Chewed up, spat out in race for gold
This is the tale of thousands of men who for years were exploited in the gold mines of SA, only to return home shadows of their former selves, broken by the ravaging illness of silicosis. This extract is from a book called Broke & Broken by Lucas Ledwaba
THOSE ones who owned the mines, I hate them, I hate them very much.
Zwelendaba Mgidi was 23 years old when he left his home village of Kwa-Bala in the beautiful valleys of Mpondoland, Eastern Cape, to start work on the gold mines of the Free State province in 1983.
From as far back as the late 1800s, Mpondoland became a reservoir for cheap labour in the industrialised areas like the Witwatersrand. The gold mining industry recruited thousands of young African men, particularly from the poor rural areas of Lesotho, Eastern Cape, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi and Botswana to use as cheap labour on the mines.
Many of the men worked as night soil collectors in the early days of the development of black townships such as Soweto and Alexandra, which served as labour reserves for the developing City of Gold.
Even though job prospects on the mines have dropped due to changing political and economic trends, the road to the mines still remains an escape for many in Mpondoland and other rural areas of Eastern Cape.
Mgidi was healthy, fit, energetic and dreamt of one day returning to Kwa-Bala in his own car to retire in peace.
But his return home in 2011 was not the one he had imagined at all in the 28 years he had spent working underground. Instead, he was a pathetic shell of the man he once was. He was a wreck.
A damaged human being with rotting lungs. The price he paid for digging for gold, the precious metal that made others, except those who dug for it, filthy rich. In 2008, aged 48, he received the worst news of his life.
The Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases (MBOD) diagnosed him with silicosis, “an irreversible, progressive, incurable and at a later stage disabling and potentially fatal disease”.
“I spent most of my life on the mines,” says Mgidi, aged 55 years old in 2015. Between 1983 and 1988, Mgidi worked as a timber boy at Lorraine Gold Mine where his duty was to erect timber poles in the tunnels to prevent the walls from collapsing during blasting.
From 1999 to 2004 he was employed as a winch driver at President Steyn Mine where he pulled the scraper to move the rock from the stope face into the tipper and from 2004 to 2011 he worked as team leader and was responsible for blasting of rocks underground at Bambanani Mine. All these mines are in Welkom in Free State.
But those are just memories now, covered in the deadly haze of dust containing invisible silica particles. On a warm but windy Saturday afternoon when most men from the village are tending to their fields and livestock or attending to important matters of the area, he sits in the warm winter’s sun, deep in thought.
His lungs are failing him. Silicosis is slowly eating away at him. He’s a broken man with no hope. He is a prisoner, a prisoner of silicosis, a man held hostage by his own body.
Mgidi has a spectacular view of the majestic, curvy hills that stretch as far as the eye can see to the north and west of his homestead in Kwa-Bala village, near Flagstaff.
Beautifully painted rondavels cling to the hilltops as if carefully placed there to add colour to the green, grass-matted hills. Mgidi spends most of his days basking in the sun in his homestead here. This is a view that could warm anyone’s heart, especially on a clear day.
“My health,” responds Mgidi when I ask what, in his view, would be just compensation for the damage done to him. “If I can get my health back. That’s what would make me happiest, getting my health back.”
At times he has been so struck down by illness that his wife Noziqhamo and their five children feared the worst.
Even when we met in May 2015, he was frail, trembled in the warm winter sun and his face was drawn and pale, his eyes wide, looking exhausted. As a young man he was full of dreams. One of his dreams was to earn enough to buy himself a car. But such was the low pay on the mines that he has never owned one. Instead, he sits in the sun watching the traffic fly past, wishing he could get behind the wheel to get himself to the clinic and to the community hall to collect his state disability pension.
“When I go to get my pension, I have to walk a long distance. Even taking a bath is very difficult. Everything is difficult.”
Broke and Broken was launched yesterday at Constitution Hill and is published by Jacana Publishers. The recommended retail price is R195.