Why (almost) everything I learnt on social media about the Buffelsfontein tragedy turned out to be wrong

The SAPS’ operation Vala Umgodi which led to more than a 100 miners starving to death in shaft 10 and 11 at the Buffelsfontein mine required the complete erasure of the individual human beings who became the victims of this operation, so that they could be treated as an imagined entity whose members collectively deserved to be punished for any number of heinous crimes ascribed to the group collectively.

Last week I learnt on social media that artisanal miners in South Africa are all undocumented immigrants, that they all terrorise the communities they come from, and that they all commit the most heinous crimes – including murder and rape – on a daily basis. I learnt that these miners (but not the mine owners who had failed to secure their mines after their closure) sabotage the country’s economy to the tune of R3 billion (sometimes it becomes R6 billion) each year by extracting gold from abandoned mines, gold which would otherwise have remained underground forever.

I learnt that the miners who starved to death or were killed when they fell to their deaths when they attempted to exit the Bufffelsfontein mine by climbing up a rusted pipe attached to the wall of shaft 10 of the mine had only themselves to blame, that they had chosen to die rather than be arrested and charged with minor offences or, at most, deportation from the country.

I learnt that the SAPS’ operation Vala Umgodi that ostensibly targeted illegal mining was the only thing standing between law abiding citizens and criminal chaos and that it was a good thing that the miners trapped in shaft 10 and 11 at the Buffelsfontein mine were being punished (although it was not really a punishment as they were not trapped and were not starving) because the miners had all freely chosen to get involved in illegal mining and could, in any event, all have left the shafts where some of them had remained trapped and had eventually starved to death.

I further learnt that it was counter-revolutionary to ask if the police operation was likely to result in the dismantling of the syndicates in charge of the illegal mining operations, or to suggest that many of the artisanal miners trapped underground (but, of course, not trapped at all) went underground to support themselves and their families. I learnt it was even worse to point out that the money they had earned had helped to sustain the communities they lived in.

I learnt that those who said that the artisanal miners were starving were lying through their teeth, that the miners were in fact living in the lap of luxury, as illustrated by the fact that they had had the temerity to ask for cloths to be sent down the mine to help them to wipe maggots from the rotting corpses trapped underground.

I further learnt that the government eventually agreed to help fund the operation to rescue the surviving miners whom the government said needed no rescuing. I did not learn why people who were not trapped needed to be rescued. But I did learn that the villains of this catastrophe were not the SAPS, whose actions resulted in the death of more than a 100 people (and counting), nor the government ministers who cheered on this deathly folly, but rather the NGO’s and their lawyers who “promoted criminality” by turning to the courts in a desperate attempt to get the government to rescue the dying miners.

Lastly, I learnt from social media users that the lives of undocumented immigrants from the rest of our continent (but not from Europe or the USA) who become artisanal miners have little value, that these miners are in fact not fully human (are, in fact, animals), and that they therefore all deserved the extra-judicial punishment (including death) meted out by the state, and that it was heartless and cruel to suggest that these miners were human beings like everybody else.

What I did not learn because I did not bother to check was how many of the people who “educated” me on social media about these “facts” over the past week mentioned “Pan Africanism” or “African/black solidarity” in their bios, how many had previously defended a politically powerful or wealthy person implicated in corruption with the “innocent until proven guilty” slogan or by pointing out that only a court of law can convict somebody of a crime and impose the appropriate punishment after a fair trial. (I did notice that the Twitter bio of an enthusiastic supporter of the starvation policy mentioned God – and her deep love for all humans – in her bio.)

Of course, almost everything I “learnt” on social media last week about the Buffelsfontein disaster was wrong.

That so many members of the public wrongly came to believe (or claimed they believed) that none of the miners were trapped underground, can perhaps be explained by the fact that the SAPS and some government ministers had vigorously promoted this fiction. The SAPS had long claimed that there was nothing stopping the miners trapped in the Buffelsfontein mine from exiting via the Margret Shaft (owned by another mining company) and had even issued a directive instructing the miners in shaft 10 and 11 of the Buffelsfontein mine to exit via the Margret Shaft.

But many of the miners could not do so, as it was impossible to access the Margret Shaft from Shaft 10 and 11 of the Buffelsfontein mine, a fact that was eventually confirmed under oath by one of the owners of the Margret Shaft in papers submitted as part of a High Court application.

As court papers makes clear, at the start of the operation the SAPS had closed the tunnels that had previously been used to facilitate delivery of food, water and medication to the miners in the shafts, in an attempt to starve the miners and thus to “smoke them out”. This left only a manually operated pully system at shaft 11 to facilitate the miners’ access to food, water, medication and other necessities. This pully system was dangerous and time consuming to operate and could be used intermittently to bring trapped miners to the surface (but not to lower down food) on occasions when the police allowed this, and when enough money could be scraped together by the community to pay for the nylon rope which had to be replaced every three days.

