Johannesburg — Illegal Gold Mining Spreads as Gold Prices Rise

A rising gold price has pulled dozens of illegal miners into abandoned shafts across Johannesburg's western townships, straining local water supplies and testing a police force that says the problem has outgrown its capacity to fight it, according to an Oct. 30 Guardian dispatch from Durban Deep.

How much illegal mining is happening around Johannesburg?

Researchers put the number of illegal miners in South Africa, known locally as zama zamas, in the tens of thousands, the Guardian reported. 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 roughly $1 billion — was being exported illegally, according to the Guardian. The term zama zama means roughly "to take a chance" in Zulu, the paper noted.

Why has illegal mining increased now?

The Guardian's reporting ties the uptick directly to the price of gold, which it says has soared, making it more profitable to work the abandoned shafts that dot the Roodepoort area west of Johannesburg. The dispatch does not give a specific dollar figure for the price move, but frames the surge in digging activity as a direct response to it. Cora Bailey, who has run the animal charity Claw — Community Led Animal Welfare — in the area since 1991, told the Guardian she has watched the pattern repeat for more than three decades, with each jump in gold value bringing a fresh wave of diggers to the shafts near her property.

What happened at the Claw animal charity?

In late September, dozens of zama zamas arrived to dig across the dirt road from Claw, the Guardian reported. The miners began drawing water from the charity's two 25,000-litre tanks — supplies the city government fills irregularly for roughly 100 rescued and injured animals on site — to use for panning and processing ore. "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 told the Guardian in mid-October.

About a week after that shortage, police cleared away grass that had partly concealed the mining activity, the paper reported. Within days, a smaller group of miners returned, though Bailey said they were by then taking water from Claw only to drink rather than for processing, according to the Guardian.

How is South African police responding?

South Africa's police have publicized enforcement actions even as the scale of illegal mining appears to outstrip them. On Oct. 19, police said they had arrested 71 suspected zama zamas nationwide over the previous week, the Guardian reported. Set against researchers' estimates that tens of thousands of people are involved in illegal mining, that arrest tally represents a small fraction of the activity described in the report. Bailey told the Guardian that police had informed her directly that the scale of illegal mining near her property was too big for them to address.

Enforcement has also carried a human cost. The Guardian's reporting references a 2025 police operation in which 93 bodies were recovered in connection with illegal mining activity, though the dispatch reviewed for this report does not detail the full circumstances of that incident.

What economic and environmental damage has illegal mining caused?

Beyond the water strain at Claw, the Guardian's headline points to sinkholes and scarred land as visible costs of the digging around Johannesburg, a city built atop more than a century of gold-mining tunnels. Hunter's 2019 estimate — that a tenth of national gold output, worth about $1 billion, leaves the country illegally — frames the activity as a meaningful leak in a formal export market that remains one of South Africa's primary sources of foreign-currency earnings. The Guardian's reporting does not provide updated figures on illegal exports beyond that 2019 estimate.

What happens next for residents near the mining sites?

The Guardian's dispatch offers no indication that the underlying drivers — high gold prices and persistent water, land, and policing gaps — are expected to ease. Bailey's account suggests a cycle in which police intervention produces only temporary disruption: miners who left after the grass-clearing operation had already partly returned within days, according to her Guardian interview. For now, Claw continues to ration water between its animal population and the miners working the shafts across the road, a arrangement Bailey described to the Guardian as unprecedented in her more than three decades at the site.

The full account, including additional detail on the scope of enforcement and the toll on affected communities, is available from the Guardian.