God’s tears add a sparkle to
It’s a hard life being an illegal artisanal miner near Kimberley but now there are signs they may become recognised
Moses Modibedi had a feeling it was going to be his lucky day. That January morning he left his ramshackle plastic-covered shanty on the outskirts of Kimberley for another shift toiling in the diamond waste fields. As he began work, just after 8am, he shovelled some gravel left over from the previous day on to a self-made wire-mesh sieve. He was about to pick it up when something in the rubble caught his eye.
“It was a 21-carat. But I can’t tell you how much I made [from selling it],” he says with a chuckle.
When he came to the diamond fields to start work as a zama-zama, the term given to artisanal miners, he had only a single bed, some cutlery, wooden poles, sheets and plastic bags to set up a shack in Samaria, a shantytown that’s home to hundreds of artisanal miners near Kimberley.
Modibedi had been working as a driver on a diamond mine, earning R1700 a month. He could hardly make ends meet, especially because he had to support unemployed siblings and an extended family. Fed up, he quit and headed for Kimberley, where he had heard through the bush telegraph that men and women were making good money as their own bosses digging for diamonds.
For two months he sweated, seven days a week, without any luck, returning to his shanty dispirited but determined not to give up. Back home in Taung, worried family members would scramble around for money and send him just enough to buy bread.
His beat-up bakkie helped to bring in some money, ferrying goods for fellow miners.
But the diamond, a fruit from Mother Earth, put a shine into his life. Now he drives a second-hand Toyota SUV that one would struggle to find even in a middle-class suburb. He has renovated his family home in Taung. The plastic-covered shack he called home for years has been upgraded into a spacious wooden home.
Two weeks after selling the diamond on the black market, he was back in Samaria, digging and sifting through the ground in search of another.
“You never know when you are going to get another one. It’s like gambling. [It’s] win or lose,” he says, pouring a mound of earth into a bucket.
Next to him his two assistants, Gilbert Sehumi and Abednigo Piet, are hard at work. Dust rises and sand drops at their feet as they push a 1.5m sieve to and fro.
People are scattered all around and way beyond them on the flat land, consumed by the same task. Using picks, shovels, plastic buckets and sieves, they work quietly, with deep frowns, meticulously sifting through piles of soil in search of the shiny stone that could be their passport out of this hard life.
There are about 3 000 artisanal miners, both men and women, scratching out a living on the land that used to be residual dumping sites for the diamond mining conglomerate De Beers. They come from as far afield as Lesotho, the Free State, Mpumalanga, KwaZuluNatal, North West, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and from the Northern Cape itself.
Modibedi and his comrades, who are organised under the Batho Pele and Goedemoed Mining co-operatives, are part of a new generation shaking the foundations of dominance by colonial establishments. The two co-operatives make up the Northern Cape Artisanal Miners’ Association, which is on a mission to formalise and regulate the miners’ activities.
Lucky Seekoei, the chairperson of the association, says they are mining on 35 hectares divided into five pockets of land. De Beers’ dumping ground for residue from its mining operations was more recently sold to Ekapa Mining.
For the better part of the past decade, mine security and police had running battles with the endless stream of zama-zamas to keep them out. Seekoei, himself a former zamazama, says during that period more than 50 people were arrested for offences ranging from trespassing to public violence.
But the threat of jail time and hefty fines did not deter the zama-zamas — with dependents waiting in povertystricken villages and townships, they stuck it out.
“People are trying to make a living,” says Seekoei, standing on an elevated mound of soil at one of the sites, which the diggers call Beefmaster. “All the minerals from the land helped to change their lives,” he says, referring to almost a dozen cars, including what appears to be a brand-new double cab, parked in the fields.
He says the association plans to register all the zama-zamas operating in the diamond fields and to ensure they have mining permits, which will allow them to trade on the open market. They are given a raw deal on the black market.
They also want to introduce medical aid and a pension fund, and to register individual miners with the South African Revenue Services so that they can pay tax. To be part of the co-operative, zama-zamas pay a R100 administration fee and hand in a certified copy of their identity document.
“We want to stop this thing of people hiding their money under mattresses. They must be able to bank their money without fear [of the authorities],” says Seekoei.
Last month, the department of mineral resources agreed to issue Batho Pele and Goedemoed with small-scale mining permits. This has set the zama-zamas in the Northern Cape on a path towards normalising their activities.
Instead of fleeing in fear when they spot a mine security patrol, they now