Growing up, Cyprial dreamed of being a lawyer. 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 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 kilograms at full speed through tunnels and up steep hills to trucks waiting to deliver coal to informal sellers in nearby Ermelo.
Only a few tree trunks propped up the stone slab forming the roof at the mine entrance – a hole in the slope of a gutted hill abandoned by a mining company in eastern Mpumalanga province, an area scarred by decades of coal extraction.
South Africa ranks among the world’s top coal producers, with the fossil fuel firing about 80 percent of the country’s electricity. As one of the 12 largest greenhouse gas emitters globally, the country became the first in 2021 to sign a Just Energy Transition Partnership deal worth $8.5 billion with wealthy nations to move away from dirty-power generation.
Yet 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.
Underground realities
“Down the shaft, it’s pitch black. You cannot even see your finger,” said Cyprial, taking a drag of a joint he said helped “take all the fears and shove them away.”
Speaking under a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from authorities, he feared the illegal mine might one day collapse on him.
“Half of the youth from here in Ermelo are doing this job,” he said.
Unemployment in Mpumalanga stands at 34 percent according to latest government figures—higher than the national average. Despite coal from Ermelo powering cities across the country and abroad, many locals live in shacks without electricity access.
‘Artisanal’ versus ‘illegal’
The government calls Cyprial and others “illegal miners,” but they prefer “artisanal mining,” saying their unauthorized work is essential to the local community.
“This coal, we transport it to communities so those people can use it to cook and to warm themselves,” said Jabulani Sibiya, who chairs Ermelo’s artisanal miners’ union.
The electricity produced in Mpumalanga is too expensive for many locals, he said. “It’s not fair.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa has called miners like these a “menace” to the country’s economy and security, with authorities working to stamp out the activity.
Analysts estimate there were more than 40,000 illegal miners in South Africa in 2021, though most operated in abandoned gold shafts. Meanwhile, the formal coal sector employs more than 100,000 people in direct and indirect jobs across the value chain, according to University of Cape Town research.
Fighting for a fair future
Ermelo’s artisanal miners have applied for a collective mining permit, but the process is costly and slow, said Zethu Hlatshwayo, spokesman for the National Association of Artisanal Miners.
Earlier this year, the government introduced a draft bill to facilitate artisanal mining formalization. But the process remains mired in red tape, Hlatshwayo said.
“You have to have land, permits, you have to do your environmental authorization,” he explained. Miners also need a “rehabilitation fund” to restore land to its pre-mining state.
“All of that will take you to a good three million rands,” he said – an unimaginable sum for miners living “hand to mouth.”
According to Hlatshwayo, a “just transition” to green energy requires ordinary people also have access to South Africa’s mineral wealth. This would correct “the injustices of the past,” he said, referring to the apartheid era when the lucrative mining industry was exclusively white-owned.
“For us, ‘just transition’ means transitioning from a large-scale destructive form of mining, into a sustainable, artisanal and small-scale mining sector,” he said, sitting in a vegetable garden he tends with a local environmental NGO.
Activist Philani Mngomezulu, working in the same garden, added: “Just one community mine, in the entire history of mining in this town—that’s all we’re fighting for!”
Beyond coal’s end
The men argue that mining will continue even after the coal phaseout, including for critical minerals needed for products from solar panels to electric cars.
But it’s essential to “include sustainability, and artisanal and small-scale miners from the marginalized communities,” Hlatshwayo said.
“It will not be a just transition if our people are left behind.”
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