South Africa’s illegal mining industry: Gang-controlled ‘towns’ grow underground

Along with about 600 other men, Ndumiso lives and works in a small gang-controlled “town” – complete with markets and a red-light district – in a disused gold mine in South Africa. Grown deep underground.

Ndumiso told the BBC that after being laid off by a major mining firm, he decided to join a gang that was working as an illegal miner in its underground world called “Zama Zama”. Known as “

He mines the precious metal and sells it every three months on the black market for huge profits, earning him more than before – though the risks are now much greater.

“Life underground is brutal. Not many people make it out alive,” the 52-year-old told the BBC on condition that his real name not be used because he feared reprisals.

He said that there are bodies and skeletons in one level of the shaft. We call it Zamzam Cemetery.

But for those who survive, like Ndumiso, the job can be lucrative.

While he sleeps on sandbags after days of backbreaking underground, his family lives in a house he bought in a suburb of the central city, Johannesburg.

He said he paid 130,000 rand (about $7,000; £5,600) in cash for the one-bedroom house, which he has now extended to add three more bedrooms.

An illegal miner for almost eight years, Ndumiso has managed to send his three children to fee-paying schools – one of whom is now at university.

“I have to raise my wife and kids and that’s the only way I know how,” he said, adding that after he spent too much, becoming a car hijacker or a robber, the crime rate was high. Instead of increasing I preferred to work underground. Years trying to find legal work.

His current job is in a mine in the small town of Stilfontein, about 90 miles (145 km) southwest of Johannesburg. The center of global attention Security forces stopped the unloading of food and water after a government minister, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, promised to “smoke out” hundreds of miners underground there.

“Criminals are not to be helped. Criminals are to be persecuted,” Ntshavheni said. Ntshavheni said.

A campaign group, The Society for the Protection of Our Constitution, has launched a court case to demand access to the mine shaft, which police say is about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep.

The court has given an interim decision saying that food and other essential supplies can be delivered to the miners.

Ndumiso operates a different shaft at the mine, and was exposed last month before the current stand-off.

He is now waiting to see how the situation unfolds before deciding on a return.

The stand-off follows the government’s decision to crack down on an industry that has gone out of control and is run by mafia-like groups.

Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee Makatiku Mehlawal said the country has been plagued by illegal mining for many years and mining communities are suffering from fringe criminal activities such as rape, looting and damage to public infrastructure. On mineral resources

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the mine was a “crime scene”, but police were negotiating with the miners to end the standoff rather than arresting them.

“Law enforcement authorities have information that some miners may be heavily armed. It is well established that illegal miners are recruited by criminal gangs and are part of wider organized crime. become part of syndicates,” he added.

Ndumiso was among the millions of workers – both local and nationals of neighboring states such as Lesotho – who have been pushed back as South Africa’s mining industry has declined over the past three decades. Many of them have become “Zama Zama” on abandoned mines.

David van Wyk, a researcher at the South Africa-based Benchmark Foundation who has studied the industry, said there are about 6,000 mines in the country.

“Although they are not profitable for large-scale industrial mining, they are profitable for small-scale mining,” he said. BBC Focus on Africa Podcast.

Ndumiso said he worked as a drill operator, earning less than $220 (£175) a month for a gold mining company until he was laid off in 1996.

After struggling to find full-time employment for the next 20 years due to South Africa’s extremely high unemployment rate, he said he decided to become an illegal miner.

There are tens of thousands of illegal miners in South Africa, Mr. Van Wyk said, with about 36,000 in Gauteng province alone, the country’s economic heartland, where gold was first discovered in the 19th century.

“Zamazama often spend months underground without a surface and rely heavily on outside aid for food and other necessities. It is a difficult and dangerous job,” a report by the campaign group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime reports. I have been told.

“Some carry pistols, shotguns and semi-automatic weapons to protect themselves from rival gangs of miners,” he added.

