Over a harrowing three days, Jan. 13-15, 246 starving miners and the bodies of 78 dead miners were brought to the surface from the 4,200-foot-deep abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine near Stilfontein, South Africa, a small town 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg.
While South African government forces waited to arrest the miners, two area residents — Mandla Charles and Mzwandile Mkwayi — volunteered to carry out a series of trips in a cage lowered and raised by a crane on the surface until everyone they could find was out.
The deaths are the latest casualties in the African National Congress-led government’s war against illegal mining operations, dubbed operation “Close the Hole.” Its target is the more than 6,000 gold mines abandoned by their owners when they could no longer produce profits high enough to justify large-scale corporate operation. They have become battlegrounds for miners and gangs as the price of gold has hit a historic high of $2,700 an ounce.
The miners are largely undocumented immigrants known as “zama zamas.” In the Zulu language this means “hustlers” or “chance takers.” The term is used by the capitalist media to imply the miners are criminals.
The South African Police Service laid siege to the mine last August, preventing food and water from reaching the miners. They expected the miners would give up and come to the surface. This was the case last November, when 565 blockaded miners surfaced from an abandoned mine near Orkney and were arrested. Police spokespeople told the press that their strategy could be summed up as “surrender or starve.”
Many miners at Buffelsfontein perished from starvation and lack of water. Others fell to their deaths in attempts to climb up the mine’s air shaft, a mile-and-a-half vertical climb that would take three days.
The police deny any responsibility for the miners’ deaths. Community members disagreed. The Stilfontein Crisis Committee and Mining Affected Communities United in Action, made up of members of the community and other organizations, said miners were pleading for assistance, no longer well enough to get out on their own. They needed to be rescued.
Local people say the cops were working with gang members in the mine.
Community members explained the miners were trapped in two shafts more than a mile deep, lined with concrete walls with no stairs. The miners had to be pulled to the surface. Volunteers organized to do just that, with a rope and pulley system, but it took so much time and effort that only one person could be brought up at a time. At that rate the rescue would take months and many more would die.
The South African Police Service continued to block people from providing the trapped miners with food. “By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive,” it said.
Local community forces rescue
The government was forced by court order to prepare a rescue effort. That’s when the crane and cage setup was erected. But local authorities refused to send anyone to operate them. Charles and Mkwayi told the Wall Street Journal they knew the trapped miners. They said the surviving miners had to resort to eating cockroaches and rotting flesh from those who had died. “They had lost hope.”
Mkwayi is unemployed and Charles, like the men he rescued, has worked as a “zama zama.” “That’s why I managed to go down. I was just thinking of those guys,” he said.
Deeply affected by what they saw and experienced, they kept going until no one was left behind. They made more than 30 round trips over three days, cramming as many as 13 men and bodies into the cage. “Our government failed them,” said Mkwayi.
Gwede Mantashe, the South African government’s petroleum and resource minister, defended the siege and the deaths as a necessary crackdown on illegal mining. “It’s a criminal activity,” he said, “an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Mantashe were both leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers during the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s, when the majority of union membership in the mines were migrant workers. Ramaphosa went on to become a boss, then a capitalist politician.
All in all, 1,576 rescued miners were arrested and 121 deported. Most came from Mozambique, others from Lesotho and Zimbabwe. Twenty-one were South African. All were taken into police custody.
Capitalist crisis breeds exploitation
As the capitalist economic crisis deepens across southern Africa, with crushing inflation and unemployment, workers from nearby countries are drawn to South Africa, looking for a way to survive. They find the crisis facing working people in South Africa is deep, with an unemployment rate of 42%.
This is what drives people into working in these abandoned mines, digging out gold from old deposits. They find themselves caught up amid armed criminal gangs fighting violent turf wars over the profits.
These gangs are politically well connected. They superexploit the miners, forcing them to work for months in abandoned death traps. These mines have no power, no emergency response, no means of transport for miners or products, no roof support and poor ventilation. The gangs skim off the bulk of the profit.
While none of the main mine worker unions issued any statements about this disaster, the South African Federation of Trade Unions, the second-largest union federation in the country, did issue a statement blaming the government for allowing the men “to starve to death in the depths of the earth.”
“These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other Southern African countries, were left to die in one of the most horrific displays of state willful negligence in recent history.”