Digging deep: Residents of the township of Khuma, close to the Buffelsfontein mine in Stilfontein, North West, the place zama zamas are trapped underground, say they’re struggling economically after a police operation shut down unlawful mining exercise. Photograph: Lunga Mzangwe
Tons of of casual miners have been trapped within the shaft of an deserted gold mine in Stilfontein, after police blocked the exit in November as a part of its Operation Vala UmGodi (Operation Shut the Gap).
The final contempt for the lives of males trapped underground has uncovered a collective hesitation on the face of injustice. It has uncovered the betrayal of the constitutional mission that envisages an egalitarian South Africa firmly entrenched in rules of human dignity.
The community-initiated rescue mission was sluggish. With greater than 50 individuals required to drag one particular person from the mine shaft with a rope, progress can solely be sluggish. Within the first two weeks of this rescue mission solely 12 individuals made it out. A report from one of many survivors was grim. He stated he had been consuming a mix of toothpaste and bathroom paper to keep away from the feeling of being consumed by starvation. He additionally stated our bodies had begun to decompose underground.
Within the absence of fundamental requirements and a system to redistribute the little they’d, violence and chaos started to flare underground as individuals competed for restricted assets.
The Stilfontein group’s name for the federal government to intervene was met with a flat refusal. The official authorities place was that these underground are criminals mining illegally. This has meant they’d no water and meals. The federal government’s place was defended by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who stated in a press release: “The Stilfontein mine is against the law scene the place the offence of unlawful mining is being dedicated. It’s customary police apply all over the place to safe against the law scene and to dam off escape routes that allow criminals to evade arrest.”
Ramaphosa’s characterisation of this humanitarian disaster as against the law scene sums up the angle of the state and the narrative dominant in components of the media — that these caught underground are criminals who ought to, within the phrases of a authorities minister, “be smoked out”.
Some who’ve normal themselves as instantaneous constitutional legislation specialists on social media platforms have endorsed the federal government’s reactionary place, within the identify of the rule of legislation, saying “the state can’t be held ransom by criminals”. They overlook that the overarching precept of the rule of legislation is justice. They ignore that people who find themselves alleged to be perpetrators of against the law don’t stop being human beings entitled to the appropriate to life and different basic constitutional rights.
The dearth of empathy for this part of society, the zama zamas (those that maintain attempting) is the results of a single narrative pushed by the media, together with social media. Most commentary, together with stories, have castigated these staff as a supply of all types of evil, as undesirable, harmful. This one dimensional reporting poses hazard for democracy and freedom.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cautions us, a single story-narrative “robs individuals of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity tough.” We all know from our not-so-distant previous that manufacturing consent this manner has had catastrophic penalties for black individuals.
The bloodbath of 34 placing miners at Marikana in 2012 occurred, partly, as a result of the vast majority of the media reporting robbed the strikers of their humanity. We all know this by way of the qualitative and quantitative analysis of South Africa’s main media and journalism scholar, Jane Duncan, who uncovered editorial failures within the reporting of the strike. The protection uncritically embraced the spin of the mining firm and the police. The voices of the miners concerned in a wildcat strike, exterior of the unions, have been absent.
Mineworkers protesting for a residing wage have been portrayed as irrational, inherently violent and prison. Instantly after the bloodbath the police weren’t known as to account by the media. Their model of self-defence was thought of acceptable as a result of the mineworkers had already been painted as prison and irrational.
South Africa suffers from mass unemployment and endemic starvation. These in energy are more and more criminalising the methods individuals use to discover a place to stay and a solution to earn an revenue. Criminalising the poor permits the federal government and different elite actors to masks their very own shortcomings in addressing urgent problems with poverty. The narrative has given the state the legitimacy it must unleash violence and arrests quite than tackle the underlying precarity that pushed determined individuals into the deep and dank shafts of an outdated mine lengthy since deserted by capitalist corporations.
