By Ally Nylen
We have traveled to our last destination in South Africa and the program is coming to a close. Johannesburg has been an enriching and educational experience, where we had the opportunity to visit multiple museums, landscapes, markets, and see performances. As I reflect back on the past few days here, I have come to better understand the various lives lived in this city from past to present.
A large focus of our time in Johannesburg has been on mining. We were able to go to a gold mine as well as see a performance based on what life was like working and living in the mines. Before both of these events, I read two documents about mining in South Africa. The fact sheet gave me a basic understanding of the mining to retail process for diamonds. Diamonds are a major natural resource and the industry employs around 10 million people all over the world. Additionally, the fact sheet estimates that the diamond trade contributes $8.5 billion a year to Africa. The document explained how “diamonds are helping transform southern Africa and the lives of its people” by using the revenue to create wealth for themselves. Four main areas were focused on as benefits of mining: financial, health, education, and employment. Diamonds create a large economic contribution in the countries where they are found, they create funding for counseling, testing, education, etc. for the HIV pandemic, children can go to school longer based off higher revenue, and approximately 38,000 people are employed in southern Africa by the diamond industry. Through my reading I learned that the diamond industry gave an economic boost to South Africa after being discovered in 1870.
The reading titled “Diamonds: Forever or For Good?” provided more insight on the diamond industry in comparison to the country that I have experienced for the past three weeks. The article stated that mining exports are led by gold and diamonds and South Africa is a middle-income country, but has the most extreme income disparities in the world. While mining has boosted the economy and focused on four areas listed above, it is clear that only a minority are seeing the benefits. About 5.4 million people live in “first world” conditions, where 22 million people live in “third world” conditions. Learning about the success of the diamond industry on paper contrasted with my experiences in Johannesburg.
We saw a show called Egoli, which was about the lives of a group of miners living in a mining camp in Johannesburg. The show was extremely powerful as it portrayed the physical, emotional, and mental challenges these men were faced with. The implementation of apartheid left non-whites out of the formal economic and political systems, leaving a huge number of blacks to work in the mines. Through this performance I saw the dependence on alcohol, the distance from family, and health issues all caused by this type of work. While observing the horrible conditions, it struck me when three coins were thrown down for all the workers to fight over. The low pay for the back-breaking and life-threatening work showed the corruption in the system that was boosting the economy for the privileged. Seeing this performance made me think back and question what I read on the Diamond Fact Sheet that was assigned. The four categories listed make the assumption that mining is helping South Africa as a whole, but it doesn’t focus on those that it is barely helping and more importantly those that it is and has been hurting.
We also traveled to what was the deepest and richest gold mine in the world. The mine employed 30,000 miners and stopped operating in 1977. Here I had the opportunity to go down the shaft to learn about what life was like for the miners. One striking fact was that a miner would be left to set off the detonator for the dynamite to bomb the ground in order to go deeper. The danger that these jobs created was so high and it ended up destroying families, as I saw in Egoli when one of the character’s son died. In the mine we were exposed to the level of noise the machines made and learned that most of the miners were deaf or had hearing problems. Also, they would use the cage to come down into the mine that was 3,200 meters deep, but if there was a power failure they would have to walk back up, which is 151 steps from the lowest point that we went to. After going into the mine we saw a show that discussed the gold from the mines. I learned that the majority of gold is sold to the South Africa Reserve Bank, but the rest is used in other things like telephone exchanges, computer circuits, dentistry, etc.
These experiences created conflict within myself as I learned about the mining industry. While the industry as a whole adds revenue to South Africa, which is a positive for the economy, my experiences showed that the work is deathly and underpaid and the entire country is not seeing the return from the industry. As part of the Venda Council, I thought a lot about how this industry is a huge part of the economy, but raised the question of human rights. The system of apartheid forced a specific group of people into a job that boosted the economy, but that group is still living in poverty and overall poor conditions. It seems unjust that the few continue to benefit off of the work that the majority had no choice in. I question the information that is spread about the mining industry in both the past and the present. I wonder who is being informed of the positive, boosting information that is laid out on the fact sheet and who is aware of the conditions that are exposed through the performance and mine that I experienced. Without the opportunity to come to South Africa and see firsthand what mining conditions are like, I don’t know that I would ever get that information. With that being said, I also question if that minority population living in this country has been exposed to all the truths of the mining industry.
