The violent underworld of Stilfontein’s zama zamas

Late on Sunday night, 14 zama zamas surfaced from deep underground at a disused mine in Stilfontein, where a major operation against illegal mining is ongoing. Police were guarding the shaft’s entrance and arrested them. One of the zama zamas gave his age as 14.

The miners were all Mozambican. Their clothes were torn and muddy. Some of them had bare feet. They had been climbing for several days up the giant steel girders that held a transport elevator in place when the mine was still operational.

The shaft is deeper than 1.5 km and no longer ventilated, emitting hot vapor that billows upwards like steam. The men were soaking wet and had cuts on their hands.

A reporter for Newzroom Afrika interviewed some of the men before they were taken into custody. They said that they had been hired as casual labourers, unaware this would lead them into some of the world’s deepest and most dangerous mines.

One man had been at a roadside area in Middelburg where unemployed people wait for gardening or construction jobs, he said, when some men pulled up in a white minibus and offered him work in Johannesburg. He hurriedly went home and said goodbye to his wife, with whom he has four children. This was his last contact with his family for three months.

Other men were similarly recruited in the townships of Diepsloot and Alexandra. The recruiters were said to be Basotho men.

Instead of stopping in Joburg, the minibus headed out of the city. “We started asking questions but they threatened us with guns,” the man from Middelburg said. They arrived in Stilfontein and were ordered to go underground.

In the past few years, Stilfontein has become an epicenter of South Africa’s illicit gold industry. The town lies just outside Klerksdorp on the N12 highway, dwarfed by hills of dumped rock and tailings from industrial mines that began operating in the 1950s.

Most of these mines have since been closed down due to declining profitability, though vast quantities of gold remain in the ground. Over the past decade, these abandoned shafts have been taken over by powerful gangs.

A mine security expert from the neighbouring town of Orkney, another zama zama hotspot, told GroundUp that a single shaft could have 500 men working inside, each mining 30 grams of gold per week. He stressed that these were conservative estimates. A gram of gold currently sells for about R1,000 on the black market, meaning that each shaft could generate upwards of R60-million monthly.

There are more than a dozen abandoned shafts surrounding Stilfontein, representing staggering returns for the syndicates controlling the trade. These groups also profit by selling food and other supplies — gumboots, batteries, shovels — to men underground at hugely inflated prices.

Analysts have estimated that illegal mining accounts for around a tenth of South Africa’s annual gold production, although some mining executives privately believe the true figure is even higher. Based on last year’s production statistics, this amounts to ten metric tons of gold, worth more than R15-billion at current gold prices.

This illicit economy endures for a variety of reasons. There are hundreds of disused shafts left behind by the mining industry. Government regulations around mine closures have been weakly enforced. Poverty and unemployment are high in former mining towns. Money from illegal gold mining has corrupted many agencies tasked with combating the issue.

Besides obtaining gold from abandoned shafts, syndicates smuggle zama zamas into operational mines, bribing employees to facilitate their entry.

The illicit gold trade is loosely organised into a pyramid structure. At the top are white-collar criminals who launder gold from zama zamas into the legal gold market, with a hierarchy of buyers and middlemen beneath them. The miners are at the bottom.

Over the past two decades, heavily armed gangs from Lesotho have muscled in on the shafts, operating as extortion rackets. In Stilfontein, working in abandoned mines became impossible without paying them steep fees.

These men, some wearing masks or balaclavas, were trying to assist with rescue efforts. Archive photo: Ihsaan Haffejee

One zama zama told GroundUp that it cost around R10,000 to enter and R25,000 to return. Local gold buyers would often front these expenses in return for a cut of the gold the miners produced. Many zama zamas became trapped in debt while underground, a cycle worsened by the high cost of food, which they paid for in gold. Some men could remain in the mines for months or years and come away with “nothing”, the zama zama said.

His own work for the syndicate involved roping men in and out of the shafts as a “cage operator”, the same term used on functioning mines for controlling the transport elevator. Sometimes he was sent underground to transport provisions to distant tunnels where zama zamas were living, trekking for hours in the darkness. This earned him a salary of R8,000 per month.

He grew up in Stilfontein’s township of Khuma, which was built for black mine labourers during apartheid and named after a Setswana word for “wealth”. His father had been a migrant labourer on the mines but returned to Mozambique after being retrenched in the early 2000s. His mother was unemployed, and to support his siblings he left school before matriculating. Now in his thirties, he has been a zama zama his entire adult life.

Initially he had dug for gold at the surface, but later he began working for a Basotho gang. He described seeing young men at the shafts who had been brought there unwillingly. Most were from Mozambique and Zimbabwe. “They say they don’t want to go underground,” he said. “We see them crying.”

He estimated that a third of the zama zamas he encountered were coerced into entering the mines. “You will take him down there by force. He will be beaten,” he explained.

One night last year, he started lowering a Zimbabwean teenager who was shaking with fear and unable to speak. The rope felt unusually light after a few hundred meters, so he asked some men to help pull it back up. The teenager had been trying to slow his descent by gripping the shaft’s metal frame with his thighs, slackening the tension on the rope. When they hauled him out, his testicles had been torn loose and were hanging from a flap of skin.

Over the past few months, a joint police and military operation in Stilfontein has attempted to force zama zamas out from underground by blocking their supply of food. To date, more than 1,300 miners have been arrested. More than 1,200 were from Mozambique and Zimbabwe. About 100 were undocumented children from neighbouring countries.

Most of these miners have come up via the elevator of a nearby functioning mine shaft. Some have said that they were held captive by gang members. A mine security official involved in the operation told GroundUp that Basotho men with assault rifles were guarding the tunnels that connect the shaft to abandoned mines and only allowing zama zamas to exit if they handed over their gold.

“Whenever they come out, they are paying,” the official said. He added that the gang was withholding food from miners who remained underground. Some have been surviving by eating toilet paper and toothpaste.

A few weeks ago, five young men climbed out from an abandoned shaft near Khuma, surprising a police guard stationed there. They reported travelling for three weeks through the tunnels after escaping the gang and then climbing vertically for more than a kilometre. An official who saw them described their bodies as “crushed”. He added: “We don’t know how they did it.”

The mine’s concrete headframe, a looming tower some 50 meters high, has not yet been torn down. Inside is the mouth of the shaft, a black hole in the earth surrounded by twisted metal and frayed ropes dangling over the edge.

The men said that they had been offered jobs and brought to Stilfontein without knowing what lay in wait for them.

The Mozambicans who came out this past Sunday used a different shaft to exit. Its surface infrastructure was demolished in 2018 and the entrance sealed over, but zama zamas blew it open the following year. Prior to the clampdown, hitmen guarded the site from on top of an adjacent rock dump.

The mine is situated near another abandoned shaft where an informal operation to rescue zama zamas from underground began earlier this month. Mine rescue experts have since taken over, using specialised equipment.

The police have used the escape of the 14 men to argue that the zama zamas are not trapped and “simply refuse to resurface because they are avoiding arrest”, as a press release earlier this week stated.

Hundreds of men are still believed to be underground. “They are caught between the police and the gangs,” a community leader in Stilfontein said. “It’s a double victimisation.”

Published originally on GroundUp .