Keywords

Where to from here? What do these pervasive forms of precarity, and informal relations mean for governance, and for the work of the Zama Zama? This final chapter looks at possible pathways moving forward: how marginalised residents carve out space for voice and agency through protests, what might happen to South Africa if the absence of the state persist, and finally what future there might be for informal mining in the country.

The miners and the people living in the township do not care for the government. When things go wrong, instead of calling local city councillors or voting in elections, they make their voices heard through protests. South Africa is known as the ‘protest capital of the world’ (Bekker, 2021) with an average of 11 protests each day (Alexander et al., 2018), and the frequency and violence associated with these in South Africa is increasing. Protests are more than just a once off event or a demonstration of specific grievances. In South Africa, protest actions are deeply moving voices of agency and transformation among the poor. The mobilisation of ordinary people, the coming together of coalitions from churches and other faith groups, trade unions, non-profits and local community groups to amplify access to rights are characteristic of the anti-apartheid struggle, when civil liberties were curtailed for people of colour, and this momentum of taking to the streets has persisted in the democratic dispensation (Bond, 2013; Chigwata, 2017; Ngwane, 2010; Pithouse, 2008).

But what exactly are protests and what role do they play in governance and state making? Protest action has been theorised as a “rebellion of the poor” a way for marginalised communities to make their voices heard and to get the attention of those in power (Breakfast et al., 2019). They can also be seen as “weapons of the weak” to borrow from Scott’s work on everyday forms of resistance among villagers in Malaysia (Scott, 2008). In this sense, protests are a way to re-establish relations within a community and with the state. Alexander defines protests in townships as “socially-organised protests that place demands on people who hold or benefit from political power (which includes, but is not limited to, local politicians)” (2010: p. 25). Although there are strong arguments and evidence to suggest that this form of protest is concerned with service delivery, Pithouse argues that the frequent, violent forms of service delivery in South Africa today are concerned with issues of citizenship, belonging, legitimacy and inclusion (Pithouse, 2008). In urban poor communities, where the government is absent, and the people are desperate, protests have now become a way to carve out and claim power. And this has become dangerous for democracy.

***

In the southern winter of 2021, a series of events played out that would plunge urban poor communities into further precarity and push the country to a proverbial edge of instability (Singh, 2021). On June 29, the affable former president, Jacob Zuma, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt of court after he failed to appear before a National Commission of enquiry into corruption and abuse of state power, known as ‘state capture’. Following a few back and forth legal challenges between his legal team and the state, the court ruled that he had until July 7 to hand himself over to the police, or face arrest. Meanwhile, a small but strong group of loyal supporters began to camp outside his rural home, Inkandla, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, vowing to protect him from the “politically motivated “smear campaign” that Zuma claimed he was a victim of. Eventually, eleventh-hour, backroom negotiations between Zuma and the government resulted in the former president being taken into custody by the police (Singh, 2021).

The response from his supporters was swift. After another legal challenge was thrown out by a judge on July 9, a campaign to mobilise support for Zuma was organised and a series of protests erupted. In the previous five years, protests had changed gear across the country. Since the success of the 2015 #FeesMustFall movement when university students demanded access to free, decolonial education, protests often called for a national ‘shutdown’ and employed tactics of blocking roads, burning tires and spreading fear and disunity on social media. For this campaign, protestors organised a #NationalShutdown on the N3, a major national highway between Durban and Johannesburg, close enough to Zuma’s homestead to bus in mobilisers, and important enough for the live media coverage that ensued. A series of long-haul trucks at the heart of the economy that ferry much-needed goods from the port of Durban to the commercial hub of Johannesburg were forced to stop, drivers hauled violently out, and the trucks set alight, effectively closing a major road and making a strong statement. What happened next, was devastating and unpredicted. Within days KwaZulu-Natal unravelled into anarchy, protestors and looters taking over the street, shopping centres looted in plain view of rolling television cameras and police officers who stood helplessly watching. Police were dismal and slow in response, unable or unwilling to act. In their place citizens stepped in, setting up armed roadblocks on entry points into neighbourhoods, arming themselves as they patrolled homes and businesses, and co-opting private security guards to patrol, and arrest anyone suspected of being associated with the looting and unrest. Effectively, the people became a form of de facto police, taking the law into the own hands, and at times breaking it, as they tried desperately to protect lives and livelihoods. Invariably, vigilantism creeped in, and racial dynamics spewed to the forefront, with racial profiling of Black African people at roadblocks by mainly Asian, ‘Coloured’ and white ‘community protectors’ (Singh, 2021; Vhumbunu, 2021).

