operation Close the Hole).
The general contempt for the lives of men trapped underground has exposed a collective hesitation at the face of injustice. It has exposed the betrayal of the constitutional project that envisages an egalitarian South Africa firmly entrenched in principles of human dignity.
The community-initiated rescue mission was slow. With more than 50 people required to pull one person from the mine shaft with a rope, progress can only be slow. In the first two weeks of this rescue mission only 12 people made it out. A report from one of the survivors was grim. He said he had been eating a mixture of toothpaste and toilet paper to avoid the sensation of being consumed by hunger. He also said bodies had begun to decompose underground.
In the absence of basic necessities and a system to redistribute the little they had, violence and chaos began to flare underground as people competed for limited resources.
The Stilfontein community’s call for the government to intervene was met with a flat refusal. The official government position was that those underground are criminals mining illegally. This has meant they had no water and food. The government’s position was defended by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who said in a statement: “The Stilfontein mine is a crime scene where the offence of illegal mining is being committed. It is standard police practice everywhere to secure a crime scene and to block off escape routes that enable criminals to evade arrest.”
Ramaphosa’s characterisation of this humanitarian crisis as a crime scene sums up the attitude of the state and the narrative dominant in parts of the media — that those stuck underground are criminals who should, in the words of a government minister, “be smoked out”.
Some who have fashioned themselves as instant constitutional law experts on social media platforms have endorsed the government’s reactionary position, in the name of the rule of law, saying “the state cannot be held ransom by criminals”. They forget that the overarching principle of the rule of law is justice. They ignore that people who are alleged to be perpetrators of a crime don’t cease being human beings entitled to the right to life and other fundamental constitutional rights.
The lack of empathy for this section of society, the zama zamas (those who keep trying) is the result of a single narrative driven by the media, including social media. Most commentary, including reports, have castigated these workers as a source of all kinds of evil, as undesirable, dangerous. This one dimensional reporting poses danger for democracy and freedom.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cautions us, a single story-narrative “robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.” We know from our not-so-distant past that manufacturing consent this way has had catastrophic consequences for black people.
The massacre of 34 striking miners at Marikana in 2012 happened, in part, because the majority of the media reporting robbed the strikers of their humanity. We know this through the qualitative and quantitative research of South Africa’s leading media and journalism scholar, Jane Duncan, who exposed editorial failures in the reporting of the strike. The coverage uncritically embraced the spin of the mining company and the police. The voices of the miners involved in a wildcat strike, outside of the unions, were absent.
Mineworkers protesting for a living wage were portrayed as irrational, inherently violent and criminal. Immediately after the massacre the police were not called to account by the media. Their version of self-defence was considered acceptable because the mineworkers had already been painted as criminal and irrational.
South Africa suffers from mass unemployment and endemic hunger. Those in power are increasingly criminalising the strategies people use to find a place to live and a way to earn an income. Criminalising the poor allows the government and other elite actors to mask their own shortcomings in addressing pressing issues of poverty. The narrative has given the state the legitimacy it needs to unleash violence and arrests rather than address the underlying precarity that pushed desperate people into the deep and dank shafts of an old mine long since abandoned by capitalist firms.
The single narrative about the zama zamas does not allow us to have an honest conversation about the state’s failure to break colonial extractivism that continues define the mining industry, where black working-class people continue to be exploited as cheap labour, and to lose their land to mining companies, now operating with local political elites including, in some cases, traditional authorities.
The language of “problem people” does not allow us to see these workers as human beings that face all kinds of barriers to becoming legal miners.
The government’s insistence that those stuck underground are criminals is a misdirection. In his acclaimed book, Open Veins of Latin America, Edwardo Galeano writes that “the more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.”
But more than anything, this criminalising language shows the pervasiveness of racism in South African society. Writing in the early 20th century in The Souls of Black Folks, W E B Du Bois identified the “problem of the colour line” as the driving force for the global system of exploitation. Half of the world’s population was subjected to colonial rule and not seen as human. This phenomenon persists in the 21st century.
Global capitalism has erased the fact that the smartphones, computers and electric vehicles, that signify today’s technological advancement, are a product of deadly, inhumane, slave-like working conditions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). About 70% of the world’s cobalt, which powers these items, comes from the DRC. People, including women and children, work as informal mineworkers for a mere dollar or less, just to survive. Not only are they in the mercy of warlords, people get buried alive while digging with picks and shovels.
As big tech companies sell iPhones, which have become markers of wealth and make super profits, the violence visited upon those at the source of production gets minimal or no mention in mainstream media. As Frantz Fanon puts it in The Wretched of the Earth, because these are Africans, “they are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.” If we do not insist on the humanity of those who are marginalised and in need of solidarity, like the zama zamas of South Africa, the DRC and elsewhere in the continent, we are complicit in the systems that don’t recognise them as people but objects to be exploited and discarded.
The problem is compounded by shrill demands that the state not support the men trapped underground because they are illegal foreigners.
If we pay careful attention to the history and political economy of mining in South Africa, the fact that some of the informal miners come from other countries in Southern Africa should not come as a surprise. For most of the last century mine workers were recruited by mining companies in rural parts of South Africa and from across Southern Africa.
This historical fact is beautifully documented by the late jazz maestro, Hugh Masikela, in a song called Stimela. Just as the sound of the train and instruments fade, in a poet like tone, Masikela announces:
There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi
There is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe
There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique
From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland
From all the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa
This train carries young and old, African men
Who are conscripted to come and work on contract
In the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg
And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day
For almost no pay …
These employment patterns that characterised the mining industry for more than a century cannot disappear overnight.
Many of those stuck underground are former mineworkers who have been retrenched or had family members that worked as mineworkers. It is understandable that mining conglomerates can no longer profit from the disused mines because of the costs of operation, but this does not mean there are no minerals to mine. The gold is still there, and informal mineworkers are going to the ends of the Earth in search of it. They risk their lives to feed themselves and their families.
To avoid similar incidents such as Stilfontein, the state must urgently adopt a policy that recognises small-scale informal mining as a wealth redistributive tool in a country with deep levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty. The minister of minerals and petroleum resources must come out from the shadows and commit to breaking the neocolonial nature of the mining industry that continues to extract mineral wealth without real benefit of communities.
With proper state support of informal mining, people will be able to blunt some of the edges of mass unemployment and impoverishment. But we are not going to be able to get to this point if we insist on criminalising informal minework.
Musawenkosi Cabe is a freelance legal journalist.
