Death no deterrent for S. African gem diggers
SOUTH AFRICA: The man slips the plastic pouch of gems into his mouth, an illicit haul from the sandy deposits scattered among the mountains of South Africa's diamond coast.
"It's my safe," he explains, sliding the stash back along the inside of his cheek.
The group of diggers are waiting for the cover of darkness to make another raid on a disused mine, opposite their make-shift camp, where 10 miners died in an avalanche three months ago.
Illegal miners in South Africa are ready to risk death to chase a share of the mineral riches that shaped the continent's biggest economy.
In sparsely populated Namaqualand, where the famed gem deposits run along the icy Atlantic Ocean to the Namibian border, diamond giant De Beers was once the top employer, providing 3,000 jobs and building two towns with recreation halls, a golf course and schools, to house its staff.
But its mines were halted in 2008 and the company's Namaqualand operations are in the final stages of a 225 million rand ($27 million, 22 million euro) sell-off after years of retrenchments.
The slowdown has emptied out the private mining towns, but has lured growing numbers of diggers from the area's other small settlements into the abandoned fields.
A question of survival
"I can say that more than 60 per cent of the active workforce are involved in the informal diamond trade," said Andy Pienaar, of the social outreach office in Komaggas, one of the few small villages in the mining area.
"There was sort of a blessing from the community that 'people, you may go'" dig, he added.
"It was about survival. It was about sustaining and we're not talking about high life standards, we're talking about just basically survival."