Anger Over This Mine That Became A Tomb

It’s been a year since three workers were trapped in a collapsed mine. Desperate family want answers.

- Yonela Mgwali

The dirt road to Christopher Mazibuko’s house in Louieville, in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, is rocky, quiet and roamed by skinny goats.

Mazibuko lives in a single room, made of mud, in Louieville, 20 minutes from Lily Mine that took the life of his wife. On this bright Sunday afternoon, Mazibuko is wearing casual clothes. He sits on his doorstep; with friends sharing a beer – maybe alcohol eases the pain.

It has been a year since the fatal accident at the Vantage Goldfields-owned Lily Mine, near Barberton, where three people – Mazibuko’s wife Pretty Nkambule, Yvonne Mnisi and Solomon Nyarende – were buried in rubble.

Lily Mine began as an oxide open pit operation, in 2000, and became a shallow, underground operation.

It has been a year since we last saw Mazibuko. On that day, soon after the tragedy, he was sitting on a small bench, cradling his seven-month-old daughter and five-year-old son. There was the agony of both hope and despair in their eyes.

Mazibuko will never forget his last day with his wife, one of the three entombed in a steel container, 80 meters underground, after a crown pillar collapsed at the open pit gold mine, on February 5, 2016. He shakes his head and sheds a tear.

On that fateful day, Mazibuko, who also works at the mine, was on leave.

He woke up early to prepare a lunchbox for Nkambule and walked her to the bus station. Little did he know that it would be their last walk together.