JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—In the shadow of a six-story-high mine dump, excavated sand gleaming white in the sun, a young man, sweat streaming down his bare chest, runs his fingers through a bucket of stony dirt he’s just pulled from the depths of a dark shaft.
David Mokushane (not his real name) is a zama zama, an illegal miner, on the western outskirts of Johannesburg.
In the language of Sesotho, he chuckles: “All the time, every day, we wait for the big one, the big find, something left behind many years ago, to make us money to feed our families for a year.”…