The ‘surrender or starve’ saga in Stilfontein is a chronicle of deaths foretold

15 Jan 2025

‘Starvation’ was the terminology used by the police – it was the goal, and the ghastly results are now emerging from the depths.

The emaciated bodies being hauled out of the hellhole near Stilfontein in North West are shocking testimony to the achievement of the South African state’s “surrender or starve” strategy in “smoking out” illegal miners.

This is a chronicle of deaths foretold – around 60 and counting. But this standoff between police and illegal miners has deep historical roots and there are no easy paths to resolving the issues that gave rise to this calamity.

Like so many other tragedies that scar the history of South African mining, this unfolding catastrophe in the gold fields has taken its grim toll overwhelmingly on poor black workers from neighbouring countries who, for generations, have been exploited to enrich others from the country’s glittering resource wealth.

To recap: the South African Police Service (SAPS) in early November said they had arrested 565 gold miners, or zama zamas, in North West as part of Operation Vala Umgodi.

In a statement at the time, the cops said the zamas were resurfacing “...as a result of starvation and dehydration. SAPS and members of the SANDF blocked communities in and around these abandoned mining shafts ... from delivering food parcels, water and necessities to these illegal miners. This act of stamping the authority of the state eventually forced these illegal miners to resurface.”

The police used the term “starvation”– it was the goal, and the ghastly results are now emerging from the depths.

Read more: Hundreds of illegal miners arrested after underground food and water supplies cut

An old strategy taken to brutal levels

Curtailing essential supplies such as food and water has been employed for years as a strategy to curb illegal gold mining. Over a decade ago, Harmony Gold adopted a policy of banning all food underground at its operations to prevent its own workforce from smuggling sustenance to illegal miners who infiltrate working mines and disused shafts such as the one near Stilfontein.

“There are two things you need to survive underground: food and water. You can always get water down a mine but the food ban has made a real difference,” former Harmony chief executive Graham Briggs told Reuters in 2012.

Unions signed up to the ban on condition that a hearty free meal be provided at the surface at the end of each shift.

That policy was worked out with unions by a legitimate mining company to deprive illegal miners of food. But the Stilfontein saga – which will probably soon be known as the “Stilfontein Slaughter” or something along those lines – has taken this strategy to a new and brutal level.

Industry sources have told this correspondent in the past that the first sign that a team of illegal miners has ended a months-long “shift” underground to be replaced by a new one is when almost all food and water in shops in the vicinity vanishes from the shelves.

This is a reflection of the underground economy which has enabled illegal mining to flourish, and the tactics used in Stilfontein were a response to this state of affairs.

On paper, the concept no doubt looked like a winner.

But it failed to take into account that zamas are often coerced to remain below the surface. Survivors’ testimony will be needed in the coming weeks and months to confirm this, but it is plausible that many of these men were forced to “stay and starve”.

People, as a rule, don’t choose starvation. These were not hunger strikers suffering for a political cause.

Organised crime

Illegal gold mining is a branch of transnational organised crime – violence and intimidation are its hallmarks. Zama zamas gain access to operating mines by threatening the families of security staff. The armed wings of this illicit labour force launch attacks on smelters and other facilities where gold is processed and stored before it is flown by helicopter to the Rand Refinery.

The illegal miners themselves have few alternatives to their dangerous occupation. Their plight is a legacy of South Africa’s migrant labour system, which for decades ruthlessly exploited an impoverished and cheap rural workforce from Mozambique, Lesotho and the former bantustan territories.

South Africa’s mines in the 1980s employed almost 500,000 foreign workers. That number, according to the last available data provided to me by the Minerals Council South Africa, now stands at around 30,000.

But the economies of Lesotho and Mozambique remain woefully undeveloped. Many of the rhino poachers in Kruger, the livestock rustlers on the Lesotho border and the men collecting recycling refuse in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs hail from both nations.

Read more: How the twilight of SA’s migrant labour system spawned a social apocalypse

And so too, do the illegal miners. Most of those who have been brought to the surface near Stilfontein in recent days, dead or alive, come from those two countries.

Viewed through this prism, Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources Gwede Mantashe’s comments in Stilfontein on Tuesday were stunningly callous and ignored a chapter of history that he himself played a role in.

“Our communities here say we must give licences to [the illegal miners] … If they say so, we’ll come here and hear them out and have a hearing that please give licences to steal gold to Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Lesotho nationals. It’s a criminal activity. It’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main,” he said.

Read more: Stilfontein body count mounts as 51 corpses hauled from mine, 106 rescued

The fathers and grandfathers of the men that Mantashe disparaged were, once upon a time, his comrades in the National Union of Mineworkers, forged in the struggle against apartheid. Now wrapped in a blue-light bubble of self-importance, he has no empathy for the horrors they endure.

Illegal gold mining, the proceeds of which mostly flow to the gangsters at the top as the precious metal is laundered in places like Dubai, has taken off like a California wildfire because of the smouldering failure of the state under Mantashe’s ANC. From the ashes, the grandsons of former NUM members have risen to haunt the state and the industry that spawned them.

Alternatives to surrender or starve?

Alternative strategies that come to mind include a display of basic human decency. The men were clearly trapped with no other route out and possibly coerced. Providing them with a minimum amount of food and water in this situation would not have been to support illegal mining activities – it would have been humanitarian aid.

Richard Spoor, one of South Africa’s leading human rights lawyers, told Daily Maverick that there were grounds for legal action.

“I think that there is a case. When the police cut off the food supply and their means of exiting the mine, they should have been aware that people would starve to death. That is recklessness. They should be held responsible for the deaths that ensued,” he said.

On this front, the cops’ statements in the public domain may be used against the SAPS in court.

But the situation is also not so clear cut.

Louis Nel, a mining security consultant, told Daily Maverick that the men who starved and the survivors surfacing were probably those who did not get their share of what food was left because they were “unproductive.”

‘Modern slavery’

“It’s like a section 189, they are laying off those deemed useless,” he said. In a system that is akin to modern slavery, Nel said that in return for access to the shafts illegal miners had to produce a certain amount of gold to pay for their equipment and food before they could earn a “wage”.

It’s possible, he said, that the ringleaders and their armed muscle may remain down there until the storm on the surface subsides. If this is true, perhaps they would have consumed any food that was sent down.

More broadly, much needs to be done to curtail the illicit gold economy in its current form. Developing the economies of Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe with meaningful job creation would be a good start, but that is not going to happen anytime soon under the current governments.

Arming the South African police and prosecuting authorities with the capacity to go after the kingpins would also be helpful and there are some tentative signs that the business/government initiative on crime and corruption is bearing some fruit. Clamping down on illegal gold mining should be a priority.

Formalising the sector is an idea that has floated around for years, but it is easier said than done and there seems to be no political push in this direction.

One of the good-news stories to emerge from South Africa’s formal mining sector in the past couple of decades has been the vast improvement in health and safety. As of early October – when the data was last available – 2024 was on track to be a record safety year.

Read more: South Africa’s mining sector is on track in 2024 for a record safety year

A record low of 49 deaths was recorded in 2022 – still a shocking number, but a far cry from the carnage of the 1980s when as many as 800 South African miners were killed on the job in a single year.

But there is no remotely accurate record of the zama zama body count over the years. The skeletal corpses being hoisted up the Stilfontein shaft are the tip of a monstrous iceberg of injustice. DM

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Business Maverick

An old strategy taken to brutal levels

Organised crime

Alternatives to surrender or starve?

‘Modern slavery’