The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

South Africa:
Government Traps and Starves Migrant Miners

Feb 3, 2025

246 starving, emaciated miners and the bodies of 78 dead miners were brought out of an abandoned gold mine in mid-January. Police had blocked off the entrances to the mine since last August—they consider the miners to be trespassers. They had cut off supplies of food and water into the mine. Desperate miners had resorted to eating cockroaches and the flesh of their dead comrades.

South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at 42%! Nonetheless, few South Africans prospect for gold dust in abandoned mines because it is so dangerous. Of 1500-plus workers who were in the mine, the overwhelming majority were poor migrants from other nations in southern Africa, such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Those who enter the mines are called “zama zama,” meaning “take a chance,” because they are risking their lives for the chance to make some money.

The police blockade was part of a campaign to shut down “informal” mining that they called “Close the Hole.” It ended up becoming a murder operation. A protest forced the police to allow local rescuers in—but police refused to offer any assistance themselves.

South Africa was the world’s largest gold producer up until 2007. The apartheid system was used to keep black workers in an extremely exploited position. Their labor dug these extremely deep mines, and produced gold at low cost to the South African capitalists.

The mine workers union was one of the key forces of the struggles in the 1980s that brought down the apartheid regime and brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power. Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, was a leader of the mine workers’ union. The workers’ struggles dismantled apartheid and brought in black politicians, but left capitalism in place.

Now Ramaphosa’s government starves poor migrant workers to death in order to serve the interests of the capitalists. It shows the need to overthrow not only a racist system of government, but the entire system of capitalist exploitation itself.