Keywords

Let us take a step back from Sipho and the others, to get a sense of the type of space they live and work in, and the community that has moulded them. Here in the township, there are multiple and intersecting forms of informality, producing persistent forms of precarity, laced by pockets of resistance, resiliency and agency. Insecure housing, rumours and connections, and spiritual beliefs and practices inform social relations and work arrangements. The township is heaving with energy and filled with nuance of risk and resiliency. It is a dynamic and fluid space capturing the harsh socio-economic realities of depravation that are prevalent in post-colonial cities, and a fertile ground for organic forms of governance and agency to emerge. Rapid urbanisation in South Africa means that townships are bursting at the seams, and scarce resources are calling into question who belongs and under what conditions. For the Zama Zama the spatial, spiritual and political organisation of the township informs how they live and how they do their work.

Townships

Townships go by different names: informal settlements, slums and shanty towns. Regardless of what they are called this form of informal housing and shelter are a symbol of post-colonial cities across the global South (Desai, 2013; Gunter, 2017; Huchzermeyer, 2006). Townships and mining have an entwined history of racialised control, segregation and inequities in this country. The first township in South Africa was established by the colonial government in 1901 in Cape Town to isolate the local Black population, deemed a health hazard, after an outbreak of the bubonic plague (Philip, 2014). In 1913, the Natives Land Act began the process of dismantling Black ownership of land and livelihoods forcing Black people into low-waged work and poverty, a legacy that still prevails. At its heart the Act was aimed at dispossessing Black people of their land and ensuring a supply of labour to the growing demands of the mining industry. Over the next 100 years, Black people became temporary residents in their own land, their very existence policed and criminalised, their ability to access the resources of the land severely compromised and their daily existence confined to life in townships (Philip, 2014).

The spatial development of townships is characterised by resource-poor spaces of cheaply built houses on poor quality land that would not lend itself to farming, far away from white areas, to reinforce the out of sight, out of mid ideology of apartheid, connected to the city by rail to make a cheaper, and more efficient transit, and accessible by one road only.

Politically, control has been the core principle driving the governance of townships. This was achieved through a number of policies and approaches. First townships were divided by racial and then ethnic lines, reinforcing the divide and conquer philosophy of the British colonists. This would come to inform enforce the latter-day rumours, suspicions and xenophobic attacks. Second the organic and customary practices of propel in the townships were constantly criminalised, subduing the spirit while crippling the township economy. The extensive measures taken by the government to disband the production and distribution of beer in townships during apartheid are a good example of this (Philip, 2014).

Third, governance of the township was always undemocratic, removed from its people, politicised, reinforcing difference and administering violence rather than emphasising service delivery and unity (Philip, 2014; Schenck, 2021). In the 1970s, centralised boards of administration led by white civil servants managed the affairs of Black, mixed race and Asian townships from afar. Later, Community Councils with duly elected bodies of administration were put in place, but voter turnout was low, and any effort at development was minimal. The scarcity of services continued well into the post-apartheid era, where a major public housing development strategy was pursued, through the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). Although it achieved some success in building new homes, other services such as education, sanitation, water, health care and roads failed to keep pace and eventually corruption and increased sustained demand collapsed any gains that were made (Meth, 2013; Philip, 2014).

Today, townships remain a mishmash of overcrowded spaces with physical depravation, few public services and poor governance (Jürgens, 2013). In their seminal work on townships in South Africa, Bonner and Segal (1998) cited in Philip (2014: p. 34) conclude: “the key focus of the specifications set down for townships was to enable the government to exert control” (p. 34). Townships are sites of contested power between and among people and the state, exercised in and through the spatial realities of townships and the ways in which these are governed.

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From overhead, the township shines and glints in the hot sun, rows upon rows of tin shacks, wedged in every available space, punctuated only by those looming mine dumps. To reach the community where Sipho and the others live, there is sharp and bumpy turn off the main road and then down several dusty, and unmarked roads barely wide enough for a car. To go deeper still, one needs to follow footpaths carved into the Highveld grassland by thousands of pairs of tired feet each day. No tarred roads here, no road signs, or street names, nor any traffic lights or pedestrian crossings. Walking, like driving, is an art of survival, cutting a pathway here, hopping over a bush there and always watching over both shoulders for criminals, stray dogs and other forms of danger.

Once inside the township proper, there are a mix of tin and brick shack dwellings built in dense proximity, with roofs hanging as low as 1, 5 meters high, barely high enough to stand upright in for most adults. The shacks are built from scavenged materials, tin and zinc preferred for their sturdiness, but plastic sheets and other plastic materials will do too. In some homes a few foundations, or one or two walls have been built in earnest with bricks and cement, the rest of the home a patchwork of other material. Doors hang from haphazard frames and many shacks have no windows at all. Cold water taps are scattered every 70 meters or so, as are outbuildings with pit latrines, a nod to a dysfunctional government that drops these indignities on its people. For many, there are no pit latrines at all, the bush works as a toilet. Both buzz with flies and the stench settle permanently in the air. Household waste is dumped among scratchy bushes, from which people scavenge recyclables to sell, and where children play, and chicken scratch. In the mid-morning sun, and women dump grey water from their laundry outside their homes before hanging clothes to dance and dry on taut wire or string tied between roofs or poles.

