The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction, edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle, is a collection of the best of the best creative nonfiction from the country over the last 30 years – featuring big names (Coetzee, Ndebele, Steinberg, Madondo, De Greef, Malan, Kannemeyer, Sosibo, Krog, Motshumi) and lesser known but no less important emerging voices (Mji, Nkosi, Roy) on the SA literary journalism scene.
This extract is published by permission.
Underworld by Kimon de Greef
A few years ago, a mining company was considering reopening an old mine shaft in Welkom, a city in South Africa’s interior. Welkom was once the centre of the world’s richest goldfields. There were close to fifty shafts in an area roughly the size of Brooklyn, but most of these mines had been shut down in the past three decades. Large deposits of gold remained, though the ore was of poor grade and situated at great depths, making it prohibitively expensive to mine on an industrial scale. The shafts in Welkom were among the deepest that had ever been sunk, plunging vertically for a mile or more and opening, at different levels, onto cavernous horizontal passages that narrowed toward the gold reefs: a labyrinthine network of tunnels far beneath the city.
Most of the surface infrastructure for this particular mine had been dismantled several years prior, but there was still a hole in the ground – a concrete cylinder roughly two kilometres deep. 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 nine metres in diameter, with an internal frame of large steel girders. The camera descends at one and a half metres per second. At around 250 metres, 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 camera continues its descent, leaving the men in darkness. Twisted around the horizontal beams below them – at 500 metres, at 800 metres – are corpses: the remains of men who have fallen, or perhaps been thrown, to their deaths. The bottom third of the shaft is badly damaged, preventing the camera from going farther. If there are other bodies, they may never be found.
As Welkom’s mining industry collapsed in the 1990s, a dystopian criminal economy emerged in its place, with thousands of men entering the abandoned tunnels and using rudimentary tools to dig for the leftover ore. With few overhead costs or safety standards, these outlaw miners, in some cases, could strike it rich. Many others remained in poverty, or died underground. The miners became known as zama zamas, a Zulu term that loosely translates to “take a chance”. Most were immigrants from neighbouring countries – Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho – that once sent millions of mine workers to South Africa, and whose economies were heavily dependent on mining wages. “You started seeing these new men in the townships,” Pitso Tsibolane, a man who grew up in Welkom, explained to me. “They’re not dressed like locals, don’t talk like locals – they’re just there. And then they vanish, and you know they’re back underground.”
Owing to the difficulty of entering the mines, zama zamas often stayed underground for months, their existence illuminated by headlamps. Down below, temperatures can exceed 40°C, with suffocating humidity. Rockfalls are common, and rescuers have encountered bodies crushed by boulders the size of cars. “I think they all go through hell,” a doctor in Welkom, who has treated dozens of zama zamas, told me. The men he saw had turned grey for lack of sunlight, their bodies were emaciated, and most of them had tuberculosis from inhaling dust in the unventilated tunnels. They were blinded for hours upon returning to the surface.
I recently met a zama zama named Simon who had lived underground for two years. Born in a rural area of Zimbabwe, he arrived in Welkom in 2010. He started digging for gold at the surface, which was dusted with ore from the industry’s heyday. There was gold beside the railway tracks that had once transported rock from the mines, gold among the foundations of torn-down processing plants, gold in the beds of ephemeral streams. But Simon was earning only around R600 a day. He aspired to build a house and open a business. To get more gold, he would need to go underground.
In no other country in the world does illegal mining take place inside such colossal industrial shafts. In the past twenty years, zama zamas have spread across South Africa’s gold-mining areas, becoming a national crisis. Analysts have estimated that illegal mining accounts for around a tenth of South Africa’s annual gold production, though mining companies, wary of alarming investors, tend to downplay the extent of the criminal trade. The operations underground are controlled by powerful syndicates, which then launder the gold into legal supply chains. The properties that have made gold useful as a store of value – notably the ease with which it can be melted down into new forms – also make it difficult to trace. A wedding band, a cellphone circuit board, and an investment coin may all contain gold that was mined by zama zamas. Welkom, once an economic engine of the apartheid state, emerged as an early – and especially dire – hotspot for illegal mining. Since 2007, officials in the Free State province, where Welkom is situated, have recovered the bodies of more than seven hundred zama zamas – but not all deaths are reported to the authorities, and many bodies remain belowground. “We call it the zama graveyard,” a forensic officer said in a 2017 news interview, following an underground explosion that killed more than forty people. In decommissioned mines, the ventilation systems no longer function, and harmful gases accumulate. At certain concentrations of methane, a mine becomes a bomb that can be detonated by the merest spark; even rocks knocking against each other can set off a blast. In Johannesburg, about 250 kilometres northeast of Welkom, there are fears that illegal miners may cause gas pipelines to explode, including those beneath Africa’s largest soccer stadium.
Kimon De Greef is a freelance journalist from Cape Town. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times and GroundUp, and is the co-author of Poacher: Confessions from the Abalone Underworld (Kwela, 2018). He is at work on a book about psychedelic toads. Underworld was first published as The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines in the New Yorker, 20 February 2023. © Kimon de Greef