Deep Underground - Documentary SeriesIn January 2025, South African police ended a months-long siege at a defunct gold mine by cutting off food and water to force hundreds of illegal miners to the surface, and pulled out 78 bodies. Our series follows the syndicate economy that put those men underground, the siege that nearly buried them there, and the sister who took the state to court to bring her brother home.
In August 2024, police laid siege to the disused Buffelsfontein Gold Mine near Stilfontein, North West, attempting to force out miners they estimated in the hundreds. By November, officers were cutting off food and water at the shaft entrances, a tactic police defended as necessary “to avoid allowing criminality to thrive.” A court ordered restrictions lifted, but by January 2025, when a court-ordered extraction operation finally went ahead, rescuers pulled 78 bodies and 246 survivors, many so emaciated they could barely stand, from shafts more than two kilometres underground. Community volunteers from the nearby Khuma township had already recovered several more bodies through informal rescue efforts before police allowed the official operation to begin.
Deep Underground traces this world from the syndicate economics that built it, through the 154 days of the Stilfontein siege, to the unresolved question at its centre: whether this was law enforcement doing an ugly job, or, as the miners' own families and civil society groups insist, a mass death the state had the power to prevent.
