In the small town of Stilfontein, some 90 miles from the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, hundreds, possibly thousands, of illegal miners—locally called zama zamas (which can be translated as “hustle hustle,” people who take risks to work)—have been underground in an abandoned mine shaft for more than a month. They are refusing to exit the mine and are in a standoff with the South African Police Service.
The police have posted officers waiting for them on the surface. Although more than 1,000 miners have already come up and been arrested, among them some children, authorities have no idea how many miners are still in the shaft 2,000 meters underground. The bodies of dead miners have been dragged to the surface by rope in recent weeks.
At the beginning of November, South African authorities said that they would end illegal mining in an operation called Vala Umgodi (“Close the Pit”). That effort has proven to be deeply challenging for civil authorities.
South African police halted the delivery of all food supplies to the miners to pressure them to resurface. A minister in the presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshaveni, said in fact that no help would be sent underground to the miners. “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out,” she said. “Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted.”
“We didn’t send them there, and they didn’t go down there with good intentions for the republic, so we can’t help them.”
But on Nov. 16, 2024, the High Court in the country’s capital, Pretoria, handed miners a lifeline when it ordered authorities to allow delivery of food and water supplies for the starving and dehydrated miners underground. The court said that the aid could be delivered by humanitarian groups.
South Africa is a mineral-rich country. According to official estimates, it holds nearly 30 percent of the world’s gold and 88 percent of all platinum deposits. Gold is still a valuable commodity, but rising mining costs—exacerbated by the country’s regular disruptions in electric service and the increasing inaccessibility of gold deposits—have made most mines in South Africa unprofitable.
When mines shut down, some mining companies do not make an adequate effort to seal off access to the abandoned site. Neither do former mine operators pay much attention to the rehabilitation of the damaged ecosystem around a mine site.
They also typically abandon the informal human settlements that rise up around mines, including homes and communities for the mine’s workforce. Thousands of workers have been left destitute around former mining operations in rural areas often far from South African cities and towns where they might find new work or reach social services.
Conditions are worse for abandoned mine workers who are not South African. Mine operators have a long history of importing labor from neighboring countries like Lesotho and Mozambique, but these miners do not receive legal residency in South Africa and have little to no access to basic services when mines close down.
In an attempt to survive, miners who have lost their jobs, as well as undocumented migrant workers, are increasingly entering closed mines to extract remaining mineral deposits. They risk their lives reaching unsafe shafts by rope and pulley systems—tunnels often collapse and there is the danger of toxic chemical inhalation. Miners at abandoned sites typically endure extreme temperatures below ground in their effort to eke out a living.
The Rev. Peter-John Pearson, the director of the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office, has been following developments in the mining sector closely. “About 16 unused mine shafts in the country are being exploited for mining again,” he said. Father Pearson said that anyone with knowledge of mine engineering will understand how easy it is for miners to access closed mines.
One of the big dangers in these wildcat mining operations is the weakening of support pillars within abandoned mines after miners extract minerals from them. “It makes everything on top more vulnerable and dangerous without the [structural] support an ongoing mining structure would have in such circumstances,” he said.
These black market mining efforts have become a means of survival for miners and others who seek to make a livelihood around the mine sites. Locals provide food, drink and cigarettes to the miners and, in doing so, try to survive themselves in these extremely impoverished settlements.
Miners are often recruited by criminal syndicates that can introduce the extracted minerals into the formal local and international markets. Fortunes have been made by those at the top of the chain. Local community members say that some miners are persuaded to work at the sites, then kept underground against their will. The police say that some of the illegal miners or the people supervising them are heavily armed.
Father Pearson said, “A troublesome and unfortunate dimension is that people from neighboring poverty-stricken countries have been [enticed] into this work by syndicates operating outside the country.” The migrant laborers believe they are coming to South Africa to perform casual labor but are delivered into the mines where they work under “the most subhuman employment conditions,” Father Pearson reported. Their “basic human rights are nonexistent.”
The informal mining extraction also creates an economic burden to South Africa as a whole, he added, explaining the nation does not receive the royalties that official mining operations generate. Father Pearson described the criminal operations as a kind of “economic sabotage.”
The Most Rev. Sithembele Sipuka, president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the South African Council of Churches, said in an interview with America that the situation is complex, beginning with the excesses allowed to the mining industries in the first place. Bishop Sipuka said that private sector mine owners and operators “get away with murder in the way that they maximize profits while destroying the environment and not improving the lives of the people in the area, nor rehabilitating what they have destroyed when they move out.”
Regarding the illegal mining, Father Pearson worried that heavily armed criminal gangs are using poor people to make huge profits and that many miners were being forced to remain underground against their will. “This is undoubtedly a criminal operation,” he said.
Bishop Sipuka said that the inability of the South African government to contain the power of transnational criminal syndicates is another aspect of the crisis. The complex issues related to the illegal mine operations in the end must address the humanitarian conditions faced by the miners and protect the human dignity of both the South African and immigrant laborers who are being exploited, he said.
Father Pearson is concerned that the crisis has already been used by politicians to exploit longstanding problems of xenophobia and hostility to immigrant workers in South Africa.
Bishop Sipuka said that “the immediate moral question is how you deal with human beings created in the image of God in a way that respects their dignity. There is no one solution; we must agonize around all the frustrations but devise a humane way of dealing with them.”
He said that the South African Council of Churches would continue a dialogue with all parties, including the miners themselves, to seek a resolution to the crisis in Stilfontein, but he cautioned against holding the miners as the only culpable party. “The police, who are handling the present crisis of trapped miners, who are only foot soldiers, should widen their investigations into the alleged syndicates behind all this and have them prosecuted.”
According to Father Pearson, the church’s parliamentary liaison office planned to continue to highlight the “absolute unforgivable exploitation of the vulnerable and the poor by syndicates.”
“Let us look at power relationships and the broader issue of poverty in the region and, thus, the exploitation of the vulnerable through seductions by syndicate groups,” he said. “Until regional justice, [an end to government] corruption and economic justice are realized, people will be vulnerable to these marauding criminal groups.”
