SA‘s informal miners fight for their future in coal’s twilight

GROWING up, Cyprial dreamed of being a lawyer.

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Instead, he now spends his days underground, swinging a pickaxe against rock in a pitch-black illegal mine that snakes for kilometres beneath South Africa’s coal heartland.The rumbling of wheelbarrows echoed down the narrow tunnels where he and dozens of other men had been mining since dawn.

Some chipped away at the rock face, their dim headlamps barely piercing the darkness.

Others pushed loads of up to 100 kilogrammes at full speed through the tunnels and up a steep hill to trucks waiting to deliver the coal to informal sellers in the nearby town of Ermelo.

Only a few tree trunks propped up the slab of stone forming the roof of the entrance to the mine, a hole in the slope of a gutted hill abandoned by a mining company in the eastern Mpumalanga province scarred by decades of coal extraction.

South Africa is among the world’s top producers of coal, which fires about 80 percent of the country’s electricity.

Ranked among the 12 largest greenhouse gas emitters globally, the country became in 2021 the first in the world to sign a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) deal with wealthy nations, worth $8.5 billion, to move away from dirty-power generation.

And while most of South Africa’s electricity comes from Mpumalanga, locals say they have benefited little from large-scale, formal mining and fear the transition to green energy might leave them behind again.

‘Artisanal’ or ‘illegal’?