Mining’s legacy of scars
An exhibition of photographs by Ilan Godfrey now on show in Cape Town illustrates the human cost of the riches drawn from the earth by the mining industry. Max Price and Paul Weinberg report
THE anniversary of the Marikana massacre is a grim testament to the legacy of mining in South Africa. This year is also the centenary of the 1913 Land Act, so the opening this month of Ilan Godfrey’s photographic exhibition, Legacy of the Mine, and the publication of his book of the same name (by Jacana) is imbued with significance.
His images probe the dark side of the industry, the flip side of its glamour, profits, aristocracy and economic contribution.
South Africa has geologically the richest resource of mining deposits in the world. Early evidence of mining activity dates back to the Iron Age, 1 500 years ago. The Mapungubwe archaeological finds, including the famous gold rhino sculpture, demonstrate this.
But the mining story in South Africa really takes off with the discovery of diamonds 150 years ago and gold a couple of decades later — events that set the country on a path of growth and industrialisation, but also exploitation and dispossession.
Godfrey is the winner of the Ernest Cole Award, managed by the University of Cape Town Libraries. It enables a documentary photographer to prepare a portfolio, exhibition and book that focus on social issues.
Cole, the photographer for whom the award is named, published a book, House of Bondage, in 1967 with images of the gold mines around Johannesburg, life in the hostels, and the migrant labour system. His most famous photograph is of a group of African men standing naked with their arms in the air while being medically examined.
Nearly 50 years later, Godfrey’s photographs pick up the story where Cole left off.
His lens focuses on the indelible scars mining has left on the landscape — socially, environmentally and health-wise.
He starts with a wide angle — broad landscapes — and then zooms to the middle ground, a focus on communities and their habitat, or deserted habitat, and how they are coping: ghost towns near closed shafts and mines; sad, desperate, tiny communities left behind, having nowhere to go and nothing to do after the mine has been depleted; families and villages in rural areas from which the miners came and to which they returned — or did not, in the case of the Marikana victims.
Then the focus becomes intense: portraits of people whose lives have been broken by their work on the mines — silicosis, HIV/Aids, accidents, injury; Zama-Zamas, people mining by hand in disused mines, sifting the tailings, descending into abandoned shafts and living underground for six months at a time; women crushing rocks by hand for three days and being poisoned with mercury to extract a gram of gold. Finally, the graves of the Marikana workers shot by police and their colleagues hacked by other miners.
The mines and related laws such as the Land Act helped destroy a peasant economy in exchange for poorly paid wage labour, created racial job hier- archies and ethnic job categories and residences, coughed up those too sick or damaged to continue working, and displaced the burden of their care to rural areas — and often other countries.
This is underlined by Sakhela Buhlungu of the University of Pretoria, who writes in the foreword: “For the workers, migrant
Migrant labour was an experience characterised by violence, humiliation and loss of dignity
labour was (and for some still is) an experience characterised by violence, humiliation and loss of dignity, and gross exploitation.”
One of the progressive spinoffs of the mining industry conflicts was the emergence of the militant mineworkers’ actions, which helped develop a viable trade union culture.
Mining, with its strong as- sociations to the colonial past, multinationals and apartheid, has become, since 1994, the major locus for black economic empowerment. Has this changing of the guard brought more humane and egalitarian solutions?
At the Aurora mines, formerly owned by Nelson Mandela’s grandson and President Jacob Zuma’s nephew, thousands of workers suffered as a result of false promises and non-payment.
Lonmin mine, where the Marikana incident took place, has Cyril Ramaphosa as a part owner and director. Now deputy president of the ANC, he was formerly secretary-general of the National Union of Mineworkers.
“Research in mining areas shows that former and current miners in positions of authority do not seem to make much of a difference in the day-to-day conditions of mineworkers and their families . . . These leaders continue to enrich themselves under conditions very similar to those that mine owners in colonial and apartheid days made their riches,” writes Bhuhlungu.
The spectre of Marikana, much like that of Sharpeville, haunts us. The question is: How much has the mining industry really changed in a democratic South Africa? And can it leave a legacy that is different from the one portrayed by Godfrey?
Price is vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town. Weinberg is senior curator of the Photograph & Film Archives at UCT. The Legacy of the Mine exhibition is at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town until September 21, before moving to Durban and Johannesburg