Humanizing Migrants and Miners of Southern Africa

We celebrated last Christmas with friends in the Qacha’s Nek District of Lesotho, the small mountainous nation surrounded by South Africa. It was in Qacha’s Nek that Christina Balch and I met for the first time while living there as Peace Corps volunteers in 2008. Our friends welcomed us warmly this time as they always have for my research visits over the years. Even over our long distance, we have remained close for eighteen years.

Like anywhere, in Lesotho people come home for the holidays. “Hela monna, nako e telele (hey man, long time)!” Children play. People eat, drink, and celebrate. We catch up on our lives and families and talk about those who have died or fallen sick, and those who are away in South Africa working or seeking work.

Migration is an idea and a lived experience, both for an individual migrant and for the social networks in which they live. Migration back and forth from South Africa has been a central part of being Basotho, as people from Lesotho are called, for the past 150 years.

My former students are now grown people with their own families. One of them, Thabo (pseudonym), has found work in “the mines,” sometimes called likoting—literally, “the holes.” No one seems sure which mine. I remember Thabo working his tail off in school, at home, and on the football pitch. Despite Thabo’s efforts, he never passed graduation exams. As Thabo saw it, his options were nil in Lesotho, and so like so many others he has gone, at least for now.

As an environmental historian with a close relationship to Lesotho, migrant experiences have always shaped my research and thinking. I wish the best for Thabo, but the archives teach me to worry too.

Archival documents and images help us reflect on the environments in which migrant miners have lived and died—the mines, hostels, transit routes, homes, and villages. In this exhibit, Christina and I mesh art and archive to pay tribute to miners who died in the early 1980s in the gold mines of Welkom, South Africa, the place represented by the black hole in Belongings. Our objective is to humanize all those who have lived, and continue to live, similar lives, and who sustain our world through their work and sacrifice.

Belongings by Christina Balch, 2025
Acrylic, watercolor, graphite and colored pencil on watercolor paper
105 cm x 75 cm (41 inches x 29.5 inches)
Artwork photography credit: Kobus Robbertze
Studio space provided by the University of the Free State, Fine Arts Department

Detail of Belongings

Humanizing the Archive

It was scraps of paper, some exhibited here, found at a specific time and place, that sparked this work. I visited the Free State Archives Repository in Bloemfontein for another project on South African history. Historians like me mine mountains of material for small nuggets that tell us about the past. Sometimes, we find unintended gems in the process. The estate papers of the Welkom Magistrate Court glimmered with subtle, yet powerful evidence of migrant lives and environments.

Joseph Letsela—a man, husband, father, son, and miner from Lesotho—was one such life.

Joseph Letsela was one of the many Black African men who died in mining accidents in the early 1980s in Welkom. Welkom has been a goldmining hub since the 1940s. Its tightly controlled labor force has been almost exclusively Black African. The labyrinth of Apartheid-era legislation and policing enforced this until the 1990s.

A single box in this archival collection contains about 100 files: one file for each deceased person. Each file holds four or five sheets of paper, sometimes identification documents too. Each file is brief, banal, and bureaucratic. But I saw more in these scraps of paper. They were the forebears of Thabo, my former student, and of so many other migrant miners from Lesotho and elsewhere whose humanity society has minimized.

I told Christina about the documents over dinner one night, and she, too, was inspired. Christina returned to the archives with me. Together, we saw individuals, families, and homes in these files. Words were inadequate. Christina took up her tools to tell a story through art; one about people, space, home, and environments.

The men who died violent deaths in the corporate mines of Welkom in this period lived lives that straddled different environments that illustrate their humanity. Joseph Letsela lived in Ha Khanyetsi, a village in Qacha’s Nek like the one in the photo below, not far from where Christina and I spent last Christmas with friends. Joseph was the son of Motlatsi and Malena. Joseph’s wife ’Mamoetsuoa gave birth to at least one child named Moetsuoa, maybe more.

Letsela worked at Free State Geduld Mines on a stope team, which extracted ore from the “stopes”—tunnels that are excavated horizontally from the mine shafts. It is loud, cramped, dusty, and dangerous work. Put simply, “ke boima–it is heavy,” as one miner friend told me. On April 7, 1981, Joseph Letsela died underground from an “open fracture skull.” As in most of the death notices that we saw, the space for describing the actual accident was left blank. The voids in the documents often spoke louder than the written words.

The Geduld Mines management sent Letsela’s belongings home to Lesotho with a relative. The clothesline in Belongings displays items that were found in Joseph’s locker in Hostel No. 4 where he slept, congregated with friends, and ate meals. The line illuminates a link between a man, a hostile work environment, and his home, where now another hole formed from his permanent absence.

The returned belongings included due wages of about 170 Rand. No death benefit, no pension.

At Ha Khanyetsi, ’Mamoetsuoa would have received her husband’s clothing. In traditional Basotho practice, Joseph’s immediate family would have given away his clothing and blankets to appropriate kin after a period of mourning. Any person who has lost a loved one suddenly can appreciate this significance. When my father died young, my brother and I wore our dad’s old clothes and shoes, clinging to his belongings that contained traces of his personhood.

Letsela was only one of thousands of Basotho and other men from the region who had met similar fates: Tlotlollo Thabisi, a father of six children from Lesotho; and Themba Tshezi of KwaZulu (South Africa) who left behind a guitar among other belongings; and Chigotsane Chongo from Mozambique, whose Bible was sent home after his head was crushed in an accident. Their humanity erased by the conditions of their life and death, these small artifacts are a powerful reminder: they parented, sang, and prayed, like anyone.

