Category: Reportage

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rachel Wynberg, Professor and DST/NRF Bio-economy Research Chair, University of Cape Town

African Perspectives on Agroecology is a new book with 33 contributions from academics, non-governmental organisations, farmer organisations and policy makers. It is free to download, and reviewers have described it as a “must read for all who care about the future of Africa and its people”. The book outlines how agroecology, which brings ecological principles into farming practices and food systems, can solve food shortages and environmental damage caused by mass, commercial farming. We asked the book’s editor and the South African Research Chair on Environmental and Social Dimensions of the Bio-economy, Rachel Wynberg, to set out why this book is so important.

What’s wrong with the current system of food production?

The dominant model of modern agriculture in the world is based on monoculture, where one crop is grown across large areas using chemical fertilisers and pesticides. It relies on seeds that are owned by big corporations and are often subsidised by governments at a high cost.

The book outlines how this approach to growing food is flawed. Firstly, it carries major costs. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s State of Food and Agriculture 2024 report, the costs of diet-related disease, hunger and malnutrition and other costs amount to about US$8 trillion a year. Countries in the global south carry much of the burden.

Secondly, the current approach is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. This happens through deforestation and land degradation, livestock and fertiliser emissions, energy use, and the globalised nature of agriculture. Food is often produced far from where it is consumed.

Huge farmlands also wipe out biodiversity and degrade one third of all soils, globally. Industrial agriculture has many negative impacts on ecosystem health, livestock and human wellbeing.

What’s the alternative?

Agroecology is a good alternative. It uses natural processes such as fixing nitrogen in the soil by planting legumes, and conserving natural habitat to encourage beneficial predators that keep pests in check. It includes planting a diversity of crops, rather than just one, to prevent pest outbreaks, and avoiding synthetic pesticides and herbicides.

Agroecology places importance on building natural, local, economically viable and socially just food systems. It aims to support farmers and rural communities.

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Read more: Africa’s worsening food crisis – it’s time for an agricultural revolution

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As a result, it fosters more equal social relations and improves food and nutritional security.

Agroecology also recognises local ways of knowing and doing things, and respects the rights of Indigenous people to seeds and plants that they have planted for many generations. Transforming research and education are an important part of agroecology.

What are the advantages?

Agroecology increases the capacity of farming systems to adapt to climate change. Studies show how agroecology increases crop yields, regulates water and nutrients, increases agricultural diversity and reduces pests.

It gives farmers more choice about what to grow and eat. This enables them to produce a wider variety of healthy food.

Can agroecology grow enough food for everyone?

Agroecology can be scaled up through:

• farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchanges

• creating professional networks of agroecology practitioners

• local seed-saving networks or groups that share different seeds that are adapted to local conditions

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Read more: Indigenous plants and food security: a South African case study

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• solidarity networks: community-based groups or movements that aim to support each other, cooperate and take collective action.

• the revival and use of indigenous and under-utilised crops and livestock breeds such as pearl and finger millet, sorghum and Nguni cattle

• linking producers with consumers and markets.

What needs to be done?

Urgent actions are needed, especially in the climate “hotspot” of sub-Saharan Africa. Agroecology needs supportive policies and funding. South Africa has had a draft agroecology strategy for more than 10 years but this has not yet been adopted.

Development aid for farmers often undermines agroecology. It typically promotes a “new” African Green Revolution that uses hybrid seeds, agrochemicals, new technologies, and links to markets. However, hybrid seed, especially genetically modified seed, can contaminate local seed systems that are better adapted to local conditions.

The book illustrates what can go wrong. Maize is said to have “modernised” development and promoted foreign investment in Africa. But it has displaced indigenous crops such as sorghum and millet which are more nutritious and drought-resistant.

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Read more: Amazing ting: South Africa must reinvigorate sorghum as a key food before it’s lost

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Subsidy programmes and state support for hybrid maize also back multinational agrochemical and seed companies.

Governments, industry and those funding research, innovation and consumer marketing must actively move away from a maize culture and invest in a bigger range of crops.

For millions of smallholder African farmers, there is a deep understanding of how animals, plants, soil, people and weather patterns are connected to and affect one another. Agricultural development programmes, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides, and genetically modified seeds disrupt these relationships. They can devalue local knowledge and skills in favour of “expert”-led innovations. This means that farmers lose their capacity to understand their environment and their ability to react appropriately.

