Khopotso Bodibe: Welcome to Cry Like a Boy, a Euronews original podcast series dedicated to revealing stories of men who are defying centuries-old stereotypes in five different African countries.
I am Khopotso Bodibe and I am a South African radio journalist and a professional who uses media for activism and advocacy around health and gender issues.
If you are new to the show, this podcast explores how the pressure to be “a man” can harm families and society. After having travelled to Burundi and Senegal, today we continue a discussion that started off in Lesotho, a small enclave kingdom surrounded by South Africa.
If you haven’t listened to the previous episodes, stop now and go back. You’ll hear the story of how the pressure to be a breadwinner for the family is destroying the lives of thousands of men and families in Lesotho, as men leave their homes to seek employment, ostensibly in an effort to provide for their families, in dangerous illegal mines in South Africa.
Today we continue exploring this topic with Mpiwa Mangwiro. Mpiwa is based in Johannesburg and is an Advocacy Specialist for MenEngage Africa Alliance, fighting to achieve gender equality by including men and boys as part of the solution.
We also invited to this podcast Rosalind Morris, who has taught anthropology at Columbia University for 25 years and has produced a documentary on the zama zama, the illegal miners who come to South Africa not just from Lesotho, but also from other neighbouring countries such as Botswana or Zimbabwe.
We remind you that these interviews have been recorded at separate times.
Khopotso Bodibe: In EP. 9 and 10 of this show, we heard from a man living in a rural and depopulated district of Lesotho, he tells us that all young boys around there “no longer look for safe, formal employment after finishing school, they all go to those illegal mines”. He has two sons, and he is afraid they will follow this path too. “Boys will always be boys and they may be interested in working in the zama-zama when they see others making a lot of money”.
But is this true Rosalind?
Rosalind Morris: You know, this is interesting, I asked people on the other side of the mines, and we know that very few people make any money. Hardly anything. The fantasy that one strikes it rich is ridiculous. Every once in a while, someone strikes it rich. What does this mean, really? It means that you might get forty-five hundred grand worth of gold. So three hundred US dollars worth of gold. You might live for four months on that.
This is not rich, but the fantasy of this possibility is enormously powerful. It circulates like wildfire in this world. So when people say, oh, let’s go, we can get money quickly, we’ll bring it back, it’s the best way, this is going to be contradicted by experience very, very quickly and people have to live in the space of that contradiction. This is where the debt arises. This is where all of the anxiety about showing wealth that you don’t have arises.
But when I ask people, why don’t you tell people back home that this is not real? They tell me something very interesting. They say that the very fact that one person does well or that someone is able to, for example, acquire a motorcycle or maybe can squat in a house that looks grander than what is available at home, that to deny anyone else the capacity to try for that would be considered by those other people to be an act of violence in and of itself, a foreclosure of that other group persons possible future.
And so they’re willing to traffic in this fantasy, or at least not to reveal it for its duplicity. And this, I think, is a big part of the continuing industry. Nobody is getting very, very rich except perhaps a few gangsters and not just gangsters that you would imagine, you know. In the area where I work, I know there are white suburban residents who are asking the men who garden for them to take some money and buy gold and act as buyers and they become, you know, suburban gangsters who can take gold into a shop and sell it and have no questions asked.
SOUNDBITE FROM THE DOCUMENTARY: WE ARE ZAMA ZAMA
They are not all constantly being robbed underground, but they are afraid of being robbed underground all the time.
It happens people are press-ganged and you know, it’s a space where, as in so many informal communities, there are incredible forces, organised forces of criminality, and there’s everyone else who’s living in an effort to avoid it. And I think one of the big risks in the discourse about zama zama in South Africa is that these people are themselves the heart of the criminal problem, whereas in fact, these people, that is those who are going underground are primarily the victims of that criminal problem.