South Africa's gold belt produced more than a third of all gold ever mined globally. Now the Witwatersrand reef's legacy is 6,100 derelict mines, 1,170 unsafe openings, and a political class that finds it easier to blame illegal miners than to confront the structural failures that created them. The zama zamas — "those who take a chance" — number in the tens of thousands. A 2019 estimate put illegal gold production at roughly a tenth of South Africa's total output, worth approximately $1bn in annual exports. They work shafts that mining companies were legally obligated to seal and rehabilitate but never did. The gold price has soared; the miners followed the incentive. The human cost is distributed with brutal asymmetry. Underground workers are "super-exploited cheap labour," as Bench Marks Foundation researcher David van Wyk puts it. Armed gangs control shaft access and take the gold. In Stilfontein in 2025, police blocked food and water deliveries to miners underground; 93 bodies were eventually pulled from the shaft. Meanwhile, in Khutsong township, illegal mining rents are the economic backbone — "without those rents, it's a ghost town." Politicians approaching local elections on 4 November have found their scapegoat. Johannesburg council member Kenny Kunene toured sinkholes he attributed to zama zamas, including a section of Wemmer Pan Road that has completely disappeared. But Columbia University anthropologist Rosalind Morris is direct: "The biggest culprit of sinkholes in South Africa is formal industrial mining, which dewaters at a scale of hundreds of millions of gallons of water removed from underground every day." Zama zamas cause some structural collapse, she acknowledges, but the attribution is "completely fallacious" as a primary explanation. The extraction chain is layered. Mining companies extracted gold for over a century, then walked away from rehabilitation obligations — the government now counts those mines as "ownerless." Gang networks extract from the miners themselves, controlling access and skimming value at gunpoint. Politicians extract electoral capital by directing public anger at foreign workers rather than addressing unemployment, corporate negligence, or corrupt officials who profit from the trade. Even the community-level picture is complex: Cora Bailey's animal welfare charity lost its water supply to miners panning across the road, while the city government that should fill those tanks does so only "irregularly." The formal licensing path that might convert this shadow economy into something taxable and safer barely exists. Campaign group Mining Affected Communities United in Action advocates for artisanal mining licences, but there is no political momentum behind the idea. A 33-year-old phone accessory seller in Khutsong captures the calculus plainly: "On the surface there's peanuts. Underground there's money." With 40,000 tonnes of gold reportedly still underground, costs of formal recovery rising, and no enforcement mechanism capable of sealing thousands of abandoned shafts, the dynamics are locked in. Higher gold prices, persistent poverty and unemployment, corporate impunity on rehabilitation, and police capacity that cannot match the scale of the problem — none of these are changing direction.