In South Africa, 13, 7% of households live in informal shelter, in the city of Johannesburg this figure rises to 19%. In other words, nearly one in five households in the city are living in an informal dwelling. One in five households are living in a permanent state of temporariness, a permanent state of being unable to meet their most basic needs of shelter, water and sanitation. Fifteen per cent of households in the country have no access to electricity, a figure that in the Gauteng province is actually increasing year on year due to rapid urbanisation, 12% of homes have no water, and 12% of urban homes in the country use their own rubbish dump to dispose of garbage (Statistics South Africa, 2019a, 2019b). This sense of being in limbo, of waiting for things to improve, to settle and find permanency is associated with refugees, those fleeing their homeland (Hari, 2013). But here in post-apartheid South Africa, disregard by the government does not discriminate against citizens and migrants; being poor means to be marginalised and to face daily ontological insecurity.

This is the township. The jobs are long gone here; 44% of South Africans are unemployed, young Black people are disproportionately represented in this statistic, and most find themselves here in the township, doing what they can to make ends meet (Statistics South Africa, 2021). Women sell airtime vouchers and groceries on upturned crates at the side of the street; men fix car tires and batteries in ditches and clearings, youth wash cars with rags underneath flimsy tin roofs, women sell sex and home-brewed beer; men sell drugs, people mine for gold. This is the informal economy, the lifeblood and safety net among poor South Africans. This is the daily hustle.

This is the township. The police don’t come if you need them, and ambulances are scared to pick up the sick. There are informal nodes of governance here where elected ward councillors have their hands greased before they look up from their desks; where school principals charge fees to line their pockets for access to free-fee public schools, where unelected local elites like community and business leaders have the power to summon the police, and direct the authorities to action. Here the police will arrest someone if you pay them nicely, source you a firearm if you want to take care of the matter yourself, or lose a charge sheet if you get into trouble. There is no justice here, instead groups and gangs patrol the streets to keep the area safe or to break up a fight (Alexander, 2010; Netswera, 2014; Pattillo, 2012).

The trees stand alone here in the informal settlement; silent witnesses to the rapes and robberies, the kisses between innocent young couples who steal some privacy; and providing reprieve for children who play, as their parents work. Young people kick tattered soccer balls all day and long into the evening when the shadows turn dark and long, and many, many more just sit and watch and wait, a permanent state of disease and precarity. This is home for millions of the urban poor. But there is also an energy here. A spirit of resiliency to make things work. A hustle to keep going. The township never sleeps, it doesn’t catch its breath, it doesn’t pause, or wink, yawn or stumble. Busy, busy, busy. Each person is connected to another by money, and duty, and blood, and love, and lust, by guilt, and by burden, by need and by choice. This is the township.

Networks

We have our own rules here, our way of working. There is no councillor or premier or minister what-what in the township. We have our leaders. If you want nothing done go to the police, but if you want stuff fixed fast-fast come to us, we are the eyes and ears and the muscles of the community.

These are the words of the miners. They articulate well the reality of informal governance in the township where a patronage-based system of governance is in place. Community leaders, who are unelected, and can be religious, or traditional leaders, or simply prominent businesspeople, have considerable influence on how communities are run: who has access to resources, who can live in an area or who do business, who hears about job or tender opportunities, etc. Elected officials have vested business interests in the community, including in the gold mining informal economy, sponsoring miners or introducing buyers. Police have a reciprocal relationship with the community, protecting and harming, benefiting from and facilitating gold mining in equal breaths. It is a complex web of governance, and social order, drawing on money, resources, nationality and ethnicity, position and power. And it is at the heart of how informal mining, and by extension the townships they are located in, are organised and governed.

Networks are “ties and interactions, whether formal or informal forged between a multiplicity of actors” (Ramia, 2018). Networks in the governance literature refer to formal and informal connections between actors, organisations and sectors (p. 331) with a purpose of policymaking and/or implementation (Klijn, 2008: p. 511 cited in Ramia, 2018). The informal aspect of governance networks is poorly understood in general (there is an emerging literature on backroom deals and lunch club agendas in the European and American context but that is not relevant here). Instead, the connections of the Zama Zama speak to how power and governance is exercised through informal connections between formal and informal actors, in parallel to, or at times completely replacing formal governance.

