A MINEFIELD OF HOPE .... AND VIOLENCE
“Mercury might as well be currency with them,” Nhlengetwa said. “There’s no way those guys can source that. There’s absolutely no way, so who’s giving it to them?”
The use of mercury is also one of illegal mining’s many health concerns. Deadly caveins constitute another major hazard, as zamas often mine load-bearing pillars in underground mines in the seismically active Witwatersrand Basin.
David van Wyk is a researcher with the Bench Marks Foundation who hopes to organise zamas into co-operatives to work toward a safer industry.
“Many of them are people who have been mineworkers in the past, whose retrenchment packages were not sufficient for them to even get home to Zimbabwe, the Eastern Cape or
Several Johannesburg-based companies mine gold around the town of Tarkwa, Ghana, where galamsey operators – the Ghanaian name for small-scale miners – have worked for years.
Galamsey are given land on the perimeter of mines that would not be economical if mined by the companies, which in turn buy the gold from the galamsey. Similar agreements exist in Tanzania, as well.
However, the gold in South Africa is much deeper, with mines in the West Rand tunnelling as far as 4km below ground.
This forces zamas to rely on l e gitimate operations, either by sneaking into operational mines or by digging in already-abandoned ones.
As high arrest rates and failed attempts at mine closure have not slowed illegal gold mining, those involved are searching for alter native methods to combat the problem.
Proposed solutions range from the co-operatives suggested by Van Wyk, to regu- lated mining on the periphery of large-scale operations such as what exists in Ghana.
“The leftover gold is there. It’s not feasible to mine on a large scale,” Nhlengetwa said.
“No matter how dangerous it may be, (zamas) are actually making it profitable.”