Stilfontein massacre a stark reminder of South Africa's ongoing struggle with human rights violations

The deliberate starving to death of at least 78 men at the bottom of the disused Buffelsfontein mine is a human tragedy on a scale akin to Marikana, Life Esidimeni, the Enyobeni Tavern deaths, the Usindiso building fire and the ANC government’s early response to deny people with Aids access to lifesaving treatment during the early 2000s. The South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) is right to use the word “massacre”.

Sadly there’s no sign of penitence or regret by those who sanctioned starving the miners out. Neither is there any suggestion that the deaths should be mourned by our nation.

On 14 January 2025, the day when most of the dead and nearly dead bodies of the starved miners began to be brought up from the bottom of shaft 11, the sight of Mineral and Energy Resources Minister, Gwede Mantashe, arriving in a convoy of blue-light black sedans said it all. 

Mantashe was obviously oblivious to the incongruity of his grand entrance. The fact that he was once a mineworker himself and is a leader of a communist party is evidence of how low once principled (presumably) people can go. 

Most of the dead of Stilfontein were men who came from Mozambique, economic refugees from a country where the unemployment rate is 25%, with only 20% of employment being waged labour. The remaining 80% of workers are in informal employment. 

According to the World Bank, between 2014/15 and 2019/20 the national poverty rate surged from 48.4% to 62.8%, and the number of poor from 13.1 to 18.9 million. 

Contributing to this is an epidemic of corruption by the ruling party, Frelimo. The fact that on 15 January 2025, as bodies were still being lifted from the mine, President Cyril Ramaphosa spent the day in Maputo at the inauguration of Daniel Chapo, another corrupt Frelimo president and government after yet another stolen election, also speaks volumes.

But still, one wonders whether even if the majority of the miners had been poor South Africans it would have made any difference, because as Pierre de Vos has explained, the facts indict the government. 

They knew from August 2024 (see this Timeline of the Stilfontein saga) that lives were at risk. Yet a misinformation campaign combined with stigmatising the miners as zama zamas or undocumented migrants was enough to rob them of humanity, the right to rescue and ultimately life. 

No one can claim ignorance. This was death by commission. 

Read more: You Know, Because We Told You

Sadly however, much as our politicians deserve opprobrium, to an extent South Africans are all complicit in this shameful moment in our constitutional democracy. 

The non-response by government and emergency services that we tacitly sanctioned robbed us of our humanity as well. For example, instead of investigating the stories of the miners, putting a human face to the tragedy, parts of the media mocked them. I remember the jolly laughter shared between anchors on radio 702 one day around reports that a request sent up the shaft for food included tomato sauce, as if it was a luxury. 

Ridiculing the miners in this way served to distract attention from the threats to their lives. It helped divert serious discussion about inequality and desperation in our society, the base survival instinct that would have driven these men (and many others) underground in the first place. For who would voluntarily descend into a dark suffocating hell for months at a time, risking lives, safety and comfort, to make a meagre living if they weren’t desperate? The formula is simple: No money = no food; no money = no dignity; no money means beg, steal, or prostrate yourself to the lowest bidder.

Why, I wondered, were these human beings not deserving of the same attention that gripped the world when 12 boys were trapped in a tunnel in Thailand in 2021?

Read more: Notes on the underground — where the most desperate and impoverished scavenge for illicit gold 

Our selective amnesia forgets that adult unemployment stands at 32%; the steep rise in the price of food; the fact that 31 years after the advent of democracy there is still no system of social security for the ordinary unemployed?

Well researched calls for a universal Basic Income Grant have been repeatedly batted away. Instead the indigent are expected to survive on the R370 per month Social Relief of Distress grant, and even this is given grudgingly. Indeed, on Thursday last week the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria, in a groundbreaking judgment, said that the government had given it: “no explanation why both the SRD grant and the means threshold are not linked to measures such as the food poverty line although the purpose of the SRD grant is to alleviate hunger and poverty in society”.

The court went on to say that the “Department of Social Development and South African Social Security Agency seem to be oblivious to the human suffering and indignation caused by the deployment of regulations with barriers that preclude the eligible SRD grant applicants from receiving it and the inefficient administration and payment of the SRD grant to the successful applicants”. (para 161)

These comments, and the string of other state failures to the poor, betray a deeper problem: a total loss of empathy for the lives of the poor and most vulnerable — be they miners, waste pickers, the league of hungry or the homeless. 

Beginning with the Aids epidemic when more than 330,000 people died preventable deaths due to then president Thabo Mbeki’s Aids denialism, negligence of the poor has become a pattern: 34 people were shot at Marikana in 2012. A total of 144 died in the Life Esidimeni saga in 2016; 208 people died in the 2018 listeriosis outbreak; 21 children at the Enyobeni Tavern in 2022; 1,457 children under five have been recorded as dying of malnutrition (the actual number is much higher) in the last two years… When will it stop? 

But we can’t just blame the government. The ease with which society and the media is willing to move on from these disasters without justice or truth ends up implicating us all in what Wits Professor Achille Mbembe in his book Brutalism calls an era of “increasingly unprecedented violence against (poor) people, matter, and the biosphere”, a “planetary social war” against the black and brown poor, migrants and the economically dispossessed.   

Rediscovering our compassion: learning from civil society 

As Christmas and Hanukkah approach, a time of reflection, kindness and humanity, we cannot celebrate while these miners remain in darkness, starving, separated from their loved ones.