Dying for gold: who killed the miners of Buffelsfontein?
economist.com
The gangs force miners to pay exorbitant prices for food, equipment and sometimes even entry to the mine. In some cases the gangs refuse to hoist a miner to the surface until he has found enough gold to pay off his debts. Three teenage zama-zamas told journalists last year that they were given false promises of work, then forced into Buffels at gunpoint. Other miners interviewed by police said that the going rate to be pulled out was 25 grams of gold, worth about 25,000 rand ($1,400) at black-market prices.
The two old friends lived in Khuma and were in their 30s. They were both fathers, and mindful of their responsibilities. “As we all know in South Africa there are no jobs,” said George. He used to work at a slime dump, a site where waste from gold extraction is disposed of, but had been laid off. George wanted to buy satchels and school uniforms for his children. Alfred was already worrying about Christmas. They could make 9,000 rand ($500) a month working the ropes underground – three times as much as they would get frying fish in the local shopping mall. They wouldn’t have to do it for long. The entrance to the shaft was just across a river from their homes; the tunnels probably lay beneath their feet.
When I called Bernard Swanepoel, a former boss of Village Main Reef, the company that owned the mine when it closed, he was astonished that anyone was there at all. “I’ve worked on mines all my life,” he said. “If you told me that you could swing someone down a kilometre on a rope I’d have told you exactly how mad you are.”The sheer danger of mine shafts is one reason why the law mandates them to be “rehabilitated” after they close. The headframe at the top should be demolished, the metal sold for scrap, the rubble pushed down the hole. Finally a concrete plug should be set into the top of the shaft, ideally to a depth of ten metres or more. That is enough, in theory, to stop anyone from getting back in.
Who killed Supang and the 90 other men who are known to have died in Buffels? The famo gangs took the shafts by force. The mine-owners did not do enough to seal the holes. The government dallied over a rescue. The police knowingly starved the miners and suggested, falsely, that they could easily come out if they chose. The economy offered few other opportunities for the “ones who tried their luck”.