In isiZulu, the phrase zama zama carries a gentle, melancholy cadence that official press releases tend to strip away. It means to take a chance, or to try your luck against long odds. To the comfortable residents of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs and the politicians who appear before cameras in flak jackets, the term has become synonymous with terror: armed syndicates, collapsing roads, and lawless men haunting the fringes of the city. But if you stand on the red, sun-baked earth near Roodepoort, where the old Witwatersrand reef cracks open into the underworld, you see something much older and far more heartbreaking. You see men covered in fine yellow dust, carrying battery packs and plastic water jugs, preparing to descend into absolute darkness because the surface offers them no other way to feed their children.
The wire dispatches speak of scarred landscapes, sinkholes, and police operations that yield hundreds of arrests but change nothing. They document the real distress of township residents whose foundations are rattling and animal rescue workers who find their fences breached by informal miners. Yet the story almost always begins in the present tense, as though these thousands of abandoned shafts simply opened up overnight, conjured into existence by foreign interlopers from Lesotho, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. We are encouraged to view this as a crisis of immigration and policing, a tidy clash between the rule of law and opportunistic crime. It is a comforting narrative for those in power, because it absolves everyone who ever made a fortune from South African soil.
To understand the zama zamas, you have to remember who dug the holes in the first place. For more than a century, the Witwatersrand was the beating financial heart of British imperial ambitions and apartheid industrialization. Generations of Black men from across Southern Africa were herded into single-sex barracks, paid pennies, and sent down to carve out the richest gold deposits the world had ever seen. That gold paved the roads of modern Johannesburg, built the glittering towers of London’s financial district, and underpinned the global monetary system. But when the richest seams were exhausted and the margins began to thin, the mining conglomerates did what capital always does across the Global South. They declared subsidiaries bankrupt, closed down operations, and quietly slipped out the side door, leaving behind toxic mine dumps, radioactive dust, and thousands of kilometers of unsealed, un-rehabilitated underground tunnels.
Now, as the global price of gold reaches historic highs—driven by the anxieties of central banks and investors in the wealthy world—the discarded crumbs left in those forgotten tunnels have become valuable again. A man without papers and without work in a continent strangled by debt and austerity will look at a crack in the earth and see a livelihood. He knows the risks intimately. He knows that the rock could shift at any moment, that rival crews carry automatic rifles, and that toxic gases can extinguish a life in seconds. He is not taking a chance out of thrill; he is calculating the price of his own body against the total absence of economic alternatives.
Instead of reckoning with this colonial inheritance, the South African state has chosen the theater of the police raid. Armored vehicles roll into neglected townships, tactical units flush out shivering young men, and ministers promise to purge the country of illegal diggers. It is the easiest form of politics: finding the most vulnerable, undocumented people in society and blaming them for structural neglect that spans generations. The xenophobic rhetoric that accompanies these crackdowns serves as a convenient smokescreen. If the public is busy being terrified of a migrant miner, they will not ask why the multinational corporations that generated billions in dividends were never forced to properly seal their concessions or clean up their environmental wreckage.
Nor does the police baton ever reach the top of the pyramid. The gold these men chisel out with handmade tools does not remain in the townships of Gauteng. It moves quickly into the hands of shadowy middlemen, enters domestic refineries, slips across borders, and eventually lands in the spotless display cases of high-end jewelers in Dubai, Zurich, and New York. The system functions precisely as extraction has always functioned in Africa: the physical danger, environmental devastation, and criminal stigma are localized entirely in Black bodies, while the refined value flows seamlessly to the metropoles of global finance.
Until we talk about historical restitution and corporate liability, Johannesburg will continue to collapse into itself. Treating abandoned mine shafts as a mere policing issue is like sweeping dust off a floor that is rotting through to the joists. The men digging beneath Roodepoort are not an aberration in the history of gold extraction; they are its logical conclusion. They are the human debris left behind by an extractive model that took everything of value, transferred the profits across oceans, and left the poorest among us to scavenge the ruins of an empire that never cared whether they lived or died.