With ghastly stories emerging about cannibalism and mass death underground, it was time to reconnect with the anthropology professor and filmmaker Rosalind Morris, who remains perhaps the best-qualified person to speak on these matters. The recent interview, conducted over the phone, has been edited for clarity and length.
In 2021, a professor of anthropology named Rosalind Morris released a film called We are Zama Zama. (The film is outstanding, and can be streamed for a fee here.) For decades, Morris — who holds a teaching position in the anthropology department at Columbia University in the City of New York — has studied the phenomenon of informal mining along the Witwatersrand’s denuded gold belt. What differentiates her work from the usual guff is the fact that she collaborates with the miners themselves, crafting papers, books, films and installations that are both honest and revelatory in their depiction of perhaps the world’s most dangerous and thankless vocation.
Morris shot the bulk of the footage for We are Zama Zama back in 2016. (She has returned to South Africa often and continues to speak to her sources on an almost daily basis.) Her contention is that the literal and figurative landscape has changed irrevocably over the past eight years. The complexities of informal mining have been erased by a hostile press and public — zama zamas have been reframed as outsiders illegally plundering what remains of South Africa’s wealth, while the authorities look on and do nothing. No one seems to ask why those miners are down there. Why would someone starve to death underground for less than a living wage?
More pointedly, who are the middlemen who run the shafts? Who are the big bosses who benefit from these new forms of slave labour? Are they the very people slandering zama zamas on television?
With ghastly stories emerging about cannibalism and mass death underground, it was time to reconnect with Morris, who remains perhaps the best-qualified person to speak on these matters. The recent interview, conducted over the phone, has been edited for clarity and length.
DM: Tell us a little bit about what you’ve been up to since we last spoke in these pages, back in 2021.
RM: Along with finishing up several books, I have continued to go back to South Africa. I was there in August 2024, and I visited the areas that I always go to, near Durban Roodepoort Deep. But I also returned to Carletonville and Khutsong to get a sense of how things look and feel. And I arrived in the middle of what felt like a kind of throwback to the ’80s — burning tyres and closed roads, which is kind of the story we’ve been watching for the last six months.
DM: Why don’t you give us your impressions on what is going on down there?
RM: Well, a great deal is changing. The world that was at the centre of my film, which we started filming back in 2016, in some very real way doesn’t exist anymore. And the transformations are so complete. If you were to go to Carletonville, there’s hardly a road any longer. All the infrastructure is being dismantled — even the old [mining] headgear, that great, strange creature that towers above Durban Deep, one of its legs is missing. There is a kind of scavenging that has taken over everything.
There’s much more desperation. Places that were once very fully occupied are quite vacated now. It’s much more dominated by quite powerfully armed gangs. And ordinary life is becoming very difficult. There’s water shortages, there’s fear, there’s a great deal of violence, and there is very little response from the police that doesn’t take the form of sieges [of mine shafts]. And still, in that amazing way in South Africa, people somehow manage to keep making a life in these incredible circumstances.
Ethnic conflict
DM: Yes, South Africa’s resilience is as much a handicap as it is a strength. Leaving aside the visible scavenging on the surface, what is happening underneath the ground, and why?
RM: The relatively formal settlements are still functioning, although their relationships to the very transient population of zama zamas have changed. There are shafts that are no longer viable, that have been mined out, that have collapsed, that are known by police or security, and therefore are no longer secure to enter.
In other cases, ethnic conflict, which I consider to be the ghost of apartheid, has continued. These fights have changed the composition and the demographics of the groups who occupy one or another place. An area that I do know very well, Durban Roodepoort Deep, was initially occupied by Zimbabwean migrants. They felt a great deal of pressure from other migrants, especially the gangs that are based in Lesotho. But they are now also confronted with influxes of Mozambican zama zamas, who tend to work in much more surface areas.
Their relationships with the formal miners have changed as well, and there’s sometimes overt competition between formal reclamation companies and smaller mines. Sometimes it’s direct competition, and sometimes it’s complicitous work, and sometimes it’s abuse between one vis-à-vis the other. And if you sort of think about the causal factors, clearly the rising price of gold is part of that.
DM: I feel that this is rarely discussed enough. Back in 2016, gold hovered at around $1,200 an ounce. It is now lingering at around $2,600 That’s a significant, significant difference.
