Today's Labour News

Sunday World reports that when the men who had been holed up more than two kilometres underground for months in a disused mine in Stilfontein in North West saw a team that had come to rescue them, they went down on their knees and threw themselves at the rescuers, their hands pressed together, pleading for help.

Still visibly distressed, Mandla Charles, one of the volunteers who joined the rescue team, recalled the gory scenes just after the rescue operation on Thursday. The men’s bodies were emaciated, their skeletal bodies covered in sores and they had dry lips and sunken eyes. Charles and Mzwandile Mkwayi were two community members who volunteered to go underground and retrieve the men and bodies during the government’s extraction operation this week. Working with Mines Rescue Services (MRS), the extraction operation took place at shaft 11 of the disused Buffelsfontein gold mine from Monday to Thursday. Over the four-day period, a total of 246 men were rescued and arrested. A total of 78 bodies were recovered. Charles was traumatised by the condition of the miners underground. MRS used a mobile rescue winder to lower the cage underground. The cage had three cameras mounted on it and was designed to take a maximum of six people at a time. “It was difficult for us to choose who to load first in the cage and who to load later in the day. Some of those men did not believe that we would come back for another trip to take them out,” said Charles.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Mpho Koka on page 8 of Sunday World of 19 January 2025
• Read too, How death stalked Stilfontein’s dark, stinking depths, at Sunday Times (subscriber access only)
• And also, Cannibalism, starvation and death: Two illegal Stilfontein miners speak of hell underground, at News24 (subscriber access only)

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