Trapped for gold: The dangers facing illegal miners in South Africa
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hundreds of illegal gold miners known as “Zama Zamas” are in an underground standoff against police in South Africa. Authorities are cutting off food and supplies to lure the miners out. As the standoff intensifies, their lives are threatened, thousands of feet below ground.
In this episode:
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Kimon de Greef (@kimon_de_greef), Journalist
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Khaled Soltan and Chloe K. Li with Sarí el-Khalili, Ashish Malhotra, Manny Panaretos, Duha Mosaad, Hagir Saleh, and our host, Kevin Hirten, in for Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, a police standoff a mile underground. |
| 0:15.0 | The aim is to force people working in an illegal mine in Stilfontein to return to the surface where they'll |
| 0:21.9 | be arrested. In South Africa, authorities had been trying to, quote, smoke them out by cutting |
| 0:28.6 | off food and supplies forcing them to the surface. But now, as time ticks by, the standoff |
| 0:35.6 | is turning into a rescue operation. |
| 0:40.0 | I'm Kevin Horton, and this is the take. |
| 0:52.8 | Right now, in the town of Stillfontein, about 150 kilometers southwest of Johannesburg, |
| 0:58.8 | hundreds of men are huddled together thousands of feet below ground. |
| 1:03.2 | They are called Zama Zamas, illegal miners that eke out a living from the scraps of gold |
| 1:08.6 | that are still salvageable from abandoned mines, while |
| 1:11.9 | their syndicate bosses make millions. |
| 1:16.0 | Joining us now is Kimon de Grief. |
| 1:18.0 | He's a freelance reporter from South Africa. |
| 1:23.2 | Kimmon, you've been writing about Zama Zama's since long before this current crisis started to play |
| 1:28.3 | out. Let's just start with some basics. What is a Zama Zama, and what are they doing |
| 1:35.3 | underground in the first place? So in South Africa, the term Zama Zama loosely applies to any legal |
| 1:42.4 | minor of any description, so that somebody taking |
| 1:45.2 | gold, diamonds, or chrome. By far the most criminalized of them is South Africa's illicit |
| 1:52.0 | mining industry for gold. And South Africa, being formerly the world's largest gold producer, |
| 2:00.1 | has thousands of old gold shafts that are, in many |
| 2:04.3 | cases, the deepest gold shafts in the world. Many of those mines are closed down. They're no longer |
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