Scavengers pick over legend of Durban Deep
ROODEPOORT, SOUTH AFRICA— Just off the highway and behind a yellow auto repair shop, Andile Jeremiah slipped into a hole in the ground, descending into an abandoned 100-year-old mine that had helped make South Africa rich.
For a poor man in a country with a slumping economy, it was time to look for whatever had been left behind. South Africa was once the world’s biggest gold producer, with more than 75 per cent of all global reserves in 1970. That iconic industry created wealth that attracted immigrants from around the world, paid for the construction of roads and railroads and made South Africa’s economy the largest on the continent.
Now, its rubble has become a new kind of symbol — of desperation.
Economic growth has stalled. The rand has fallen by 30 per cent against the U.S. dollar in the past two years. China’s once voracious demand for minerals has crashed. The mines where so many became rich closed down after reserves were depleted even faster than expected. A generation of poor South Africans and migrants now break into them and scavenge illegally to survive.
“A second gold rush,” said Niël Pretorius, chief executive of DRDGOLD, which shuttered the mine that Jeremiah now sneaks into every day.
The mine is called Durban Deep. Founded in 1896 and nicknamed the “Grand Old Lady,” it was one of the most profitable mines in the world, producing more than $20 billion worth of gold before it closed in 2001. At one point, it employed 18,000 people. Elton John wrote a song about it. “Going two miles down to the heart of Durban Deep,” he sang.
Then the reserves in the mine dwindled. The remaining gold was so inaccessible that, for a major company, it was prohibitively expensive and dangerous to extract. The mine was closed, its shafts sealed with concrete.
Now, to get inside Durban Deep means finding a tiny hole, usually created by an amateur’s dynamite blast. Even when the mine was a formal operation, carefully monitored and secured, the descent was dangerous. But today, the chances of death or injury are much higher. There is no maintenance, no safety equipment, no access to oxygen and no oversight from professional mining companies. In 2014, 21 illegal miners died in the mine on a single day. The miners say at least one person perishes every week, although there are no official figures.
A third of the gold industry’s 180,000 employees were fired between 2004 and 2015. Many returned to the mines on their own, this time illegally.
“When you close a mine, you’re leaving miners without a job — the guys who know the mine well, who know how to get inside,” said Lerato Legong, head of the legal department at South Africa’s Chamber of Mines.
As Jeremiah crawled downward into the earth on a recent day, he found a piece of a long hose once used to deliver oxygen into the mine, a relic from more profitable days.
“Left behind by the white people,” he said, and he kept crawling deeper.
Jeremiah, 31and originally from Zimbabwe, was drawn here in 2005, when his own country’s economy contracted. He worked as a plumber in Johannesburg for a while, but finding work became too difficult. He looked for legal mining jobs. There were none.
Now, he and the other miners are the first link in a vast illegal network.
When he finishes after 24 hours underground, he brings whatever promising dust and rock he has found to a nearby neighbourhood, where it is refined in vats of mercury and then stirred in old metal gas canisters. It will take hours before he knows exactly what he has found. Sometimes, a day is worth $3. Sometimes, it’s worth $50.
At the next step, there are middlemen such as John Mhofu, a lean man from northern South Africa who oversees an illegal refining process that, next to a main road, is hardly hidden from public view.
Mhofu, who once operated a forklift in a warehouse, will sell the gold to another man who will, in turn, sell it again. Eventually, it makes its way into the pool of gold mined legally and sold around the world. Even though the police are supposed to be cracking down on illegal mining and refining, Mhofu says that remaining in business is as simple as paying the right police officer, sometimes in small pieces of gold.
South Africa’s formal gold sector still churns out about $4 billion in revenue every year. Along with platinum, coal and iron ore, it’s still an important part of the economy. But with China’s construction boom slowing, commodity prices are sliding.
The economy has struggled recently, and not just because of falling prices for commodities, which constitute about 8 per cent of gross domestic product. The country’s manufacturing sector has been hobbled by power constraints. Its agriculture sector has been hit by a historic drought.
Although gold is typically counter-cyclical — its value rising in times of economic uncertainty — South African gold reserves aren’t enough to offset the decline in the prices of other commodities. Gold output nationwide has fallen by about 85 per cent since 1980, according to government statistics. South Africa now produces only 6 per cent of the world’s gold, as recent exploration here has yielded little, while countries such as Brazil and Mongolia have found new deposits.
The country has not faced an economic crisis of this magnitude since the apartheid era, when international sanctions threatened the South African economy.
Jeremiah is vaguely aware of those problems, but mostly he is focused on his own struggle — looking for lightly discoloured veins underground that might yield a big find. It’s the same quest that brought generations of southern Africans here. But this time, under much more dangerous conditions, the miner’s goal is subsistence, not wealth.