The system required between 40 and 50 people to physically pull somebody out of the shaft (or to lower food down), but for most of October and November the SAPS prevented the community from using this system to provide life-saving supplies to the trapped miners. The High Court eventually ordered the SAPS on 1 December 2024 to allow the provision of supplies to be lowered by the pully system, but the police at first ignored this court order, requiring further legal action to force them to comply. (Full disclosure: my sister Anna-Marie de Vos has been part of the legal team who brought this and other applications in an attempt to prevent the deaths of even more trapped miners.)

The first time the SAPS had forcibly halted community led rescue efforts was on 19 October 2024. At the time it claimed that the government would assume responsibility for the situation. (The SAPS seemed to have blown hot and cold about whether to allow community led rescue efforts via the pully system at shaft 11.) By mid-December, the community had nevertheless managed to pull 34 mineworkers to safety and retrieve 9 of the bodies of deceased miners.

The Buffelsfontein mine’s underground network spans 19 levels, and these levels are not linked by stairs or tunnels. While the toughest and most daring miners trapped on some of these levels might have been able to exit the mine, it is incontrovertible that others were trapped underground without food or clean water, and that many eventually died of starvation or from injuries that could not be treated underground.

The government eventually agreed to help fund the rescue operation, in effect conceding that some miners were trapped and facing death, but only long after they must have known that this was so. According to an eye-witness report, rescued miners emerged from the mine last week appearing “emaciated, their bones visible through their clothes”, while “some could barely walk and had to be helped by medical staff”.

These emaciated survivors were the lucky ones. A large number of miners had paid with their lives. This included the 78 miners whose bodies were brought to the surface during the rescue operation, those who died while trying to exit the mine and whose bodies will never be found, as well as those whose bodies had been brought to the surface before the rescue operation started.

Some might attempt to defend this profoundly immoral operation in a legalistic way by arguing that it was not as bad as it looks because the police leaders responsible for instituting the siege did not do so with the intention of starving the miner’s to death. But even if this had been true at the start of the siege, it does not explain the gross failure of the SAPS to ascertain at the start of the siege whether all the miners were in a position to exit the mine as they had claimed. Nor does it explain why they insisted on continuing the siege and denying the self-evident facts even after it became clear that some miners were trapped and that many had already died of starvation.

Had the SAPS operation not taken place, the trapped artisanal miners who starved to death would have been alive today. The SAPS operation was therefore the cause of these deaths. Whether those responsible intended to cause their deaths (thus the intention to commit murder), or whether their gross negligence caused these deaths (thus whether they might be guilty of culpable homicide) would be for a court to decide.

But the larger question is this. Why were the SAPS, some politicians, and a large section of the public so invested in continuing the siege at Buffelsfontein?

Was it really to combat “illegal mining” activities (prohibited by section 5(4) of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act of 2002), a minor offence that carries – in terms of section 99(1)(g) of the Act – a maximum sentence of no more than six months imprisonment? (First time offenders usually receive a suspended sentence or pay a small fine.)

Was the real purpose – as suggested by the numerous media statements issued by the SAPS over the past year to promote operation Vala Umgodi – to punish undocumented immigrants involved in mining by starving them (to death, if necessary), and to deport anyone else lucky enough to have survived? Or was this one of those cases where corrupt SAPS officers in the pocket of one syndicate, helped to destroy the hold a rival syndicate had over the flow of gold out of the mine?

More worrying is what this operation said about the governments’ basic respect for human life. It reflects a callous and frightening belief that when combatting crime – even of a minor nature – the state can do as it pleases, with no regard for the lives or dignity of those the state and the public have collectively branded as barbaric and dangerous “criminals”.

It required the complete erasure of the individual human beings who became the victims of this operation, so that the individuals could be treated as an imagined collective entity (“illegal miners”, “zama zama’s”, illegal immigrants”, “criminals”) whose members the state could then be said to have every right to convict and punish for anything any member of their group might have ever been accused of doing.

This erasure of the humanity of those targeted by this operation is reflected in the SAPS media statements on operation Vala Umgodi. Those arrested are never named. At best, they are classified according to their immigration status (“illegal immigrant”, “South African citizen”), or in terms of their alleged crime (“illegal miner”.) Whether the police has bothered to compile a list with the names of all those who died as a result of their operation is not clear. I fear that, even in death, those involved in this operation do not view them as human beings deserving of this tiny recognition of their humanity.

(What do any of us in any event know about the lives of any of the artisanal miners who eventually died of starvation in the Buffelsfontein mine? Their names and that of their partners, mistresses, and children? The hopes and dreams they had for their children, or – some being children themselves – for themselves? Their political views or favourite soccer teams? What the victims thought or said in the hours before they succumbed to starvation?)

Because all the victims of this operation are widely (but wrongly) perceived to be “undocumented foreigners” (which automatically disqualified them from being fully human), and because many people hold even the lowliest artisanal miners collectively responsible for the heinous violence and cruelty committed by some of the henchmen of syndicate bosses, many South Africans seem to assume that this tragedy has nothing to do with them.

This would be a mistake.

Because a society in which the lives of some humans are not valued at all, a society in which some people are in fact not considered to be (and not treated as being) fully human, is a society in which all who live in it have reason to worry that they too will one day be forced to choose, either to join the mob going after the outcasts, or to become the victims of such a mob.

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