Emaciated illegal miners are rescued from underground during the official rescue operation at a disused gold mine shaft in Stilfontein. (Photo: EPA-EFE / KIM LUDBROOK) 
One of our national anthems is Stimela, Hugh Masekela’s haunting tribute to the migrant labourers who came from across southern Africa, from Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, and elsewhere, to dig the gold and coal on which modern South Africa is built.
Bra Hugh’s trumpet, his words, sing the searing story of migrant labour, and our interconnectedness to the region is apparent in every word and every blast of that trumpet. Andries Bezuidenhout writes that the song should be the workers’ anthem, telling in its story an essential part of our history.
Today, the song tells of our present, too, and of how a government desperate to deal with powerful illegal mining networks, which, according to the industry, cost South Africa R70-billion a year in lost investments and assets, is also forgetting that history.
Read more: The ‘surrender or starve’ saga in Stilfontein is a chronicle of deaths foretold
As private mine rescuers brought up the Stilfontein miners, alive (216) and dead (78) by the end of 15 January on the third day of a 10-day operation, this is how the police identified the miners: “216 are alive illegal miners. 78 are deceased.”
A day earlier, the cops said in a statement: “On day two of the operations, a total of 106 alive illegal miners were retrieved and arrested for illegal mining. 51 were certified dead.
“A breakdown of those arrested per nationality is as follows: Mozambicans: 67; Lesotho: 26; Zimbabweans: 11, South Africans: 2.”
The cops did not identify the dead miners by name; Deputy Minister of Police Polly Boshielo said their embassies had been contacted. Where were their names, their stories? Why hadn’t the living miners been fed, checked by doctors and given a respite before being questioned and thrown into jail, I wondered.
Many were emaciated and like the walking dead, as this report by Lerato Mutsila and Felix Dlangamandla shows.
What happened to Ubuntu?
Ubuntu flew out of the window in a frenzy of othering, an act of historical amnesia. They should be shown no mercy, said a Cabinet minister this week; in November last year, the Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshaveni, said the miners would be smoked out.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ED_512561.jpg "Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshaveni. (Photo: Gallo Images / Frennie Shivambu)")
While Police Minister Senzo Mchunu said this week that one death was one too many, the official communiqués reduced the dead and emaciated to children of a lesser God.
It’s as if the state’s representatives did not know nor care that the Buffelsfontein mine, now the epicentre of the police’s anti-illegal mining Operation Vala Mgodi (Plug the hole), was built on the sweat of Mozambican, Basotho, Zimbabwean and South African workers as part of the migrant labour system that was a lynchpin of apartheid-colonialism.
The mine at Stilfontein was one of three incorporated in 1949 (the year after formal apartheid was declared by Hendrik Verwoerd) and later became part of the Genmin stable, a company at which both President Cyril Ramaphosa and Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources Gwede Mantashe organised workers and rose as mineworker leaders.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ED_541862.jpg "President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo: Gallo Images / ER Lombard)")
Their roles as National Union of Mineworkers general secretaries are why both hold their current jobs.
A people’s government can never forget our history, even as it tackles illegal mining, which, as
Mntambo of EWN showed, is highly organised and profitable for its kingpins. We can’t forget that history, even as a wave of anti-migrant sentiment sweeps the land – so powerful that the overwhelming response to the dead and emaciated men is that they deserve no better because they are foreigners.
Nightmare at Stilfontein makes global headlines
This week, there was only one story about South Africa, and it wasn’t the good matric results, the upbeat assessment of South Africa’s growth potential in a new Bloomberg survey, or the fact that the rand was the top performer against a surging US dollar in 2024.
It was none of that good news.
The story of the dead miners, the starving miners who were rescued by the government only after civil society and the courts intervened, flashed across the world. Video images showed the nightmare underground at Buffelsfontein, a shuttered mine where the remaining gold in the reef lies almost 2km underground.
Many of the tunnels were flooded by acid mine water, making it impossible for workers to swim out to reach one of the two shafts they could use, said Christopher Rutledge, the executive director of Mining Affected Communities United in Africa (Macua), which co-ordinated solidarity food drops, peoples’ rescue efforts, and last weekend’s court case brought by Lawyers for Human Rights.
What will Ramaphosa do this time?
Over the next week, more bodies and more starving miners will be brought to the surface as a private company conducts the professional rescue operation and targets 10 days for complete retrieval.
Ramaphosa must take the lead in ensuring that this appalling story does not become another Marikana, the 2012 massacre of striking miners by post-apartheid police in which 34 miners and 10 security workers at Lonmin were killed.
It is an albatross Ramaphosa continues to carry as he was on the Lonmin board at the time as a shareholder, and intervened to counsel executives to ask for more muscular police action.
Of course, he wasn’t to blame for the police shootings, but he was not close enough to the pressure building at the mine. The Farlam Commission of Inquiry into Marikana found that Ramaphosa could have used his ample political capital to push for a peaceful strike resolution.
This time, Ramaphosa must get proximate and lead by heart.
Ubuntu’s language and practice, the constitutional values of solidarity and our commitment to Pan-Africanism must replace the cold anti-migrant language and securocrat communication that is turning Stilfontein into Marikana.
Is the comparison a stretch? No, says Routledge: “That’s how we are characterising it. These are poor black men condemned to death by the state without due process.” He says illegal mining is a socioeconomic problem and not a criminal issue.
South Africa is a leading mining economy, and there must be a better way to ensure the 6,000-plus abandoned mines nationwide are adequately secured.
Zama zamas (artisanal or illegal miners, depending on where you stand) drill parallel shafts or prise open the old, closed shafts. With superior mining technology and industry skills available, proper inspection and closure shouldn’t be impossible.
Only a handful of mines are closed by the Mines Department’s strict rules on how you shut a mine. The state can also beef up its ability to inspect and enforce proper closure. It’s hard work, and there is no doubt that illegal mining is a priority issue, but leaving it to the police alone has made for this early-year nightmare, where South Africa is not acting according to our Constitution or in alignment with our history.
Better practice must prevail for the children and grandchildren of the men who came to mine the gold by the steam trains that brought them from deep rural areas in South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe.
As Bra Hugh reminds us:
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 hinterland of southern and Central Africa.
This train carries young and old African men
Who are conscripted to come and work on contract
In the golden mineral mines of Johannesburg
And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day
For almost no pay.
[From Stimela, as quoted by Andries Bezuidenhout.] DM