Kimon de Greef's piece in the February 27 New Yorker, "After the Gold Rush," is the most eye-opening thing I have read in years.
The basic story is this: the small city of Welkom in South Africa was built when mining companies opened a series of deep gold mines in the 1950s. Around 1989, those mines ceased to be profitable. This was partly because the global price of gold fell, and partly because the growing power of South African blacks and their unions meant that they were not as exploitable as they once were. So the mines were closed; across this region, 150,000 miners were laid off.
Many of them responded by sneaking back into the mines and continuing to mine illegally. These men became known as zama-zamas, which means something like "risky-risky." One event that brought illegal mining to the attention of the companies happened during a routine inspection of what was supposed to be a closed shaft:
To assess the mine's condition, a team of specialists lowered a camera down the shaft with a winding machine designed for rescue missions. The footage shows a darkened tunnel, some thirty feet in diameter, with an internal frame of large steel girders. The camera descends at about 5 feet per second. At around eight hundred feet, moving figures appear in the distance, travelling downward at almost the same speed. It is two men sliding down the girders. They have neither helmets nor ropes, and their forearms are protected by sawed-off gum boots. The camer continues its descent, leaving the men in darkness. Twisted around the horizontal beams below then —at 1600 feet, at 2600 feet—are corpses: the remains of men who have fallen, or perhaps been thrown, to their deaths.
It seems that thousands of men were carrying on this very dangerous work. Although the big companies considered the mines unprofitable, enough money was being made to attract the attention of organized crime. By the 2000s, the mines were taken over by violent gangs from Lesotho, who fought underground battles with uzis and shotguns.
The town of Welkom was not in much better shape:
Welkom is surrounded by enormous flat-topped mine dumps that rise from the plains like mesas. The roads have been devoured by potholes. Several years ago, zama-zamas began breaking open wastewater pipes to process gold ore, which requies large volumes of water. They also attacked sewage plants, extracting golf from the sludge itself. Now untreated sewage flows in the streets. In addition, zama-zamas stripped copper cables from around town and within the mines. Cable theft became so rampant that Welkom experienced power failures several times per week. . . . This past November, a clock tower outside the civic center, considered one of Welkom's landmarks, displayed a different incorrect time on each of its three faces.
Eventually, in the 2000s, all the mines around Welkom fell under the control of one mob boss, a man from Mozambique known as Khombi. Khombi created his cartel by taking control of food supply to the mines; miners lived underground for months or even years at a time, all their necessities supplied from above by Khombi's gang. When they struck it big, they ordered buckets of KFC. Khombi played the part of any truly successful boss, building a mansion, corrupting the local government, making generous donations to favored charities, even bailing out the town when it fell so far behind paying for electricity that the electrical company threatened to cut off the whole community.
Just a few years ago, things began to change again. New mining technologies and the rising price of gold made it possible to resume working the mines officially, and those around Welkom were all bought up by one company. The government moved against the zama-zamas and Khombi's gang, bringing in outside police since those in Welkom were all in the pay of the gangs. Hundreds of people were arrested, including more than 50 local officials. Khombi was eventually convicted of murder. De Greef meets people who believe that when the gangs were broken up, hundreds of men were trapped underground and starved to death.
It's an astonishing story, and one still going on. De Greef says there are still zama-zamas under Welkom, besides many other places in South Africa. It is crazy in itself, and one small part of the craziness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where democracy has not led to anything that most people would call justice.
3 comments:
It crazy in itself, and one small part of the craziness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where democracy has not led to anything that most people would call justice.
And yet people would rather live in a hell of their own making than one imposed on them by others.
In that context, it's interesting to ponder this question: Would the miners rather have worked at official jobs in apartheid South Africa, forced to live in company barracks and so on, but with the working conditions much better and safer, and the pay at least as good, or work on their own in the dangerous darkness? I suspect that if you could take organized crime out of the equation, many would rather take the risk of working alone; at least any good finds they made would profit them instead of the white mine owners.
@John
There's also the question of whether, or to what degree, those are the same people. I can only assume there's some degree of overlap, but I wonder how much.
"Honest" professional miners have certain prospects for finding other mining jobs elsewhere (even despite the overall low grade of professionalism in South African mining), and for a good number of them I assume working the mines illegally would be a step down they'd rather not take if they could avoid it.
Likewise, I'm sure many of the illegal miners were utter rookies who didn't know the first thing about mining, they simply heard that there was gold and decided to try to get some for themselves. Many of them probably would never have a chance of being hired for legitimate mining operations because they'd be a liability - either because of prior criminal records, or because of unacceptable behavior patterns, or both (again, even despite the overall low grade of professionalism in South African mining).
Of course, the middle ground would quite naturally be populated to some degree with prior legitimate minors who were desperate enough for work to accept the risks of the criminal efforts. But I don't really have context for how large of a group that might have been.
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