When zama zamas go hungry deep underground in the abandoned mines where they illegally mine for gold, they sometimes resort to eating a mixture of toothpaste and toilet paper.
“You mix a soft porridge with water,” one of the miners said, miming his belly becoming full. “It hurts to swallow. Your hunger stops for a while.”
He spoke to GroundUp in Stilfontein, the former mining town in North-West province where zama zamas were recently cut off from food for approximately two months as part of a national clampdown on illegal mining dubbed “Vala Umgodi” or “Close the Hole”.
Beginning in late September, police and the military shut down access points used by gold syndicates for delivering supplies underground in an attempt to force the miners to surface. “We are going to smoke them out,” South Africa’s Minister in the Presidency warned.
Earlier this month, the police estimated that as many as 4,500 zama zamas remained underground. They subsequently revised this figure to a few hundred. Nobody knows for sure how many people are still inside the tunnels, which form an interconnected labyrinth of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kilometres surrounding some of the deepest mine shafts in the world. In the past two weeks, nearly 1,200 zama zamas have surfaced and been arrested in Stilfontein.
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