STILFONTEIN, South Africa—With hundreds of miners trapped below ground without food or water, two men from down the road volunteered to venture where no police, government officials or professional rescuers were willing to go.

On their first descent into the shaft this week, Mandla Charles and Mzwandile Mkwayi, wearing white hardhats, headlamps and T-shirts, stepped out of a red cage dangling on a cable from a crane on the surface 4,200 feet above them. Their lights illuminated a sea of emaciated faces, men crowded into a chamber who were crying and pleading to be saved from the pitch black of the abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine. The miners’ lights had burned out weeks or months earlier.

The volunteers made more than 30 round trips underground over the next three days, bringing up 246 living prospectors and the remains of 78 more. The cage, designed to hold six people in close confinement, lifted as many as 13 men to the surface on some trips.

“I can’t explain the smell down there,” Charles, 38, told The Wall Street Journal at the mine entrance in Stilfontein, 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg. “They told us they were eating human flesh and cockroaches. They had lost hope.”

The rescue mission, which concluded Thursday when no more survivors could be found, ended a monthslong standoff between miners who had been illegally digging for gold and a government determined to force them to the surface. The miners had been holed up since the police cut off their supplies of food and water in August. A legal application filed by a human-rights group to speed up the rescue included an affidavit from a miner who also said that some had resorted to consuming human flesh to stay alive.

Mkwayi and other community members were worried that a government-sanctioned rescue team would leave if no one volunteered to ride down and help bring up the miners.
Mkwayi and other community members were worried that a government-sanctioned rescue team would leave if no one volunteered to ride down and help bring up the miners.
The government finally initiated the rescue operation after human-rights groups launched a series of legal challenges to the blockade. But officials refused to allow police or other government employees to enter the mine, fearing for their safety in a subterranean dystopia that can be chaotic and often deadly. Even in normal times, gunfights have been reported among competing miners thousands of feet underground.

That’s where Charles and Mkwayi came in. The mild-mannered childhood friends grew up together in the Khuma township, a few miles from the mine. Mkwayi is unemployed and Charles, like the men he rescued, has worked as a “zama zama,” the local term for the men who dig for gold illegally in shafts closed down by the companies that ran them. The Zulu phrase means “take a chance.”



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Daniel Kiss/WSJ
Charles, who has an 11th-grade education, said he last emerged from a stint underground in October, at a different abandoned gold mine nearby. He had lived in tunnels below the surface for three months, where underground commerce was functioning as usual. He regularly purchased food, drinks and headlamps from vendors who bring their wares into the mines.

“That’s why I managed to go down—I was just thinking of those guys,” said Charles, a father of four. “We didn’t care about the danger. We wanted to save those guys.”

Officials thought it would be prudent to send down two locals from the nearby township, as they were more likely to have a rapport with the weak and desperate prospectors than anyone involved in the blockade that had led to their dire circumstances.

Community members including Mkwayi were concerned that the government-sanctioned rescue team, which remained above ground, would leave if no one volunteered to ride down in the cage to collect the miners, living and dead. Officials were concerned about the weakened men’s ability to enter, open and close the cage safely themselves.

“I took those bodies with my hands and put them in the cage,” said Mkwayi, 36, who also has four children. “Our government failed them.”



Clerics prayed at an entrance to the mine on Thursday.
Charles said it was difficult to assure the anguished men that he and Mkwayi would continue to come down to fetch them until everyone was brought safely to the surface.

“It was difficult to decide” whom to bring up first, Charles said. Each trip up and down took 45 minutes. They tried to prioritize the weakest, sickest and deceased, for fear the decomposition would worsen. They brought bread, potato chips and water with them, to ease the last agonizing hours underground.

For about five months, the informal workers were trapped underground as police tried to “smoke them out,” in the words of Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, minister in the South African presidency. The operation was part of the police’s “Close the Hole” plan to combat illegal mining, which has reached crisis levels here.

