Trapped in the Mine

The miners​ first realised they were in danger when someone threw stones down the shaft. To communicate with people above ground, usually to ask for food, water or medicine, the miners would shake a rope and shout through a cut-off plastic bottle that amplified their voices. Family members or other miners would shake the rope and yell back. Supplies would follow. But for days there had been no reply. Gcina Lepheana had been working deep in the illegal mine for five months when, in October last year, the deliveries stopped. ‘For days we shook the rope with no response,’ he said. ‘At one point, stones were thrown into the tunnels, and we knew that as a sign of imminent danger. It was then that we suspected the police were involved.’ The men were afraid. They held meetings, trying to work out what to do. They still had supplies of toothpaste, vinegar and salt, and mixed these with the water that dripped from the rocks.

For weeks, they had no contact with the surface world. Then, in early November, pamphlets headed ‘Urgent notice to illegal miners’ were dropped into the shaft. They were printed in four languages – English, isiXhosa, Sotho and Tsonga – and read: ‘We urge all miners to exit at Margaret Shaft as it is the safest existing exit.’ Lepheana was trapped in Shaft 11 of the Buffelsfontein gold mine, which officially closed down in 2013, near a town called Stilfontein, two hours’ drive from Johannesburg; others were in Shaft 10, more than a kilometre away. Nobody knew how to get to Margaret Shaft, which is roughly twenty kilometres away, and, by now, most of the men were too weak to go very far. A few did set out to look for the shaft but returned saying they had encountered ‘a huge body of water’. They couldn’t tell how deep it was and suspected the water might be toxic. Margaret Shaft, which was also being worked by informal miners, is owned by a company called Harmony Gold. Its security and forensic investigations manager wrote in a court affidavit in December that the suggestion miners from Shafts 10 and 11 would be able to exit at Margaret ‘bears no scrutiny’. Before ending the supply of food and water to the miners and removing their means of exit, the police had, it seems, failed to make certain that they had a way to get back to the surface.

Like thousands of South African mine shafts, these three shafts were closed by the companies that owned them when they stopped being profitable. They still contained gold, but not enough to offset the costs of mining it safely. The formal mining industry in South Africa is increasingly safe – 2024 saw the lowest number of deaths on record – but Lepheana and the others were informal miners, known as zama-zamas, or ‘try-try’ in isiZulu: those who take a chance. South Africa was the world’s top gold producer until the mid-2000s, when the industry began a steep decline. As mines were closed, more and more people turned to informal mining, a trend that accelerated as the price of gold increased. In 2016, gold was valued at around $1200 an ounce. Today, it’s $2900. Around thirty thousand zama-zamas are thought to operate across more than six thousand abandoned mines in South Africa. Most of them are undocumented migrants from Mozambique, Lesotho or Zimbabwe. The police decision to cut off food supplies at the Stilfontein mines was part of Operation Vala Umgodi (‘Close the Hole’), which began in December 2023. The crackdown wasn’t prompted by safety concerns, but, rather, was a response to government claims that informal mining costs the South African economy $3 billion in lost income and tax revenue (though this figure assumes that the gold would be extracted without the zama-zamas). According to the police, 18,000 people have been arrested since 2023.

What is called ‘informal’ mining is in fact a highly organised, if extremely dangerous, business. Many of South Africa’s abandoned gold mines are huge, interconnected systems, with shafts at multiple levels. Some of the miners work in small groups, but there are also teams hundreds-strong that are controlled by armed gangs. The miners sell to the gang bosses, who sell to the syndicate bosses, who arrange for the gold to be taken overseas – often through the United Arab Emirates or India, which have lax gold-carrying laws. Gold is desirable not least because it is untraceable. The Wagner Group, now essentially a front for the Russian state, has earned $2.5 billion from illicit gold mining since the invasion of Ukraine, much of it from the Central African Republic. Illicit gold funds Islamic State affiliates, human trafficking, drug and arms smuggling, money laundering and protection rackets.

