Gold built South Africa, and in no other country has it been pursued to greater depths. Thanks to the tremendous reserves of gold and diamonds beneath its surface, the land once considered “the least endowed of colonial regions” became Africa’s richest.
This mining industry married absolute wealth and absolute poverty. Corporations like De Beers and Anglo American, capable of bringing capital and scientific expertise to bear on ever-deeper gold deposits, dominated the industry. Their ultradeep mines were marvels of extraction, but they functioned through exploitation of the starkest sort. African migrant laborers, denied fair wages or legal rights, always formed the basis of the industry.
South Africa’s model of racial domination would undergird this simultaneous production of wealth and poverty. Apartheid furnished the reserve of precarious migrant workers that mining demanded. After it ended, these workers built their own parallel industry inside those same mines. This is the world of the zama zama: an illegal economy marked by harrowing labor and an appetite for risk. The term in isiZulu means a trier, one who chances his luck.
Today there are more than thirty thousand zama zamas in South Africa — small-scale miners digging for gold without permits or heavy equipment. Among fifteen million such miners globally, zama zamas are unique in that they generally operate not in surface pits but in the deep, subsurface mines abandoned by large corporations. Around six thousand of these shuttered mines litter South Africa, mainly in the northeastern gold belt surrounding Johannesburg.
Despite being confined to fairly crude hand tools and explosives, the zama zamas dig up a lot of gold. The South African government estimates that $3.7…
Auteur: Tyler Antonio Lynch
