Illustrative image: Rescue workers trying to save trapped illegal mine workers from an unused mine. (Photo: Yunus Mohamed / Gallo Images / Foto24) | Illegal mine worker enters an abandoned mine shaft in Benoni. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla / Gallo Images / Beeld) | An excavator works at an illegal mine in Benoni. (Photo: Alon Skuy / Gallo Images / The Ties) 
South African mining is a death cult.
Between the years 1912 and 1994, more than 69,000 people lost their lives in mining-related accidents in South Africa, many of them on the Witwatersrand goldfields. The vast majority were unskilled black migrant labourers, who either by choice or coercion (often there was no distinction between the two) found themselves working the deepest shafts in the world, engaged in one of the most dangerous vocations in history.
It’s worth asking: Are those who survived the South African gold boom living as comfortable pensioners, breathing the glorious air of Mangaung or Tofu, Mozambique? The answer, of course, is no.
The term “Randlord” was devised to describe a small band of white men who benefited from South African mining — today, we’d describe them as oligarchs. The principal tool in their enrichment was apartheid, which above all was a racialised labour system which provided cheap bodies to the mines.
Most of the countless ounces of bullion mined from the Witwatersrand flitted away into the global market until South African gold turned suddenly poisonous in the 1980s. By then, the mines had entered their sunset era and the men who had been subject to forced labour, many from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, were dying from silicosis or TB at home.
Make no mistake — gold built South Africa, which is another way of saying that the men who mined gold built South Africa. A large percentage of them — at times close to a third, according to the historian Charles van Onselen — were not South African. The roads and developed-world infrastructure that spirits people and goods along the N1 and the N3, both mining highways, are among the happy hangovers of the apartheid labour system. But not everyone gets to enjoy them.
The 30-year extension of apartheid-era economic disenfranchisement, to say nothing of the regional back-scratching between the ANC and Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe and with Frelimo in Mozambique, has had predictable consequences. Southern Africa is a post-employment desert, where a mulish addiction to resource extraction has frozen the economy in time. Avatars of the old system, like Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe, still seem to think it’s the 1970s, where both the environment and men are disposable. The Marikana massacre is a reminder that the old rules still apply. So too is the fact that last year, the industry celebrated a record safety year — there were “only” 49 fatalities.
So is it any wonder that the holes of the Witwatersrand still scream with death? The zama zama crisis, which has grown more grim and violent as the regional meltdown has grown more severe, is an indication of state failure at a systemic and catastrophic level. Once again, there are the Randlords at the top, spiriting away their wealth to faraway lands. This time, they are careful to remain anonymous — they don’t build social clubs and foundations and neighbourhoods emblazoned with their names.
Brutal bourgeoisie
Once again, there are foremen and line managers and security goons, a comprador class that populates informal mining’s brutal bourgeoisie. This time, they wield AK-47s and benefit from the fact that their charges — the latest version of South Africa’s literal and figurative underclass — have no protection at all. Not from the law, not from the international community, and not from the South African population writ large, who have become so inured to the state-sanctioned murder of poor people that it’s become something of a national sport.
It would be wonderful to think that the tactics employed by the authorities are new, but they’re not. The zama zama clean-up Operation Vala Umgodi is a mediaeval-style siege, as stupid as it is brutal. Starving and smoking men out of their underground labours is not what an enlightened people would do. It’s all rendered a little harder to swallow when numerous news reports and analyses have indicated that the police and the political class, to say nothing of elements within the licit mining industry, are benefiting from the zama zama economy.
What’s unfolded in Stilfontein must be properly described — it is state-sanctioned extrajudicial murder. It hardly takes a genius to realise that this will change nothing. Nor does it take a PhD in geopolitics to understand that fixing the problem will require a regional approach to economic regeneration and border security.
South African sovereignty is under threat, but not from zama zamas — the poorest and most desperate inhabitants of a failed region. Rather, it’s under threat because of the tacit deals in place with murderous neighbouring regimes, all of which depend on the illicit gold trade to prop up their kleptocracies.
Just keep an eye on the next SADC lovefest, where the ANC-led government will once again refuse to call out either Zanu-PF or Frelimo for routinely stealing elections, and the tamed members of the “Government of National Unity” will stand by, tongues lolling from mouths, playing along with the old order. Meanwhile, the ANC waves the fig leaf of the Constitution, pretending that we’ve moved on from the bad old days. And yet, it is very clear that we haven’t.
The zama zama are ghosts — of an old economic system that dates back a century and a half. Of a brutality toward miners that refuses to abate. And of greed and cruelty that starts and ends at the top.
Of the many sins perpetuated by the ANC, this may be the worst — the refusal to innovate a new approach to the resource sector, a gleeful willingness to allow corpses of the poor to rot in mine shafts, and a gangland approach to regional deal-making, all of which has resulted in the vile slaughterfest currently unfolding on the Rand.
Once, mining money fled to London. The Randlords’ great-great grandchildren will never need to work, so vast is their accumulated wealth. And yet, the shafts they dug are still jammed with men desperate for a piece of the action.
This new money flees to Dubai, blood gold’s new Shangri-la. It’s not coming home.
And South Africa keeps mortgaging its future, to the extent that it may not have one. DM