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People watch as Senzo Mchunu, South African police minister (not pictured), inspects outside the mineshaft where it is estimated that hundreds of illegal miners are believed to be hiding ...
South Africa's illegal miners – called zama zamas, or "take a chance" in colloquial Zulu – are estimated to number more than 50,000, a tenfold increase in two decades.
South Africa's government says it will let thousands of illegal miners starve until they accept their fate and emerge from an abandoned shaft to face arrest. South Africa is trying to starve 4,000 ...
Some members of the local community say their relatives have been in the mine for nearly six months, since July. Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich South Africa where companies close down mines that are no longer profitable, leaving informal miners to illegally enter them to try and find leftover deposits.
A government delegation led by police minister Senzo Mchunu visited the site of the disused mine on Friday to engage with the community and relatives of the miners who are underground. While Mchunu insisted that the illegal miners were committing a crime, he said the government also wanted to save their lives.
The South African government has launched a rescue operation at an abandoned gold mine in the country’s North West province, where at least 109 men have died, a group representing the miners ...
Mnguni said that the more than 500 miners still underground were in different places in the mine, which is one of the deepest in South Africa at 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) deep and has multiple shafts, many levels and is a maze of tunnels, he said.
Illegal gold miners, commonly referred to as "zama zamas", operate in abandoned mine shafts and use the empty gas cylinders, known as "phendukas", to process the stolen ore. The cylinders, often stolen, are first drained of gas, then cut open so that ore can be placed in them along with a steel ball which crushes the ore as the cylinder is rotated.