Reported by The Guardian
There is no end in sight for the drivers of illegal mining, while police action appears ineffective
C ora Bailey has been encountering illegal miners ever since she first started treating injured animals in the townships around Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, in 1991. But as the price of gold has soared, so too has activity in the abandoned mine shafts that mark the area.
In late September, dozens of zama zamas – the name given to illegal miners in South Africa , meaning roughly “to take a chance” in Zulu – arrived to dig for gold across the dirt road from her charity, Claw (Community Led Animal Welfare).
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Soon, they were taking water for their panning and processing from the organisation’s two 25,000-litre water tanks, which are filled irregularly by the city government for the 100 or so rescued and injured animals on site.
“We’ve asked them really nicely and haven’t ever refused them water to drink … But, for the first time ever, we closed the gate at 12 [midday], because we literally had about two buckets of water left,” Bailey said in mid-October.
Police told her that the scale of the illegal mining was too big for them to do anything about, she said at the time. About a week later, officers sheared away the grass that had partly hidden the zama zamas . But within a few days a smaller group had returned, although Bailey said they were now taking Claw’s water only for drinking.
South Africa’s police regularly trumpet their success in tackling illegal mining. On 19 October, they said they had arrested 71 suspected zama zamas across the country in the previous week.
However, researchers put the number of illegal miners in the tens of thousands. In 2019, Marcena Hunter, a researcher at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, estimated that a tenth of South Africa’s gold production , worth about $1bn, was being exported illegally .
Police operations have also led to tragedy. In 2025, 93 bodies were pulled from a mine shaft in Stilfontein , after officers blocked food and water from…