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Industrial-scale illegal mining is
destroying villages in South Africa and now accounts for ten per cent of all
chrome produced by the country –the world’s biggest supplier of the ore, which
is essential for stainless steel production
Words and photographs by Tommy Trenchard
Amid the din of heavy machinery, a dozen men and women wearing Wellington boots and balaclavas slowly pick their way along the edge of a pile of rocks as high as a four-storey building. They scan the slope as they go, stopping from time to time to collect chunks of dull-grey stone, which they store in makeshift plastic containers. Over the ridge, in an apocalyptic landscape of craters and rock heaps that stretch almost as far as the eye can see, huge yellow excavators claw at the ground and dumper trucks rumble along sandy tracks, throwing up clouds of dust.
This is Witrandjie, until recently a sleepy, unremarkable village in South Africa’s Northwest Province. Now, it has found itself thrown into turmoil by the world’s growing thirst for chrome. Chrome ore is essential for the production of stainless steel, and global demand for both is soaring. South Africa has by far the world’s largest known chrome reserves and is the top supplier to countries from the USA to China. However, the rising demand, coupled with the government’s failure to enforce its mining laws, has given rise to an illegal mining boom of staggering proportions.
‘It’s chaos here,’ said Kabelo Thlabane, a 35-year-old resident of the village. ‘But we’re powerless to stop it.’
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When Thlabane was growing up, Witrandjie (pronounced ‘VIT-rind-key’) was surrounded on all sides by open grassland where children would play and the villagers could graze their cattle and tend to small plots of maize and other crops. Today, it’s a wasteland.
‘Just look at it,’ said Thlabane. ‘I used to walk through here every day. Now it’s so dangerous you can’t enter after dark. People get mugged. Women get raped’.
For more than a century, South Africa’s enormous mineral wealth has fuelled the nation’s development, but in recent years, illegal mining of everything from diamonds to coal has become an ever more pressing problem for the government, depriving it of desperately needed revenue and giving rise to an insidious underground economy characterised by corruption and violence. Elsewhere in the country, minerals are illegally mined in secret. In Johannesburg, gold miners operate deep underground in abandoned mine shafts. Along the country’s Atlantic coast, illicit diamond diggers are locked in a constant game of cat and mouse with the police, fleeing into their hand-dug tunnels whenever law enforcement agencies conduct raids. But in Witrandjie, there’s little attempt to hide. A few miners acquire paperwork that gives them the appearance of being a legitimate mining company but most don’t bother.
Relying on the protection of corrupt police officers or government officials, illegal miners use heavy machinery in broad daylight while heavily armed guards in SWAT gear watch over their pits. One industry expert has described them as ‘pirate miners’. Unconstrained by the limitations asociated with having to work in secret, they’re able to operate on an industrial scale. It’s estimated that as much as a million tonnes of chrome ore per year – more ten per cent of South Africa’s total chrome production, or roughly five per cent of the entire global supply – comes from the country’s illegal mines.
According to a recent report by Bloomberg Businessweek, it’s not uncommon for as much as 3,500 tonnes of chrome-bearing rock to be trucked out of Witrandjie alone in a single day. It’s then taken to nearby processing plants before being shipped on via Johannesburg to the country’s ports, or across the border into Mozambique. According to a report by the Global Initiative for Transnational Organised Crime, by the time it reaches the ports of Durban, Richard’s Bay or Maputo, the illegal chrome has ‘vanished’ into the legal supply chain. Most is exported to China, the world’s top stainless steel producer, where it ends up in everything from saucepans to skyscrapers.
In Witrandjie, the mines never sleep. Huge pits, some of them more than 100 metres deep, are now eating right into the village itself, obliterating grazing land, roads, burial grounds and even people’s back gardens.
‘It shouldn’t be allowed,’ said Talitha Phiri, a single mother whose home stands barely 30 metres from the encroaching pits. ‘The whole thing is illegal. How can we live like this?’
The noise from the mines prevents Phiri and her family from sleeping at night, and teachers at her grandson Oratile’s school have started to complain that he’s so tired he can no longer stay awake during class. From time to time, Phiri feels her whole house shaking. Clouds of dust in the air make it impossible to dry her laundry. A few months ago, excavators even dug up her father-in-law’s grave.
The 24-hour noise from illegal mines next
to her home stops Talitha Phiri and her children from sleeping
Godfrey Molwana, 36, says that his village
has turned into a wasteland
‘It starts as a small thing,’ she said, pointing to a new hole in the ground behind her house. ‘But come back in three weeks and it’ll be huge. I worry about my children’.
