Gold is more expensive now than it has ever been, although it is still mined all over the world. The deepest mines are in South Africa. More men have probably died in the deep mines of the Witwatersrand and and the Free State than anywhere else: between 1984 and 2005 over 11,000 miners died in South African mines. In 2003 alone, the death toll was 270.
In any underground mine, the trick is to keep the excavations open so that rock can be extracted as waste and ore, without endangering the miners. Blasting work disturbs geology and can cause the rock to behave unpredictably. Geologists and specialists in rock mechanics study and test the rock so that that the best support can be provided. They now know much more about these systems than before, but at great depths and pressures it is still not an exact science.
The main reasons mining continues are that gold is a vital component of all electronic items and for its enduring popularity as a haven for investors and speculators. If we only wanted gold for use as jewellery or for scientific purposes, there is enough of it already in circulation to meet those needs. Thus, gold continues to be mined at great risk and extracted in one of the dirtiest industrial processes mankind has ever devised. After it is smelted and poured into bars, most will be traded without ever leaving a vault. The buyer will derive no pleasure from owning them, except the satisfaction of his clever investment.
Both mining and reduction processes use chemicals and water that are impossible to isolate from the environment and water table, no matter how noble the intentions of the mining company. This will always be dangerous for the planet but acceptable if there is no other choice. That gold is still being prospected and mined so that money can be conjured from its mere existence is madness.
All mining companies talk a blue streak about their environmental credentials and some of them may mean what they say. But when their planning goes wrong or is inadequate and eats into the bottom line of their balance sheets and dividends, they will fight tooth and nail to evade responsibility for any damage they have caused. Of course, gold mining is not the only villain in this piece, but it produces a commodity that arguably, does not need to come from new mines. After all, gold has not underpinned the value of a currency since 1971, when the United States abandoned the gold standard.
So, we keep mining it lawfully and to turn a handsome profit. But it is now also mined unlawfully and at a scale that competes with the legitimate mining industry. Two evils have emerged: first, illegal miners have no regard for any fragile environment and its water table. Second, illegal mining is invariably controlled by gangsters, who do not care about the desperate men they force or dupe into doing the work. They will corrupt anyone who helps them to carry it on and threaten those who obstruct them.
One example will make my point. South Africa has scores of abandoned gold mines, some dating back to the late nineteenth century, when the vast deposits of the Witwatersrand were discovered near Johannesburg. There was always legitimate money to be earned from abandoned workings and even from the mountainous dumps of finely crushed gold ore that surround Johannesburg and other cities, many of which contain recoverable quantities of gold.
In the workings themselves there is gold in the sludge in the drains, in the dust and rock fragments that cover the floor of every tunnel and working place and even blasted into the timber supports. Some older workings are easily accessible from the surface; one has only to walk into them down an inclined shaft. Others would involve climbing down a vertical shaft a mile deep, on greasy and slippery steel girders that support the sides of the shaft and carry the man and rock hoists.
I was a miner myself on the mines of the west Rand. The thought of climbing down the supports of a main vertical shaft, even with safety equipment, makes me feel quite ill. And yet, that is exactly what men have been doing. Once down in the workings, they cannot emerge each day as ordinary miners do, so they stay underground, fed and maintained by the criminals who oversee the enterprise. The wretches that work underground are called Zama Zamas.
The South African Police (SAPS) have tried to disrupt these operations because of resentment in the communities around them to increased criminal activity and violent confrontations between Zama Zamas and residents. In one infamous episode in 2022, some film students were attacked and raped at a disused mine in Krugersdorp, causing a national outcry. Eighty men were arrested. The charges against fourteen defendants in the case have since been dropped.
In August 2024, the SAPS and the Department of Mineral Resources began an operation to end illegal mining at a large gold mine at West Stilfontein in the Northwest region. What was effectively a siege to starve the miners into submission ended in January 2025, after more than a thousand men emerged from the workings, over two kilometres below the surface. Many were in shreds of clothing, with no shoes, emaciated and sick. It was reported that 78 bodies came out, although other estimates put the death toll at 87. The outcome provoked public outrage and has done nothing to end the problem.
Mining is dangerous enough when it is carried out by large corporations, controlled by legislation and governments that will prosecute them if they endanger their employees or the neighbouring population. One can only wonder at the desperation that would force men into the illegal version of the work. What is certain is that if legal mining is environmentally dirty, illegal mining is far worse.
Consider that at West Stillfontein, up to a thousand men lived underground for months, maybe years at a time, working without the ventilation that would have cleaned the air and kept it safe to breathe when the mine was operating legally. Their untreated bodily waste would have polluted the environment where they lived and worked. If they were extracting the metal underground, the effluent from the unregulated process will have done the same and may also have entered the water table.
Where there is gold, men have always taken huge risks to get it out. At its current preposterous price and with abandoned mines eliminating the need for expensive excavations to get to it, one must assume that illegal mining will continue to attract men prepared to undergo unspeakable danger and privation to earn a living.
But if this entails climbing down steel girders beside a mile of screaming black void, it must show how desperate life has become for the men that do it. Where it goes unpunished, endangering the environment and the lives of people it affects, illegal mining is another uncomfortable measure of society’s contempt for human life and dignity.
https://www.dmre.gov.za/mineral-resources/mine-health-and-safety/mine-accidents-and-disasters
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