RM: Indeed, and this changes things. There was a World Council report issued in November last year titled Silence is Golden, which is more than a little ironic. But it came with an interesting subtitle that I think reflects a kind of change in the international civil society’s approach to these issues: “A Report on the Exploitation of Artisanal Gold Miners to Fund War, Terrorism and Organised Crime.” That reflects a new willingness to understand that this very stratified economy is an exploitative one, and those people who are going underground are largely the victims of this exploitative system.
A lot of the money passes through Dubai and is funding not just terrorism, but a proliferating number of non-state military entities. But there’s another huge part of the story which is related to ongoing military conflicts — maybe 10 or 15% of the world’s population right now is excluded from access to formal banking. And the more the United Nations pushes the likes of India to go towards digitised, biometric uniform financial systems, the more and more exclusion there is from any kind of backward route to banks and other kinds of money transfer systems.
So not having documents because you’re not a citizen can mean that you’re outside of that system. That’s a huge, huge market and a big part of the reason driving the need for illicit gold. And I think we have to consider those two economies side by side. On the one hand, the usual suspects of terror and paramilitaries and so forth. The other is just a kind of enormous destitute population of people who need cash, who need money, and have no means to access it in its digital forms. There’s a growing body of people who, by virtue of poverty and document status, can’t access banking.
Hatred, fear and bigotry
DM: And so they need gold, and this is how they get it. But if we’re looking at this from the South African point of view, when you listen to a radio call-in show or look at the letters to the editor of any publication, the loathing directed towards foreign zama zamas in particular, but zama zamas more generally, is astounding. They’re considered the total scum of the Earth. They are ripping off South Africans’ kindness. They are taking advantage of our softness. They are turning our Constitution upside down and battering us South Africans with it. What would you say to a South African who holds these views?
RM: You know, I have been reading the press and the letters, and it’s shocking to me how profound this rage, hatred, fear and bigotry is. It’s obviously intensified hugely in recent years, and this has something to do with just the density of the populations of people. Globally, we’ve seen the number of informal miners double almost every 10 years for the past four decades. So the estimates suggest there are about 20 million such people in the world working only in the gold sector. It is assumed that 80% of the total workforce in the gold sector is informal or involved in small-scale operations. Now those numbers can’t be true for South Africa, which still has 70,000 people working in the formal sector. But one could assume that the numbers that we’re talking about have grown enormously in the last decade and a half.
So what people used to assume was 10,000 zama zamas I would say now is about 50,000, so that’s a lot of pressure. And it’s pressure on the environment. It’s pressure on water. It’s pressure on people. There’s a reason for people’s frustrations. I understand that. But what disturbs me about the South African discourse is that these individuals contribute enormously to local economies. These are people who are supporting others at home, but their money is also entering into the local economy, entering into the licit economy. They pay rent, they buy food, they purchase supplies. But that is no longer visible in the public sphere.
In the past, you used to find people saying, well, you know, they’re not so bad, they’re tenants. They’re decent, hard-working folk. And I don’t hear that a whole lot any more. And I don’t hear that partly because there’s so much surface attack on the immediate infrastructure that people need. If your road is gone, your lights are gone, and your water is not available, then you’re starting to feel pressured. So there’s a change in the kind of generalisation, if not totalisation, of the activity that puts pressure on people in a different way.
But unlike everywhere else in the world, it’s the lowest-level members of this economy who are being held responsible for it. There are lots of people in the police and in the formal mining sector who are engaged in this. There’s no possibility, in my opinion, of addressing the situation until one recognises that underground zama zamas are simply the most desperate, most impoverished people in this chain.
You would never do an analysis of the formal gold sector and not differentiate between various levels of management and the complex strata of skills in the underground labouring sector. But we don’t do that with the informal economy. There’s no difference in people’s minds between the AK-47-toting gangsters who are operating the security system, and the guys who are scavenging underground and scrounging for food. As we can now see clearly, they are starving there, locked underground, trapped underground. These are siege tactics that you normally address to a foreign enemy, and even that’s a violation of international law.
Economic flight
DM: I think we could agree that zama zamas are viewed as a foreign enemy. And it points to the zama zamas’ essential foreignness. These are people who do not live on the surface of the planet. They live underground. They are pale. They are otherworldly. The second and also equally undeniable fact is that many are from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. And what I do find quite curious is why the root causes of economic flight from Mozambique and Zimbabwe are not bound up into the conversation we have about all of these people working in these very, very dangerous mine shafts underneath Johannesburg.
