City of Gold

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

Departing San Francisco headed to South Africa, I was looking forward to exploring a new country, gazing at animal herds, eating exotic meals. A journey of an entirely different sort was waiting for me.

Crossing the North American continent, flying over the Atlantic Ocean, traversing the length of continental Africa and then dropping down a stomach-churning 700-foot mine shaft was never part of my travel plan. But here I am.

Underground. Wearing a hard hat.

City of Gold (in Zulu, eGoli) is Johannesburg’s nickname. Its premier amusement park is Gold Reef City—a Disney-like gold rush mining town. The theme is money.

Above ground, carnival rides, the laughter of children frolicking and cheery actors in period costumes. Souvenir shops sell tee shirts, and a casino sells financial ruin. Below ground, cruelty and human exploitation.

Gold mining in South Africa is the ulcerous history of one set of humans fucking over another set of humans because there was profit in it—and because no one stopped them. Long before South Africa’s four decades of racial apartheid, gold mines—shut down just 50 years ago—were a human lodestone of misery marbled with money.

In the mines, instant death came from rock falls and slow deaths by deprivation. Lifetimes of constant fear, of tortured survival, of walking cadavers. Under tons of earth and rock, coarse, craggy, pocked, pitted tunnels were chiseled to create subterranean human ant farms. A purgatory where death was freedom.

Mine shaft collapses—called rockfalls—crushed their fair share of miners, and scared the shit out of the rest. Workers died from rockfalls, tuberculosis, silicosis and pneumonia at a rate equal to a 9/11 Twin Towers attack every year, year after year, non-stop.

Workers lived in overcrowded prison compounds corralled with barbed wire. Cement slab bunks. No bedding. No sanitation worth the name. Dysentery, scurvy, typhoid.

The mine is drafty, chilly, claustrophobic, but I’m sweating. My stomach is knotted, my mouth dry. Standing apart from my tour group, I can only handle so much information. It is too appalling and feels all too familiar.

Exiting the mine, my eyes squint under the glaring sun. Despite the sweltering heat crawling in and out of my pores, I have goosebumps.

A mine worker in 19th century Joburg wasn’t paid enough to support a family. In 21st century America, fifty-three million adults earn less than the U.S. poverty threshold for a family of four. A full-time, minimum-wage worker needs to work an extra 33 hours just to equal the measly amount that Ebenezer Scrooge paid his workers in the Dickens’ novel ‘A Christmas Carol.’

Childcare workers, maids, cashiers, waiters, parking lot attendants are today’s gold miners. If math or morality mean anything, they are monetary slaves being mined right in front of me, every day.

In the future, an American amusement park modeled after Gold Reef City will replicate a McDonald’s, a childcare center or a Hilton hotel room. The exhibit will showcase large employers—a part of their souls cracked—exploiting workers on a mass scale and getting away with it.

Savage capitalism without a savage mine. Just savage people.

Click here for more short stories set in South Africa.