Reclaiming the Living Dead: the Zama Zama Miners
Ellen Schattschneider
In recent years, as they became enmeshed in the violent control of criminal syndicates and were then trapped underground by South African police, the zama zama miners of Stilfontein came to take on some of the characteristics of what Giorgio Agamben (2002), in his insightful analysis of Nazi imagery, terms “the living dead,” materially and symbolically stripped of full humanness by those in power. When they were finally brought to the surface, the barely living survivors were described as “walking dead" in media reports. There were endless denunciations of the zama zama. The miners were unfairly condemned as alien parasites sucking out the terrestrial lifeblood of the nation’s mineral patrimony, terrorising honest citizens of South Africa through organised crime (Morris 2021, 2025a, 2025b).
How to reclaim the humanity of those whose humanness was so brutally diminished and denied, while still acknowledging and mourning the grievous mistreatment of the most vulnerable members of the nation? How to demonstrate that they were actively caring for their family members, many of whom resided around the old mine openings in precarious conditions?
Berman’s tactic is to locate her prints on the surface of the pock-marked land around Stilfontein. She refuses to confine the “living dead” to underground warrens, their supposed natural habitat. Rather, these works insist that their proper place is on the surface, emphatically part of local communities and national space.
Reclaiming Crown Mines I and II, 2025, Etching
She shows, especially in Ghosts of Stilfontein I and II, the outlines of the small shantytown shelters occupied by the miners’ families, reminding us that their material conditions are not so vastly different from that of millions of other South Africans. Berman’s prints in effect cry out: look at your fellow residents of the land that we all share, the very land that South Africans and Frontline State citizens struggled together to liberate.
Her series of six images - three pairs - can be conceptualized in terms of the classic anthropological three-part scheme of rites of passage, clarified by Arnold Van Gennep (1909, 1960) and Victor Turner (1967): first, separation, in which the subjects of the ritual process are divorced from their conventional coordinates of experience; the second, the liminal, or “betwixt and between” stage, a reversible world of disequilibrium; and finally, the stage of reaggregation in which the ritual subject is reintegrated into a wider social or cosmological continuum, normally at a higher structural level.
For about a century, this tripartite scheme could be positively applied to the experience of millions of mining labor migrants. They were separated off from natal kith and kin, entered into the liminal, ambiguous world of the underground mines, and then returned home to reintegration, a process sealed in many cases through the purchase of bridewealth cattle that secured a future for themselves and their lineage. Yet, during the recent crisis, this classic scheme has been violated and distorted, and safe reintegration is nowhere at hand: rather than re-emerging triumphant from their underground travails, able to care for their loved ones, the survivors were excoriated, criminally prosecuted, and deported.
In the first pair of images, we begin with the initial separation phase. InReclaiming Crown Mines I, we clearly discern human figures. One kneels, closely connected to the earth, another stands and hoists onto his shoulder a box that might be full of ore or tailings. The central section of the landscape seems to be torn open, containing figures that are more indistinct, their limbs contorted; they might be dead or on the verge of death, nearly swallowed up in the earth. They hover on the threshold between the deceased and the “living dead”, but our eyes cannot turn from them. InReclaiming Crown Mines II, the work of reclamation seems still more difficult, as the passage of time renders the Lost even less discernible. The shapes of bodies are only hinted at, as if they are merging irrevocably with the earth.
Excavating Ghosts I and II, 2025, Etching
The next pair of works places us in the liminal zone. In Excavating Ghosts I, full human figures are not visible, yet mounds of dirt raised from access shafts are uncannily evocative of barely buried bodies, hovering between invisibility and tangibility. Next, in Excavating Ghosts II, we behold a stratigraphy, looking up at a rock-face that seems to hold traces of the faces of the Dead.
Ghosts of Stilfontein I and II, 2025, Etching
Finally, the third set of images suggests a reintegration process that is tragically incomplete. In The Ghosts of Stilfontein I and II, our gaze becomes more aerial, as we behold a larger perspective. We cannot fully make out human shapes, although the scattered trees might evoke traces of those who have departed. Ghosts of Stilfontein I centers on an enormous furrow in the land, funneling into a gaping mouth in the foreground, plunging, one senses, deep into the earth. In the Ghost of Stilfontein II the single channel has expanded into multiple furrows spread across the scarred landscape, converging towards a distant vanishing point. The foregrounds of each furrow are dark, again evocative of the deep shafts in which the zama zama were confined for weeks, many starved to death. Only now the furrows seem to describe the contours of fingers, as Mother Earth holds the precious Dead in her capacious hand.
Over the course of the six prints in this series, the surface is figured as a kind of dynamic membrane that gradually absorbs more and more of the Lost into the land itself, which promises dreams of wealth hedged about with terrible danger. The net effect of this sequence is to cast the fractured land of Stilfontein as a kind of cemetery. In diverse African societies, burial grounds are sites of homemaking, constituting compelling claims to be fundamentally of a place. One is reminded of the final scene in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist(1974), in which the unknown murdered stranger is respectfully buried by the local Black community, welcoming him home, to be at one with the ancestors (Clingman 1992).
In this respect, Berman not only excavates the spectral presences of those abandoned underground; she emphatically gives them a home, a place of honor in the South African body politic, a place that has been denied to them in most mainstream discourse. In Berman’s healing vision, the zama zama are no longer the exiled “living dead”, perpetual aliens condemned to wander through subterranean shafts outside the bounds of conventional humankind. Rather, through the witnessing and excavating craft of the printmaker, the miners are resurfaced to become one with the land itself, at long last imbued with the essence of ancestorhood.
References:
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archives. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Zone Books.
Clingman, Stephen. 1992. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. University of Massachusetts Press.
Morris, Rosalind. 2021. We are Zama Zama. Documentary: https://www.wearezamazama.com/
Morris, Rosalind, 2025a. Unstable Ground: The Lives, Death, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa. Columbia University Press.
Morris, Rosalind, 2025a. Interview with Dennis Davis, Judge for Yourself, 15 February 2025.
https://www.enca.com/shows/judge-yourself-20-february-2025
Turner, Victor. 1967. "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols (New York: Cornell University Press, 338-347
Van Gennep, 1909 (1960)The Rites of Passage.The University of Chicago Press.