In the shadows of South Africa’s mining landscape, thousands of shafts lie abandoned—resembling derelict waiting rooms for tragedies yet to unfold. One such tragedy occured in Stilfontein, North West, in 2024. By January 2025, under the state’s Operation Vala Umgodi, around 80 bodies of artisanal miners had been retrieved from an unused shaft of the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine. The number of emaciated, disoriented survivors who surfaced from the shaft was countless.

The Stilfontein disaster has been widely critiqued across society, with near-universal condemnation of the state’s public policy failures. This article argues that those failures are not exceptional but symptomatic of a deeper systemic crisis: the government’s approach to mine rehabilitation, and its erasure of women from South Africa’s mining narrative.

Founded in 1949 as a residential nucleus for gold mine labor, Stilfontein epitomizes the rise, fall, and unresolved legacy of a mineral-dependent economy. It stands as both archive and graveyard—testament to the depraved ambitions of the colonial industrial project, and a haunting reminder of democratic South Africa’s unfinished liberation imperative.

At its peak, Stilfontein’s gold mines generated billions in revenue, propping up the apartheid state. Yet across the homelands of Southern Africa, children waited for fathers who had lost their names—and their way back home—in the dark bellies of mine tunnels.

In the first decade of democracy, the gold mining industry declined sharply. As reserves dwindled, and faced with rising operational costs and a transforming national economy, many companies shuttered their operations—abandoning mine sites and the communities that surrounded them. By 2022, the auditor-general counted approximately 6,000 abandoned, unrehabilitated mines across the country.

At many of these sites, workers remained. Some stayed to extract residual minerals, too ashamed to return home empty-handed. Others had built new families in mining towns. Some had nowhere else to go. In this vacuum, new artisanal mining communities emerged: AmaZama Zama—meaning “to repeatedly try.”

Too often, AmaZama Zama is misused to refer only to the men directly involved in extraction. But artisanal mining, particularly in unrehabilitated sites, is never an isolated activity. It exists within broader communities that include men, women, and children—each playing interdependent roles to support and sustain small-scale operations. In many ways, AmaZama Zama communities are wounded extensions of precolonial mining practice.

Before the rise of the colonial mining complex in the mid-1800s, South Africa’s indigenous communities engaged in small-scale mining for iron, copper, and gold. These practices were rooted in a philosophy that dignified the miner and honored the earth. Rituals were performed before and after extraction. But in the wake of colonialism and industrial abandon, today’s small-scale mining communities are criminalized, their existence flattened into tropes of illegality and violence—raising, for many, the uncomfortable question of how much has changed between apartheid and the democratic era.

The state’s response to artisanal mining has followed two tracks: the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Policy (2022), which seeks to formalize the sector, and Operation Vala Umgodi (2023), which seeks to eliminate illegal operations. The latter is a multi-departmental enforcement effort that includes sealing shaft entrances, cutting off supply routes, and arresting miners. The operation has reportedly led to thousands of arrests, deportations, and the seizure of firearms, ammunition, cash, explosives, and minerals. With its mandate set to expire in May 2025, its long-term impact remains uncertain.

Legally, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) places the responsibility for mine rehabilitation on the mining rights holder, requiring them to set aside financial guarantees. Yet the ongoing proliferation of abandoned sites reveals the limits of this legal framework—and the absence of deeper cultural memory around what rehabilitation once meant.

As the Sanusi Credo Mutwa explained, for many African communities, the earth was never a resource to be exploited but a living being to be honored and restored:

For many centuries the black people of Africa have believed that the Earth was a woman, a living, merciful entity, a Great Mother who allowed us to dig deep into her sacred flesh in search of minerals that ensured our survival in this world… after the people of Africa had dug a mine and worked that mine for several decades, when the mineral they had been digging for was exhausted, the African people used to undertake the great task of refilling that mine back again… This is why, when the prospectors of the last century arrived in many parts of South Africa, they found that nearly all the ancient mines that had been worked by black people had been sealed afterwards. It happens because of this belief that the Earth is a gigantic woman whose wounds have to be healed and whose skirts have to be arranged after each outrage by human beings.

To proceed according to Mutwa’s logic is to accept that among its greatest feats, colonialism erased the sociocultural and historical memory of its victims. Under colonial rule, land and other sacred natural resources were commodified, and industry—especially mining—was masculinized. In post-1994 South Africa, artisanal mining is still often framed through the trope of the violent, gun-wielding, shirtless Black man, endlessly engaged in tribal warfare underground. Mutwa locates this phenomenon not in political conflict, but in memory:

You’ve often heard that in the mines in many parts of South Africa terrible fights often break out between miners of different tribes. These fights are due to a deep-rooted feeling of guilt, not to tribal animosity. Because each Black miner who goes underground has deep within his mind a feeling that he is committing a sacrilege. He feels guilty of rape, of incest, because he, being a man, should really not be allowed to enter the biggest woman of all, which is earth. This is why in African tradition most of the mining was done by barren women, because only women should injure the greatest woman of all.

Despite this profound history, when women’s roles are acknowledged in mining discourse, they are often relegated to the margins—framed as support structures to male protagonists. In Stilfontein, this gendered marginalization was vividly evident. Operations at Shaft 11 resembled two distinct, gendered worlds.

The first world was feminine: a tree-lined road leading to the shaft, where women gathered under the canopy of towering trees. They prayed, cooked, waited, searched—creating a fragile thread of hope. Yet even when engaged by the media, their role in a vision of the earth as a divinely feminine Great Mother was left unexplored.

The second world was the shaft precinct itself: dusty or muddy, depending on the weather, surrounded by armed and anxious members of the South African Police Service. Its air was heavy with anticipated violence. At the entrance stood young men—visibly poor, malnourished, desperate-eyed—pulling in chorus on a long harness, patched together every few meters, each tear and repair a record of danger barely survived.

The gendered geography of Stilfontein is a shameful reminder of the memory loss inflicted during the colonial encounter. Yet at the same time, and perhaps as an act of liberation, it offers an opportunity for the democratic state to rethink its approach to mine rehabilitation. In a truly postcolonial South Africa, abandoned mines should not be tolerated. Nor should artisanal and small-scale mining continue to be criminalized. Women’s intuitive connection to land and community must be seen not as supplementary but central to any meaningful process of mine rehabilitation.

In May 2025, the South African Human Rights Commission will convene a national inquiry on artisanal and small-scale mining, mine rehabilitation, and Operation Vala Umgodi, among other related matters. In light of the systemic crisis rooted in unrehabilitated mines, this inquiry will dig deeper into the efficacy of the state’s legislative, policy, and programmatic responses. Central to this process will be assessing what tools are needed to deliver real liberation—liberation from the aftershocks of colonial violence still imprinted on the land, its people, and the environment.

The commission is inviting submissions from individuals and groups across public, private, academic, and civil society sectors. These may take the form of research, policy analysis, investigative reports, testimonies, proposals, poems, essays, or other expressions of knowledge. What is needed now is not only critique but collective reimagining. And perhaps, in that act of remembering, something like healing can begin.