Cora Bailey, who founded Claw (Community Led Animal Welfare), has encountered illegal miners since she began treating injured animals in the area's townships around Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, in 1991. In late September, dozens of zama zamas, the name given to illegal miners in South Africa, meaning roughly "to take a chance" in Zulu, arrived to dig for gold across the dirt road from her charity. They drew on the organisation's two 25,000-litre water tanks, which the city government fills irregularly for the roughly 100 rescued and injured animals on site. "We've asked them really nicely and haven't ever refused them water to drink … But, for the first time ever, we closed the gate at 12 [midday], because we literally had about two buckets of water left," Bailey said in mid-October.
Police told her the scale of the illegal mining was too big for them to do anything about, she said. About a week later, officers sheared away the grass that had partly hidden the miners, but within a few days a smaller group had returned; Bailey said they were now taking Claw's water only for drinking. The police regularly trumpet their success in tackling illegal mining: on 19 October they said they had arrested 71 suspected zama zamas across the country in the previous week. Researchers, however, put the number of illegal miners in the tens of thousands.
In 2019, Marcena Hunter, a researcher at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, estimated that a tenth of South Africa's gold production, worth about $1bn, was being exported illegally. In 2025, 93 bodies were pulled from a mine shaft in Stilfontein after officers blocked food and water from being delivered underground. The dynamics driving the mining include the high price of gold, poverty, unemployment, corrupt politicians and police profiting, and the failure of mining companies to fulfil their legal obligation to seal shafts when they cease operating.
A gold find on a farm in 1884 sparked a gold rush that led to Johannesburg's creation; production peaked in the 1970s, and South Africa was the world's largest producer for more than a century until 2007. In 2009, Morris Viljoen, a geology professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, estimated that the reef that gave the university its name had produced more than a third of the gold ever mined globally. The city government claims 40,000 tonnes of gold still lie underground in the region, but the remainder lies ever deeper, raising recovery costs. Mining companies are supposed to seal old shafts and rehabilitate the environment around them; the mining minister, Gwede Mantashe, said in response to a parliamentary question that in 2025 there were "6,100 derelict and ownerless mines and 1,170 unsafe mine openings". Experts agree that most zama zamas come from neighbouring countries, principally Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Above ground, the ground is caving open. In May, Kenny Kunene, the Johannesburg council member responsible for transport, took journalists on a tour of sinkholes he claimed were the fault of zama zamas, including a section of Wemmer Pan Road that has completely collapsed. The road was once the main artery linking the city's central business district to the south-eastern suburbs. Rosalind Morris, an anthropology professor at Columbia University who has worked extensively with illegal miners, said the porous dolomitic rock south and west of the city becomes unstable when water is removed. "The biggest culprit of sinkholes in South Africa is formal industrial mining, which dewaters at a scale of hundreds of millions of gallons of water removed from underground every day," she said. There are areas of residual gold being intensely mined by zama zamas, she said, and "some of that definitely causes structural collapse, there's no doubt about it. But the idea that this was invented or caused for the first time by zama zamas is completely fallacious."
Zama zamas are also frequently blamed for violence in mining areas, including a mass shooting in Wedela township in September. David van Wyk, the lead researcher at the Bench Marks Foundation, said the culpability lay with the often-feuding gangs that controlled access to the shafts. "The guys working in the mine are actually super-exploited cheap labour … The guys with the guns are the guys who take the gold," he said. "They don't go underground."
In Khutsong, about 80km west of Johannesburg, illegal miners, local and foreign, kept the township afloat, said Vusi Cele, the youth secretary for the local branch of Mining Affected Communities United in Action, which advocates for "artisanal miners" to be granted mining licences. "Without those rents, it's a ghost town," he said. Cele, 33, sells mobile phone covers and screen protectors above ground, but said he would mine if he could get a licence. "On the surface there's peanuts," he said. "Underground there's money."