The bottle of brown sludge handed to Dr Linda Makwatini, the adviser to Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs Penuell Maduna, in Parliament earlier this month went almost unnoticed.
It came from a mining town and was brought to the centre of power by a range of environmental organisations. The contents were highly contaminated and polluted.
It was a symbol of the degradation the mining industry has visited on large tracts of land. Around the country, whole communities and many thousands of employees work and live on time bombs. The mine dumps, the slimes dams and the disused uranium plants of the gold-mining industry carry with them untold and unmeasured horrors.
Last week, the Mail & Guardian uncovered indications of widespread contamination in the heart of the Free State’s goldfields.
No one disputes that the mining industry was until recently the bedrock of the South African economy. It brought great prosperity to some and was the livelihood of millions. But the industry has also mined with impunity and little accountability.
And it is glib about the harm it may have caused. The industry’s doctors say more workers die from smoking than from the cancers which strike through years of exposure to uranium.
They spend millions shoring up perceptions that different cancers are peculiar to certain regions: Mozambicans suffer a higher number of throat cancers; Transkeians get more liver cancer than the rest. By contrast, the mining houses have spent little on studies tracking miners once they leave the mines to study the effects that years of toiling underground have on their long-term health and on the children they conceive. Consequently there is little epidemiology from the world’s largest mining industry for future generations of mining barons like Cyril Ramaphosa and Mzi Khumalo to plan better occupational health systems and practices.
It’s never too late. The industry should engage in a little reparation and restitution of its own. Start the medical studies now. Clean the slimes dams. And work with communities to minimise the disease that living in the shadow of the dumps brings. And government must play a role too, either by facilitating or insisting if that doesn’t work.
The bottle of sludge cannot go unnoticed forever or the next generation will pay the price.