Out-of-work miners are scratching a dangerous and illegal living through small-scale gold mining in the Eastern Transvaal, writes Fumane Diseko
Retrenched miners in the Eastern Transvaal are risking their lives for gold, digging their own tunnels into the hills around Barberton to find the ore that can support them and their families.
The narrow tunnels are dangerous and can collapse and bury the miners. They risk poisoning from the process they use to extract the gold from the ore. Their mining activities are branded illegal, usually because the land does not belong to them and the diggers do not have mining rights, and the miners are often harassed and arrested by police or security guards.
But they are determined to continue their activities, saying they would rather work in these conditions than steal or starve. One area where informal mining is concentrated is on land owned by Lilly Mines, now closed, a hilly area seemingly quiet and uninhabited. Once you start walking the hills, however, you begin to see the holes opening into the ground, leading into dark, narrow tunnels.
Calling down the tunnels at first brings no response — the miners refuse to come to the surface. Finally, a man wearing a green rainsuit lifts himself out of one tunnel with accustomed ease, balancing on several wooden poles and metal bars, seemingly precariously wedged into the sides of the red, bottomless hole. Sweat trickles down his face. He mumbles something, lifts his hand to his face to wipe away the sweat and discreetly vanishes into the mountains without another
A few minutes later, a man in red-soiled, tattered clothes emerges from the same hole and sits casually on the edge of it. Zamzam Boy Shongwe is king of the castle, he owns this hole and works with two men; the one who has just disappeared, for fear of arrest, and the other one who is hurt and at home.
“He was hit by a fragment of a stone he was chiselling with his hammer and chisel,” says Shongwe. “He wounded himself close to the eye.”
Mining under these conditions is a hazardous business: “Who or what will help me if I had to be buried in this
And on the surface, there are other dangers. “Yesterday, they arrested people. They ran,” he says, seemingly bemused by the recollection. He says he watched the spectacle as miners were chased around the hills like headless chickens by the security guards from neighbouring Sheba Mines, who were firing shots at them. Shongwe refused to run.
“I give myself up,” he explains. The sentence, if one is convicted, is approximately six months, “and you are back as before and digging.”
He does not see how anybody loses anything because of his mining activities and says this is just another way of avoiding stealing as a means of survival. “I do not steal this from anyone and there is no way that someone can claim to be hurt by my work.”
But “there is too little (gold).” He is frustrated by the fact that he can only mine a small amount of ore because he has no choice but to use a hammer and chisel. The best equipment is an open-cut diamond drill, then the amount of ore would be much greater and the task of extracting gold would be less labour
Shongwe unknots a tightly fastened piece of yellow plastic and spreads the contents onto the palm of his muscled hand. There are small, crushed, grey stones and, among them, the little glinting yellow bits of
He has dug for gold since 1968; worked from Ellisberg in Ezulwini to Impala in Rustenburg in 1977. During this time he was injured and never compensated. He once worked for an American, looking for rocks with gold, sampling rocks at a depth of about two metres. With concentration, he traces an approximately centimetre- thin strand of grey rock running vertically through the red rock surface of the hole. The strand breaks slightly; he shows where it continues.
“Where it begins to run horizontally,” he explains, “it becomes baby.” By this he means that it can be mined because it has gold in it. It is called baby at that stage because “it nourishes — like a woman it has some wealth in it”. It is the movement of the “baby” stone which determines when the tunnel should be dug
The chiselled stone is hoisted by rope to the surface in an old 25-litre paint container out of the 16-metre deep tunnel, which the three-man team had dug over three months. There the rock is crushed, then panned to sift it further.
The panned remnants are mixed with mercury, then the mercury and gold mixture is put in a cloth and squeezed through. The gold remains in the cloth. Other sources in the mining industry have said that the extraction of gold using mercury can cause brain damage — Shongwe disagrees. The use of cyanide in mining is what poisons miners, he says, and mercury is much safer.
He buys his mercury from Swaziland whenever he can afford to — the prices fluctuate and, unlike the prices paid for his gold, the price is determined by the seller. He recently went to Barbrooke Mines to see someone who had suggested that the mine could purify the ore for them. This is a new approach to curb the poisoning suffered by entrepreneurial miners.
Shongwe smokes and moves about on the surface, cradling a knobkerrie he fondly refers to as “makoti”, meaning bride. Yes, he has a wife and two children in Mhlangatane, Swaziland. “I’m going home on Friday,” he muses as he looks at the slight drizzle in the mountains. “I’m going to plant.”
Life is not easy in these candle-lit tunnels. Shongwe wishes he was a woman, then his life would not be so hard. Most days they can barely afford to feed themselves. They have not mined anything worthwhile in the past three months. Whenever a little bit of gold is found, they split it and each sells it as he sees fit. But the time will come, he hopes, when he finds his pot of gold. He would finally retire and go back home.