An Extractive Relationship

In addition to countless laborers, Lesotho has contributed much to South Africa. Many anti-apartheid political exiles, heroes of modern South Africa, hid in Lesotho’s mountains. There they were sheltered by the generosity and warmth of Basotho residents, who sacrificed their own security. Travelers like me continue to experience this warmth and generosity today.

Farmers in Lesotho have produced commercial wool and mohair for export since at least the 1870s, often under coercive policies. Millions of merino sheep and angora goats have, as a result, devoured Lesotho’s grasslands, hastened soil erosion, and made local food production more difficult. Rather than bolstering the development that both British colonial planners and post-independence leaders have imagined, the wool and mohair industries continue to deepen Lesotho’s dependence on South Africa both for exporting its resources and for migrants seeking work.

Water, as drawn in Belongings, springs from Lesotho’s mountains where it is harnessed in the tangle of engineering works that are the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) and transported to quench South Africa’s insatiable thirst. The benefits to Lesotho are modest at best, ecologically and socially destructive at worst. It is an extractive relationship, one in which Lesotho has provided South Africa with so much and received so little in return.

Lesotho deserves better.

But Basotho have always fought for better: to preserve their own culture and stories and to improve their working conditions. Artists of a popular music genre—Famo—chronicle the struggles and celebrate the adventures of migrant life. Barely a year after Jospeh Letsela was killed in Welkom, Black miners, including some Basotho, formed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), in part, to create safer working conditions. The mining corporations and their allies in the apartheid state fought hard against this union, denigrating strikes and protests as violent rampages and riots. The irony, of course, is their neglect of the violence that workers like Joseph Letsela, Tlotlollo Thabisi, and countless others experienced at the hands of mining corporations and the state.

When five thousand miners went on strike in Welkom in July 1981, many were ultimately fired for participating. South African photographer William Matlala and his colleagues captured this glum reality.

The NUM worked diligently to improve the lives of miners, nearly all of them migrants working from one temporary contract to the next. Still, in 1983 and again in 1986, two major mining disasters took the lives of nearly 250 miners. We don’t have to glorify this violence with heroics, but these men, husbands, sons, fathers, and friends deserve the same dignity and respect that all humans do.

Re-Telling Migrant Worker Stories through Art

We join an important chorus with this work. Historians and social scientists of southern Africa, and elsewhere, have offered deeply researched scholarship on the social, medical, and cultural experience of migrants. But perhaps art about mines and migrants has deepened our sense of humanity the most.

Music rings loud. Loretta Lynn told Americans about family poverty in “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Bruce Springsteen built on older traditions of visual art, literature, and film in telling a story of Mexican migrants in “Sinaloa Cowboy.” Similarly, in his masterpiece “Stimela” (Coal Train), South African musician Hugh Masekela told the world how men came on trains from afar, coerced from their rural homes to drill in the mines of Johannesburg for “almost no pay,” while living in “filthy flea ridden” corporate hostels and eating “mish mash.” 

In Mine Boy, South African writer Peter Abrahams brings readers into the mines and townships of 1940s Johannesburg through the life of Xuma. Xuma is a man of high morals, deeply disturbed by  “the hissing and explosions from the bowels of the earth” that “beat against his brain.” A genius of visual arts of the mines, South African William Kentridge illustrates workers’ lives, corporate greed, and the environmental violence of extraction through charcoal and stylistic animation in his 1991 animated film Mine, among others.

The collective work of artists has helped to humanize miners and migrants, yet ignorance, apathy, and intolerance remain prevalent.

While we watched xenophobia shape the 2024 U.S. election from abroad, we also followed a troubling story in South Africa. In January 2025, 90 dead miners and nearly four hundred emaciated survivors, operating illegally and mostly undocumented, were pulled from a defunct gold mine shaft at Stilfontein. They were essentially starved to death by South African authorities. These so-called zama zamas (hustlers) work under horrible conditions, often under criminal syndicates, and are mostly migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho. It is a complicated story, to be sure, but zama zamas have been broadly demonized by the South African public, reduced to villains devoid of human character. On the contrary, they too have homes, families, hopes, and fears.

This is not Lesotho’s story alone. Migrant workers from all over South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere—documented or not—have long provided essential labor in South Africa. They mine, they farm, they care for the young, old, and sick, and they do other important work. But migrant workers have rarely received the compensation, respect, or dignity that they deserve, neither in the past nor in the present. It’s an ongoing story in the Americas, Europe, and everywhere. 

Belongings connects Lesotho and South Africa, but it could also connect the United States and Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica, or Guatemala. Like all people, migrant workers are human, fallible, and mortal. Seeing their humanity first, empathizing with them as humans, allows us to understand the tangle of complex local and global systems in which our fragile lives are embedded.

---

Featured Image: South African Mine Fire Traps. Photo by FIFTY, 2015.

Christopher Conz (he/him) is an environmental historian of southern Africa. He was a Fulbright Scholar based at the University of the Free State in South Africa where he conducted research on the environmental history of forced removals under apartheid. In 2024, Conz published his first book, titled Environment, Knowledge, and Injustice in Lesotho: The Poverty of Progress. Website. Contact.

Christina Balch (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary American artist and cultural producer. Christina is part of the artist collective FeministFuturist and the nonprofit organization the Racial Justice Collaborative. Her drawing Belongings is featured in “Breaking Ground: A Stethoscape Exhibition,”a group exhibition at the Vrystaat Arts Festival in July 2025 in South Africa. Website.