“Surrender or Starve”

In 2023, South African police launched a major campaign to crack down on illegal mining. Operation Vala Umgodi translates roughly to “Plug the hole” — a fair summary of the tactics employed at Stilfontein.

In August 2024, police blockaded the entrances to the abandoned Buffelsfontein mine, a labyrinth of tunnels and shafts extending more than two kilometers underground. Within were hundreds of zama zamas operating from bases in the mine itself. Nobody knew quite how many; while police put the number at 300, the mine’s population would prove closer to 2,500. These miners now faced the crudest form of siege. No food, water, batteries, or medicine would enter the mine for months. “We are not sending help to criminals,” announced a government minister. “We are going to smoke them out.”

These “surrender or starve” tactics seemed designed to produce the latter outcome. Clearly, few miners would willingly put themselves up for arrest and deportation. Whether the heavily armed criminal syndicates that governed the mines would allow anybody to leave was another question entirely. Many zama zamas are outright enslaved, recruited under false pretenses and sometimes “forced underground at gunpoint.” Once below, gangs keep them heavily indebted, charging exorbitant prices for supplies and demanding crippling exit tolls. As a Stilfontein community leader put it, “Caught between the police and the gangs,” zama zamas suffer a “double victimization.”

An initial wave of exits seemed to give credence to the police line that “no one [was] trapped” and they could exit of their own volition. By mid-November, some 1,200 miners had emerged and been arrested. Hundreds more remained underground in increasingly dire conditions. Police insisted this contingent was simply “refusing to resurface.”

Advocacy groups like Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA) protested the use of starvation as a tool of law and order. Their legal efforts managed to partially break the siege in mid-November, when an interim court order allowed aid into the mine. Using a makeshift pulley-system, MACUA lowered crates of oatmeal and maize drink to the miners below. The pulley returned bearing handwritten notes. “We are perishing slowly,” wrote the miners. “People are dying because of starvation.”

Two kilometres below the earth was a hell that defied comprehension. Video footage showed miners emaciated to the point of starvation. Heaped in corners of the waterlogged shafts lay corpses wrapped in blankets and plastic. Food had run out entirely. When rotten maize-meal and cockroaches, toothpaste and toilet-paper soup were exhausted, some men resorted to cannibalism. “We are also eating human flesh of those who are falling because of starvation,” read the miners’ notes. “Please, we request assistance, there is a lot of people here underground.”

“Refusing to resurface” seems the least likely motive for enduring such hardship. More plausibly, most miners were too weak to make the days-long climb up the exit shaft or were prevented from doing so by force. Surfaced miners identified the mine’s boss, Lesotho national James “Tiger” Tshoaeli, as maintaining a reign of terror “responsible for the torture and starvation of hundreds.” Exiting the mine was harder still since the police had destroyed its elevator system, leaving a rope-pulley as the only way out — a mechanism capable of lifting just one person per hour.

These factors would explain the astonishing lengths to which some zama zamas resorted to reach the surface. On Christmas Day, a forty-year-old South African miner emerged having climbed up a two kilometer mineshaft by clinging to the steel girders embedded in its walls. For five days he hauled himself up without ropes or equipment. “I had to stay awake for five days,” he said. “If you make a mistake and fall asleep, you’ll fall and die. I used all my inner strength to stay alive.” Along his ascent, he encountered reminders of the price of failure: ten bodies in various states of decomposition.

By January, the miners’ plight was national news, and the provincial high court ordered the government to evacuate the mine. On January 13, a mining rescue company started work at Stilfontein, replacing crude rope-pulleys with an elevator capable of shuttling bodies, living and dead, to the surface. The 246 surviving miners were so emaciated that the elevator could operate way above its capacity. A rescue operation expected to take weeks was over in three days.

For thousands of impoverished manual laborers from Mozambique and Lesotho, Operation Vala Umgodi ended in arrest and deportation. The gold mafia running the industry has been far less disrupted. After emerging from the mine, notorious gang boss “Tiger” Tshoaeli promptly escaped with police assistance. He remains at large today.

The final toll: two thousand miners arrested, seventy-eight dead. Nobody knows how many bodies remain interred underground. A union leader concludes, “This is the Stilfontein massacre.”