Many of the miners are forced to work at depths of two kilometres or more for months at a time. They bring picks, hammers, headlamps and on occasion explosives to extract small amounts of gold. The ore is sometimes partially refined underground, the pieces crushed in a pestle and mortar, and then the fine dust mixed with water and mercury. This produces a mercury-gold amalgam, which can later be heated to make pure gold. A doctor at Johannesburg’s Baragwanath Hospital told me that she had treated local children for mercury poisoning caused by gold refining: mercury fumes are densest in the air a few feet above ground. Each shaft in a mine will have a shop – or shops – selling food and supplies, such as batteries for headlamps, which the miners pay for in gold or amalgam. Each shaft also has a hierarchy. At the bottom are those who dig. Above them are those who sell supplies, who guard the ropes that are the only means of getting back to the surface and who organise for the bodies of miners who die underground to be pulled back up. Those higher up the chain, the underground bosses, are often armed. To leave, miners have to ‘buy a rope’; that is, they must pay one of the bosses a given amount of amalgam, usually between 25 and 40 grams. Thirty grams of amalgam could take three months to mine – or a week, if you’re lucky. The miners carry what is left, in the form of amalgam or ore, to the surface, where it can be further refined or sold.

Operation Vala Umgodi reached the Stilfontein shafts last August. The police began to close the entrances, all of which should have been sealed after the mine was decommissioned a decade ago. The rope and pulley systems the miners used to exit the shafts were also removed. After the pamphlets were dropped, miners began emerging from Margaret Shaft. Although they were certain to be arrested (for trespassing and, most of them, on immigration charges), it was better than staying underground. More than a thousand men and boys surfaced in the first few weeks – proof, the police later claimed, that the miners in Shafts 10 and 11 weren’t actually trapped.

Clement Moeletsi went down Shaft 10 in late July last year. Supplies stopped arriving abruptly a month later. By September, people had run out of clean water and were drinking from stagnant pools and eating cockroaches. Moeletsi went six weeks without food, drinking water that he said had a strong chemical taste and burned his insides. His head and stomach ached. The men around him grew weak and thin. ‘Arms that once could dig or carry now trembled under the weight of even the smallest task,’ he said in an affidavit. Cuts and sores wouldn’t heal and the sound of coughing ‘rattled through the tunnels’. Some huddled silently; some were delirious and mumbling; others called out to their families. The only means of escape involved climbing a thin and rusty metal pole, which ran up the shaft. While one person climbed, another had to hold the pole steady. Few managed to make it to the top. One miner estimated that three-quarters of those who attempted the climb fell to their deaths.

Worried relatives and off-duty miners in Khuma, a nearby township, found out that police had surrounded the entrance to the shaft. They knew that supplies would soon run out and began gathering donations, using the money to buy and borrow lengths of rope which they tied together until they had a single piece, 1.5 kilometres long. Their plan was to set up a system similar to the one usually used to bring the miners to the surface. They would lower someone into the mine to help the trapped miners to safety. The rope would be fed through the hands of fifteen men, while a miner called Gorge Dube acted as the rope’s ‘selector’, a role like that of a winch operator. Dube tied the rope around himself and two cement blocks. If he made a mistake – if the rope or load was too heavy, or suddenly much lighter, or moved too much or fell too fast – he would be pulled into the shaft. ‘To maintain my balance during this physically demanding task,’ Dube told the Constitutional Court in January, ‘I pressed my left foot firmly against one of the cement blocks, using it as an anchor to counterbalance the force exerted by the rope.’

The first Khuma rescuer was lowered into Shaft 11 on 12 November, a month after supplies stopped coming. ‘There was a person who came underground, and I knew him because he had been working at a tuckshop at level 13,’ Paulos Sithole, a 28-year-old miner from Mozambique, wrote in his affidavit. ‘I don’t know him by name but I knew him. He told us that we were going to be rescued and we will get out by being fastened with a rope.’ The man stayed for about five minutes, Sithole said, before being lifted out again. ‘We convened and organised ourselves,’ Lepheana reported. They decided that the weakest would be sent up first. Four people had died, and their bodies would be sent up too. Lepheana and Sithole were both chosen for rescue.