At another level, among the Zama Zama, connections are a form of resiliency and are essential for survival. Knowing one person will lead you to another and another and will take you underground. For international migrants, the men and women from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho migrants, life in South Africa begins with work in low-skilled or informal employment, such as domestic work, construction, in small shops or as security, where wages are low (typically around R 2,000–R 3,000 a month), hours are long and exploitation by employers is rife. Through connections, a pathway to informal mining and the economic stability it holds are offered. Given the limited reach of the state in a positive sense among the urban poor, connections become a means to access the resources of the state either through parallel actors who provide these services or through state agents who facilitate access through a bribe. A compelling example of this is around physical security. If there is a theft among the miners, they know that calling the police will likely not result in a case being opened, or an investigation carried out. Instead as a group of miners told us, they will resolve the matter internally. They will carry out an investigation by collecting information through their networks, asking around to see if anyone heard or saw anything. They will confront the alleged suspect and then depending on their response find a resolution. This could either be the return of the stolen goods and an admission of guilt, or failing this, beating the suspect, or even invoking curses on them through their ancestors. Another option would be to pay a private security or even a police officer to investigate and resolve the matter.

Alongside connections are perceptions and rumours. Rumours are defined as “public communications that are infused with private hypotheses about how the world works (Rosnow, 1991), or more specifically, ways of making sense of things “to help us cope with our anxieties and uncertainties” (Rosnow, 2005). Rumours often arise in conditions of uncertainty, when the truth is obscured. In the African literature, (Musambachime, 1988) provides a helpful synopsis, stating “rumours are fuelled by a desire for meaning, a quest for clarification, or a logical explanation of an event ... by people socializing together, or those affected by them” (1988: p. 201). Rumours have a long history as a form of political control. In Zambia for instance, rumours were used by the authorities to govern and control by spreading fear, or anxiety.

Words then become weaponised means of exerting power. Life in a township is characterised by rumour. What is right is less important than what is perceived to be right, what is useful matters more than what is allowed or legal. The rumours fly thick and fast in the community:

Where is Mpho? Did you hear she was raped and the family are gone maybe Boksburg where they have a brother or maybe Soweto?

It is bad.

The other day two tsotsti (thieves) came into the house through windows, while she was sleeping with her husband and her 6 months old baby. They took plastic and burnt it on the stove and burnt it on the husband and shot him, and they raped her, they wanted money and they wanted the pendukas.

The husband said he is broke he is working as a tailor in Fordsburg but they burnt him with plastic on the foot and legs. After shooting the husband in the leg they took Mpho to another woman who used to be a dealer, who was also her sister to get the pendukas, but her sister was gone back home so no one was there and then they left her outside at night, but she survived.

That one is strong, maybe she put a curse on them.

No, she came home and now her house is empty. The Zama Zama are becoming tsotsis now, or the tsotsi are becoming Zama Zama, I don’t know, but it is bad.

Using the literature on refugees to conceptualise rumours for the urban poor provides a helpful analytical framework given their shared sense of precarity. In ‘the national order of things’, Malkki (1995) wrote that “everyone belongs to a nation state and through citizenship of the same, claim rights and incur responsibilities”. For refugees this concept of statehood and citizenship is of course, flawed. Turner in his work with Ugandan refugees in Burundi showed how refugees use rumours to express their expectations and relate to the international community in the absence of formal rights of voting, decision-making or participatory governance. For the urban poor like the Zama Zama, rumours become tools through which an alternate reality can be constructed, through which meaning can be made of things around them, and in doing so, they can articulate a sense of control and claim a sense of presence in an otherwise invisible state of relations between them and the government.

Rumours for this community are ways to feel connected to each other and create a sense of legitimacy and belonging. Simply put, they help people make sense of what is going on, and insert their agency in situations in which they would otherwise have no voice. There are many rumours in the township around relationships, who is connected to whom in which ways, rumours on mining and who is getting rich, who is stealing from whom, and how much of gold was found. These are the stories of the township. The stories of survival.

But of course rumours can also be dangerous. Without adequate mechanisms for transparency and accountability life in the township can quickly dissolve into suspicion, personal agendas, jealousy and revenge. Miners spoke of how they were beaten up by rival gangs, of vigilante groups who dispense their own form of violent justice by assaulting, and even killing suspected criminals, and how certain ethnic groups, or those with connections to the police can turn on the innocent if they are weak, or come from an minority ethnic group. And it is a form of fear mongering, and performance-based politics that is being echoed on the national stage by a prominent political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (Mbete, 2015; Satgar, 2019), which I return to in Chapter 5.

