We are living through multiple iterations of deathmaking. As with all instances of black death, we watch dispassionately or cheer those instrumentalised to kill. In this case, it appears that most South Africans want the artisanal miners — zama zamas — killed.
“Val’umgodi. Close the hole. Bury them alive. Smoke them out.” Government ministers seeking popularity after losing an election abandon their principles and the Constitution they have sworn to uphold. They chant death. The values of politicians are a sun-dried carcass. Even the flies take no interest.
This zama zama catastrophe is occurring in slow motion and most of the citizenry want death to speed up. Every day, more bodies are lifted out of the mining tunnels of Stilfontein in North West. Let it be placed on record that a massacre is underway in the belly of the old mining belt.
Like most occurrences in late capitalism, this is a complicated moment. But most of us refuse the nuance and latch onto expedient explanations that we hope will make our lives easier.
We live on land on which colonial theft, apartheid atrocities and extractive exploitation has occurred. Mining land is haunted by these ghosts of history.
They will always be complicated. Living on land abused by racial capitalism will never be easy. It is akin to residing on a cemetery.
Because we are blaming, perhaps, let us draw the net of complicity. There are the mining barons, and colonial and apartheid authoritarian governments that exploited millions of black people to build the mining industry that built this country. There are the late and post-apartheid governments that did not hold mining houses responsible for not closing old mines as they should have.
We have governments that thrive on surplus populations of desperate unemployed people. Systems that allow mass inequalities where we can have some of the world’s richest people alongside its poorest.
It is common cause for most people that artisanal miners terrorise the people who live alongside exhausted mines and waste dunes.
They generally operate as a shady extra-legal force in a single-minded drive to survive even if this means stealing, killing and damaging neighbouring infrastructure.
But these miners are the ghosts of history. They form a long chain of millions of people who have been the cheap labour of mining houses since the late 1800s when gold mining began in earnest in South Africa.
It is unsurprising that many of the dead and “illegals” being lifted from the mining tunnels are Mozambicans. As Charles van Onselen’s The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners To and From the Witwatersrand Mines, 1902-1955 tells us, Mozambicans were the largest group of people working in South African mines. They are in large part responsible for the very profits used to build the infrastructure we want to protect today.
In our mines, Mozambicans have for generations worked and died in mine falls and terrible working conditions cheek by jowl with Zimbabweans, Malawians, Basotho, Swati and those from South Africa’s homelands including the former Transkei.
The standoff between zama zama leaders now underground for more than a month without sunlight, toilets or healthcare and the police who guard the mouths of the tunnels has variously appalled and entertained the South African public.
In early December, an artisanal miner addressed the media in isiXhosa. He said many of those underground are South African. He spoke of the adolescents driven underground by the desperation of impoverishment and their vulnerability in the dark pits of the earth.
He was making the point that if we were killing under the ruse of the expendable lives of “foreigners”, then he wanted it on record that desperate South Africans were also among those in the death tunnels and that teenagers were being smoked out and were among the emaciated bodies drawn up by rope.
Those scavenging the wastes of capital share blackness and impoverishment. The doing word for how to make people poor and desperate is impoverishment.
I write this piece on the day that we woke to the news that a note attached to one of the miners forced up the tunnels towards the sunlight listed things wanted by those underground. Among the items requested was tomato sauce and mayonnaise.
Radio talk shows and social media erupted with incredulity. How could illegals demand luxuries, they asked. Our police and state are fools to negotiate with criminals, they asserted. Radio hosts and listeners laughed at the brazenness of these miners. Our Human Rights Commission has become a tool for illegality, they contended. The refrain is that the commission is a symptom of too many rights in this country.
The commission has become unpopular. Perhaps they too should turn away in the face of expendable death. Black aliens or illegals are not regarded as human. We know this from the endemic Afrophobia and its eruptions. 2008 saw our cities lined with white tents after illegals were smoked out. This remains an itchy blemish. An erupting cancer.
After living dangerously in dark, gaseous tunnels, without bathing, on scraps of food and limited drinking water supply for more than month, the wretched cannot ask for mayonnaise. They watch their peers die and then sit with the corpses. On the eve of the Christmas holidays, tomato sauce and mayonnaise have become the breaking point of our brittle humanity. Surely, now that they have requested mayonnaise, they should all die. Should poisonous gas be leaked into the tunnels?
And after the hundreds of people currently underground die, what will we do with those who replace them? Kill them too? In our characteristic way, we will not attend to the demonic grounds bequeathed to us by colonial, apartheid and late racial capitalist regimes.
To reckon with the scale of the problem, we must attend to the genocidal histories and ecologies of mining. Black people have been compelled deep underground to mine for gold for 150 years. After gold mining became obsolete and mining barons and parasitic governments pocketed the surplus wealth, these people and their families were abandoned.
Today, rural areas in Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho and the Eastern Cape are zones of abandonment. Places of broken dreams and maimed generations of miners who returned home to die or were buried in underground tremors and their mine falls. As a child of Lusikisiki in the 1980s, I remember the smell of tuberculosis and Aids offloaded from the buses. I was there when we buried the miners. And now, descendants watch the sun set on empty stomachs.
Without replacement industries, artisanal miners scavenge the leftover wastes. They continue an unbroken 150-year trail into the tunnels of the mines that crisscross the Highveld. No smoking them out will solve the wrongs of more than a century. Even mayonnaise is not enough.
Hugo Canham is a writer and professor at Unisa. He writes in his personal capacity and is the author of Riotous Deathscapes.
