From Stilfontein to Sabie, the word zama zama has become synonymous with desperation and defiance, embodying tales of forced labour and shattered dreams – caught, as it were, between a rock and the devil.
For those schooled under apartheid’s Bantu education system, the religious studies classrooms often echoed with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
It’s a cautionary tale of ambition: men striving to build a staircase to heaven, only to face divine sabotage.
Their dreams dismantled, they were scattered across the earth, and their languages fractured.
Fast forward to 2024, and a different story unfolds in South Africa. This time, it’s not heaven the men are chasing, but the hellish depths of abandoned mine shafts.
They’re not seeking streets of gold; they’re risking life and limb for a few glints of it buried beneath the earth’s crust.
In the North West town of Stilfontein, love letters were reportedly smuggled out of the pits – desperate scribbles to wives and children, promises of return, though many know the truth.
The zama zamas, as they’re called, are not united by faith or ambition but by desperation.
They descend into the underworld, drawn not by visions of glory but by the unyielding hunger that drives a father to provide, even if it means gambling his life.
For these desperate human beings, the abandoned shafts of South Africa are both a lifeline and a death trap.
Unlike the builders of Babel, who were scattered across the world, zama zamas gather from distant lands.
They come from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, and use the broken dialect of survival in South Africa’s mines.
Many barely speak fanakalo, the apartheid mining industry’s patchwork language, but down there, communication isn’t optional – it’s the difference between life and death.
The construction workers of our Babel metaphor dreamed of touching the heavens, but
zama zamas risk being buried tens of kilometres below the surface. The juxtaposition couldn’t be starker.
Where Babel’s workers sought to defy the divine, these illegal miners are simply confronting a system that has already abandoned them.
They claw through rock and dust in search of life-changing ore.
But the cost is staggering. In Stilfontein, the South African Police Service’s Operation Vala Umgodi played out like a siege.
As shafts were sealed and supply lines cut, miners faced starvation, dehydration and suffocation underground.
When they finally emerged, the world watched in horror: skeletal figures, their hollowed faces betraying weeks of hunger .
In Mpumalanga’s Sabie region, a similar scene unfolded when rescue teams pulled 153 people from South Mine, an abandoned gold shaft.
Among those rescued, 95 were from Lesotho, 32 from Mozambique, and 16 from Zimbabwe, all found without valid documentation. Only 10 were South Africans, and they were released.
Some Lesotho nationals now face charges of kidnapping and illegal mining, highlighting the complex web of syndicates operating underground.
It is reported that South Africa loses over R70-billion annually to illegal mining.
