Along with about 600 other men, Ndumiso lives and works in a small gang-controlled "town" - complete with markets and a red light district - that has grown up deep underground at a disused gold mine in South Africa.
"In one level of the shaft there are bodies and skeletons. We call that the zama-zama graveyard," he said.While he sleeps on sandbags after back-breaking days underground, his family lives in a house he has bought in a township of the main city, Johannesburg. His current job is at a mine in the small town of Stilfontein, around 90 miles south-west of Johannesburg, which is at the
South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa said the mine was a "crime scene", but police were negotiating with the miners to end the stand-off, rather than going down to arrest them. "While they are not profitable for large-scale industrial mining, they are profitable for small-scaling mining," he told theNdumiso said he used to work as a drill operator, earning less than $220 a month, for a gold-mining company until he was laid off in 1996.
"Some carry pistols, shotguns and semi-automatic weapons to protect themselves from rival gangs of miners," it added. Most of what he finds he gives to the gang leader, who pays him a minimum of $1,100 every two weeks. He said he was able to keep some gold, which he sells on the black market to top up his income.
Ndumiso does not come out more often in case he loses his digging spot, but after three months it gets too much to remain underground. This is then "washed" by his group at a makeshift plant to separate the gold using dangerous chemicals like mercury and sodium cyanide.He said he has a ready-made buyer, whom he contacts via WhatsApp.
As for the buyer of his gold, Ndumiso said he did not know anything about him, except that he was a white man in an illegal industry that involves people of different races and classes. "There should be a policy to decriminalise their operations, to better organise them and to regulate them," he added.