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Read more: Agriculture training in South Africa badly needs an overhaul. Here are some ideas

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Lastly, agriculture research and training needs to be rethought. Research and development is now mostly shaped by market-led approaches that favour crops grown by large-scale commercial farmers. A public sector research and development agenda for agroecology needs to be developed. It should be based both on scientific knowledge as well as traditional and local knowledge.

What would help?

Agricultural research should be co-created by everyone involved. Farmer-led research and innovation can support food system transformations.

New ways of seeing and doing research are evolving. Western scientific and traditional knowledges are mixing in ways that can transform farming. Our book points out that social movements are emerging as a powerful force for change.

We hope to support these efforts through a new, four year, European Union supported initiative to establish a research and training network: the Research for Agroecology Network in Southern Africa. New agroecology knowledge networks in South Africa and Zimbabwe have also been started to coordinate research and develop curricula.

– Industrial scale farming is flawed: what ecologically-friendly farming practices could look like in Africa
– https://theconversation.com/industrial-scale-farming-is-flawed-what-ecologically-friendly-farming-practices-could-look-like-in-africa-245579

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Justin Bradfield, Associate professor, University of Johannesburg

In 1983 archaeologists excavating a cave in South Africa discovered an unusual femur bone. It belonged to an unspecified antelope and was found to be 7,000 years old. X-rays revealed that three modified bone arrowheads had been placed into the marrow cavity.

At the conclusion of the 1983 excavation the bone, together with other artefacts recovered from the cave, was placed in the University of the Witwatersrand’s Archaeology Department storerooms. It lay there until 2022. That’s when new archaeological investigations began at the site where the femur had been discovered: Kruger Cave, in the western Magaliesberg mountains, about 1.5 hours’ drive from Johannesburg. This renewed interest prompted scientists to take a fresh look at Kruger Cave’s treasures.

I am an archaeologist who’s interested in the organic materials preserved at Kruger Cave and in protecting the site for future generations. Along with other scientists from the University of Johannesburg, I suspected that the femur contained more than just sediment and degraded marrow. We had worked together to publish the chemical constituents of a 500-year-old medicine container discovered in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, and decided to conduct a similar investigation into the chemistry of the matrix surrounding the arrowheads inside the femur.

Our research has revealed that the femur’s contents are arguably the oldest multi-component arrow poison in the world. It’s a complex recipe combining at least two toxic plant ingredients. There’s also evidence of a third toxin.

This is by no means the oldest use of poison for hunting. The application of poison to hunting weapons is thought to have originated about 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, along with the invention of projectile technology in Africa. But evidence for poison at that period is tentative at best and yet to be verified chemically.

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Read more: What a bone arrowhead from South Africa reveals about ancient human cognition

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Our discovery is the oldest confirmed use of a mixture of two or more plant toxins specifically applied to arrowheads. The ability to mix together complex recipes, whether for poison, adhesive or medicinal purposes, speaks directly to their makers’ cognitive capacities and traditional pharmacological knowledge.

This study also highlights the potential contribution of archaeobotany (the study of ancient plant remains) and organic chemistry to our understanding of the past. It also shows how these two disciplines can work together to tell the story of our past.

Studying the femur

The X-ray images taken in the 1980s were of relatively poor quality. So we decided to re-image the femur using micro-CT. This process essentially uses thousands of X-rays to reconstruct artefacts in three dimensions, at very high resolution. Our results revealed that the sediment-like matrix filling the marrow cavity into which the arrowheads had been placed was not regular archaeological sediment. It was clearly foreign matter.

A small sample of the material was taken and its chemical constituents were analysed. The chemistry results revealed the presence of two toxic cardiac glycosides (which disrupt the functioning of the heart muscle): digitoxin and strophanthidin. Both are known to have been used historically in some poisons associated with bow hunting. We also found ricinoleic acid, which can occur as a result of the oxidative breakdown of the toxic lectin ricin. These organic compounds, and others we identified, do not occur in the same plants. This indicates that several plant ingredients must have been combined to create a poisonous recipe.

None of the plant species that contain digitoxin and strophanthadin occur naturally in the vicinity of Kruger Cave. The remains of these plants have also not been detected in archaeobotanical studies of the excavated material. This would suggest that either people were travelling long distances to acquire their ingredients or that there was an established trade in these floral commodities.

Researchers know that long-distance transport of sea shells, as ornaments and later as currency, had been happening throughout Africa long before 7,000 years ago. But the long-distance movement of non-domestic plants at so early a date is something we had not expected. The fact that people knew which plants to acquire, where to find them and how to use them effectively speaks volumes about the antiquity of traditional pharmacological knowledge systems.