Ndumiso told the BBC he had a pistol, but also paid his gang a “protection fee” of about $8 a month.

He said its heavily armed guards deter threats, particularly from Lesotho gangs known for possessing more lethal firepower.

Under the 24-hour protection of the gang, Ndumiso said he used dynamite to search for gold using rock blasting and rudimentary tools such as axes, spades and chisels.

He gives most of what he gets to the gang leader, who pays him at least $1,100 every two weeks. He said he was able to keep some gold, which he sold on the black market to supplement his income.

He was one of the lucky miners who made such an arrangement, he explained, explaining that others were kidnapped and taken to the shafts to work as slave laborers, receiving no payment or gold.

Ndumiso said he usually lived underground for about three months at a time, and then came up for two to four weeks to spend time with his family and sell his gold, before moving into the deeper pits.

“I look forward to sleeping in my own bed and eating a home-cooked meal. Breathing in the fresh air is an incredibly powerful feeling.”

Ndumiso doesn’t come out very often if he loses his burrow, but after three months it becomes too much to stay underground.

He recalled that once he reached the surface: “I was so blinded by the sunlight that I thought I was going blind.”

His skin had also turned so pale that his wife took him for a medical check-up: “I was honest with the doctor about where I lived. He didn’t say anything, and just treated me. He gave me Given vitamins.”

Above ground Ndumiso does not just rest. He also works with other illegal miners as the ore rocks lifted from the bottom are cracked and ground into a fine powder.

It is then “washed” by his group in a makeshift plant using dangerous chemicals like mercury and sodium cyanide to separate the gold.

Ndumiso said he then sells his portion of the gold – for $55 a gram, less than that. Official price of about $77.

He said he has a ready-made buyer, whom he contacts through WhatsApp.

“The first time I met him I didn’t trust him so I told him to meet me in the police station car park. I knew I would be safe there.

“Now we meet in any car park. We have a scale. We weigh the gold on the spot. Then I hand it to him, and he pays me in cash,” he pointed out. That he goes in between. $3,800 and $5,500.

He receives this amount every three months, meaning his average annual income is between $15,500 and $22,000 – far more than he earned as a legally employed miner.

Ndumiso said the gang leaders earned far more, but he did not know how much.

As for the buyer of his gold, Ndumiso said he knows nothing about him, except that he is a white man in an illegal industry involving people of different races and classes.

This makes it difficult to control criminal networks, Mr Van Wyk said, adding that the government was targeting miners – but not “the kingpins living in the leafy suburbs of Johannesburg and Cape Town”.

Mr Ramaphosa said illegal mining was “costing our economy billions of rands in lost export revenue, royalties and taxes” and the government would continue to work with mining firms “to ensure for them to take responsibility for rehabilitating or closing mines that are no longer working.”

Mr Van Wyk told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast that the government would make South Africa’s economic crisis worse if it took control of the “Zuma Zams”.

“There should be a policy to criminalize their operations, regulate them better and regulate them,” he added.

When Ndumiso goes back to work underground, he takes cartons of canned food with him to avoid paying high prices at the “markets” there.

Apart from food, basic items – such as cigarettes, flashlights, batteries – and mining tools were sold there, he said.

It shows that a community – or a small town – has developed underground over the years, according to Ndumiso there was even a red light district, where sex workers were brought underground by gangs. .

Ndumiso said the mine he worked in consisted of several levels, and a maze of tunnels that were interconnected.

“They are like highways, with painted markings to direct different places and surfaces – like the surface we use as a toilet, or the surface we use as a Zamzam cemetery,” he said. say.”

“Some competitors are killed by gang members; others die during falling rocks and are crushed by large rocks. I lost a friend when he was robbed of his gold and shot in the head. Gone.”

Although life underground is dangerous, it’s a risk that thousands like Ndumiso are willing to take, because they say the alternative is to live and die poor in a nation where the unemployment rate is 30 percent. is more than