San Francisco Frontiers - Gold rush grips South African township

Dozens of fortune-seekers have flocked to the township of Springs, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of the city, scouring the dirt for gold.

The scene echoes the rush that built Johannesburg, the country's financial capital, at the turn of the 20th century.

The diggers, armed with pickaxes, arrived almost overnight.

"They spread like a virus," security guard Princess Thoko Mlangeni, 33, told AFP outside her tin‑shack home overlooking the field, recalling how they first appeared on February  8.

The sudden invasion of Springs -- birthplace of 1991 Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer -- reflects a wider frenzy, as gold prices have surged past $5,000 an ounce this year, more than double their January level.

According to Mlangeni's brother, Nicholas, the scramble in the township began when someone digging a fence-post hole noticed the soil's unusual hue and tested it in water.

Word spread on social media, and within days the field was crowded with hopeful prospectors.

Most are not chasing riches so much as survival in a country where unemployment hovers near 32 percent, according to government figures.

Mlangeni tried her luck too.

"I only found a tiny little bit," she said, showing a fraction of her little fingernail.

With a 12‑hour night shift ahead, the work was simply more trouble than it was worth for the mother of two.

- 'I can buy food' -

Others persist.

Between drags on a cigarette, Siyabonga Sidontsa stuffed soil into empty maize‑meal sacks.

"I came on Tuesday. I live a 30-minute walk away, and I take the sacks back with that," he said, pointing to the wheelbarrow he acquired for the purpose.

Processing 10 sacks of soil each day, he said that in five days he had earned 450 rand -- just under $30 -- more than he makes in a typical week since losing his gardening job five years ago.

"I got very little but I can buy food with that," said the 47-year-old father of three.

Some crews work at a bigger scale, loading small tipper trucks.

Men dig in flip‑flops through dense black earth, "cow dung", as a young girl sitting on full sacks calls it. Women carry the loads to the vehicles.

One of them weaves between the craters under the watchful eyes of cows displaced from their enclosure. On her head she balances a bag of the freshly dug soil.

For Sidontsa, the answer is simple: they should open a proper mine here "so that we can work".

South Africa, long renowned for its mineral wealth, saw a similar frenzy in 2021 when crystal‑like stones found in KwaZulu-Natal province sparked a diamond rush, only for experts to confirm they were merely quartz.

The country has a sprawling underworld of clandestine artisanal miners.

S.Jackson--SFF