By News Online's Justin Pearce

South Africa's gold is hard to get. With gold seams set in solid rock 2,000 metres below the earth's surface, extracting the precious metal is a highly dangerous and difficult operation.

Some analysts have argued that without apartheid, South Africa's gold mines would scarcely have been economically viable at all.

Rock falls are a constant hazard. The 45cm (18 inch) high tunnels in which the miners work are made unstable by the blasting which is necessary to reach the gold.

Fires in the confined spaces are a further danger.

It is the gold mines which have made South Africa the wealthiest country in Africa - but the human cost has been immense.

The death toll at South African gold mines this century is reported as anything from 69,000 to 100,000.

More than one million people have sustained injuries over the same period.

Miners disenfranchised

The vast majority of South African deep-level miners are black - and before 1994 they had no vote and hardly any basic human rights.

"Black labour for the mines has always been cheap, readily available and with little value in terms of humanity," James Motlatsi, president of South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers, argued in a speech about the 1997 mine health and safety act.

"It was therefore always cheaper to dump sick and injured mineworkers on to the rural areas and to take on fresh workers, than to take preventative measures within the mines."

Migrant labour

Mining depended on a policy of migrant labour, with laws prohibiting the miners from settling in the cities with their families.

Miners would travel hundreds of kilometres to work, returning home only once or twice a year.

On the mines they were accommodated in hostels owned by the mining companies, isolated from wider urban society and under the scrutiny of their employers - another factor which hindered political mobilisation.

Many of the miners came from impoverished neighbouring countries such as Lesotho, or even from as far away as Malawi - and their livelihood depended on compliance.

The "homelands" policy ensured that even South African miners lost their citizenship, as black people were assigned on an ethnic basis to patches of land which were given nominal independence from South Africa.

Mr Motlatsi points out that black miners had no representation on mine safety committees - and argues that health and safety measures introduced in apartheid days had more to do with productivity than with workers' welfare.

Political will

The growth of the union movement in the 1980s and the official end of apartheid in 1994 brought with it an improvement in the mines' safety record.

Safety laws, training and equipment were improved. Last year, South Africa signed an international convention on mine safety.

For the first time, the political will exists to reduce the high death toll on the gold mines.

The pattern of mine ownership is also changing. African Rainbow Minerals, owner of the mine where 14 people were trapped underground in January, is a black-controlled company set up under the government's philosophy of black economic empowerment.

Yet even over the past three years, the death rate has averaged at more than one miner each day.

Unions still say that however much the rules may have changed, there are still not enough safety inspectors - and that some mine managers still value output more than safety.