The Khuma rescuers worked from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Before lowering food or medicine, they shouted the word ‘hashtag’ into the shaft and waited for the miners’ response of ‘yelisha’ – ‘bring it down.’ On 13 November they sent down supplies, including painkillers, antiretrovirals (many of the miners had HIV), batteries, water, instant maize meal, bottles of Mageu (a fermented maize drink) and Morvite (a brand of sweetened porridge). ‘It was barely enough for a single meal,’ according to Lepheana. There were hundreds of people to feed. Sithole said that the food was taken by the bosses before being distributed: a kilogram of maize meal was divided between about eight people. (The police used his affidavit as evidence that the miners were stockpiling food.)

The further the rope descended into the shaft, the heavier it grew above ground. The friction burned through Dube’s gloves and cut his hands. The men knew the rope had reached the miners when they heard banging on a big oil drum. A round trip took 45 minutes: supplies down; a miner or a body up. Lepheana was pulled to the surface. Sithole came next. His affidavit ends: ‘I am glad to be the one who was rescued because it is too hard underground. That is all I can say.’ Both men were immediately detained.

Meanwhile word spread through Shaft 10 that food deliveries had resumed at Shaft 11. The miners began to move. ‘The journey was treacherous,’ Moeletsi wrote. ‘Along the way, we encountered a section of the mine where the heat was almost unbearable, so intense that it was deemed unsafe to cross under normal circumstances.’ South African deep-cut mines can reach temperatures of 60°C. When they arrived at Shaft 11, they found it filled with exhausted, starving men. ‘Some were slumped against the walls, too weak to stand, while others sat silently, their hollow eyes fixed on the shaft above, waiting for signs of relief.’

The rescuers approached an NGO, Mining Affected Communities in United Action (MACUA), and it spoke to lawyers and the press. By mid-November, local media were reporting that as many as four thousand miners might be trapped, but that many had already resurfaced. The fact that Margaret Shaft couldn’t be reached from Shafts 10 and 11 wouldn’t be reported for weeks. In mid-November, the minister in the presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, laughed when she was asked by a journalist if the government planned to send aid or rescuers down the shafts. ‘We are going to smoke them out,’ she said. ‘Criminals are not to be helped. Criminals are to be persecuted.’

When the next delivery arrived, parcels of instant maize meal and water ‘were torn apart with frantic hands’, according to Moeletsi. The maize was divided into tiny portions. ‘It barely counted as nourishment.’ On 19 November, the deliveries stopped. The rescuers had retrieved 25 people and 16 bodies, but their ropes had either worn through or were too short to be used again (each time a corpse was pulled up, the part of the rope that had been in contact with the body was cut off to prevent contamination). A new rope the length of the shaft cost the equivalent of £700, more than three months’ wages. The North West province, where Khuma and Stilfontein are located, has an unemployment rate of more than 50 per cent.

There was silence for three days, then, just before midday on 22 November, a new rope came down the shaft. This time, it held light sticks, a camera and a letter from Buffelsfontein Gold Mine asking if the miners wanted to be rescued. Buffelsfontein had employed a company called Mines Rescue Services to determine the cost of a rescue. At 12.22 p.m., the letter was removed by the miners. At 12.45, the miners attached their reply. ‘Illegals responded saying they are about five hundred,’ an MRS employee wrote to the mine owners, ‘and three hundred of them are sick and that they need food, and all of them would like to be rescued.’ The rescue company attached its quote: roughly half a million dollars. MACUA filed a case at the High Court in Pretoria, calling for the government to provide humanitarian aid. On 1 December, the judge ruled that while the miners could receive aid, it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to provide it. The police must, however, allow the community aid and rescues to continue.