A staggering 42% unemployment rate in South Africa has led to high levels of chronic poverty, leaving many men with little choice but to clamber down gold shafts closed by some of the world’s biggest mining companies, in order to feed their families. The zama zamas are often the lowest-level workers for larger criminal gangs that ultimately sell the gold abroad.

Between August and January, more than 1,500 miners emerged voluntarily from the Buffelsfontein shaft. Others died attempting to climb out of the mine, while some became too weak to try after hunkering down for months to avoid arrest.

Survivors pulled out of the mine between Monday and Wednesday this week were charged with trespassing and other crimes, and were either arrested or taken for medical treatment. Despite being attacked for their harsh methods, government officials have maintained their hardline stance against the miners.

“There is nothing that we would do differently,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Asaneng, acting police commissioner of North West province, where Buffelsfontein is located, said at a press conference Thursday.

He compared the calls for humanitarian assistance for the miners to asking the police to send food and water to a robber holed up inside a bank. Sending sustenance to the miners would be “aiding and abetting crime and criminality,” he said.



South Africa’s rapidly aging mines are also the world’s deepest.
The miners rescued from Buffelsfontein are but a handful of the tens of thousands of zama zamas in South Africa, most of them migrants who have come from neighboring countries in the hope of building a better life. But with jobs scarce, many end up digging illegally for gold in nightmarish conditions.

South Africa has more than 6,000 abandoned mines, the legacy of what was for decades the world’s top gold-producing country. South Africa’s storied gold-mining sector has churned out nearly half the gold bullion and jewelry ever produced.

The country’s rapidly aging mines are also the world’s deepest, thanks to decades of cheap, Black labor utilized during apartheid, the system of white-minority rule that ended in 1994. That has made the continuing of operations at many mines costly and dangerous, leading to closures.

Police and rights groups have said that Charles and Mkwayi, heroes in their local community where many of the miners lived with their families, will receive access to counseling after their harrowing rescue mission.

“It was traumatizing, to see those people,” Mkwayi said. “My heart is broken.”

The ordeal has also made Charles think twice about returning underground to prospect for gold, despite a lack of jobs in Stilfontein. He hopes the government will legalize the zama zamas’ work, allowing prospectors to dig more safely in closed corporate mines.

“I’m not sure I will go back down,” Charles said. “Maybe next time, it will be me.”

LINK: https://www.wsj.com/world/asia...c?utm_source=newssho

These are the mine shafts under Butte, MT. It was once the "Richest hill on earth" and the largest city west of Minneapolis. Some of those tunnels are more than a mile deep (not unlike the SA mine). I have an old friend who worked in the deepest mines there back in the 60s. I can't even imagine doing that for a living...or even going down there to scrounge. No thanks.



Hats off to the guys who went down there to get those men. They have bigger balls than I.

The problems caused by the illegal mining are immense. The explosives used in illegal mining are also used in cash-in-transit robberies and ATM bombings. The mine mentioned isn't even particularly deep by local standards. The deepest mines run at just under 2.5 miles deep
https://x.com/i/status/1878452599407456331

These two articles give a little more background.
https://groundup.org.za/articl...gal-mining-industry/

https://groundup.org.za/articl...and-zama-zama-gangs/

It amazes me at how many of these situations have occurred and how long the people lived/survived until help came. God bless them.

This doesn’t read as them being trapped so much as they didn’t want to come up while the law was there. Perhaps they let it drag on to point that they couldn’t make the climb back up.

I’d wager that some of the companies owning the mines control the gangs and draw a tithe to allow illicit (and highly dangerous) mining whereas they would be crucified for sending legitimate employees into such horrendous conditions. Otherwise, why not permanently seal them with a copious amount of explosives, steel rubble and backfilling? Simply capping them off is obviously not a solution when criminals are blowing the shafts back open so easily.

The Chinese are illegally mining.

There is a saying in China. If you can cheat, then cheat.