For days the country was on the edge, holding its collective breathe to see if it will tip into civil war, or if somehow the government could hold things together. Eventually, the army was called in, the riots and looting were stopped and economic activity resumed. But the damage was done. The relationship between people and the government, at the heart of the disorder and chaos, was fractured, and the fissures in government was all too evident on television and online. Within days the country’s historical racial tensions surfaced, threatening to undo decades of a democratic and non-racial order and further deepen economic and political instability in the country. At the end of a fortnight of terror, 337 people had died, the currency had lost 2% of its value, the economy suffered R 23,5 billion of loss, and racialised and ethnic identities became sharper and politicised (Singh, 2021). The absence of the state, the individualist survival of every person, the emergence of local mobilisers and informal authorities were evident. But this is not new. These dynamics, and this socio-political reality, has been evident in informal communities for decades. What the Zuma mobilisation did was to push the politics of the poor in informal townships into mainstream middle-class suburbia and onto the front pages of the major newspapers.

The New South Africa

How did South Africa get here? How did one of the most powerful nation-states which thrived on a perverted sense of order and surveillance during apartheid, which metamorphosed into the darling of donors in the 1990s, eschewing liberalism in its progressive Constitution, its rainbow nation of multiculturalism, its vibrant civil society and free press, an independent judiciary and a robust democracy become reduced to a gangster state? In Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama writes, “strong established institutions are needed to enable order”. He goes on to argue: “….a functioning healthy bureaucracy is essential to maintain the law and order” (Fukuyama, 2014). In South Africa, a progressive Constitution exists side-by-side with broken, bruised or absent institutions. Recent investigative journalism and academic research have shown the existence of a ‘shadow state’ created by former President Zuma between 2009 and 2019. The question of course is whether the state has eroded or whether it was never present for informal communities in the first place. The recent literature on state capture in South Africa argues the former: that South Africa’s healthy institutions and strong state have been undermined by corruption and collusion.

And while Zuma indeed leveraged the shadows for his own gain, he did not create them. This state of malaise is a deeper and wider infection which has been caused by more than the chaos and corruption from 2009. Indeed, its existence lies in a disconnection between citizens and the state caused by the fundamental absence of the state in providing basic services and the erosion of any trust in formal authority due to years of state-fuelled oppression during apartheid. The vacuum that has been created by this disconnection has been filled with all sorts of political and economic opportunists. For Zuma and his friends, it was the capitalist, those with the money to buy power and those with power who would sell it, i.e. “networks [that] reciprocate” (Fukuyama, 2014). In Sipho’s position, and indeed in the broader politics, economics and social conditions in the informal community in which informal mining occurs, we see a fundamental absence of state-centred, institution-driven governance.

Communities in which the state is absent, or its resources subverted for personal gain, are common across urban and rural South Africa (Friedman, 2019; Haffajee, 2021). And people like Kennedy know this first hand. Kennedy has lived in South Africa for most of his adult life. He was recruited to work in the gold mines through TEBA and lived in the mining hostels in one of the areas where informal mining is now common, on the west rand of Johannesburg. When the mines closed, the hostels were sold off, and as a former worker he has preferential access to buy a new home that was being built by the government nearby using part of the retrenchment package he received from the mining company. But municipal corruption set those plans aside, instead the homes were sold to relatives and friends of the municipal workers. Kennedy alleges that it quickly deteriorated into an ethnic game, with houses being sold to people from a certain South African ethnic group who resold or rented them to foreigners to make money. In 1994, almost 2 million people had no homes in South Africa. In the next 25 years, nearly million homes would be built by the national government for the poor. Despite this, the housing backlog in 2019 was at 2,3 million people. Some of the problems with access to housing can be attributed to population growth and migration, but corruption through nepotism, bribery and misallocating title deeds to the wrong person are mostly to blame (Hyslop, 2005; Maluleke, 2019).

