Vala Inhliziyo

Title: Vala Inhliziyo, Artist: Bernice Troskie, 2025. Oil on Canvas, 50cm x 20cm (x2).

Published on Freedom Day, 27th April 2025, this piece references a controversy in the early part of 2025, where hundreds of illegal artisanal miners were trapped at the bottom of a disused mine shaft in the Stilfontein area of South Africa. The Project was given the Zulu name “Vala Umgodi”, meaning “Close the Hole”. The title of this paining plays on that, with the Umgodi (the hole) replaced with Inhliziyo (meaning the Heart). Some of the young miners escaped and came to the surface, where they were arrested by police almost immediately. They recalled harrowing tales of Gang over-lords, slavery at gunpoint, months spent kilometres under the earth, starvation, and, as we would later realise due to signs on the emaciated corpses brought to the surface; cannibalism. We carry the blame for that as a society, for creating a world in which these young men thought this was their only option to provide for themselves and their families, for allowing this to happen to our children. One of the young men, or rather children, who escaped the gangs and made his way back up was only 14 years old.