English▸ noun
(plural zama zama or plural zama zamas)
South African English informal a person who works illegally in abandoned mineshafts in order to retrieve metals or minerals: the team entered the mine intending to evict the zama zamas.
– ORIGIN Zulu, from a reduplication of -zama, stem of ukuzama ‘try, strive, make an attempt to obtain something’. Zama Zama was used from 1994 as the name of a national lottery in South Africa.