While MACUA’s lawyers prepared to appeal, the Khuma rescuers launched a crowdfunding campaign, which was picked up by the national press and raised around $4000. They used some of the money to purchase a new rope. Food and medicine were delivered on 3 December. On 9 December, Moeletsi was rescued and immediately detained. ‘Everyone underground was ready to come out,’ he wrote in his affidavit. ‘There were no stockpiles of food, and the notion that we could voluntarily come out is entirely false.’ In the days following his arrest, more miners joined Moeletsi in custody. He asked them how things were underground. People were resorting to eating the dead, they told him. Another miner confirmed this in an affidavit and it was mentioned in a letter sent to the surface on Christmas Eve. Because the miners were starving, the letter reported, they were ‘eating human flesh of those who are falling’. ‘The problem is that we have been hungry for a long time,’ one miner wrote. ‘Even myself, I’m losing strength and it is me who is tying the people you are pulling up.’ Some men were still trying to climb the metal pole.

For more than a century, South African gold, platinum, coal and diamonds have been dug by miners from Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and beyond. Their experiences are preserved in songs still sung in South Africa, though the history is rarely discussed. ‘Shosholoza’, adopted as a South African struggle song and sometimes referred to as the country’s second national anthem, has its origins in a work song sung by Zimbabwean miners. In the early decades of the 20th century, most of South Africa’s miners were from Mozambique. The British made a deal with the Portuguese: in return for Mozambican labour, they would arrange for trains to be routed through certain ports, guaranteeing the Portuguese a steady income of taxes and fees. Mozambicans were not consulted. But many signed up to work on the mines: it was a choice between that or forced labour at home. Their contribution, and that of other migrant labourers, is nearly always ignored by politicians. When asked about Stilfontein, the police were at pains to point out that the miners were mostly illegal migrants. The police minister, Senzo Mchunu, joked that women in Stilfontein should stop dating foreigners. ‘It’s a criminal activity,’ Gwede Mantashe, minister of mineral and petroleum resources, said of the illegal mining in January. ‘It’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main.’

In his song ‘Stimela’, the South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, who grew up in the mining area of Witbank, describes the trains coming from Namibia and Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique, carrying men to the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg and its surrounding towns, where they would work ‘sixteen hours or more a day for almost no pay’. As a child in Johannesburg, I learned the song ‘Bombela iStimela’ in isiZulu classes, but not its migrant history. The children in the song are anticipating the arrival home of their fathers, who have been working in the mines. They imagine being given a silver jacket, ‘bought with money’. Many songs and poems from this period record the marvel and horror of the trains. The word bombela both mimics the sound of the train and tells us about the journey: in siSwati it means ‘to crowd’ or ‘to pack tightly’.

In Lesotho, the British made mining one of the few careers available to the Basotho people. In an anonymous poem from 1998, a young man describes crossing the river to South Africa in search of work in the mines. Cannibals (lelimo) are waiting for him. According to the historian David Coplan, lelimo referred to the earth into which you descended as well as to the white mining bosses, who consumed your labour and destroyed your body, and the black ‘boss boys’ who worked with the whites. The young man of the poem both wants and fears what lies ahead:

I kept quiet and brought down my prayers.
When I said, ‘Let the earth swallow me up,’
They answered mercifully, the cannibals of war:
‘This day is your last.’

On 10 January, the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court, ordered the state to rescue the miners and ensure the uninterrupted delivery of food, water and medicine. The ground was cleared for a crane that would carry them to the surface, paid for by the state and the Minerals Council of South Africa. In the process, the concrete blocks used by the Khuma rescuers were destroyed. They had pulled 34 people to the surface. Mandla Charles, one of those rescuers, has worked as a zama-zama in Shafts 10 and 11 for a decade. In his affidavit, he described the darkness underground as though it were alive. ‘The darkness itself seems to shift … In places where the tunnels are narrow and the air is thick with dust, the darkness feels like it presses in on you, making it almost impossible to see or breathe.’

Charles descended with the cage to help bring up the remaining miners. The rescue team had estimated that it would take two weeks to bring everyone up. In the end, it took three days to rescue 246 miners and retrieve 78 more bodies. Of the two thousand miners who had come out of the Stilfontein mine since August, the police reported, 1125 were Mozambican, 465 were from Zimbabwe, 200 from Lesotho and 26 from South Africa. ‘We are not even dealing with South Africans,’ Polly Boshielo, the deputy police minister, told the press. President Cyril Ramaphosa has yet to acknowledge the dead.

