Abrie de Villiers has turned up for work in her usual outfit: a cropped, diamante-speckled T-shirt revealing a belly-button ring; thick make-up and lilac-painted nails to match her overalls.
”You have to stay feminine in this business,’’ she says, but the flick knife she hides in her wellington boots gives a clue to the tough world she inhabits.
De Villiers is the first — and only — fully qualified female miner working underground in South Africa. She has worked at East Rand Proprietary Mine outside Johannesburg for the past year and is one of 34 women, and 3 000 men, employed to work underground.
Every morning at 5am she descends 4km in a cage — then walks or, when it becomes too narrow, crawls — for 3km through a sludgy tunnel. All while carrying 30kg of drilling equipment and explosives.
Once there, she works for eight hours in cramped conditions laying a network of explosives to blast through the gold ore. She breaths air thick with dust in temperatures that can exceed 40°C.
If that isn’t bad enough, there are no toilets — ablutions are conducted either in a bucket or a quiet corner — and the stench can become unbearable.
After 400 shifts like this, she earned her certificate and became a qualified miner. During her training, she didn’t see the sun for two months; she was underground all day, seven days a week and the lack of sunlight left her depressed, thin and tired.
Despite the discomfort, De Villiers says she would never give up the mine; she loves being underground and working with heavy machines. ”It’s so nice. It’s lovely. Having all this every day,’’ she says.
For the women who work in South Africa’s mining industry, shovelling muck alongside the men is a sign of a recently won freedom. Blacks weren’t the only people to feel the sting of apartheid’s injustice. Laws were also written to protect men’s jobs: women couldn’t become pilots, couldn’t drive trains and couldn’t enter combat.
In the mining industry there were only two types of work open to women; they could become secretaries or prostitutes. But after the new post-apartheid Constitution was adopted in 1997, the restrictions were swept aside and some mines reported queues of up to 500 women vying for the chance to work underground.
”This is freedom,’’ says Victoria Tyumbu, a 29-year-old single mother who has been a semi-skilled labourer at the mine for the past two years.
She works in a team of six women who, between them, shovel 500 bags of gold ore a day, six days a week. The work is back-breaking but Tyumbu, like most of her female colleagues, chose it in preference to being a domestic worker — working under the discontented gaze of a ”madam’’. ”We have the right to work where we want. We are equal to the men,’’ she says.
Money isn’t the main reason women choose to work underground. Unqualified labourers only earn R1 500 a month, which is less than some domestic workers earn.
But, at least in the mines, there is the possibility of promotion. Mines also offer training to staff who show potential, and for many women the promise of education offers hope for a more secure future.
But it’s not easy. More than 100 miners die underground every year in South Africa; so far only one has been a woman. Aids is endemic among miners — around 40% are HIV-positive — and crime is rife.
Gold theft from South Africa’s mines amounts to about 35 tons of pure gold a year. Much of the crime is organised in the miners’ accommodation. Certain hostels are so dangerous that even the police will only enter with military back-up.
There is also the threat of rape. Most male miners migrate from rural areas to the Reef in search of work, leaving their families behind. ”You see a lot of ugly things if a man doesn’t see a female for three months,’’ De Villiers says. Which is why she carries a knife in her boot. If any of the men tried anything? ”I’d kill them. And they know it.’’
Although the law is on their side, the women never access it. They feel that if they were to make an official complaint, the managers might decide that the mine is no place for them.
It was the threat of sexual vice that excluded women from mining jobs in Britain in the 1850s, and still does. To the Victorian mentality, mines were hellish infernos and subterranean breeding grounds for the ways of the devil. When a Victorian inspector went to a mine in Yorkshire in 1847 and reported that young women were working topless alongside naked men — miners regularly stripped off, and still do, when the heat became too intense — he concluded that the mines were worse than brothels.
Sexual misconduct was common, religious instruction non-existent and the coarse language that young women were exposed to was simply unacceptable, the report found. The result was an Act of Parliament banning women from going underground.
In South Africa there is still male resistance to female miners. When De Villiers was working for her certificate, she was often made to work in the worst areas of the mine to test her mettle. Women say that when they first started, the men called them ”sluts’’ and ”bitches’’.
But Tyumbu, a team leader, says: ”We didn’t care because we came to work just like them.”
Despite the risks, the women are determined. For De Villiers, the thought of changing professions has only ever been fleeting. ”I thought of running a health and beauty place, but I don’t want to sit around talking shit to females about how handsome their husbands are,” she says.
While women get equal pay and have to undergo the same physical tests as men, they generally only get to clean up — a term used for shovelling ore into bags for processing.
There are only 19 fully qualified women miners, and De Villiers is the only one working underground. She is therefore the only one to be put to work in the most physically demanding part of the mine — where the drilling and extraction take place.
For black women, the disadvantage is twofold. Not only do they lack the physical strength of men, but they are also disadvantaged by apartheid’s legacy.
The Bantu Education system left many black women lacking in the two subjects intrinsic to a mining qualification — maths and science. Connie, a young black woman, has been trying to get her certificate alongside De Villiers but hasn’t been successful so far.
It may yet take a generation before black women can truly compete on an equal footing. But although there are still some difficulties to overcome, the mines want to attract women because they are good, reliable workers.
De Villiers has her own reasons for wanting more women colleagues. Miners are given production bonuses and as a result rarely take a break or stop for a chat.
If everyone worked like the men, ”it would make you just wish to die every day’,’ she says. ”But females make you feel better, they are more human.’’
Perhaps, in years to come, mines will no longer be seen as dens of injustice, full of humans toiling like machines. If De Villiers gets her way, mines will be full of cheerful women wearing natty outfits and giving the men a run for their money. — Â