Since the onslaught of the chrome rush began, the residents of Witrandjie have been faced with a simple choice: try to fight it or join it.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of unemployment, with the lack of jobs acute in rural areas. Save for subsistence farming, which has become markedly harder since the mining began, there are very few other options for young people in the village. Consequently, many have sought to earn a living digging out chrome with shovels in abandoned pits or searching for scraps in the waste left behind by larger-scale operators. Locally, this kind of work is known as ‘topa-topa’.
‘We’re really struggling here,’ said 19-year-old Kgamotso Stephen, who earns a few dollars a day hacking chunks of chrome from the walls of a disused mine with a pickaxe. ‘Sometimes we couldn’t even afford to eat. But with this job, I survive. And I’m a breadwinner for my family.’
The work is tough and dangerous, and with no safety measures in place, fatal accidents are common. The first Margaret Ditshwana knew about her son Thabang’s death last March was when two policemen turned up at her house. They explained that he had been doing topa-topa work in an illegal mine outside the village when one of the pit’s walls collapsed, crushing him and a friend beneath several tonnes of rock and earth.
Ditshwana, who before her retirement worked as a photographer for the Department of Home Affairs taking passport pictures for people’s identity documents, had never been happy about her son’s decision to become an illicit chrome picker. But with so few other options available, she understood it nonetheless.
Since Thabang’s death, she has found a therapeutic outlet for her grief in topiary, pruning the plants in her immaculate front garden into hearts and butterflies. She takes great pride in her home, but Ditshwana is depressed about what’s happening to her village.
‘It makes me want to cry,’ she said. ‘We used to know everybody here, but now we’re all strangers. And we’re not safe anymore. We hear gunshots at night, especially when people have been drinking.’
Margaret Ditshwana, whose son, Thabang,
died in an accident at an illegal chrome mine
The 24-hour noise from illegal mines next
to her home stops Talitha Phiri and her children from sleeping
Ditshwana’s two surviving children, now aged 19 and 20, are both unemployed. The family keeps a few cattle, but it’s become harder and harder to find grazing for them. Not long ago, her cows could graze freely in the scrubland behind her home. Now, the closest grazing she can access requires a five-kilometre round trip.
‘We want legal mining,’ she said. ‘Not this. If they shut them all down I would be so happy. They should send in the soldiers.’
Over the past few years, the police and other law-enforcement agencies have made some arrests, seizing chrome shipments and confiscating mining equipment, but this has had little overall impact. Illegal chrome mining is now rampant throughout large parts of South Africa’s Limpopo and Northwest provinces.
For some locals, however, particularly those with capital or connections, the chrome boom has been a blessing. Scattered among the shabby bungalows that line Witrandjie’s sandy streets, a growing number of spacious new homes stand as gaudy monuments to the area’s subterranean riches.
Time and again, local people have found themselves sidelined by South Africa’s mining industry, with the lion’s share of profits ending up either overseas, with the country’s wealthy white minority, or lining the pockets of corrupt politicians. As a result, some of the country’s most mineral-rich areas remain desperately poor.
‘This is the only way we’ll benefit,’ said one illegal mine operator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ‘This land belongs to us.’
The mine owner, a Witrandjie resident who operates several major pits backed by various unscrupulous investors, now exports tonnes of chrome ore every week. Aside from his core staff, he employs a dozen local men and women as chrome pickers to collect what his diggers miss. The man explained that his venture is protected by a contact in the police force, as well as by his investors’ connections in the government’s Department of Mineral Resources. But he’s one of a lucky few who’ve been able to fully capitalise on the boom. Topa-topa chrome picking may have provided a basic survival wage for many, but the serious chrome wealth has bypassed most Witrandjie residents. It has also led to feuds over land and money, sowing division in what was once a peaceful community. The local traditional authorities have found themselves powerless to impose order and an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust hangs over the village.
‘This used to be a quiet place,’ said Godfrey Molwana, a 36-year-old Witrandjie resident. ‘But when people see money, it leads to conflict. It makes them greedy.’
Thalitha Phiri, the single mother whose life has been turned upside down by the round-the-clock mining just beyond her garden fence, has done everything she can to try to stop it, appealing to people with authority in the village and even pleading with the miners themselves, but to no avail. And she’s worried about what could happen if she pushes further.
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‘They call me a troublemaker,’ she said. ‘And this business is dangerous. They’re already killing each other. They’ll just throw your body in a pit and say you fell.’
In the meantime, there’s little she and her
family can do but watch as the miners creep ever nearer. ‘It’s destroying our
lives,’ she said. ‘I just want them gone’.