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Read more: 500-year-old horn container discovered in South Africa sheds light on pre-colonial Khoisan medicines

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In southern Africa, adhesives made with conifer resin, as well as ochre and fat mixtures, date back at least 60,000 years. Documented knowledge of plants’ medicinal properties in the region dates back to around the same period. However the oldest confirmed medicine that combines more than one ingredient – which, as mentioned earlier, we identified from a discovery in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province – is only 500 years old.

Poison and weapons

The application of poison to weapons signals an evolutionary advancement in the development of hunting technology.

Historical records demonstrate that in most parts of the world hunters relied on toxic compounds derived from plants and animals to make their weapons more effective. In southern Africa, a great variety of plants and animals are known to have been used by different groups of hunters to tip their arrows. These poisons were often combined in complex recipes using a variety of preparatory procedures.

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Read more: We’re closer to learning when humans first daubed arrows with poison

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The earliest molecular evidence for poison in southern Africa comes from a 24,000-year-old wooden spatula at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on the border between Swaziland and South Africa, where traces of ricinoleic acid were found. Ricinoleic acid is one of the by-products (a smaller constituent molecule of a larger organic compound) of the potent toxin ricin, which is found in the castor bean plant. The Border Cave example is, however, probably a single-component poison and not a complex recipe.

What’s assumed to be arrow poison has been found on bone arrowheads at Kuumbi Cave, Zanzibar, from 13,000-year-old deposits. No chemical or other scientific tests were undertaken to verify this interpretation.

Finally, another team recently analysed poison from a 1,000-year-old arrow from Kruger Cave. Although the oxidative by-products of cardiac glycosides were positively identified, this specimen was significantly more degraded than that from the older femur container. We think the femur container helped to protect the poison from the worst effects of biological degradation.

– Discovery in South Africa holds oldest evidence of mixing ingredients to make arrow poison
– https://theconversation.com/discovery-in-south-africa-holds-oldest-evidence-of-mixing-ingredients-to-make-arrow-poison-247250

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Research Associate, University of Oxford

Zimbabwean art historian Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti travelled by road to five southern African countries – Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Mozambique and Zambia – in pursuit of hidden stories. His mission was to visit artists in their studios to learn about the environments in which they work and what inspires them.

The opportunity to do the road trip arose from a writing fellowship with the Arak Collection, one of the largest contemporary African art collections in the Middle East.

The result is a new book called Chronicles of the Road: Five Nations, Five Artists that documents Muvhuti’s experiences. At the same time it maps and gathers voices that are not often encountered in academic studies, or even on bookstore shelves.

As a scholar of southern African literary cultures and intellectual histories, I interviewed Muvhuti about his project.

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Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Your new book visits places that are very diverse in terms of language, colonial histories, cultures. What did you learn from the trip and from the works of the artists you chose to profile?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: I intentionally opted to travel by road. I wanted to talk to fellow passengers on buses and public taxis. I wanted to appreciate the landscapes, the rugged terrains and the sacred sites, as well as gain insight into the people’s daily rituals, joys and struggles. I wanted to experience the vibe of the African market scene, and to chat with Yango (ride-hailing service) drivers.

Importantly, I wanted to gain an appreciation of the art scenes the selected artists work and operate in. I wanted to hear from other cultural workers working with the artists. I’ll admit that an exercise like this one needed more time than I had.

These artists are inspired by different elements of their cultures and everyday practices, which makes the region’s art output so multifaceted, rich and complex. But the key lesson was that we share a lot in common, despite the colonial demarcations separating us, and the ethnic differences.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Exploring southern Africa through cartography, or mapmaking, can help our understanding of the region’s interconnected histories. Was mapping part of your objective?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: Central to my project was the idea that the selected artists draw much from their surroundings. So I wanted to find out if there are transnational connections in their practices.

You will be amazed to hear of the impact of #RhodesMustFall (a South African student protest movement calling for decolonisation) on the work of Botswana’s Thebe Phetogo. He was a student at the University of Cape Town when the fallist movement emerged.

An anecdote which excited me is the impact a 1990s visit to Zimbabwe had on Namibian artist Rudolf Seibeb’s thinking, making him explore other media. He’d visited the Batapata Workshop.

