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Zwelendaba Mgidi, the man whose haunting photograph graces the cover of the book Broke & Broken – The Shameful Legacy of Gold Mining in South Africa, died in a rural hospital in the Eastern Cape late last month.
Mgidi died from complications associated with silicosis, an incurable cancer of the lungs caused by long term exposure to silica dust generated during gold mining.
He was 58 years old. His was another cheap, black life wasted in the bowels of the earth by the gold mining companies who, in their quest to maximise profits, neglected to provide adequate health and safety equipment to their labourers.
As a result, for more than 100 years of gold mining in South Africa, hundreds of thousands of black African men like Mgidi were exposed to this killer dust. We may never know for sure how many of them have died from this disease since industrialised gold mining started on the Witwatersrand in 1886.
Mgidi was 23 years old when he was recruited to work on the mines in 1983. He returned home in 2011, aged 52. He was diagnosed with silicosis in 2008, aged 48. He had worked on the mines for 28 years. When he was sent home to wait for death, he received a paltry payment of around R70 000.
Like many men before him, who were discarded once their bodies began to deteriorate from the effects of the illness, he headed back home to his home in KwaBala, near Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape.
There he lived out his final years in abject poverty and pain, struggling to breathe and unable to perform the most basic duties. Even when I met him in February 2016, the mere act of speaking proved difficult. He paused constantly to draw air and his body shivered as he spoke in a soft voice. A once healthy man who kept fit through road running and boxing, he was reduced to a shell, a damaged human being with rotten lungs.
He was a pawn in an unjust game, a cruel system of dispossession of land and destruction of the old way of life that forced generations of men like him into an abusive, undignified life of labourers serving ruthless randlords who cared only about profit on the mines.
In the eyes of their exploitative bosses these men were mere objects that did not deserve to be protected from the deadly effects of silica dust generated during gold mining.
Mgidi had been in and out of hospital. His poor, unemployed wife Noziqhamo could not let him out of her sight. He needed her constant love and care. Their children watched and cried as the man they once knew as a fit boxing fanatic faded away.
Last month, as Noziqhamo was preparing for her own mother’s burial, Mgidi’s health deteriorated yet again. An ambulance was dispatched. He was taken to the Holy Cross Hospital in the area. The gold mines of South Africa had eaten again.
He became another statistic, one of hundreds of thousands who continue to die poor in remote, under-resourced hospitals, far away from the shiny, glamorous offices where mine bosses continue to live in opulence through the sweat of these men.
Mgidi was buried in his home village of KwaBala. No more will he sit in the shade and watch the beauty of the green majestic hills of his home.
During the last seven years of his life he had joined the fight against the mining companies that had left him and scores of his colleagues helpless wrecks. Mgidi was one of the plaintiffs in the court action against gold mining companies.
Lawyers for the former mineworkers and their beneficiaries are demanding compensation for their suffering, caused by the mining company’s failure to provide them with the necessary health and safety equipment that would have helped to safeguard their health.
The case has dragged for years in the South Gauteng High Court and the Constitutional Court. The mining companies have reduced this matter of life and death to a game of legal technicalities.
However, it appears a settlement may finally be reached between the mining companies and the lawyers for Mgidi and his colleagues. This month the South Gauteng High Court was set to hear an appeal against an earlier ruling granting lawyers for the miners legal grounds to continue with a class action against the mining houses.
This has been postponed so that both parties to negotiate a settlement that may finally ensure the families of Mgidi and his colleagues finally find some form of justice in the form of monetary compensation.
But this has come too late, way too late, for many others include Mgidi and Boxwell Mokholofu, another of the litigants featured in Broke & Broken who died last year.
Before his death Mokholofu had constantly enquired from the Mineworkers Development Agency staff in Lesotho when the case was likely to be concluded. They had no answers. The mine bosses, the men with the big bucks were still playing their dirty game in the courts.
In 2016 I met Mokholofu at his home village of Tlokweng in Lesotho. He was a broken man who had taken to drinking in an attempt to numb his constant pain caused by living with rotting lungs. He was stressed, angry and anxious for news of the case in which he too was a litigant.
“I want to say to those people who employed us that they are cruel,” he told me.
He died over a year later.
During an interview in 2016, Mgidi told me: “I hate them. Those who owned the mines, I hate them very much.”
• This article first appeared on Mukurukuru Media, and is republished here with kind permission from former City Press journalist Lucas Ledwaba.
Broke & Broken
The book Broke & Broken – The Shameful Legacy of Gold Mining in South Africa [BlackBird Jacana 2016] was written by veteran journalist Lucas Ledwaba and City Press photographer Leon Sadiki.
The book explores the exploitation of the miners and the blatant disregard for health and safety regulations, the implications of which continue to be felt in rural villages far away from the imposing mine shafts.
It has been nominated for the Humanities and Social Sciences Awards 2018. It was also long listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Non-Fiction Awards 2017.
The book is available at selected book stores or hereat a recommended retail price of R225.