Kennedy’s experience and that of the many others in this book whether of the criminal justice system, health care or protection point to a pattern of governance in which the state has failed. The unravelling of law and order and the rise of anarchy during the political mobilisation, looting and violence in July demonstrate the extent to which the authority of the state has eroded. But what has emerged in its place?

Occurring outside the state, the lives of the miners illustrate how communities respond to state failure. Globally, there is an engaging literature in this field. Hagmann and Peclard’s concept of a negotiated state draws out the formation (and failure) of the state by a range of nonstate actors. Menkhaus’s mediated statehood shows how sub-Saharan states in the context of protected violence do governance without a government, and Meagher argues for a nuanced understanding of hybrid forms of government which include “both corrosive and constructive forms” (Hagmann, 2010). In South Africa, there is emerging work on the potential for positive outcomes for communities when the state is not functioning adequately (Rubin, 2011). A state is a “central authority that can exercise a monopoly of legitimate force over its territory to keep peace and enforce the law” (Fukuyama, 2014) [own emphasis]. Unlike many of its neighbouring countries, especially in the wake of independence, South Africa has boasted of a successful transition to democratic governance, characterised by free and fair multi-party elections held every 5 years, a progressive Constitution, strong and impartial institutions to uphold it, a free press and a vibrant civil society that can (for now) operate without fear or favour. The question, therefore, is less of its legitimacy than of the state’s reach and consequently of its ability to hold a ‘monopoly of power’.

This is the new South Africa. A country in which there is a hybridity of governance, a form of authorly consisting of multi-actors, where formal and informal systems interconnect (Gross, 2017). Whether in the form of community protection forums and neighbourhood safety groups, or civil society-led service provision of basic amnesties (e.g. the non-profit The Gift of the Givers has been instrumental in drilling boreholes for public hospitals), these forms of governance form part of what (Raeymaekers et al., 2008) terms the “creativity of African societies in coping with limited statehood and political turmoil”. The governance of life and livelihoods in informal communities’ points to a pervasive sense of multiple nodes of power, of which the state holds only one lever. Alongside the state, and in some instances in a direct replacement of it, there is a range of local, patronage base systems that claim and exercise control over their spaces or “territory” (Jinnah, 2016).

The danger of course, is that left unchecked, an absent or misdirected state, can create space for dangerous, violent and discriminatory politics that fuel and embolden populism, hate speech, fake news, xenophobia, ethnic and racial discrimination and vigilantism. As we see in the lives of the Zama Zama this is especially destructive for the poor.

***

Sipho is chewing the end of a cigarette as he sits on a rock near the entrance of the shaft. The dust has settled on the accident and he has done what he could to help the miners trapped underground, to recover the remains of those who died, to comfort the ones left behind and to do good for the families far away. But now the shaft is opened again, and the tears have dried, and the work has to go on, for the livelihoods of thousands of people depend on it. Sipho is whimsical today, he dreams of being the real boss of this shaft one day. Perhaps have an office here instead of the concrete pillars he sits on, a nice desk and chair?

Efforts to support the informal mining in South Africa are limited. If formalised, the benefits would be multi-fold, and much-needed: safer conditions for miners, participatory and inclusive economic development for communities, skills transfer that would benefit environmental rehabilitation, increased tax revenue for the state and a supportive economy that could create jobs and livelihoods. Similar calls are being made around the world to promote, rather than punish informal mining (Bester & Groenewald 2021; Hilson et al., 2017; Shen & Gunson, 2006; Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007). But there is hope. Informal mining in the diamond sector in the country appears to be moving towards recognition and support. A coalition of informal mine workers together with other civic society groups working in the area of land rights, environmental justice and informal workers’ rights have successfully advocated for reform. In 2018, the government issued thousands of mining licences to informal diamond miners (another group of Zama Zama) in the Northern Cape province (Khumalo, 2018). This group faced similar challenges to the Zama Zama in the gold sector: violence, subject to arrest, dangerous conditions underground and little proportional benefit from their mining once diamonds entered the formal supply chain. Alongside the licences to mine, supportive measures for assisting the Zama Zama to sell their diamonds in the formal market and access to land where mining takes place were also made (University of Cape Town, 2018). Similar efforts are also underway to support women in the sector (Tran, 2022). But with centuries of dispossession and inequities to address, progress is slow.

