Mystery of the mine graves and who is buried there
MP wants investigation in case apartheid hit squad victims are interred with miners
WALKING around the Evander gold mine near the Winkelhaak shaft, in Evander, Mpumalanga, a visitor suddenly comes upon them: a thousand graves stretching into the distance.
Apart from numbers, they are unmarked, and there is no indication why the graves are there and no tombstones explaining who is buried in them.
This week, Zet Luzipho, chairman of the parliamentary portfolio committee on mineral resources, said the graves should be investigated to see if any murdered apartheid activists were buried there.
“You cannot automatically say that because the graves are near the Evander gold mine, they are therefore those of miners. What if, one day, one of the hit squad members who is on his deathbed confesses that activists were buried there? You must bear in mind that these burials seem to have taken place at the height of apartheid,” Luzipho said.
Placed on some of the graves, however, are boots, hard hats, pickaxes and chisels. Winkelhaak shaft is owned by Pan African Resources, and former employees say the graves belong to people, mostly from Southern African Development Community countries, who worked at the mine and died of silicosis, in rock falls and other accidents.
John Dlamini, originally from Swaziland, who started work at the shaft as a rock-drill operator, said deaths did not seem to be declared by the authorities 50 years ago.
“If someone died of an accident, particularly ‘a fall of ground’, they would just send his number home and two days down the line he would be buried in a pauper’s grave. There would be no funeral or anything to respect the worker. Mining operations continued as usual. The company would only give a free shift to about 20 people so that they could dig the grave for the person.
“And often, more than one person died at a time — so letting 20 people off a shift to do DEAD END: John Dlamini, who worked on the mines for more than 20 years, at Winkelhaak cemetery. He said miners who died on the job were buried in unmarked graves. The roofs of hostels in the background were removed to force miners out the job worked well,” he said.
Other former employees said the site is also a resting place for the 177 victims of the 1986 Kinross disaster, one of the worst in the world, caused by a gas leak that ignited.
James Mlomo, of Polokwane, who started in 1957 as a malayisha (a loader of ore into the underground trucks) and worked his way up to labour relations officer, remembers how 19 people died in a lift cage when a skip crashed.
Mlomo said people from outside South Africa and even those from the Transkei and Ciskei were not repatriated for burial.
Edwin Mahlelebe, also from Swaziland, who started working at the Winkelhaak shaft when he was 18, said he was lucky to have survived. “I spent 30 years underground and I did not have the bad luck that others had. I still thank God that I came out in 1974 without being injured. Accidents were the norm in Winkelhaak. If you didn’t die there, you would come out disabled. Nobody would bother about your injuries,” he said.
“Everybody made a slogan in Fanakalo: ‘Noko mina yifa mina zohamba Winkelhaak lapha mathuna’ — Even if I die I will go to the graves in Winkelhaak.”
The mines in the area were owned by the Union Corporation, which became Gencor on its merger with General Mining in the ’80s and was then subsumed into BHP Billiton.
“In 1998, Gencor Gold merged with Gold Fields of South Africa to form Gold Fields Ltd, and Evander was part of our portfolio for about a year before we sold it to Harmony,” said Gold Fields spokesman Sven Lunsche.
Harmony spokeswoman Henrika Ninham confirmed that the company acquired Evander in August 1998 from Gold Fields.
Both said their companies had no connection to the graves.
The industry relied then largely on migrant labour from Swaziland, Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho and rural South Africa. Labour was recruited by the Employment Bureau of Africa.
Attempts to get the bureau to explain the terms of workers’ contracts in the ’80s, and what would happen to their bodies if they were killed on the job, drew a blank this week.
The National Union of Mineworkers and the Department of Mineral Resources had planned to make the site one of several heritage sites to honour fallen miners. But the plan was shelved after the portfolio committee called for more information on the graves.
What if [a] hit squad member on his deathbed confesses that activists were buried there?