Source: AFP
In Johannesburg, illegal miners and mining companies are in a race to tap golden riches hidden in hundreds of piles of mine waste, many taller than a 20-story building.
The hills that dot the city’s landscape are now coveted by South African mining companies, whose underground gold deposits are becoming harder to exploit every year.
The area is dotted with slag heaps, shafts and deep ditches left by generations of miners, whose arrival during a gold rush in the 1880s led to the birth of the town.
South Africa has lost its decades-long crown as Africa’s biggest gold producer to Ghana, but still has more than 100 active mines, including 44 around Johannesburg.
“Production peaked at around 1,000 tonnes in 1970 and has been steadily declining since then,” John Reid, head of market strategy at the World Gold Council (WGC), told AFP.
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By 1993 the southern African nation was producing at about half its peak rate, just 619 tonnes per year. By 2022 it was at less than a tenth of 1970 production levels, just over 90 tonnes.
Johannesburg was once known as “eGoli” or “the place of gold”, but the city and the Witwatersrand region now produce only a quarter of the country’s gold output each year.
Painful but profitable
But now, an increasing amount of gold is coming from the waste hills. Many are decades old and were left when lots of gold dust and lots of chunks were overlooked as miners searched for richer seams.
Artisanal miners and illegal mining gangs, whose members are commonly known as “zama zamas,” clean, recycle and process the remaining gold ore — often while fighting each other.
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In July, five people were found shot dead near an abandoned well west of Johannesburg.
Source: AFP
Illegal activities also affect active mines, which mining companies have long complained costs them money and poses a threat to their staff.
The “zama zamas” are mainly migrants who come to South Africa to try to make money from illegal pits, living and working in difficult conditions.
“Originally artisanal miners would go to these dumps and find whatever they could,” Dale McKinley, a development studies researcher at the University of Johannesburg, told AFP.
“And when it was clear there was a lot of money to be made, the zama-zama syndicates started moving.”
And then the big mining companies, despite abandoning their dumps decades ago, decided to take another look at the waste themselves.
McKinley criticized the mining companies, saying they were only returning to their tailings “now that the gold industry has gone dormant.”
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Radioactive loot
Companies like Pan African Resources are buying up the hills in a 21st century gold rush.
The company says it plans to extract gold by blasting the tailings with high-pressure hoses and feeding the pulp to an automated processing plant — a technique known as hydromining.
“Low-cost gold mining like the rest of the tailings has a good future in South Africa,” said Pan African’s environmental manager Reino van den Berg on a tour of the tailings hills.
Source: AFP
South Africa has approximately 6,500 abandoned mines, many with abandoned slag heaps.
Each ton of rock and dirt has about 0.3 grams of gold, making the painstaking search profitable and far less expensive and dangerous than a mine several hundred meters underground, van den Berg said.
However, there is conflict between the three parties who are all fighting for their share of the gold waste, as access to the old mines is often controlled by rival gangs.
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And the piles themselves are an environmental hazard where mining company employees wear anti-pollution masks but thousands live in slums amid the debris.
The air around the hills contains chemical and radioactive particles, and South Africa’s gold seams also often contain uranium.
Source: AFP