For now, this life, this precarious life, this life of hardship, exploitation, oppression and equally of agency and opportunity continue to characterise the stories of informal miners in South Africa. From early prospect mining, to organised industrial labour, and the work that now falls in its shadow, mining has been central to the lives, identities and social context of millions of mostly Black people in the region. In the stories told here, the desperation to access basic rights, housing, food, health care, employment and education is an everyday reality. For migrants, there are additional issues to navigate. For migrants there are additional issues to navigate: xenophobia, physical insecurity, and insecure documentation. The latter from a broken immigration system that is unable to process legitimate asylum claims or naturalise neighbours who have lived and worked legally for decades in the country. For internal migrants, those forced to be away from loved ones and the confidence and peace this brings; to be able to go home and put your feet up after a long day, instead of being forced to make two homes, and speak in two tongues. To think about a family, and responsibilities, and traditions left behind in fertile valleys while opportunities, and risks and promises emerge in the dust of Johannesburg’s sprawling shadow.

And for women, oh for women it is the burden of their bodies; of childbearing and child rearing, while they are barely able to protect themselves. “Will you watch my child”, she asks the neighbour, “I have a job today”? “Can you let me pay rent next week please, she asks the grumpy old landlord?” My children here, and my children at home, they need me. I must walk on, even though my body is tired, and my hands are chapped, my heart is sore, I must walk on, work on, carrying this child inside of me, or behind me, I must go on. Around her is a violent rage, she sees the bruises on her friend’s face, and she hears the screams in the township at night. But she must go on, as her mother did before her.

And so, on they go on. Old and young, onward they go hustling another day. It is an arduous journey navigating physical hurdles in the form of an unsympathetic, and corrupt bureaucracy, a broken public transport system that keeps people away from services and the state. It is a mental hurdle to overcome colonised ways of being that exclude the Black who are poor.

The resignation lingers in the way the miners at court hang their faces when the case is postponed again, or when the docket is lost, and the ways the wives wrap their blankets around them when the police arrive at the shaft following the accident. It is a resignation that this is the way things are, the way they have always been, if you are poor and Black. The fancy words in the Constitution might say you have rights, but the system still oppresses you.

So there is no faith no hope in the state, no desire to turn to it when needed, because it has not provided, and cannot be trusted.

But there is comfort and there is strength, and there is resilience in the midst of this suffering. Sundays are glorious days! The sun shines bright and the women wear white dresses that are bleached and ironed to stiff creases. Their heads are adorned with snug turbans and headdresses, and their faces shine as they gather under the shady trees. The dust and the thorns of the Highveld landscape retreat as they sing the glories of their Lord.

The singing and the hymns revive the crowd, energise them, make them and put their struggles into perspective. And within the crowd there are sisters who care and brothers who ask about each other, and visit the sick and care for the old. And when the prayers are over and the songs have been sung, there is the food! Beautiful warm food cooked with love: steaming spinach spiced with flavour, creamy butternut and cabbage that has grown in patches near their homes, crispy chicken feet from the hens that were squawking outside their homes yesterday. And the food is always plentiful, because they are a people of God.

The spiritual is always here; the symbols and rituals guiding the men as they go underground, removing danger and guarding against greed; the souls of the ancestors comforting the bosoms of the women as they grind above, driving away jealousy. This is a people who have love for God, and this love guides their ethics, and guards their resentment, fills them with hope and strength and creates a community bound by spiritual ties and material needs.

As so the rock from the Creator is brought forth from the ground, and the sand is dusted, and the gold glitters. As the seasons change, they run from the late afternoon summer storms, putting out their buckets to collect the rainwater as it seeps through the tin roofs of their homes; and huddle around the woodfired stoves to ward off the bitter cold winds of the winter Highveld, until it is spring again and they can gather outside and plant some vegetables and sing under the trees, praising the Creator and the land He has given them, full of promise and risk, and hard work, and hope.