In the informal settlement of Mandleni, on the outskirts of Ekurhuleni, migrants from Lesotho, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe arrived seeking honest work and found instead a carefully engineered system of debt bondage — one that seized their documents, compounded their obligations, and left them with no legal path home. The exploitation, documented by investigative journalists, extended from stolen wages and physical beatings to sexual abuse, with allegations that the very authorities meant to protect these workers may have been complicit in their captivity. It is an old and terrible story: the vuln
Migrants trapped in debt bondage at illegal South African mines, police involvement alleged
Migrants subjected to physical beatings, wage theft, sexual abuse, and exploitation through forced labor and debt bondage in illegal mining operations.