An uncaring government and a gang of unscrupulous criminals. Caught between them are people regarded as expendable – people who, pushed into a desperate situation because of poverty, turn to dangerous work that exposes them to a merciless police “service”. But then, in contrast to the aforementioned, there is also a community that tried to save lives, and non-governmental organizations trying to help on the basis of the Constitution.
The nightmare situation in which so-called illegal miners in Stilfontein in South Africa’s Northwest province found themselves, represents a perfect storm of contemporary power dynamics – not only in South Africa but across the world.
South Africa has tended in the past several years to feature in global news for all the wrong reasons. The situation at Stilfontein involved hundreds of men working illegally underground in an abandoned gold mine. The South African Police service (SAPS) blockaded the mine as part of a national operation called “Vala Umgodi”, the Zulu phrase for “close the hole”, which started in December 2023. It involves blocking the entrances to shafts to prevent provisions from reaching the miners to force them out from underground.
Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni’s aggressive statement that the miners would be “smoked out” of the mine, attracted worldwide attention even in these pitiless times. She seemingly wanted to underline that the miners would receive no help despite reports that they were starving because of the police’s purposeful blockading.
Finally, 87 bodies were brought to the surface at Stilfontein in January, and a total of 246 miners were rescued after spending several weeks underground with the dead. The rescue operation could only proceed after court actions by the community and civil society against the police. The police were at some point accused of disregarding a court order to allow food and other necessities into the mine. The Stilfontein standoff became a forced disaster with a death toll that eclipses the 2012 massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in the same province.
The actions and utterances of the police and the government were completely at odds with the central constitutional principle of human dignity in the South African Constitution, which government officials are compelled to uphold by virtue of their positions. Several years of rhetoric from government officials stigmatizing foreign Africans and promoting extreme violence against people who violate the law, irrespective of the type and circumstances of the crime committed, resulted in avoidable deaths at Stilfontein.
What makes this more outrageous, is the fact that several of the miners were underaged, that armed men kept watch over the miners, and that the situation underground may have been one of modern slavery.
The power dynamics in action at Stilfontein illustrate the massive economic shifts that have taken place over the past four decades due to the liberalization of capital flows and other policy changes associated with globalized neoliberal capitalism. The once mighty mining industry of South Africa is shrinking dramatically. Disinvestment has taken place due to a combination of factors including costs, the reduction in easily accessible mineral reserves, and government policies.
Along with liberalization and deregulation come the informalization of economic activities – a world-wide phenomenon. Alongside and intertwined with the informal economic sphere grows a shadow economy. The dividing line between legal and illegal activities becomes increasingly blurred. In the shadows, organized crime spreads its tentacles. Along with the smuggling of drugs and firearms, human trafficking gets worse. The poor, women and minors are targeted.
What makes human trafficking possible is the growing difficulty to merely survive, given current economic conditions. People grasp frantically at promises of work, only to find out in horrific ways that they have been duped. Human trafficking is aimed mostly at sexual exploitation, but at least one-fifth of victims worldwide are forced into modern slavery for labour purposes.
In addition to human trafficking, migration has skyrocketed worldwide. While the extent is frequently exaggerated in public discourse in South Africa, migration from the rest of Africa to South Africa has also increased. Starting back in the 19th century, South Africa’s mining industry was built on the backs of people from the rest of Southern Africa, especially from what is today’s Mozambique. The majority of the Stilfontein miners were Mozambicans.
Yet not all miners are foreigners. There are local people involved, as shown in media interviews with anxious family members. In the context of an economy dipping in and out of recession and an unemployment rate of over 40 percent (as per the extended definition that includes both active and inactive job seekers), options to earn a living have drastically dwindled.
No one chooses to work underground in an unsafe mine for months in life-threatening conditions. Apart from those who ended up there under false pretenses due to human trafficking, there are people who have no other way of feeding themselves. Illegal miners belong to a new underclass found worldwide: people for whom neoliberal capitalism has no use and who, due to impoverishment, are delivered into what Achille Mbembe (2019) calls “necropolitics.” This is a form of politics that makes millions of people redundant and condemns them to “death-worlds”, extreme conditions in which they become the “living-dead”.
Instead of addressing the socio-economic problems caused by neoliberal capitalism that are forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere, politicians around the world are blaming migrants. This is also how attention in South Africa is diverted away from the policy decisions that have caused current social and economic predicaments. Given that the ruling African National Congress could not muster a humane response in accordance with the Constitution’s requirement of respect for life, one would at least have expected a more sophisticated reading of the situation from a party that still engages in Marxist-Leninist analyses of social and economic conditions. But the government is adamant about its approach being correct – even as facts emerge that overturn the easy stereotypes that politicians rely on.
Crime syndicates are not separate from governments and law enforcement agencies. Politicians and the police are often implicated in organized crime. For example, Al-Jazeera investigative journalists found a direct link between Zanu-PF’s continued stranglehold on Zimbabwe and informal mining operations. The gold that workers extract in life-threatening conditions for a pittance is ultimately sold in Dubai and keeps Mnangagwa and company in opulent power and comfort.
The mine in Stilfontein where people lived underground for months, digging in the ground under armed guard, with restricted food and water, was literally transformed into a death-world by the South African police. Some corpses were well decomposed by the time they were finally removed.
This is a translated, revised and edited version of a media column that first appeared on Netwerk24.com
Christi van der Westhuizen is an associate professor at Nelson Mandela University, heading up the Research Programme at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the university.
References
Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Cite as: Westhuizen, Christi van der 2025. “Necropolitics at South Africa’s Stilfontein Mine” Focaalblog 3 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/02/03/christi-van-der-westhuizen-necropolitics-at-south-africas-stilfontein-mine/