Mpumalanga miners’ daily dice with death

Driven by biting hunger and poverty, residents of the impoverished Boekenhouthoek village in Mpumalanga have been playing Russian roulette with their lives, digging up almost the entire area in search of gemstones which they sell to survive.

Equipped with the most basic of digging tools such picks, shovels as well as chisels, the community has turned their village into a giant quarry in search of the quartzes, with almost the entire village now riddled with muddy and damp underground tunnels.

With rising unemployment, more people from the area have joined the digging frenzy, which started more than 40 years ago when the gemstones, including purple amethyst and goethite, were accidentally discovered during a dam construction.

“Now we have people coming in from outside the village to dig here and now the extent of the excavations and tunnels has reached dangerous levels. Two people were buried alive [when] their tunnel collapsed,” one of the miners, Johannes Mthimunye, 59, said.

Villagers not keen on dicing with their lives are still benefiting from the operation, charging people to dig in their yards and some residents have reported hearing people digging underneath their houses.

An elderly resident who has been renting out digging spots in his yard for the past 30 years has now gone partially blind due to sugar diabetes, with the quarries in his yard now death traps for him.

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“One night I used my walking stick to find my way to the toilet, while leaning against the wall. The next thing I was in a pit and broke both my legs,” the resident, 61, who did not want to be named, said.

Fire Mahlangu, 58, a father of four, says he has raised his children from trading the gems, admitting that it was a dangerous mission but said it was either this or starvation.

He joined the digging after losing his job as a bricklayer 20 years ago and has no plans of stopping, though he is well aware that one day he might get into the pit and never come out alive.

“As a parent, you do all that is in your power to ensure that there is food on the table and these stones are all we have,” Mahlangu said.

His operation is a family affair, with his twin sons, 24, having joined him in the mining and his wife responsible for washing off mud from the gemstones.

One of Mahlangu’s twin sons, Sipho, has a mining certificate while the other is a qualified security officer but none of them had any luck with employment.

They make between R80 and R250 per kilogram from the purple crystals, depending on the grade, while the white gems fetch between R150 and R60 and the red ones sell for between R200 and R120.

On a bad month, Mahlangu gets very little crystals from his makeshift mine shaft and would get nothing but a good month he can pocket between R12,000 and R50,000 but the latter feat is very rare.

“The agents make a killing from our hard and dangerous work because they can get up to R2000 per kilogram of purple crystals. They set their own prices and we have no say in it because they will go to the next seller,” Mahlangu said.

He said the advantage of the middlemen was that they would clean and polish the crystals so that they could ask more.

“There was one agent I was selling to. He was too rich to buy from me and was now collecting crystals from other countries. We cannot buy the chemical they use because it needs a license,” Mahlangu lamented.

As a finished product, the crystals are cut into various gemstone cuts and cabochons, with lesser quality stones used in bracelets, necklaces, and as costume jewellery.

Owing its colour to ferrous iron impurities, purple quartz – which is found only in South Africa – is believed to be a crystal of alignment and harmony by collectors.

siphom@citizen.co.za

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