RM: This is exactly what [the academic and writer] Francis Wilson anticipated. He wrote that the post-apartheid period in the mineral sector would become one of nationalisation at the level of consciousness, rather than at the level of the intellect.
If we think back, we had the beginning of the effort to eliminate or reduce foreign labour in the gold mines in the mid-70s. As a result, those regional economies have been devastated over the past five decades. Now, one can’t blame all the economic failures in, say, Zimbabwe on the loss of revenues that come through wages for mine workers. But it has been a huge factor. And the devastation of those economies has something to do with South Africa’s severance of its sense of obligation to those states.
There is also a kind of phobic imagination of this nearly animal quality that is attributed to people who spend months underground. And of course, the story that came out this past week at the high court of people being forced into cannibalism, and before that eating insects. This does nothing to help them, but few commentators are addressing the degree to which there is armed coercion involved in this. The security organisations who operate the shaft to keep people underground are merciless. They enact forms of brutality that are pretty hard to get your head around.
Weirdly, in the illicit economy, the middle managers are entirely absent from the conversation. We never talk about them in poaching — we never talk about who actually puts the elephant tusk in a bag and takes it on a plane to Dubai. We never have that conversation. And we don’t talk about the guys at or near the top. How the sharp end of the informal mining sector is getting away, literally, with murder? Is it a problem with the press? Are we not doing a good enough job exposing how these systems function? Is it since they are part of our authority structures — cops and politicians?
You know, I think you put your finger on the crucial issue there. As long as there are desperate people and gold as priced as high as it is, there are going to be people risking everything to get it. But the levels, the layers of what you describe as the middle management of this illicit economy are numerous — they extend from the head of security or the management of a small mine, all the way up to the highest levels of government. They pass through the realms of the merchant class to the very high end of the financial sector. And they are internationalised.
And you find people confronted with a kind of blunt refusal of fact that we were alerted to during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A mother would say, “My son is gone.” And the police would say, “You never had a son.” This is happening again. So it’s not just that folks are concealing buying and selling. It’s that there is a very direct and very violent disavowal of the degree to which people are involved in it.
This gives a snapshot into the degree to which local mine management, the local authorities, the local ANC, the local merchants, all the way up to the highest levels are aware of this and are making a lot of money.
The solutions
DM: Rosalind, I guess we’ve talked about the problems. But what are the solutions? I’m not expecting you to sit here and fix what seems to be a systemic problem to an almost baffling degree. But where does South Africa start to try to get not to the bottom, but to the top of this problem?
RM: Well, there are many people on the ground who know a lot, who are very deeply involved in these communities, and who should be spoken to and solicited for their understanding. This can’t be treated simply as a police action, and a very specific kind of police action — a kind of medieval siege.
I do not believe that this economy can be formalised in the way that relatively superficial mines and alluvial mining have been in other countries like the Philippines or Nicaragua. The mines in the Rand are too deep, they are too dangerous, they are infrastructurally too complex. So the solutions available to South Africa are not the same.
I would say that first of all, a regional set of solutions must be proposed. At the local level, one has to figure out that if policing is to be undertaken, should it not be addressed to the gangs and the major internationalised criminal syndicates? There needs to be a cessation of the weapons flow, and that includes the weapons that flow from the police and military into these gangs.
Then, the kind of regional economic repair that is necessary has a very big historical burden to confront. It also has a very big future burden, because climate-based disasters, climate-based agricultural change and the resultant migrations are going to create even more problems. I would say that people need to have access to credit and debt at the lowest level, so that they are not dependent on this kind of illicit cash flow. What’s more, excluding undocumented people from instruments that allow people to participate in the formal economy is not helpful at a regional level.
I think one needs to talk about major debt relief at the level of sovereign debt as well, so that monies can move into social welfare and the provision of social goods and services that people need. It would be naive to imagine that any nation-state is going to open the borders and allow anyone to come here who needs to. I mean, that’s obviously not going to happen. But then you have to stabilise the economies in the region so that informal mining isn’t perceived as a viable solution.
However horrific the experiences underground, these people go home to starvation. But I feel that as far as policing operations go, it needs to focus on the top, not the bottom. I think that those regional economies need to be liberated and stabilised, and in the meantime, people need to be able to access the ordinary credit and debt mechanisms that allow for everyday life. I mean, those are probably ridiculous things to put on the table because they’re so obvious and also so enormous. But it must be done. DM