South Africa’s deadly underworld Illegal immigrants have become desperate miners

In South Africa, illegal miners are known by the isiZulu word Zama Zama, or “take a chance”. It’s a risk that can often prove fatal. Last week, not far from Stilfontein in the northwest of the country, 246 emaciated, tattered spectres appeared blinking from Shaft 11 of the Buffelsfontein gold mine. It had been disused for years, but that didn’t stop a group of illegal miners, mostly foreigners, from trying their luck. Soon, though, they became trapped, some 2,000 metres below the dusty soil, even as the authorities denied them food and water.

By the time the survivors had emerged, 87 more lay dead, hinting at a horror not even Dickens could have conjured. Initial pathologists’ reports suggested some had died of starvation or dehydration, others from blunt-force trauma caused perhaps by factional fighting in deep hell. There have even been unconfirmed reports of cannibalism.

Anybody who has been to the lowest working levels of a modern South African gold mine — with its superb tunnelling, air extraction and lighting — can still feel the claustrophobic weight of confinement. Imagine, then, these long-abandoned shafts: dimly lit, fetid and dangerous. Think of the desperation that would lead you to stay underground, amid mounting piles of corpses, rather than give in to deportation.

Ultimately, it was only a court order that ended the terror. Private sector and voluntary groups arranged for the extrication of the dead and dying. The authorities had no appetite to enter the shaft.

So how did it happen? For years, illegal gold mining has been endemic in South Africa’s historic gold mining areas, with impoverished foreign migrants grubbing poor returns from the country’s 6,000 abandoned shafts. In the end, though, this is a story that goes far beyond the Zama Zama, speaking instead to the disaster zone that is the modern South African economy.

South Africa’s illegal miners live in appalling conditions. Overwhelmingly illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho, and often underground for months at a time, they’re dependent on syndicate runners, usually children, to bring them essential supplies through hidden access points.

Many were once employed as formal miners before the sector faltered under African National Congress (ANC) misgovernment, and they ended up jobless. The gold, for its part, is sold to intermediaries who then sell on to syndicates. Much then ends up abroad: an estimated 25 tons of illegal gold is shipped from South Africa each year.

This traffic, meanwhile, is only part of a vast criminal state, one that has permeated every crevice left by the official South African government: transport, energy generation, road haulage, waste disposal, precious mineral extraction, national infrastructure, “protection” and so endlessly on. Much has been facilitated by the ANC’s catastrophically misguided programme of race preferment, which has seen chunks of the economy and administration fall into the hands of politically connected but incompetent (and often corrupt) “cadres”.

The broader context to last week’s tragedy, then, lies in an altogether too familiar tale. Since the advent of the ANC government, between three to five million African illegal immigrants have crossed the border, many of whom end up living in abject informal settlements in the peri-urban areas, or else in thousands of “hijacked” buildings in city centres.

These buildings have been abandoned by their owners, often the state, due to the collapse of services and the law. Warlords move in, many Nigerian, and rent out space to these shadow people. The consequences are as predictable and as terrible as at Buffelsfontein’s Shaft 11.

On the night of 31 August 2023, for instance, a fire swept through a hijacked five-story Johannesburg building. 76 people died, mostly African foreigners. A 29-year-old man was subsequently arrested. He admitted he had inadvertently started the fire — while burning the body of a person he had murdered in the basement on the orders of a drug dealer. In another grim harbinger of Shaft 11, survivors refused offers of sanctuary by the authorities because they were afraid of deportation.

By and large, South Africans are not xenophobic. Indeed, they welcomed their fellow Africans in a sort of quid pro quo for the support their countries had given the ANC in their long struggle against Apartheid. For their part, southern African immigrants are eagerly sought for household, construction or retail work. They are hard-working, reliable and often better educated and skilled than locals of a similar socio-economic level. The explosion of share-ride and home delivery services alone absorbs tens of thousands each year.

But this is changing. The continuing inability of neighbouring countries to create job-generative economies has seen a trickle of immigrants swell to a flood, facilitated by the ineffectiveness of South African border management and epic corruption in the internal policing agencies.

As a flailing South African economy was also unable to create jobs on a sufficient scale for its own people, let alone foreigners, competition for low-level work increased — and so did lawlessness. Communities near the disused mines, for instance, claim foreign footpads hide in the shafts and prey on passers-by.

Enter a virulent form of xenophobia, driven by two nativist political movements: the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the infinitely more forbidding Zulu-based ethnonationalist uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP). Together, they accounted for about a fifth of the electorate in the 2024 elections, but in terms of sheer vindictiveness and venom, they punch way above their weight.

As for South Africans generally — they may not be xenophobes, but the appalling indifference with which the tragedy at No 11 Shaft has been greeted by most people speaks to a real national crisis, both political and moral.

All of this has forced the somnambulant President Cyril Ramaphosa, now heading a government of national unity after the ANC lost its overall majority last year, into action.

Operation Vala Umgodi (“Close the Hole”), a crackdown against illegal miners in places like Buffelsfontein, is one tactic. Another was the recent withdrawal of nearly a million temporary work visas from Zimbabweans, subsequently overturned by court order. The latest tactic has been a state-sponsored drive against foreign-owned micro stores and businesses among black communities. The ostensible reason has been a recent spate of deaths and illnesses, allegedly from food bought at these shops. The culprit appears to be cross-contamination from illegal toxic rat poison, used by shop owners to protect their wares.

But here is the irony: the work done by the immigrants is largely that which locals refuse to do, and in any case have diminishingly need to do: a third of South Africans now rely on state benefits. The point is being reached where a poor but prudent extended traditional family unit can realistically expect to harvest sufficient benefits to indefinitely keep work from the door.

Billions of South African rands have also been poured into encouraging black businesses: with tragically little success. That’s even as foreign-owned “spaza” shops, the name here for small convenience stores, flourish despite the lack of support.

This begs the question: is all of this not the inevitable, albeit unintended, end point of the ANC’s grand vision of economic redistribution and “transformation”, the so-called Broad Based Black Empowerment? The first phase, the mandatory expropriation of wealth and opportunity from the old order, has created a vibrant new black consumerist middle-class, but at the price of the exhaustion, disillusionment, rebellion and flight of the donor class. It has also created no economic growth.

The second phase was state capture, whereby a secondary class of beneficiaries extracted rent directly through corruption of the state organs. It is now drawing to a close after the near collapse of an embezzled state.

We are now in the third and most dangerous phase. The left-behinders, those who benefitted neither by expropriation of private wealth or embezzlement of state resources, have formed their own group which, buoyed by 30 years talk of entitlement and redistribution, envious of those who came before, pursue their own style of “transformation” through the parallel criminal state — and, latterly, the expropriation of desperate fellow Africans.