The only narrative concerning the zama zamas doesn’t permit us to have an trustworthy dialog concerning the state’s failure to interrupt colonial extractivism that continues outline the mining business, the place black working-class individuals proceed to be exploited as low-cost labour, and to lose their land to mining corporations, now working with native political elites together with, in some circumstances, conventional authorities.
The language of “drawback individuals” doesn’t permit us to see these staff as human beings that face all types of boundaries to changing into authorized miners.
The federal government’s insistence that these caught underground are criminals is a misdirection. In his acclaimed e book, Open Veins of Latin America, Edwardo Galeano writes that “the extra freedom is prolonged to enterprise, the extra prisons need to be constructed for many who endure from that enterprise.”
However greater than something, this criminalising language exhibits the pervasiveness of racism in South African society. Writing within the early twentieth century in The Souls of Black Of us, W E B Du Bois recognized the “drawback of the color line” because the driving drive for the worldwide system of exploitation. Half of the world’s inhabitants was subjected to colonial rule and never seen as human. This phenomenon persists within the twenty first century.
World capitalism has erased the truth that the smartphones, computer systems and electrical automobiles, that signify in the present day’s technological development, are a product of lethal, inhumane, slave-like working circumstances within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). About 70% of the world’s cobalt, which powers these things, comes from the DRC. Individuals, together with ladies and kids, work as casual mineworkers for a mere greenback or much less, simply to outlive. Not solely are they within the mercy of warlords, individuals get buried alive whereas digging with picks and shovels.
As huge tech corporations promote iPhones, which have change into markers of wealth and make tremendous earnings, the violence visited upon these on the supply of manufacturing will get minimal or no point out in mainstream media. As Frantz Fanon places it in The Wretched of the Earth, as a result of these are Africans, “they’re born there, it issues little the place or how; they die there, it issues not the place, nor how.” If we don’t insist on the humanity of those that are marginalised and in want of solidarity, just like the zama zamas of South Africa, the DRC and elsewhere within the continent, we’re complicit within the programs that don’t recognise them as individuals however objects to be exploited and discarded.
The issue is compounded by shrill calls for that the state not help the lads trapped underground as a result of they’re unlawful foreigners.
If we pay cautious consideration to the historical past and political economic system of mining in South Africa, the truth that a number of the casual miners come from different international locations in Southern Africa mustn’t come as a shock. For many of the final century mine staff have been recruited by mining corporations in rural components of South Africa and from throughout Southern Africa.
This historic truth is superbly documented by the late jazz maestro, Hugh Masikela, in a tune known as Stimela. Simply because the sound of the practice and devices fade, in a poet like tone, Masikela pronounces:
There’s a practice that comes from Namibia and Malawi
There’s a practice that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe
There’s a practice that comes from Angola and Mozambique
From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland
From all of the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa
This practice carries younger and outdated, African males
Who’re conscripted to come back and work on contract
Within the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg
And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or extra a day
For nearly no pay …
These employment patterns that characterised the mining business for greater than a century can’t disappear in a single day.
Lots of these caught underground are former mineworkers who’ve been retrenched or had relations that labored as mineworkers. It’s comprehensible that mining conglomerates can now not revenue from the disused mines due to the prices of operation, however this doesn’t imply there are not any minerals to mine. The gold continues to be there, and casual mineworkers are going to the ends of the Earth looking for it. They threat their lives to feed themselves and their households.
To keep away from related incidents comparable to Stilfontein, the state should urgently undertake a coverage that recognises small-scale casual mining as a wealth redistributive instrument in a rustic with deep ranges of inequality, unemployment and poverty. The minister of minerals and petroleum assets should come out from the shadows and decide to breaking the neocolonial nature of the mining business that continues to extract mineral wealth with out actual advantage of communities.
With correct state help of casual mining, individuals will be capable of blunt a number of the edges of mass unemployment and impoverishment. However we’re not going to have the ability to get so far if we insist on criminalising casual minework.
Musawenkosi Cabe is a contract authorized journalist.