[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

In recent months, South African police have undertaken a series of increasingly militarised assaults on informal miners as part of a national mandate to inhibit their activities and expel undocumented migrants. Under the aegis of an operation titled ‘Vala Umgodi’ (translated roughly as ‘seal the shaft’, or ‘plug the hole’), police have repeatedly encircled the disused shafts where informal miners called ‘zama zamas’ are working (Parliamentary Monitoring Group, Citation2025). Often following upon raids and shows of armed force, they have cut off food and water supplies in an effort to coerce the miners back to the surface, where they are detained, arrested, and, if they are non-citizens (as is the case for most zama zamas), deported. The results of Operation Vala Umgodi have been catastrophic for the miners. At Orkney, in December 2024, 1,004 miners were compelled to leave their shafts and were quickly arrested, but only after several weeks of increasing deprivation (Mabuza, Citation2024). At Stilfontein (Morris, Citation2025a; Peyton & Nhlaop, Citation2025; South African Human Rights Commission, Citation2024), beginning in November and extending into January 2025, the tactics resulted in the deaths by slow starvation of 93 miners, whose bodies were delivered to the surface in a sombre procession attended by a vast mass-media audience, both in South Africa and around the world.

The 93 corpses that were brought to the surface at the Buffelsfontein mine in Stilfontein were not the only bodies to emerge from the two shafts that the police had encircled. In addition, more than 1,500 miners also managed to crawl to the surface, from depths of more than 2 kms below the surface. For some, the upward journey took days, and survivors told tales of having to bind themselves to the cables, where they hung in suspension for hours and days, to gather enough strength to continue. Many required medical care to address the results of dehydration and starvation. But their individual experiences and their irreducibly personal traumas were also part of an enormous aggregation. The numbers indicated the scale of informal operations at Stilfontein and, implicitly, exposed the organisational complexity of this scene, as well as a new alignment of forces. How did this situation come about? What does it betoken about the transformed nature of informalised mineral and especially gold extraction in South Africa, and elsewhere? And what does it reveal about the changing relationship between the South African state and its police forces, and about the state and organised crime in the mineral sector? How do those whose desperation has compelled them to labour in this radically precarious economy experience this transformation?

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The actions of the police at Stilfontein have all the characteristics of a ‘siege’, a strategy more typically associated with military operations aimed at the capture of foreign or fortified territories than illegal mineral extraction. In this essay, I hope to show how this development indexes a transformation in the conception of informalised mining activity that attributes to it a political and not merely a criminal status, by coding it as a threat to the national geo-body as much as to the value chain. Such a coding displaces the problem of labour while invoking the spectre of the enemy, in Carl Schmitt’s (Citation1996) sense. As the economy has been newly politicised by the state, however, inter-state and/or internationalist solutions to economic crises that are neither local nor national in origin have gone unimagined.Footnote1 To be sure, this politicisation is incomplete, and the discourse about zama zamas has a hybrid dimension. They are designated as criminals in most governmental discourse, but insofar as their deaths have been avowed by the police and by many in the public sphere (and in political office) on the grounds that they are a threat to the nation-state itself, they are now threshold figures at the unstable boundary between political and criminal alterity. These developments are associated with changes in the way that the state and institutions of law operate with respect to two orders of so-called crime, namely that which is organised and which seeks extra-state power (gangs and international extra-legal organisations) which can nonetheless compete with state authority, and that which is merely referenced and/or designated in discourse as extra-legal, which may be self-organised, and which is subordinated to both forms of coercion (the illegal mineworkers).

I do not mean here that the state remains aloof from this realm of criminality, or that its agents do not themselves break the law; or that there are not complex and often intimate relations of mutual indebtedness and protection between state forces and those whose primary activities are, indeed, deemed criminal by the state (from the traffic in arms, illicit gold, narcotics and other contraband to prostitution and the human trafficking). Nor do I mean that individuals subject to the coercive reign of gangs do not often enter into forms of contractual negotiation or other kinds of engagement with the armed members of their relatively personalistic power structures. As Auyero and Sobering (Citation2019) argue, synthesising a vast literature from the anthropology of the state, relations between state and extra-state forces are often ambivalent. Rather, I am pointing to the differentiation and contest between state and criminal entities in the competition for relative authority over individuals who are subject to those competing authorities – authority here entails the capacity to solicit submission – and in the pursuit of localised control over people as labour. If such differentiations are never completely stabilised, and if individuals are often driven to negotiate their relations with those who have coercive forces to hand, in situationally specific ways, I nonetheless believe that the intense informalisation of the minerals economy in South Africa (and perhaps elsewhere) has led to a new role for gang-based or organised crime – whether that crime takes the form of the family-structured mafias of southern Europe and South Asia, or in the more charismatically centred structures of the gangs in Africa and Latin America. As the collaborations between would-be bearers of coercive power continue despite the discursive efforts of the state to claim a monopoly over coercive means, the most precarious individuals (those subject to all such claims) have been resignified as foreign enemies. That the violence perpetrated against these individuals is also often perpetrated by non-state agents – in xenophobic purges or in the affirmation of state violence by ordinary citizens in the name of national self-preservation (Super, Citation2024) – is perhaps proof that the nation-state’s ideological project retains significant efficacy, even if its apparatuses have been dispersed and displaced by social media and other forces. Before making this argument, let me first return to the scene where these developments first became visible: to the shafts and abandoned mines of South Africa, those labyrinths of desire and death, technology and its ruination.

Rosalind C. Morris,  Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.