South Africa’s clandestine miners defend their work (and want it to be legal)

Day after day, hundreds of artisanal miners bring the material they have extracted to this settlement to the west of Johannesburg, where the gold is separated from the stone and the metal is prepared for sale. The miners unload their sacks filled with broken rock into large iron bowls, and workers armed with large vertical mallets pound it into a kind of sand, which is then introduced into the cylinders, along with water and heavy metal balls that will finish the job of milling the gravel containing the gold. During the next stage, mercury is added and then, after filtering the finely ground rock, it is removed with a blowtorch, which releases the gold from the amalgam.
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