Boitumelo and Nambitha, residents of the now-defunct mine villages of Durban Deep and Blyvooruitzicht, recall with nostalgia the time when their families first moved to these areas. The men of their respective families had secured employment with the mines, which provided them with access to electricity, running water, education and housing. ‘Life was vibrant’, said Nambitha. ‘We had everything we needed and we thought that the future was bright.’

But their lives would rapidly, and unexpectedly, change when the mines suddenly ceased operation, leaving them breathing toxic air, stuck with few employment opportunities and struggling to find answers about the future.

The similarities between the women's stories, which occurred in the major South African gold mining belt within 10 years of each other, illustrate the persistent human rights challenges of the mining industry in South Africa in respect to proper mine closure, despite recent reinforcement of the domestic legal framework. Against the background of a rapidly declining gold mining industry, serious questions arise around the long-term sustainability of this extractive industry model: who will bear the costs of rehabilitation and undertake responsibility for the environmental and human rights impacts once these companies are gone?

The stories of the Blyvooruitzicht and Durban Deep mining communities, located in the gold mining belt of the Gauteng province of South Africa, offer a damning portrait of the systemic marginalization that many communities, having grown up around major mining operations in the country, experience in the aftermath of the improper closure of those operations. The inability of these communities to access their rights to environmental health and to socioeconomic well-being, once these operations have been abandoned or put on hold, has significant consequences for those communities in accessing other rights: namely, the rights to equality, dignity and life – despite the fact that these represent fundamental guarantees of the South African constitution and are an integral part of the international human rights framework.