Botho Molosankwe
Pinned under a huge rock, 17-year-old Themba Mlambo looked around the dark mineshaft – and what he saw terrified him.
Shards of light gleamed out from a pile of rocks under which five other illegal miners lay buried. The glow and slender rays were from their headlamps, but there was no movement or sound.
Mlambo knew they were dead, crushed in a rockfall. The Zimbabwean teenager was one of the few to survive the mishap at an unused mineshaft near Grootvlei mine near Springs last Monday.
It is believed that about 20 miners were killed, but the final figure may never be known. Nobody knows how many went down the shaft, and the victims are likely to remain entombed where they fell, after it was decided that it was too dangerous for rescue workers to retrieve the bodies.
Earlier this year, Mlambo had left his carpentry job for Shaft 13 in the hope of a quick buck. “I would always see other guys boasting about the money they made there. They would say they made between R5 000 and R7 000 in two days,” he said from his hospital bed.
On his first day in the mine, last month, he made R600. The shaft they entered was sealed shut, but he said “grenades” were used to blast it open.
Last Monday was Mlambo’s second time underground. He arrived around midday and joined a group of about 30 people who had food, tools, hammers, batteries for torches, and the equipment needed to extract gold from ore. Some were younger than him, said Mlambo – as young as 14.
They had been underground for about four hours when a scream echoed down the dark shaft: “Rocks are falling, rocks are falling!”
Then Mlambo heard rocks tumbling down around him. “The top of the mine was vibrating. Suddenly everyone started to run, screaming and being hit by rocks. I was running when I tripped and fell. Then a rock hit me on my back. It was so big that I could not stand up.”
Two other illegal miners, also rushing to escape the rockfall, pulled Mlambo from under the rock and carried him to safety outside.
Normally when the miners returned to the surface, people would be waiting at the entrance to buy the gold. “However, when they heard that people had died underground, they left.”
Frans Baleni, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said illegal mining was fuelled by big syndicates who were in cahoots with some mine managers. He said the syndicates would bribe managers to provide information about where gold could be found in abandoned shafts.