By César Neto
Introduction
The artisanal miners of South Africa, often of foreign origin and called “zama zamas,” were punished for “illegal” mining by being forcibly trapped in an abandoned mine where they were left without access to food and water. As a result of the government’s attempt to force them out of the mine by starvation, 78 miners perished and the 248 who were rescued were malnourished, dehydrated, and traumatized. The responsibility of the South African government, the ANC, COSATU and the Communist Party is clear. This is the second massacre of workers since the end of apartheid. In 2012, 34 miners were killed during a strike in Marikana.
The mines are no longer profitable and big business is abandoning the area.
South Africa, with more than a century of mining tradition, has more than 6,000 abandoned mines. Big companies exploit them while they are profitable, but when they lose profitability the companies look for alternatives and start again. These companies have enjoyed total impunity since before and after apartheid. They abandon the mines, they don’t remove the mountains of rubble they have created, and they are not required to restore the environment.
When mining companies leave, they leave behind villages and small towns with thousands of people unemployed and without the possibility of earning a livelihood. These workers return to the mines and try to extract gold using traditional methods, and what little they get is used to support their families. There are more than 100,000 zama zamas in the country.
Big Business and the ANC, COSATU and Communist Party governments are against the miners
In 1993 while facing the debt crisis, the World Bank imposed guidelines on all African countries in a document called “Strategy for African Mining”[1]. The document imposes several conditions on the countries, including the end of state mining companies and the control of artisanal exploration.
There are 100,000 zama zamas in the country and their combined production has the power to extract several tons of gold, although this is much less when compared to mechanized mining. “The government claims that illegal mining will cost the South African economy $3.2 billion (£2.6 billion) in 2024 alone”[2]. So Ramaphosa, a former London Miners executive, joined forces with big business to put an end to the zama zamas.
Ramaphosa’s government and the far right are against immigrants and refugees
South Africa has an extremely cruel policy towards immigrants and refugees. Trump’s attempt to prevent a child born in the United States from having U.S. citizenship has been a reality in South Africa for decades. A child born to an immigrant and a citizen will not have South African citizenship. Despite this, the far right has campaigned against the presence of immigrants and refugees through Operation Dudula, in which immigrants and refugees have been attacked in the streets, their businesses burned down, and violence used against them to drive them out.
Of the 100,000 zama zamas, the vast majority are from Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe and other African countries. So the punishment is also an expression of Ramaphosa’s capitulation to the far right.
The government decides to close the mines and expel the zama zamas
The Stilfontein gold mine was closed in 2013. In August 2024, the government launched Operation Vala Umgodi (which means “to close the hole” in isiZulu) at the Stilfontein mine. However, there were between one thousand and two thousand zama zamas inside the mine at that time, and the eviction tactic was to leave them without food or water. Regular access to the mine was improvised using pulleys, which were then blocked by the police so that no one could get in or out.
The mine is 2,000 meters deep. Inside, there is an improvised market for the sale of food and other products, as well as a system of dormitories. Typically, miners go down and spend two or three months in the dark, doing the work of looking for gold.
The only way to escape is via a connection to two openings. The journey takes an average of seven days in which the miners much crawl underground through dark, narrow, and flooded tunnels. Many miners died in their attempt to escape the mine because of tunnel collapses and drowning in these flooded areas[3]. “It’s a lie that people didn’t want to get out. These people were desperate for help, they were dying”[4].
In November, the police allowed more than a thousand people to leave the mines. They were all arrested, interrogated, and will be prosecuted. A group of mostly undocumented foreigners decided to resist inside the mine to avoid being arrested and deported.
They remained there until January 15, 2025, when they began to be rescued because of a court order that followed a national campaign under the slogan “Stilfontein, the next Marikana,” in reference to the killing of 34 miners in 2012. The national campaign was spearheaded by the General Workers’ Union of South Africa (GEWUSA), led by Mametlwe Sibei. Mametlwe is a militant Trotskyist union leader. In fact, if he were a Stalinist, he would be in the government supporting the massacre.
