The Lure of Gold

While taking care of the necessary task of exchanging travelers checks I stumbled upon an unexpected record of the cities sorted past. During the banks construction, right in the center of downtown Johannesburg, workers uncovered a vast network of tunnels running underneath the city itself. Beneath the tellers and the ATMs there is now a section of one of these tunnels which has been preserved as an exhibit. From the impressive marble lobby you can get into an elevator and when the doors open you are in a 19th century mine shaft. Lit only by lanterns, an iron cart sits on a track leading down a tight crack in the rock and onwards into the darkness below. Even more revealing are the black and white photographs on display - pictures of the mine when it was operational, with half-naked sweating Africans starring back blankly at the camera, or captured in their brutal task of breaking up the rock. In many pictures they are hunched over in the cramped spaces with knees bare in the rocky rubble, gouging at the rock with simple hand tools. In most they are not the focal point, but in the background behind a bunch of hard looking white bosses posing for the camera. In these pictures the words of Alan Paton, South Africa's most famous author, can be seen to be true - "the wealth of South Africa’s gold mining industry is not so much do to the richness of gold as it is to the poorness of black wages."

Nowhere is the vastness of the mineral wealth which has been drained from the African continent more apparent than in Johannesburg. The native name for the city - “gauteng” means “city of gold”. Of the metal estimated to have been mined in the world to date, around half has come from Africa, and the bulk of that has been from the nation of South Africa. It has been and remains the world's largest producer of both gold and diamonds. Its landscape is still littered with man-made mountains of mine waste and the hulking machinery of depleted mine-shafts. The demands of the mining companies for a guaranteed supply of permanently cheap black unskilled labor led to the legalized framework of racial discrimination. The origins of apartheid lays in large part in the mines and the lure of gold.

At the beginning of 1886 the undistinguished stretch of Transvaal highveld that would become Johannesburg was nothing more than open plains and sparsely settled farmland. All that would change when George Harrison, an Australian prospector, stumbled on the only surface outcrop of the richest gold-bearing reef in the world. Within months droves of diggers descended on the site, and a tent city was erected. Because the gold was deep and in reef form, not the easily accessible alluvial form, mining required heavy equipment, so mines were quickly concentrated in the hands of men who had the capital to finance large underground operations. From there the city of Johannesburg sprung up and is today the largest economic hub in all of Africa.




Though their conditions have been much improved miners in South Africa still do not have a life to be envied. Most begin their day by climbing into the metal cages that will take them deep into the belly of the earth where they will spend there shift in one of the narrow shafts that run as deep as 10,000 feet (nearly 2 miles). At that depth the temperature of the surrounding rock reaches 130°and it is necessary to pump refrigerated air in constantly. During my stay in South Africa the newspapers were filled with coverage of the current mine workers strike.