By Pleasant Garner, F22 Environmental Clinic Student
Once I add a key-term to my Google Alerts, it is there forever. As a result, I stay passively apprised of my research topics of yore, even when the research is no longer relevant to my life. A search term I inputted years ago during my research for my undergraduate thesis has recently surged in my inbox. The search term is “zama-zama,” which is the Zulu term for informal/illegal/artisanal miners. Recent headlines bemoan a perceived crisis in South Africa, in which zama-zamas have taken over abandoned mines and thrust surrounding communities into chaos. High-profile crimes in mining communities seem to have pushed the issue back into the national spotlight; recently, the country’s Mineral Resources and Energy Minister announced a new governmental force to combat the illegal miners.
I stumbled upon this issue accidentally, during an internship for a legal organization in South Africa that provided assistance to communities dealing with the environmental and societal scars associated with decades of intensive mining in the shadow of apartheid. The summer experience ended up as the inspiration for my senior thesis on the effect of progressive mine closure legislation, which required my return to the country over spring break to conduct interviews with residents and workers of a true ghost town. Johannesburg is the world’s largest city not located on a body of water. Instead, the city–whose Zulu name means City of Gold–is built on a reef of gold. Decades of intensive and virtually unregulated gold mining meant that all the gold close to the surface was gone at legacy mines and the remaining gold was deeper and trickier to extract.
Additionally, the fall of the apartheid regime had led to both the abolition of artificially cheap labor costs and, quite sensibly, the imposition of new progressive legislation meant to internalize some of the externalities that mine owners had long foisted on their workers and local communities. The upshot is that the double whammy of mine exhaustion and higher labor and regulatory-compliance costs had led to the closure of a number of legacy mines and the sale of the properties associated with legacy mines (barracks to house miners, housing for more senior staffs, even medical clinics and schools). However, changes in the entity with official ownership does not necessarily change the situation on the ground. And, in fact, the relatively lawless nature of the former mine town combined with the mine’s remaining gold to draw in new residents. As I wrote in my thesis, the “mine’s closure paradoxically caused the town to become an attraction to those looking for cheap housing or informal mining opportunities.” As the mine operations shut down, so did plumbing and electricity. However, people remained and continued to be attracted by the gold.
When I conducted research for my thesis in 2018, I talked to zama-zamas and women working as “crushers” at one formally-abandoned gold mine, as well as long-term residents of the community who worked legal jobs or collected welfare to support themselves. Even then, safety was front of mind for everyone I talked to, especially the women. Because zama-zamas are working illegally and many are not legal South Africans, the young men turn to each other for protection. As one zama-zama from Lesotho told me, “Everyone is killing each other. . .. Because everyone is working illegally, everyone is under pressure and has to protect themselves.” Additionally, because a large percentage of the workforce was there illegally and so could not access banks but made a significant amount of money, theft and police corruption was a big problem. I spoke with one miner who was shot the year before in a robbery.
The problems rife in South African former mine towns interested me as someone interested in environmental justice writ large. The zama-zamas and crushers I talked with dealt with extraordinary workplace hazards; I talked with a woman who crushed gold with a baby strapped to her back, sometimes having to run from police rubber bullets. Pulverized dust hung in the air from active crushing and combined with the dust blown from the massive tailings dams left by the closed formal mining operations. Mercury from the zama-zamas combined with acid mine drainage from the tailings and contaminated local streams. In other words, the active illegal mining exacerbated the environmental harms left unremediated by the formal gold mine. However, the whole rationale of illegal mining is that mining at a given area may still be profitable on an individual level operating outside of a formal liability regime replete with hazard pay and the internalization of environmental costs. In other words, the zama-zamas I spoke to were willing to risk life and limb for the gold still in the ground out of desperation, but the costs far outweighed the benefits of continued operation for an organized entity operating under the shadow of the law. The environmental and social hazards caused by illegal mining are many, but there is no way to internalize them into an illegal industry. Additionally, the zama-zamas who were willing to talk to me were sympathetic young men from Lesotho and Zimbabwe looking to support their families before they got too old for this work. One man I talked to used his mining income to support himself while he sought an electrical power certificate in Zimbabwe. On the individual level, the choices that these young men zama-zamas and young women crushers made were smart economically; on the aggregate, they were blighting a community already blighted by years of industrial mining.
I don’t have any neat answers, of course. I do just want to take every opportunity I can to elevate the stories that people told me. In a world ever-reliant on minerals extracted from the earth, it is important to ensure that enacting responsible regulations doesn’t shift activity from the legal to illegal sector.
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