The Spiritual

African spirituality, and traditional systems of healing, prayer and care are integral to Indigenous peoples across the continent. In southern Africa, there is a long-documented tradition emphasising the role of Indigenous knowledges systems in care and healing, social norms and everyday life (see for instance Bojuwoye, 2013; Edwards et al., 2009; Naidu & Darong, 2015). Here I conceptualise Indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices among the Zama Zama as acts of resiliency, adding to the literature on spirituality and work. For this community, connection to the spiritual world creates a sense of security, purpose and comfort. For the miners, gold, like other mineral resources, belongs to the land. The land and spirits are interconnected, and therefore, gold is owned and controlled by spirits known as nzuzu. This belief informs how miners approach the labour of gold mining and the rituals they perform in its extraction and use.

The nzuzu are water spirits that emerge from deep underground and control the mines. Miners have to mindful of the spirits in their work and they do so by connecting and appeasing the ancestors and spirit world. In order to be protected and seek the blessings and favour of the spirits, rituals are performed. The most common practice by miners in this study was to make offerings of food or silver coins near the entrance to the shaft. To protect themselves from the dangers underground and above, miners also consult sangomas (traditional healers) who offer rituals that protect miners and offer messages from the ancestral world that provide guidance. These beliefs inform how one should carry out the labour of mining, maintaining a sense of selflessness and not being greedy in extraction, and being in a state of cleanliness. Most miners agreed that women cannot go underground as they menstruate and this makes them impure. This then informs the gendered divisions of work in the community, with women taking on the surface work.

If miners do not respect these customs, there are consequences for the entire community. For instance, a flooded tunnel underground is understood to be the work of an nzuzu as one miner explained:

Yes, they are male snakes and women snakes in the shaft there are dams of water that’s where these snakes stay even nzuzu (mermaid) a half fish, half person they stay they in these motoros (gold soils which appear like mountains). When the spirits are angry, the snakes will cause the mountains to move or the smoke to come out. Remember when that woman went underground and there as a big rock that fell and how many people died? 20 or 30? Women know they must not go under. Remember when those people were greedy and they took more than what they need? Greediness can cause people to die. And remember when they didn’t pray and they didn’t leave stuff for the spirits how many people got sick then? But they think they clever, and they don’t listen to the sangomas.

Rats or snakes serve as ‘ancestral geologists’, according to one miner. Seeing a rat or snake underground could mean that the area has gold or that there is danger around. To know which omen this is, one needs to stop and follow the creature, if it pauses on a rock, this means there is gold around. But if the snake or rat heads towards the next entrance underground, this is a sign of danger and one needs to leave the area immediately.

In 2012, I woke up in the morning and headed towards Springs mine with my colleagues. On our way, I saw a huge shadow in front of me it was a rat but it was running here and there looking to escape. At the very moment, I felt weak. Then I decided to go back home. I donated mbuva yangu (packed food parcel) to my colleagues. I decided to go back and market (meaning soliciting for work from those who had the gold-rich rock to be ‘crushed’). Before 12 noon, hardly an hour after I left my colleagues, I heard that there was a rockfall accident and all my six colleagues perished. A total of 40 miners died in this incident, some were relatives married to my sisters. Up to this day, it haunts me, I thank my ancestors for protecting me from this disaster.

The spiritual realities of the Zama Zama reflect broader experiences and expressions of the urban in Africa. It creates both a form of order and morality and reinforces or produces new forms of exclusion Wilhelm-Solomon (2016). But spirituality offers more than just a means of making sense and coping with the challenges that the urban poor face. A broader reading of these practices suggests the need to reframe how the Zama Zama interface with urban realities. Here additional questions on land possession, historical land dispossession and communal access to the resources of the land become pertinent questions. The stories of the Zama Zama suggest the remaking of an urban enclave in which the spiritual and the physical exist side-by-side, where normative and legal frameworks are interpreted through spiritual lens, and where present and future realities are informed by the past.

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Mining, therefore, is connected to land in social and spiritual ways. And the township then is more than just a space that miners move within, and across. It is a space bound by socially produced norms. The absence of government authorities and services, creates a vacuum in which new forms of governance fester. A form of governance where connections and money are power, and where the weak remain further vulnerable.

The labour of gold mining is more than just physical work. Mining is located on land that holds gold, the wealth of the Creator. Mining is connected to spiritual beliefs and practices of how to engage with ancestors. Mining is more than a personal livelihood. It requires collective effort in treading gently and correctly, careful reflection of one’s own intentions and of how the community as a whole will be impacted. This approach is echoed among other Indigenous groups who also holds and sanctify minerals, for example, the Maori who consider jade and other minerals to be sacred (Ruckstuhl et al., 2014). Such an approach has not been fully explored in mining in South Africa. Recent transformation to the sector has considered socio-economic benefits for surrounding communities when mining licences are appraised, but efforts to include the sacred, and spiritual values and beliefs of communities towards land and natural resources have not been part of the mining policy directive as yet. The Zama Zama in their small-scale informal mining demonstrate aspects of a deeper connection to land and Indigenous beliefs that have the potential to inform more a socially just ethic in a sector that has for centuries been exploitative.