“They Must Drop Them Dead”

National reactions to the siege have been mixed. A significant proportion of the public sees zama zamas as little more than violent thieves in need of harsh suppression. Comments by far-right Johannesburg politician Kenny Kunene — “They must die like rats underground there, all of them” — epitomize wider anger with the violence and crime associated with illicit mining.

Opposition parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) — a populist party that advances a politically ambiguous muddle of leftist and nationalist rhetoric — have resisted this virulent rhetoric while nevertheless supporting the anti-zama clampdown. During Stilfontein, the EFF admitted the “devastating consequences of illegal mining on local economies, the environment, and public safety” while urging the government to “balance enforcement with respect for human rights and dignity.” Yet EFF president Julius Malema has been far from immune to tough-on-crime rhetoric, urging police not merely to besiege illegal mines but invade them outright.

This sensationalist rhetoric reflects the present weakness of South Africa’s beleaguered parliamentary left. Lacking a nationwide base or strong political coalition, and faced with a surging right, these politicians have failed to shift public discourse on vulnerable groups like zama zamas. Appeals to populist law-and-order tropes are the cheapest way to gain ground with a public overwhelmed by violent crime.

Outside the electoral sphere, industrial unions and social movements have mounted more effective responses. Declaring Stilfontein the “worst state-sponsored massacre” since apartheid, socialist unions have fiercely challenged the ANC’s war on impoverished miners. Community organizations played a leading role in fighting the siege on behalf of miners and their families, coordinating rescues and aid deliveries and launching legal challenges to the police blockade. “To allow anyone — be they citizens or undocumented immigrants — to starve to death in the depths of the earth,” union leaders argued, “is a direct violation of . . . the state’s constitutional responsibility to protect life.”

These qualified defenses of the rights of foreigners laboring in the black market have not garnered wide popularity. Amid nearly 35 percent unemployment and widespread infrastructural breakdown, concerns over crime and migration cannot be dismissed as mere reactionary rhetoric — especially since the poor are the worst-affected. Illegal miners are driven by such deprivation, even as they may exacerbate it as well.

Locals in Joburg suburbs like Riverlea, where gunfights between rival mining gangs can kill twenty at a time, “now live in constant fear.” Given such precarity, “when zamas are killed it is celebrated.” Pivoting from these present dangers to argue for structural transformations that will prevent them represents a major ongoing challenge for South Africa’s left.

The Shadow of Gold

South Africa’s illegal mining industry is often framed as a failure of law enforcement and criminal intelligence — the product of a justice system “captured by cartels.” This is only half the issue. Certainly, failures in law enforcement succor dangerous criminal syndicates. But this crisis is rooted in the broader extractive economy imposed on southern Africa since apartheid and the extreme inequality it generates.

Core pillars of the apartheid system were designed by and for the mining industry, which demanded a constant supply of black labor paid at the lowest-possible rates. At its peak, the mining industry sucked in millions of foreign laborers from Botswana to Malawi, wielding pass laws and wage suppression to ensure these miners would not settle locally or become durably enriched.

This system of precarious migrant labor still consumes the lives of thousands of men from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique — only now their labor is expended outside the formal economy as zama zamas. Thanks to gold depletion and mechanization, the mining industry has been shedding labor for nearly forty years. Across South Africa, foreign mine workers have been laid off en masse without hope of gainful employment in their native countries. This virtually guaranteed that they would resort to illegal mining to survive.

South Africa’s ruling elites have considerable stake in the industry that created such maldevelopment. President Cyril Ramaphosa made his fortune in mining, even serving as a board member for platinum giant Lonmin when its striking workers were massacred at Marikana in 2012. The ANC has long resorted to funneling mineral rents to political elites and traditional chiefs to keep its rule intact. This path of “unproductive rent-seeking and patrimonial bargains” has made certain men very, very rich, while consigning the majority of South Africans to atrocious poverty.

From Brazil’s garimpeiros to Zimbabwe’s makorokoza, the illegal miner is a worldwide phenomenon inextricable from the formal mining industry. He is its shadow. The mining magnates dig the holes from which precious minerals are extracted, but they also work to maintain a precarious labor force and ensure that the state remains captured by resource rents, its leaders loyal supporters of the extractive paradigm.

These are the preconditions of the zama zama crisis. So long as they go unaddressed, South Africa’s transition to democracy remains dangerously incomplete.