I drove to the mine the morning after the rescues ended. As I left Johannesburg, the landscape widened into fields of tall grasses, interrupted now and then by a mine shaft. I passed mine dumps, too, mountains of yellow sand that glow in the afternoon light. Shaft 11 is a short way off the N12 highway, the ‘Treasure Route’. There were several cars parked at the side of the road and a group of people sat in the shade of an acacia tree. The police let me through, and I walked towards the crane, where men in white overalls, journalists with TV cameras and policemen stood. The cage had been sent down one final time with just a camera and a microphone to make sure no one remained, and was now being pulled up. I spoke to one of the other people there, Paul Verryn, a Methodist bishop whose church was raided by police in 2008 after he opened it to Zimbabwean refugees. He told me he had come to offer counselling to anyone who needed it. He had been here during some of the Khuma rescues, he added, and seen the dead bodies brought up by rope. Corpses had to be swung from the middle of the shaft into someone’s arms, he said, in order to be cut loose. ‘That is a very intimate interaction with death.’ He had asked some of the rescuers how they were sleeping. One told him that he drank himself to sleep; another smoked dagga (cannabis); another could not stop crying.

The cage was at 900 metres and the rope coming up was wet from the water that runs down the sides of the shaft. Ten minutes later it resurfaced, empty. It was much smaller than I had imagined, just a metre wide and shaped a bit like a rocket. At one point, it had carried thirteen people to the surface in a single journey.

Two weeks after the rescues ended, I met Mandla Charles at his home in Khuma. He borrowed two beer crates from a neighbour and we sat in his garage. He tried to warn the police in October, he told me, that the miners couldn’t escape. When he arrived underground in the rescue cage, he had been welcomed like a president, he said. He had no protective clothing, only gloves and a mask. ‘So I go down, I take nine bodies to the cage. That was the first load.’ The dead were placed in body bags and hung from the centre of the cage. ‘That smell, even now, it’s still smelling to me.’ He stayed underground for hours, rather than returning up each time, so that people could be rescued more quickly. All the bodies from Shaft 11 were retrieved, he told me. On the last day, he climbed through to Shaft 10. He guessed that there were more than eighty bodies still there, most of them miners who had fallen when trying to climb the metal pole. ‘But those bodies,’ he said, and then stopped. They had been smashed up on impact. ‘When zama-zamas die underground,’ he added, ‘we always bring them to the surface.’ This confirmed what I had heard at the morgue. ‘We are used to this,’ a man behind the front desk told me, as he gestured to the neat piles of folders he was preparing for each of the dead. They were marked SM59, SM60 (SM for Stilfontein Mine). Morgue workers would get a call from time to time, usually in the morning, informing them that there were dead bodies on the N12. They would be wrapped in sheets and labelled with the person’s name and a telephone number. The morgue staff would pick them up and contact the family. A few days later, someone would arrive in a fancy car to pay the funeral expenses.

Charles told me about life underground. When you first arrived, he said, you found a place to sleep and put your blanket down there – there was lots of space, and nobody touched your things. Supplies – medicine and food from family members, or bulk supplies for the tuckshops – were retrieved, under normal circumstances, from a rope in the middle of the shaft. He walked over to the corner of the garage and picked up a metal rod with a bend at one end. He mimed leaning over the shaft and hooking the rope near the top, then pulling the load diagonally down and towards him. ‘We are criminals because the government says we are criminals,’ he said. He is waiting until the police leave the shafts and then plans to go back down.

The government has yet to release pathology reports. But an independent pathologist hired by MACUA performed twenty autopsies and concluded in each case that starvation and dehydration were the causes of death. ‘This was not simply a case of miners entering a dangerous situation; the greatest and most lethal danger came from the state itself,’ a MACUA representative said. The South African Human Rights Commission has launched a national inquiry. Most of those arrested at the Stilfontein mines will be given deferred sentences and deported – more than a hundred have left the country already. At least one person has died in police custody. On Valentine’s Day, the South African Police Service held what it described as a ‘glamorous’ awards ceremony for officers deployed as part of Operation Vala Umgodi.