The Congolese artist Zemba Luzamba credits their South African mentor, woodcut artist Boyi Molefe, for the mixed-media collaging technique he uses. Their connection is a fruitful result of Luzamba’s migration to South Africa – despite it being a nation keen on driving out African migrants.

Even though southern Africa’s original inhabitants, the Khoisan, are rare in Zambia, their paintings inform Zambian artist Kalinosi Mutale’s abstract “Kalidrawings”.

Mozambican artist Nelly Guambe’s story of turning to the creative process as a form of catharsis has a universal appeal and resonates with the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo’s practice. Like Kahlo, who took up painting while confined to her bed after a life-threatening accident, Guambe used art to help her recover after an accident in Maputo.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: You write that the research employs a biographical approach. The artists in the book were born between 1964 and 1993. Do they represent different generations, movements, or turns in the art history of the region?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: Their ages seem to suggest intergenerational connections, yet they are all contemporary artists, working today.

Seibeb has been practising for a long time, though his work started being noticed only recently, thanks to spaces like The Project Room and the Cape Town Art Fair.

Mutale, who was very active up to the 1990s, had taken a hiatus from public art exhibitions because he felt his conceptual practice was misunderstood and unappreciated by the Zambian audience.

Zemba has lived in at least three countries, and migration stories inform his work.

Phetogo and Guambe are young artists whose careers and practices resonate with the work of other young artists in the region.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: What is the Arak Collection’s significance to African art?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: Arak is a Doha-based independent private collection of African art amassed over the past decade. Unlike the typical western collectors of African art that we are most used to, Arak is “committed to fostering critical dialogue around contemporary art practices, with a focus on African art through exhibitions, publications, research and educational programs”. It offers emerging writers and curators from the continent fellowships and opportunities that include workshops across Africa.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Finally, what is your sense of the state of art writing in southern Africa?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: It is not very encouraging. Only South Africa has a regular and robust art writing practice. This is not surprising because South Africa has universities and art institutions which teach art history, curatorial studies and art criticism. It also has multiple platforms to publish the work.

The same cannot be said of nations like Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia or Zimbabwe, which are yet to introduce such programmes. The few art writers in these countries either learned the skill on their own or have been trained in South Africa or elsewhere.

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Read more: Shepherd Ndudzo’s celebrated sculptures tell an untold history of southern African art

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A lot more needs to be done to encourage art writing to complement the work the artists are doing. Some of these nations are producing some of the region’s most exciting artists whose work is not well covered or not noticed due to lack of art writing.

– Five artists, five nations: taking to the road to find southern Africa’s hidden stories
– https://theconversation.com/five-artists-five-nations-taking-to-the-road-to-find-southern-africas-hidden-stories-245767

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tebeje Molla, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, Deakin University

More than nine million Ethiopian children are currently out of school. They are caught in the crossfire of armed conflicts, natural disasters, tribal tensions and economic hardships.

In 2023, Ethiopia had a total school-aged population of 35,444,482 children, about 52% of them primary school-aged. In the same year, only 22,949,597 children were enrolled in schools, leaving over 35% of school-aged children out of school. In the past year, the ongoing humanitarian crisis has worsened the situation, forcing even more children out of school.

Armed conflict erupted in 2020 between the federal government and Tigray regional government. The crisis was compounded by armed resistance to the government in the two largest regional states, Amhara and Oromia. There are also ongoing conflicts between the pastoralist communities of the Afar and Somali regions.

The Tigray war drained the nation’s economic resources. The destruction of infrastructure, particularly schools, in this conflict forced over a million children out of school. Since then conflict in the nine regions has also undermined government control, causing widespread disruptions to essential services, including education and healthcare.

Most recently, natural disasters, including earthquakes in the eastern parts of the country, have displaced tens of thousands of civilians, including children.

Scale of the crisis

The numbers tell the story. As of November 2024, around 10,000 schools were damaged and over 6,000 schools were closed due to conflict, violence and natural disasters. The worst hit regions are Amhara, Oromia, Tigray, Somali and Afar.

In three of these – Amhara, Oromia and Tigray – a total of 8,910,000 children are out of school. Amhara is particularly hard hit with only 2.3 million students enrolling for the current academic year out of 7 million.

I am a scholar of education policy with close to 15 years of research on Ethiopia’s education sector. It’s my view that children have borne the heaviest burden from the challenges that have overwhelmed the country’s capacity to provide essential services.

Leaving millions of children out of school has devastating consequences. There is a well documented increased risk of child labour, early marriage, and other forms of exploitation. Children who miss out on early education also face lifelong disadvantages, including limited employment opportunities and greater vulnerability to poverty and social exclusion.