Rescue and worker solidarity
A company that specializes in this kind of operation was hired for the rescue, but no rescuer or police officer agreed to go down to the bottom of the mine. Two residents of Khuma, a mining town, agreed to go down. They had been fighting for months to get the people out. Former miners Mandla Carles and Mzwadile Mkwayi, who served seven years in prison for theft, risked their lives to save their neighbors.
Mandla and Mkwayi’s accounts of the encounter with the 78 dead and 248 survivors are brutal:
“The smell of death was everywhere. The bodies really stank.””I felt very weak when I saw them, it was painful to look at them. But Mandla and I decided that we had to be strong and not show them how we felt in order to motivate them.”
“The miners told me that some of them had to eat other [people] in the mine because there was no way to find food. And they were also eating cockroaches.”
“They were very dehydrated and had lost weight, so we were able to put more people in the rescue cage because they wouldn’t have survived another two days in the hole. They would have died if hadn’t gotten them out as soon as possible.”
Mkwayi says the men he rescued were so frail that the rescue cage, which was designed to hold only seven healthy adults, managed to hold 13 of them.The example of Mandla and Mkwayi’s solidarity shows once again that only the working class can save the working class itself.
The Global Vanguard Must Reject the ANC, COSATU and the Communist Party
After thirty years in power, the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) have committed countless betrayals of workers that must be rejected by the global vanguard of struggle. Let’s look at some of them:
a) The total opening of the economy to imports. As a result, the country’s industrial base collapsed, factories closed, thus creating the massive unemployment that exists today. This policy was the same at the beginning of Mandela’s government as the neoliberal policies of Menem and Collor in Argentina and Brazil, respectively;
b) A pension reform that limited the granting of retirement benefits and reduced the value of the benefits in order to pay the foreign debt;
c) Labor reform, which reversed numerous gains made by workers and threw the majority of the working class into total informality;
d) The murder of 34 striking mine workers in the Marikana area. The current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who was then the director of London Miners, was held responsible for the order of repression;
e) In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, motivated by the paralysis of the economy, there was a wave of looting in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng; 300 people died. The Communist Party, as part of the tripartite government, ignored the desperation of the population, treated the looting as “acts of crime and economic sabotage as part of a well-coordinated counter-revolution” and advocated for more repression[5].
f) In the current case of Stilfontein, there is no doubt about the responsibility of the government; one only has to look at the statements made by its ministers. The Minister of Home Affairs, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said at a press conference that the zama zamas would come out one way or another and that the government would “smoke them out”. That is, that they would use gas to force miners to come to the surface. Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe did not apologize after the rescue. He said the government would step up the fight against illegal mining, which he described as a crime and an “attack on the economy.”
At this stage of the decadence of imperialist capitalism, it is either socialism or barbarism
We have seen barbarism in the bombings of Ukraine and Gaza. In Africa, the same tragedy is unfolding in Sudan and now in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the United States, we see the far right expelling immigrant workers, yet there has not been a single case of deporting the foreign mafiosos who have settled in the country.
In this phase of capitalism, there is an open war on poverty for the benefit of the arms industry, mining companies, and finance capital. Rosa Luxemburg was right: now it’s either socialism or barbarism.
The fight against barbarism requires new trade unions and political organizations that can fight against the governments of those like Putin, Netanyahu, Burham-Hemedti, Paul Kagame, Trump and Ramaphosa as enemies to be defeated.
Sources:
[1] The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. Strategy for African Mining – Washington/DC – 1993.
[2] Trapped underground with decomposing bodies, miners faced a grim reality – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62qqg0zj6yo
[3] Stilfontein mining tragedy sparks calls for investigation –
https://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-podcasts/moneyweb-midday/stilfontein-mining-tragedy-sparks-calls-for-inquiry
[4] Trapped underground with decomposing bodies, miners faced a dark reality – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62qqg0zj6yo
[5] Returning to the path of struggle, against the ANC and the CP – https://litci.org/en/against-anc-cp/
