In January 2025, the world’s attention flicked to a maze of abandoned shafts at Buffelsfontein near Stilfontein, where a months-long police “surrender or starve” operation ended with at least 78–87 illegal miners dead and more than 240 survivors brought to the surface, many straight into handcuffs. Rights groups denounced the siege as a “massacre,” arguing that cutting off food and water to people trapped underground weaponized starvation as a tactic of law enforcement. South African authorities defended “Operation Vala Umgodi” as a necessary strike against criminal syndicates. Whatever label one prefers, the human toll was stark. Al Jazeera+1Human Rights WatchAP News
This was not an isolated tragedy but the clearest, deadliest flashpoint in a long conflict over South Africa’s abandoned goldfields and the marginalised people who mine them. The men and women colloquially called zama-zamas—“those who try their luck” in isiZulu—work in disused or even active shafts with rudimentary tools and makeshift supply lines, frequently under the thumb of violent gangs who extort, traffic and control access to ore. Police and soldiers raid camps, seize equipment and explosives, and, increasingly, lay siege to mine openings to starve miners out. Journalists and researchers estimate that the illegal trade captures a significant slice of South Africa’s gold output and is deeply entangled with organised crime, corruption, and cross-border migration. WikipediaThe New Yorker
Yet to understand why zama-zamas go underground at all—and why some frame their digging as reclamation of stolen wealth—you have to read their actions against a longer history. South Africa’s mining economy was built on land expropriation, migrant labour controls, and racialised dispossession that channelled mineral rents upward while impoverishing “labour-sending areas” across the region. As formal gold mines aged and closed, regulatory pathways into small-scale mining largely failed to materialise, leaving thousands effectively barred from legal extraction. For many in Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and in South Africa’s own townships, illegal mining is not just a gamble; it is the only available livelihood and, in some miners’ narratives, a moral return of wealth taken by colonisers and corporations. Global Initiativewits.ac.zaScienceOpenResearchGate
The state’s turn to siege tactics
The government’s multi-agency Operation Vala Umgodi—deployed nationally since late 2023—targets illegal mining hubs with arrests, deportations, and the cutting of supply lines. At Buffelsfontein/Stilfontein, police ring-fenced shafts and blocked surface access to food, fuel, and medicine. Over days, bodies and survivors emerged; witnesses and advocates said many had succumbed to dehydration and hunger underground. The state has argued that sieges save lives in the long term by breaking syndicates’ grip and preventing further looting of national resources. Rights groups counter that starving people cannot be an acceptable policing method and want a public inquiry with possible criminal accountability. AP NewsAl Jazeera+1Human Rights Watch
Parallel reporting paints a grim ecology around the shafts: gang gunfights, coerced labour, and months-long entombment in hellish conditions; laundered doré feeding legitimate refineries; and officials accused of complicity higher up the value chain. Critics argue that starving miners on the lowest rung leaves the financial architects untouched. Even some pro-enforcement voices now urge a pivot to follow the money rather than focusing on desperate diggers. The New Yorker
“Reclaiming” gold: a politics of restitution from below
Not every zama-zama articulates their work in political terms. Many say plainly that they dig to eat. But a discernible strand of miner testimony and community advocacy frames informal mining as a rightful recovery of wealth: gold taken historically through conquest and corporate extraction, with little returned to the places people come from. In this telling, the shaft becomes a site of counter-extraction—a risky, improvised attempt to pull life from the ruins left by a century of capital-intensive mining. Academic and civil-society research echoes parts of this claim: criminalisation of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), coupled with a licensing regime few poor people can navigate, pushes communities into illegality while reproducing the inequalities that mining created. ScienceOpenwits.ac.za
That politics of reclamation sits uneasily alongside the very real harms tied to the trade. Zama-zamas are not a monolith: alongside self-organised crews, violent syndicates extort “taxes,” recruit with deception, and trap miners underground. Communities above ground endure cable theft, toxic processing, and sporadic gun battles. Any honest account must hold both truths: a grievance rooted in dispossession and a dangerous, exploitative shadow economy that preys on the vulnerable. The New Yorker
From Marikana to Stilfontein: different miners, rhyming lessons
South Africa’s most infamous mining-related atrocity remains Marikana in 2012, when police shot dead 34 striking formal platinum workers during a wage dispute with Lonmin. Marikana was about union politics and corporate-state power, not illegal mining. But two lessons resonate: first, that militarised policing of labour conflict can be lethally misjudged; second, that post-apartheid promises in mining towns remain threadbare. Those continuities—precarity, institutional distrust, and the quick resort to force—help explain why many South Africans hear “Buffelsfontein” and think “again.” WikipediaThe Guardian
What an alternative would require
1) De-criminalise and formalise ASM where feasible. Civil-society submissions urge a regulatory carve-out for small-scale operators with safety, environmental and traceability requirements that poor miners can actually meet. Without a lawful route in, raids simply chase people from shaft to shaft. wits.ac.za
2) Target the finance and logistics networks. Follow the money: buyers, smugglers, transporters, and complicit officials who alchemise illicit ore into legitimate bullion. Starving men underground is a brutal shortcut that leaves the value chain intact.
3) Protect life first in enforcement. When sieges are mounted, minimum humanitarian standards—access to water, the ability for neutral rescue teams to operate, medical triage—should be non-negotiable. January 2025 showed the cost of abandoning them. Al JazeeraAP News
4) Repair mining’s social footprint. Investing in alternative livelihoods in labour-sending regions and cleaning up abandoned shafts would shrink the pool of people for whom a descent is the only option. Historical responsibility demands more than fencing off holes. Global Initiative
Conclusion
Calling zama-zamas “criminals” or “victims” alone misses the point. They are workers of last resort operating in the cavities of a profoundly unequal resource economy. Many genuinely believe they are taking back what was taken from them—gold pried from stolen land and generations of cheap, expendable labour. The state’s current strategy—visible force above ground, starvation below—has produced a humanitarian scandal without uprooting the illicit value chain. If South Africa wants fewer bodies at the mouth of its abandoned mines, it will have to choose a harder path: one that treats desperate miners as citizens with rights, not enemies to be besieged, even as it dismantles the syndicates that profit from their desperation. Al JazeeraHuman Rights Watchwits.ac.za
