Zama Zama: Taking a chance on gold

July 20, 2023 9:35 AM

South Africa was long the world's largest producer of gold, but its annual output has been dropping since the 1970s. Now it's not even the largest producer in Africa, having been supplanted by Ghana. As even local gold-mining companies turn to other parts of the world, the mines they have abandoned have often been taken over by zama zamas, "artisanal miners" operating in an illicit, unregulated and often illegal manner.

It's estimated that several thousand zama zamas are underground at any one time, many South Africans but also people from elsewhere, and violence stemming from the combination of money and flying under the legal radar has spilled into other countries.

The BBC aired an hour-long documentary about their lives in 2020, and a recent long read in the New Yorker did the same. Even more recently, an underground explosion yesterday in Johannesburg has destroyed streets in the central business district. One theory, based largely on police speculation, is that it might have had something to do with unregulated mining. It's possibly more a reflection of attitudes toward the miners, but the National Association of Artisanal Miners is aspiring to give them a voice.

posted by Quindar Beep (4 comments total)

"Artisanal mining" has always struck me as an awfully dainty term for what is often brutal, dangerous work. I don't mean to blame the workers themselves and industrial legal mining is often also brutal and exploitative. But "artisanal" conveys old-timey prospectors holding picks, not desperately poor people working with dangerous chemicals, dodgy explosives, and inadequate ventilation.

Another ugly part of artisinal mining as practiced in much of Africa is its use of child labor. See e.g. Ghana, Mali, or Uganda. I'm not finding similar reports for child labor in gold mines in South Africa, is there something different there that protects kids? Or maybe I just missed it. Children seem to be dying in abandoned coal mines, but that's an activity even less organized than artisanal gold mining.
posted by Nelson at 10:17 AM on July 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

With the price of gold at $1,970/oz = €70/g, miners gonna mine. What to do? Jason Gaber of Mt Baker Mining and Metals in Bellingham, WA has donated sluices and shaker tables (and expertise) to artisanal miners in Kenya 75m YT - to reduce the use of mercury and increase the efficiency of the work. One Kenyan works 4 hours to garner 0.2g and sells it for 600KES = €5.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:53 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Artisanal mining" has always struck me as an awfully dainty term for what is often brutal, dangerous work.

Artisanal mining is a thing in the US, too, though often more of a hobby that pays for itself than dangerous and brutal. People can get permits to set up small gold mining operations on federal lands (often on Forest Service lands), which is plenty destructive environmentally, but at such a small scale that the labor and other issues don't really come into play.

I read the New Yorker article when it came out, and what it describes is wild, especially the initial descent into the mine.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:55 PM on July 20, 2023

This is an excellent first post, by the way.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:01 PM on July 20, 2023 [3 favorites]