A barefoot man with a pickaxe ignores the ”Prohibited” sign — entry to the disused colliery could mean injury or death. At 7am a hot Berg wind is already blowing across the flyblown northern KwaZulu-Natal valley.
A nastier form of self-employment — scouring abandoned mines for coal to sell — is hard to think of, yet 45 retrenched miners and their families in Verdriet, south of Dundee, depend on it. They are a microcosm of the country’s burgeoning bootleg coal-mining industry.
Since 1980, 114 000 coalminers have been retrenched countrywide. Abandoned ”people’s mines”, as local communities know them, contain almost 3% low grade ore, and have become a lifeline.
The Department of Minerals and Energy has classified the practice as illegal because of the dangers. But in Verdriet they call their resource ”black gold”, while the miners are known by the ironically cheerful name ”Vukuzenzela” (Get up and go).
The man with the pickaxe, Peter Dlamini, extends a calloused hand, his breath smelling of stale alcohol. ”Fish Eagle,” he says. ”It’s what we drink when we want to forget.”
Dlamini was retrenched from Durban Navigation Collieries three years ago. But rather than give up in this valley of broken mud huts and upended cars, he took a pickaxe, a spade and a wheelbarrow and colonised the deserted mine behind his two-roomed home. Since then 44 other miners have joined him.
”The government says we are stealing the coal, but this is an honest business. We wouldn’t risk our lives if we had another job. I’m ready to leave, but let the government give us another job,” Dlamini says.
Each miner earns R200 a month, or a dollar a day — the universal poverty measure.
Informal coal mining is new in South Africa but common elsewhere in the developing world. In India researchers estimate that 500 000 people depend on it. In China similar numbers are cited. ”Technology is changing the way that coal is mined, which accounts for the large numbers of people losing their jobs and turning to illegal mining,” said Xavier Prevost, the department’s chief mineral economist.
Thabo Dube, the head of the regional department in Dundee, says the growth in informal mining has paralleled the decline of KwaZulu-Natal’s coal industry. Because informal mining is a new phenomenon, there are no official figures for this informal workforce.
”Legislation requires mining companies to sand-stow underground hollows and rehabilitate open-cast mines when they close their operations, but some ignore this. This has empowered illicit mining,” Dube says.
Mining companies follow the conventional board-and-pillar system in underground operations, leaving large quantities of coal as a support structure to stop the roof collapsing. The informal miners scavenge on these pillars of coal. The Vukuzenzela have dug five parallel open-cast tunnels, called ”rat holes” by the locals. They also have one underground shaft.
William Phiri, a greying member of the Vukuzenzela, wobbles up in a donkey cart with Yokohama four-by-four tyres. He whistles for the animals to stop and clambers down, chortling at his ”ABS brakes”. He points to a row of gravestones where three colleagues who died in a rockfall in 2001 are buried. ”The risk is big but we have no choice. Everybody has to live and feed their families,” he says.
Below us, seven Vukuzenzela miners dig in heat that has reached 30°C. Every few minutes they straighten up to scrape the dust from their faces.
Formal opencast mines use a giant ”walking dragline”, which has large buckets, slung beneath crane-like arms, that scrape away the earth over the coal seams. These are then blasted to break the coal into manageable chunks, which are carried away by heavy-duty trucks and graded.
In the underworld of the Vukuzenzela, the miners use pickaxes, spades and hammers ulcerated with rust. Mining from 6am till noon every weekday, it takes them two months to do what a dragline would do in a day. The coal is transported from the pit in a wheelbarrow, which one man pushes and another pulls with a rope. It is offloaded into donkey carts, nicknamed ”Little Work Ones”, which trundle kilometres of miserable road to deliver up to 250kg every afternoon.
I accompany Phiri on his delivery. As we bob up and down in tandem to the trotting donkeys — Story, Fatty, Stamp and Remove — I am struck by the haunting dignity of the poverty here. There is still no running water at Verdriet and permanent wafts of sewage from the saturated long drops. But the interiors of the mud homes have a new-pin neatness, with the dirt floors swept spotlessly and clothes folded in plastic.
Vukuzenzela customers can choose between a 50kg bag that costs R25, or an 80kg bag for R30 — ”no credit” is Phiri’s watchword. ”We run our business like a stokvel,” he says. ”Today I take all the profit; tomorrow it will be someone else’s turn. It’s ubuntu.”
Back at the mine a group of Vukuzenzela members are negotiating who should kill a rinkhals sunning itself at the entrance of the underground shaft. ”It makes a good braai, like boerewors, and the skin makes a good belt,” says Stanley Ndela.
A few metres away three other miners are sharing a ”zol” which they suck on so hard that deep shadows form in the hollows of their cheeks. More forgetting.
It is a truism that service delivery is a government mantra; but it is equally obvious that for most South Africans it remains a pipedream.
”Abantu abahluphekile basavela eziudabe ni? [Do poor people still make news?]” Dlamini had asked me the day before. It expressed his sense that the residents of Verdriet, like hundreds of other communities, have been forgotten.