He developed miners' phthisis, commonly known as silicosis, caused by fibrosis of the lungs from repeatedly inhaling silica dust. My uncle recollects that my grandfather's death was agonising and slow.
After he died, the family was thrust into a financial void. My grandmother received a mining pension, which, I am told, was her only financial compensation. It was wholly inadequate. She fed seven children with help from her brothers.
That was nearly 80 years ago. But while reading Jaine Roberts' research published last week on occupational lung disease among former black miners in the Eastern Cape, I had to think that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
To start with, silicosis prevalence continues unabated - particularly in southern Africa's rural villages, which supply mines with migrant labour and absorb the sick back into their fold to die. Roberts quotes the late Neil White of UCT's Lung Institute as saying that South Africa's silicosis epidemic is unparalleled in human history in terms of duration, intensity and size.
She collates results from studies that give weight to White's assertion. Early last century, an estimated 25 percent of white miners had silicosis. The figures for black miners are unknown. Studies in the 1990s put the prevalence of lung disease, mainly silicosis, at more than 30 percent of ex-miners, while a 2004 study showed 24 percent of employed miners had silicosis.
Early last century, silicosis was the subject of laws that supposedly allowed for medical tests and compensation, initially for white miners and only later, with discriminatory clauses, for black miners. My grandmother's struggle is testament to the mining industry's failure to properly safeguard even white families from its occupational hazards. But if you got silicosis back then, your family would be a little better off if you were white rather than black. That seems to be generally the case today too.
Silicosis is now governed by the 1973 Occupational Diseases in Mines and Works Act, which has applied equally to black miners since 1993.
Roberts describes the law as a trade-off in that miners sign away their right to sue employers for developing lung disease in exchange for statutory compensation - assuming that silicosis sufferers know first that a compensation system exists and second, that they have access to it when they return to their villages.
Roberts' research shows that 99 percent of former miners have never heard of the legislation, let alone its details. And they live far from the occupational health screening facilities in the urban areas.
Compensation comes in the form of a lump sum, capped at R84 000. That's the price we put on a breadwinner's future earnings, on children growing up without a father's guidance, on watching a man waste away. There is no provision for compensatory pension or ongoing medical costs.
Mining firms are now set to challenge a proposed increase in the dust levies they must pay for compensation to ex-miners as South Africa finally comes to terms with the real rate of prevalence of the disease.
The mining industry has been subsidised for so long with society's greatest asset - human life - that it seems to have lost all sense of responsibility for the hazards on which its wealth has been built. |
Publications