When children are not in school and miss out on learning, the consequences are far-reaching. At a personal level, disrupted education hinders their cognitive, social and emotional development. It limits their ability to acquire skills needed for personal growth and future employment. At the societal level, a lack of education drives cycles of poverty, reduces economic productivity and weakens social cohesion. Under-educated citizens are less equipped to take an active part in civic life. It also stifles innovation, worsens inequalities and holds back national progress and stability.

Despair and hopelessness have driven countless young people from Ethiopia to risk their lives on dangerous migration routes to the Middle East. The loss of educational opportunities for millions of children also undermines the nation’s capacity to develop the human capital needed for its growth. An uneducated population is more susceptible to being drawn into ongoing conflict.

What can be done?

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in April 2018 with a pledge of change for Ethiopia. But Abiy’s government often sidesteps critical challenges, choosing to amplify positive narratives over confronting pressing issues.

Instead of tackling the crisis directly, Abiy has left regional state governments to find resources. For example, in November 2024, it was left to an advocacy group formed by Amhara’s ten public universities to appeal to donors for aid for education.

In early January 2025, the Amhara regional state government also asked stakeholders to help reopen closed schools. In Ethiopia’s federal structure, the education ministry sets national policies and standards, and manages higher education. Regional governments carry out these policies, oversee primary and secondary education, and adapt curricula to local contexts. Budgets are shared based mainly on the population size of each regional state.

Denying the reality of the crisis only deepens the wounds of the nation and delays the necessary actions for peace and recovery. It’s now time for Abiy’s government to take action. It must:

• confront the crisis

• engage in dialogue to resolve conflicts

• appeal for international support.

The scale of the disruption demands a coordinated and comprehensive humanitarian response. Global development aid partners need to recognise that the education crisis in Ethiopia deserves immediate and sustained attention. Another round of global funds dedicated to education in emergencies is urgently needed.

The collective duty should extend beyond providing immediate relief. It should also encourage the Ethiopian government to resolve its various internal conflicts through peaceful dialogue. Diplomacy, negotiation and reconciliation should take precedence over war and violence.

– 9 million Ethiopian children have been forced out of school: what the government must do
– https://theconversation.com/9-million-ethiopian-children-have-been-forced-out-of-school-what-the-government-must-do-247697

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

In mid-January 2024 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 2024, nearly six months after the operation was started.

The tales of what the police operation inflicted on these mineral gleaners are harrowing. Reports of illness and starvation, of weeks in fetid air next to decomposing corpses, as well as the eating of insects and even human flesh, were entered into evidence before the constitutional court. A case was brought before the court by an organisation seeking to halt the operation on human rights grounds.

This wasn’t the first siege undertaken as part of Operation Vala Umgodi. But it was the first sustained blockade.

What could lead to the adoption of nearly medieval military tactics in a nation with otherwise robust constitutional protections for human rights as well as strong regulations governing mine closure and rehabilitation? And why do so many South African citizens appear to agree with this brutal strategy? Who are the “criminals” captured as a result of such extreme measures?

I am an anthropologist and I’ve been studying the social life and history of South African gold mining for nearly three decades. I’ve also made a film with and about informal miners.

The problems posed by informal mining will not be solved by treating it as a question of criminality or border security. It must be understood in relation to the history of the formal industry, and in terms of regional and global economic forces. This includes the problem of demonetisation (the substitution of digital tokens for hard currency), rising rates of personal debt, exclusion from digital infrastructures and protracted local economic crises.

The world of the miners

Over the years I’ve come to know many individuals who have gone underground in search of what’s been left behind by large scale industrial mining. They come from the same places as did many of their forebears who worked in the formal industry. In its heyday South Africa’s mines employed nearly half a million people. They came from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, as well as the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

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Read more: ‘The Night Trains’: a masterly study into southern Africa’s murderous migrant system

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Some are former mine workers, now unemployed. Some are farmers or fishermen whose livelihoods have been made untenable by drought and floods, or by monetary and political crises at home.

These are the people on the lowest rung of informal mining’s ladder. Like most industries, this one is highly stratified. Above such desperate individuals are the criminal syndicates who traffic in arms, people, narcotics and gold. And, as journalists and even the World Gold Council acknowledge, they are enmeshed in webs of corruption. These include bankers, as well as management and security forces of formal mines, smelting and reclamation companies, buyers and traders, and smugglers who carry gold from South Africa to Dubai.

