In February this year bodies of two illegal gold miners were discovered at an abandoned mine east of Johannesburg in South Africa in the same area where more than 20 illegal gold miners were rescued after being trapped underground for several days. Such disused mines are kill over 100 people in the country every year, but that does not serve as a deterrence to other illegal miners.

Every night hundreds of men driven by poverty and desperation and armed with little more than torches, pick-axes and nerves of steel venture into the world’s oldest and deepest gold mines to chance their luck in finding a few kilograms of the seam of gold-bearing rock that was discovered in the 1880s.

In a short documentary VICE TV follows the lives of these ‘men of gold’ know as “zama zama” in Zulu (those who try to get something from nothing) and how they work to feed their children and wives in harsh economic conditions on the outskirts of one of Africa’s fasted growing capital decades after the end of apartheid and the enactment of the Black Economic Empowerment program.