As gold prices soar, illegal miners are swarming abandoned shafts around Roodepoort, and neither police nor policy seem able to stop them.
Johannesburg, the city built on gold, is being hollowed out again, this time by the zama zamas. The name means roughly "those who take a chance" in Zulu, and it is what South Africans call illegal miners. They are flooding abandoned shafts in townships west of the city, and communities and wildlife are paying the price.
Cora Bailey has watched this story unfold since 1991, when she began treating injured animals in the townships around Roodepoort. She has always crossed paths with illegal miners, but the surge in gold prices has changed the scale of things. Old shafts that once sat quiet are busy again. In late September, dozens of zama zamas arrived to dig across a dirt road from Claw (Community Led Animal Welfare), the charity she runs.
The damage shows on the surface. Sinkholes open up, the ground is scarred, and neighbourhoods that were already stretched now live beside unstable, pockmarked terrain. Animals and people share that risk, and the people living closest to the diggings have little say in what happens next.
The bigger problem is that nothing on the horizon points to a fix. The forces driving illegal mining, from rising prices to economic desperation to abandoned infrastructure, remain firmly in place. Police crackdowns appear to have done little to slow the trade, and the miners themselves often become convenient scapegoats for deeper failures of governance. Until those failures are addressed, Johannesburg's townships will keep living on top of a gamble.
