Dozens of bodies retrieved from South Africa mine after months-long police standoff

First responders pulled dozens of bodies and hundreds of emaciated survivors from an abandoned gold mine this week, but Zinzi Tom’s brother wasn’t among them.

South African police say there’s nobody left in the mine after they removed 78 bodies and 246 survivors over the last two days.

They declared the court-ordered rescue operation over on Wednesday, cutting short what was supposed to be a 10-day operation, bringing a grisly end to a months-long standoff with illegal miners and their families.

“I don’t want to declare him dead,” Tom told As It Happens host Nil Köksal shortly after leaving the site of the operation. “I’m hopeful and praying to God that he’s going to come back.”

Illegal mining draws desperate workers

Tom hasn’t heard from her brother, Ayanda, since July 2024, when he first told her he’d be going down into the abandoned Buffelsfontein Gold Mine in Stilfontein to mine illegally.

At first, Tom says, she didn’t approve of his choice. But there were no other jobs available to him, she said, and he had to seek out a living in order to care for his children. 

“[He was] risking his life going underground and saying that he’s going to try to make ends meet,” she said. “It’s a very sad moment for us as a family.”

Illegal mining is a common practice in South Africa, where more than 30 per cent of people are unemployed. 

Migrants and others desperate to make ends meet scour the country’s thousands of abandoned mines for mineral deposits, often employed by organized crime networks.

In an effort to crack down on illegal mining, police cut off most of the exit points at the Stilfontein mine in August, while hundreds of men were still working inside. 

The goal, one cabinet minister said at the time, was to “smoke them out.”

Community says miners starved to death

Police and government officials have maintained since the beginning of the standoff that the miners were never trapped, but rather unwilling to come out and face charges.

But the miners’ friends, families and supporters have argued that many were too frail, hungry and dehydrated to make it out after police removed the pulley system used to deliver food and water supplies to them.

A court ruled in December that volunteers should be allowed to send essential supplies down to the miners, and a separate ruling last week ordered the state to launch the rescue.

The Mining Affected Communities United in Action, who launched the court case, has said some miners were trapped deep inside different parts of the mine, which is 2.5 kilometres deep with multiple shafts, many levels and a maze of tunnels.

The South African Federation of Trade Unions accused the state on Tuesday of allowing the men “to starve to death in the depths of the Earth.”

“These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other southern African countries, were left to die in one of the most horrific displays of state wilful negligence in recent history,” it said in a statement.

Athlenda Mathe, national spokesperson for the South African police, defended the operation. 

“Our mandate was to combat criminality and that is exactly what we’ve been doing,” Mathe said at the site on Wednesday. 

“By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive.”

‘Please pray for us’

All the survivors pulled out this week, many visibly frail, were taken into police custody. 

Police said 1,576 miners got out by their own means between August and the start of the rescue operation. All were arrested and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

 “If you come out and you are able to walk they take you straight to the cells,” said Mzukisi Jam, a civil society activist who has been at the site throughout the rescue operation.

Tom, meanwhile, says she’s heard some miners have been getting out on their own through a different shaft. She says she’s hoping and praying that her brother is on his way there now.

When she spoke to CBC, she still hadn’t told her family the rescue operation was over.

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m scared to look my mother in the eyes and tell her the news today.”

She asked people around the world watching this news unfold to keep her and her family in their prayers.

“I need my brother to come out alive,” she said. “Please pray for us.”