Zama zamas say they have been forced to eat human flesh to survive underground, adding that decaying human flesh tastes like pork.
They claim that consuming flesh from the rotting corpses of their comrades is sometimes the only option to stay alive.
This is the nauseating explanation by a former zama zama who obtained information from one of the illegal miners who recently resurfaced in Stilfontein, North West.
He says he was lucky enough to quit before the police’s Vula Umgodi operation began at Stilfontein Magret, shaft 10 and shaft 11 in October last year.
The zama zamas have been engaged in a standoff with police since then, refusing to emerge from their underground hideouts, and instead sending a list of demands, including for food and medication, via handwritten notes to the surface.
The matter even resulted in litigation in which civil society groups want the courts to compel the government to provide food and water to the illegal miners.
This week as the stand-off continued, Sunday World managed to piece together intimate details of life among zama zamas and the community.
“I used to pack enough food for myself down there, and when it was about to run out, I would prepare to resurface. If we are unable to leave at that time, we are forced to buy food at exorbitant prices from other illegal miners. We exchange the gold material we excavate for food,” he explained.
He said now that the government has closed all channels for delivering food, one can only imagine how many bodies, if any, have been substituted as food for them to survive.
“When we go hungry, anything we see is food for us; now that there are dead people there, to us it’s meat,” the man, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Sunday World.
Themba Moroka, a community leader from Extension six in Khuma township, believes the government should be educated about what is truly going on underground.
“They [the government] lied and said people were refusing to resurface; here, you cannot leap into a two-kilometre-deep, dark hole and bounce up on your own. We are talking about people’s lives here,” he said.
Moroka was one of the community members who volunteered to use a rope to pull the illegal miners to the surface. To date, community members have managed to bring up 33 illegal miners and nine bodies.
On Tuesday, the group awoke to discover that the structure they used to retrieve people had been destroyed, allegedly by the police.
“We’ve lost hope. That structure was the only way we could interact with the underground people. We don’t know how many people will die because our structure was also utilised to send food down there,” he said.
Zinzi Tom’s brother left six months ago. “It was normal for him to go for three months and then return home for a bit; now it’s been six months. With the community structure demolished, I doubt my brother will resurface alive,” she said.
Tom said his brother, a married father of two, had no choice but to engage in illegal mining to provide for his family.
“He has a diploma in financial economics and accounting but look where he is now,” she said.
According to residents, unemployment in Khuma is rife, forcing people to seek alternative sources of income.
“We don’t have industrial sites with a lot of job options, so this [illegal mining] was the only option, and it was available to everyone. It’s like a dump,” said a community member.
They said last year was the first time they spent Christmas without money. “We had a dry and black Christmas.
“Even if a family member is not an illegal miner, they could casually hand you a R100, which is something.”
