Zama zamas: police brutality won’t end it

Rosalind C. Morris

In mid-January over 1 000 hunger-weakened miners exited two abandoned mine shafts in Stilfontein. They had been starved out by the police in Operation Vala Umgodi — meaning “plug the hole” – which had cut off food and water in an effort to “smoke out” a shadow workforce.

An estimated 6 100 closed mines are distributed across the country. Although closed, they are not sealed. Residual gold remains in these ruins, and is extracted by miners who come from across the region. They are mainly unlicensed or undocumented migrants, and work in groups that range from a few dozen individuals to highly organised teams of hundreds.

Television stations and social media feeds carried horrendous images of the emaciated figures of the living and the dead as they were brought to the surface, nearly six months after the operation was started.

The tales of what the police operation inflicted on these mineral gleaners are harrowing. Reports of illness and starvation, of weeks in fetid air next to decomposing corpses, as well as the eating of insects and even human flesh, were entered into evidence before the constitutional court. A case was brought before the court by an organisation seeking to halt the operation on human rights grounds.

This wasn’t the first siege undertaken as part of Operation Vala Umgodi. But it was the first sustained blockade.

What could lead to the adoption of nearly medieval military tactics in a nation with otherwise robust constitutional protections for human rights as well as strong regulations governing mine closure and rehabilitation? And why do so many South African citizens appear to agree with this brutal strategy? Who are the “criminals” captured as a result of such extreme measures?

I am an anthropologist and I’ve been studying the social life and history of South African gold mining for nearly three decades. I’ve also made a film with and about informal miners.

The problems posed by informal mining will not be solved by treating it as a question of criminality or border security. It must be understood in relation to the history of the formal industry, and in terms of regional and global economic forces.

This includes the problem of demonetisation (the substitution of digital tokens for hard currency), rising rates of personal debt, exclusion from digital infrastructures and protracted local economic crises.

The world of the miners

Over the years I’ve come to know many individuals who have gone underground in search of what’s been left behind by large scale industrial mining. They come from the same places as did many of their forebears who worked in the formal industry. In its heyday South Africa’s mines employed nearly half a million people. They came from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, as well as the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Some are former mine workers, now unemployed. Some are farmers or fishermen whose livelihoods have been made untenable by drought and floods, or by monetary and political crises at home.

These are the people on the lowest rung of informal mining’s ladder. Like most industries, this one is highly stratified. Above such desperate individuals are the criminal syndicates who traffic in arms, people, narcotics and gold. And, as journalists and even the World Gold Council acknowledge, they are enmeshed in webs of corruption.

These include bankers, as well as management and security forces of formal mines, smelting and reclamation companies, buyers and traders, and smugglers who carry gold from South Africa to Dubai.

Those webs also include police and government officials with the authority to intervene. Or to profit handsomely for not intervening.

Yet, the police strategy and public sentiment in South Africa treat the gangsters and their virtually enslaved labourers as equally culpable for the economic, material and environmental devastation that afflicts the nation. And they largely ignore the depredations that resulted from the industry’s formal operations over a century and a half.

The context

The horrors in Stilfontein and elsewhere need to be understood in a global context. According to a 2024 report by the World Gold Council, 20% of the world’s newly mined gold comes from small scale and artisanal production. And an astonishing 80% of all the people who work in the gold sector worldwide do so as informal or artisanal mineworkers. Many work in the shadow of the law under extremely coercive circumstances.

In 2022, that meant about 20 million people were eking a living as small scale miners of gold. (Another 20 million or so work in similar fashion to obtain other minerals.) They, in turn, supported an estimated 270 million people. More people than live in Brazil, or about seven times the population of Canada.

These numbers reflect rapid growth in recent decades. The World Gold Council measures that upsurge from 1993, the year that triggered the era of globalisation with the fall of Soviet socialism and the emergence of new regionalisms (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union).

What we see around the world today, in tariff wars, isolationalist nationalism and the vilification of migrants, can be traced to the same period, when capital began to fly around the world and multinational corporations began to shed their commitments to local communities of labourers.

South Africa’s story

Black workers in South Africa experienced this trend in acute ways.

The country’s mineral economy was defined by the compound system, in which mineworkers lived in single-sex hostels and travelled between the mines and their residential homes on short-term contract bases. Black workers were heavily dependent on the corporation for social goods that the state was not providing because of racial policies.

Over the past four decades many South African mining corporations, like those elsewhere, shrank their work forces and moved to subcontract labour for those remaining. In lieu of benefits, they offered workers more “freedom”. Many workers desired this. But freed from longer-term contracts and from the social goods extracted by unions, they also became vulnerable to other forces. And the HIV/AIDS epidemic afflicted communities with terrible strain.

Personal indebtedness rose dramatically. For those without documented citizenship or resident status, accessing credit meant turning to shadowy lenders, including gangs, who charged and enforced merciless interest rates. This in turn strengthened the power of the gangs, long part of the landscape in southern Africa.

The undocumented and the very poor have also often been forced into a realm of criminality where they depend on illegally mined and unminted gold. These are the people who are most easily preyed upon by armed criminal groups.

Popular mythology in South Africa attributes much violent crime to the “zama zamas”. But there is no evidence of this.

In my observation, violence around the abandoned mines is mainly committed by gangs and their collaborators, who also coerce zama zamas in their underground labours, extracting from them the gold they manage to take from underground, charging security fees to enter shafts and to exit them, organising coerced prostitution, trafficking in child labour, and supplying the dynamite, the mercury, and the pneumatic drills in larger operations.

This is why the World Gold Council report is correct to speak of the exploitation of small scale and artisanal miners. It recommends that states prosecute the buyers, smelters and bankers, as well as political authorities who profit from this merciless economy.

Solutions

Laudable as these efforts to redirect prosecutorial zeal are, the solution to the problem of informal economies is not policing. Nor is it regulation.

In places where gold is found in surface deposits, licensing by the state can provide systems of oversight and a regulatory framework to protect workers. So can negotiated settlements with “criminal” gangs, who become more like corporate institutions in the process.

But in South Africa the possibility of self-organised mining appears to have passed. Rises in the price of gold have led to more intense and militarised competition among gangs. In addition, South Africa’s gold mines – the deepest in the world – aren’t hospitable sites for either licensing or decentralising strategies. It is too dangerous and too expensive to secure the thousands of miles of underground tunnels.

The solution must begin with massive regional economic repair, including debt relief for individuals and for sovereign states which can’t spend on social goods because of their interest obligations on foreign loans. It must include the stabilisation of local economies, and reinvestment in climate-resilient agriculture.

And migration needs to be rethought and decriminalised. The past of the gold mines is a history of migration. The future, shaped by climate change, will also be a story of migration. Above all, therefore, a change in consciousness is required.

Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University