Those webs also include police and government officials with the authority to intervene. Or to profit handsomely for not intervening.

Yet, the police strategy and public sentiment in South Africa treat the gangsters and their virtually enslaved labourers as equally culpable for the economic, material and environmental devastation that afflicts the nation. And they largely ignore the depredations that resulted from the industry’s formal operations over a century and a half.

The context

The horrors in Stilfontein and elsewhere need to be understood in a global context. According to a 2024 report by the World Gold Council, 20% of the world’s newly mined gold comes from small scale and artisanal production. And an astonishing 80% of all the people who work in the gold sector worldwide do so as informal or artisanal mineworkers. Many work in the shadow of the law under extremely coercive circumstances.

In 2022, that meant about 20 million people were eking a living as small scale miners of gold. (Another 20 million or so work in similar fashion to obtain other minerals.) They, in turn, supported an estimated 270 million people. More people than live in Brazil, or about seven times the population of Canada.

These numbers reflect rapid growth in recent decades. The World Gold Council measures that upsurge from 1993, the year that triggered the era of globalisation with the fall of Soviet socialism and the emergence of new regionalisms (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union).

What we see around the world today, in tariff wars, isolationalist nationalism and the vilification of migrants, can be traced to the same period, when capital began to fly around the world and multinational corporations began to shed their commitments to local communities of labourers.

South Africa’s story

Black workers in South Africa experienced this trend in acute ways.

The country’s mineral economy was defined by the compound system, in which mineworkers lived in single-sex hostels and travelled between the mines and their residential homes on short-term contract bases. Black workers were heavily dependent on the corporation for social goods that the state was not providing because of racial policies.

Over the past four decades many South African mining corporations, like those elsewhere, shrank their work forces and moved to subcontract labour for those remaining. In lieu of benefits, they offered workers more “freedom”. Many workers desired this. But freed from longer-term contracts and from the social goods extracted by unions, they also became vulnerable to other forces. And the HIV/AIDS epidemic afflicted communities with terrible strain.

Personal indebtedness rose dramatically. For those without documented citizenship or resident status, accessing credit meant turning to shadowy lenders, including gangs, who charged and enforced merciless interest rates. This in turn strengthened the power of the gangs, long part of the landscape in southern Africa.

The undocumented and the very poor have also often been forced into a realm of criminality where they depend on illegally mined and unminted gold. These are the people who are most easily preyed upon by armed criminal groups.

Popular mythology in South Africa attributes much violent crime to the “zama zamas” (the name means “to keep on trying” or “to gamble”). But there is no evidence of this.

In my observation, violence around the abandoned mines is mainly committed by gangs and their collaborators, who also coerce zama zamas in their underground labours, extracting from them the gold they manage to take from underground, charging security fees to enter shafts and to exit them, organising coerced prostitution, trafficking in child labour, and supplying the dynamite, the mercury, and the pneumatic drills in larger operations.

This is why the World Gold Council report is correct to speak of the exploitation of small scale and artisanal miners. It recommends that states prosecute the buyers, smelters and bankers, as well as political authorities who profit from this merciless economy.

Solutions

Laudable as these efforts to redirect prosecutorial zeal are, the solution to the problem of informal economies is not policing. Nor is it regulation.

In places where gold is found in surface deposits, licensing by the state can provide systems of oversight and a regulatory framework to protect workers. So can negotiated settlements with “criminal” gangs, who become more like corporate institutions in the process.

But in South Africa the possibility of self-organised mining appears to have passed. Rises in the price of gold have led to more intense and militarised competition among gangs. In addition, South Africa’s gold mines – the deepest in the world – aren’t hospitable sites for either licensing or decentralising strategies. It is too dangerous and too expensive to secure the thousands of miles of underground tunnels.

The solution must begin with massive regional economic repair, including debt relief for individuals and for sovereign states which can’t spend on social goods because of their interest obligations on foreign loans. It must include the stabilisation of local economies, and reinvestment in climate-resilient agriculture.

And migration needs to be rethought and decriminalised. The past of the gold mines is a history of migration. The future, shaped by climate change, will also be a story of migration. Above all, therefore, a change in consciousness is required.

– Informal mining in South Africa is here to stay. Police brutality won’t end it – here’s what will
– https://theconversation.com/informal-mining-in-south-africa-is-here-to-stay-police-brutality-wont-end-it-heres-what-will-247865