Today, what were once the deepest mines in the world are beginning to close. In their decaying spaces, itinerant migrants now scavenge for gold, risking their lives for a rock they call imali (money).
These informal miners are called zama zama. The word zama means to try in isiZulu. Zama zama means “to keep on trying,” but also “to gamble.” Zama Zamas are informal miners who stay for days and weeks at a time in the darkened caverns where electric trains and massive engines once pumped air in and water out. Without helmets or safety equipment, with neither oxygen nor dewatering, lighting the way with only bicycle headlamps, zama zamas are indeed gamblers, those who stake everything for survival.
Most of these migrants are from the neighboring countries: Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Malawi. They follow the same routes as did formal miners during the era when the Chamber of Mines and its labor recruiting organizations sought African workers for the most arduous labor underground. Today, however, they are mainly undocumented migrants, who cross the borders without permits and whose illegalized status excludes them from obtaining access to education, health care, security, and the rights that citizens can expect. The objects of fear and xenophobic violence, they are doubly displaced, at once hyper-visible and invisible. The extremity of the poverty that they have left behind exceeds even that of the territories in which they now seek left-over gold.
At once an experimental document of southern Africa and a testimony to the plight of undocumented migrants whose poverty and destitution compels them to leave their homes—in grief and hope—THE ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT offers audiences the opportunity to grasp the costs of history at the point when heritage gives way to ruin. It is also an act of witnessing to the creative resilience of those whose stories have not solicited the sympathetic attention of the international communities that have, for so long, benefited from extractive economies and the legacies of the mineral industries in Africa. These are not the migrants whose images adorn the front pages of newspapers, or whose pressure on the coastlines and borders of Europe has generated so much discourse about the ‘Crisis of Europe.’ Nor are they the caravaneers of the US southern border. The men and women of THE ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT are the forgotten, the ghosts in the machine of modern, speculative capital which, despite the lure of virtual, digital, or immaterial labor, continues to rely upon natural resource extraction.
Rosalind C. Morris
