A queasy, vertiginous sense of near free-fall seized my gut when I heard of the mineshaft disaster at Impala Platinum in Rustenburg on November 27 that left 13 miners dead and 50 injured, eight of them critical.
Having experienced it, one never forgets the sensation of being lowered 1km or more down into the depths of the earth. You are crammed into a large steel-meshed cage with scores of other men, all bulked out in boots, overalls, helmets, headlamps, and battery packs. It is not for claustrophobics.
On Rustenburg’s platinum belt, the cage is simply a three-tiered lift for personnel and equipment. The precious metal-bearing rock ore itself is brought to the surface in giant steel skips of about 20 tonnes.
When the cage is “dropped” down the mineshaft it’s actually being winched down on steel cables — a controlled descent that is actually not that fast at roughly 22km/h (only about two-thirds of a Usain Bolt sprint.) But that’s not what it feels like inside the cage, an experience I first had at Impala Platinum (Implats) at the age of 17 in 1984.
It was then, in a strictly business sense, the “golden age” of mining in a country that, but for its proven world-largest gold, chromium, manganese, and platinum-group metal reserves, would have remained an agricultural backwater.
In 1980, the country’s total mining output peaked at 21% of GDP topped only by manufacturing at 22%. By 2016, mining had dropped to sixth slot at 8%, two points behind transport, itself only half of finance in the number one slot at 20%.
In those intervening decades, I gathered a range of experience reporting on mining: everything from watching rock-drillers at the deafening drill-face 1,7km down the No 7 Shaft at the Wes-Driefontein gold mine in Carletonville, to crawling on hands and knees 200m along a candlelit coal-seam in the zama-zama “Jerry’s Mine” at Guba in the Eastern Cape.
The Wes-Driefontein story, first undertaken in 1996, examined the end of job reservation for whites on the mines. The colour-bar had just been scrapped and I was interviewing the first crop of miners, black and white, who were being trained together as entry-level miners. Until then, as when I had been down the Implats mine in 1984, entry-level miners were always black and derisively called piccanins, meaning children though they were all grown men.
A single, ordinary, white miner would have headed several teams of 15 black miners each lead by a black foreman with more experience than his white boss and consisting of the rock-drillers, timbermen who propped the stopes up with timber, and the malaishas (general labourers), who removed blasted ore to the underground trains or conveyor-belts running back to the skips.
Only whites could gain the coveted blasting certificate and all other pay-grades, including the offsetters — those who ran the winches operating the cages and skips — were white.
Returning in 2005, I compared white and black ore operators with a quarter-century’s experience each. The white operator earned R6,700/month and lived in a suburban mine home; the black operator earned R2,900/month and lived in a spartan mine hostel room — despite the fact that he had even trained white offsetters.
The investigation into the Implats tragedy will focus primarily on the offsetters because they drove the cage bringing 86 miners to the surface at 11 Shaft that only reached Level 17 — when it suddenly stopped and began to drop.
Emergency protocols failed to stop the 180m fall to Level 20, right near the bottom of 11 Shaft, where it was brought to a bone-crushing halt when the counterweight — which balances the load and makes lifting faster — caught in the headgear above.
It must have been hellish. Sunk in darkness, rent with the cries of the dying with the rock temperature at over 50°C and the air sharp with ammonia.
Back in 1984, I had also visited the Implats hospital where today in much better conditions many of the injured miners now lie. Then, it was redolent with the stench of faeces from black miners crippled in rockfalls.
But despite decades of subsequent improvements to mine safety, it is still moving men and equipment about underground by hoist, train, or chairlift that accounts for most fatalities in the industry. And most of the dead are still poor and black.
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