DYING FOR GOLD – SIMA Collection

Director(s): Catherine Meyburgh and Richard Pakleppa
Producer(s): Catherine Meyburgh and Richard Pakleppa

Billed as “the untold story of the making of South Africa”, this devastating documentary explores the numerous ways in which the mining industry was a key force in shaping apartheid South Africa. For more than a century, hundreds of thousands of black men from Sub-Saharan Africa have been leaving their families to dig for gold and produce South Africa’s key source of wealth. Featuring a rich archive of footage from the colonial and apartheid eras, along with interviews with gold miners whose lives have been decimated by silicosis and tuberculosis, the film clearly shows how Southern Africa’s indigenous societies were destroyed in order to create a pool of cheap surplus labour that mined some of the world’s richest deposits of gold at the cheapest possible price.