Down a shaft that plunged more than a mile below the earth in South Africa’s old mining heartland, a man’s life hung in the balance.

After weeks working — then later, trapped and starved by violent gang leaders — in the abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine in Stilfontein, he clung weakly to a makeshift pulley winching him to safety this month. Above ground, a dozen men strained under the blistering morning sun, lifting the miner out inch by tenuous inch.

The man from Mozambique, who was unable to give his name as he collapsed on the ground, was the latest survivor of a stand-off that has gripped South Africa for weeks, pitching the police against brutal criminal syndicates who run networks of desperate, impoverished miners known as zama zamas.