The miners became known as zama-zamas, a Zulu term that loosely translates to “take a chance.” Most were immigrants from neighboring countries-Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho-that once sent millions of mine workers to South Africa, and whose economies were heavily dependent on mining wages. Many others remained in poverty, or died underground. With few overhead costs or safety standards, these outlaw miners, in some cases, could strike it rich. If there are other bodies, they may never be found.Īs Welkom’s mining industry collapsed, in the nineteen-nineties, a dystopian criminal economy emerged in its place, with thousands of men entering the abandoned tunnels and using rudimentary tools to dig for the leftover ore. The bottom third of the shaft is badly damaged, preventing the camera from going farther. Twisted around the horizontal beams below them-at sixteen hundred feet, at twenty-six hundred feet-are corpses: the remains of men who have fallen, or perhaps been thrown, to their deaths. The camera continues its descent, leaving the men in darkness. They have neither helmets nor ropes, and their forearms are protected by sawed-off gum boots. At around eight hundred feet, moving figures appear in the distance, travelling downward at almost the same speed. The camera descends at five feet per second. The footage shows a darkened tunnel, some thirty feet in diameter, with an internal frame of large steel girders. To assess the mine’s condition, a team of specialists lowered a camera down the shaft with a winding machine designed for rescue missions. Most of the surface infrastructure for this particular mine had been dismantled several years prior, but there was still a hole in the ground-a concrete cylinder roughly seven thousand feet deep. The shafts in Welkom were among the deepest that had ever been sunk, plunging vertically for a mile or more and opening, at different levels, onto cavernous horizontal passages that narrowed toward the gold reefs: a labyrinthine network of tunnels far beneath the city. Large deposits of gold remained, though the ore was of poor grade and situated at great depths, making it prohibitively expensive to mine on an industrial scale. There were close to fifty shafts in an area roughly the size of Brooklyn, but most of these mines had been shut down in the past three decades. Welkom was once the center of the world’s richest goldfields. A few years ago, a mining company was considering reopening an old mine shaft in Welkom, a city in South Africa’s interior.

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