In mid-January 2025 over 1,000 hunger-weakened miners exited two abandoned mine shafts in Stilfontein, near Johannesburg in South Africa. They had been starved out by the police in Operation Vala Umgodi — meaning “plug the hole” – which had cut off food and water in an effort to “smoke out” a shadow workforce.
An estimated 6,100 closed mines are distributed across the country. Although closed, they are not sealed. Residual gold remains in these ruins, and is extracted by miners who come from across the region. They are mainly unlicensed or undocumented migrants, and work in groups that range from a few dozen individuals to highly organised teams of hundreds.
Television stations and social media feeds carried horrendous images of the emaciated figures of the living and the dead as they were brought to the surface in mid-January 2025, nearly six months after the operation was started.
