Mining History

Exploitable manganese deposits in the Cape Peninsular were known from around the late 1670s, and indeed many of our hikes pass on or close by manganese deposits of one kind or another.

Hike Kasteelpoort or Skeleton Gorge and you will walk over the stuff. At Mont Rochelle the link trail from Uitkyk  to the summit of Dutoitskop is known as The Manganese Trail.

Hike from Hout Bay East Fort and you will pass close by the old workings. Hike at Silvermine and take in the Noordhoek peak circuit, and you will be able to see far below you the stumps of the old manganese pier marked on Slingsby’s Silvermine map Jetty 1909. Slingsby…..accurate as usual.

East Fort (Dave Cowley)

If you hike around Kogelbai in the area of the camp site and tidal swim pool you will be next to out-crops of manganese. Whilst on towards Rooiels you will drive past old mine workings with even knowing it.

Manganese has many useful properties, and as such is a much sought after commodity.

The vast majority of manganese locations are superficial staining of rock outcrops, however in two locations, Rooiels and Hout Bay, there existed deep vein deposits of high enough grade manganese which lent themselves to artisinal (small scale) mining.

It was only by 1909 that the difficulties surrounding mining had been overcome, and ore began to...

A Namibian story has it that one morning during the early 1950s two men glided their light aircraft onto a diamond-strewn beach in the Namibian Sperrgebiet (German for no-go or forbidden zone) with the intention of collecting a large amount of diamonds hidden by one of them in rocky outcrops near the beach. On take-off from the beach the aircraft however nose-dived after one of the aircraft’s wheels struck a rock. They were subsequently spotted by the restricted diamond areas’ security personnel and arrested.

Fact or fiction?

Charity store offers up visual evidence

The author is constantly in search of historical South African images. On a recent visit to a Pretoria based charity organisation, the standard question was posed: “Would you have any old South African photographs?”

In majority of instances the response to this would be: “No, we throw them away”, but in this particular instance the charity store volunteer stated that she had some images stashed away somewhere. A few minutes later she appeared with 16 black & white images dating from the early 1950s by the photographer JJ Katzke, all 16,5 x 22cm in size.

The initial attraction was the four photographs of an aircraft stranded on a beach. The rest seemed of little interest, even unrelated to each other. However, when the helpful charity store volunteer stated that she would sell the batch of 16 images for R32 (around $2 or £1.6), the deal was concluded.

Back home, after much googling, the story around these images started to unfold. Soon...

Jack Cockerill was working for the Chester Diamond Drilling Company when he was engaged on a contract at the Leicester Mine, on one of the kimberlite pipes found on the farm ‘Holpan’ between Windsorton Road and Barkly West in the Northern Cape. He was housed in bachelor quarters on the farm and came into contact with the family of Willie Wienand, who was in the cartage business in the area. Romance blossomed with Willie’s daughter Gladys May Wienand, and Jack became attracted to the lifestyle of alluvial diamond digging. He left Leicester Mine, applied for a digger’s licence and set up on his own dig. This account of Jack’s life as a digger was written by his daughter, Judy, and is part of our family history. [Olwyn Garratt]

My Dad’s diggings were on a farm belonging to Mr David (Dawie) Wright. The area was proclaimed and diggers had to be of good standing to be considered eligible to be granted a licence. The Holpan diggings were not deep and they did not require a mining inspector to approve them. Although they were loosely termed alluvial diggings they were not on a river and the water required for the running of the washing plant had to be brought in by donkey wagon and stored in a tank on a raised platform.

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The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6.

I meet and talk to Frans Beleni, a senior official, his title is Production Pillarhead, with the National Union of Mineworkers. He works at Union headquarters, 7 Rissik St, an Art Deco building opposite the old SARS. His lifespan embraces the old South Africa becoming new. His forty five years have been packed with protest, change and emergence.

NUM Building Rissik Street (The Heritage Portal)

Blue plaque on the NUM building (The Heritage Portal)

Beleni, not a born Johannesburger enjoys and values its many amenities but is perturbed by the crime. He became a young activist at school, and later a fugitive from the police. This was followed by a period as a miner on the Free State Goldfields, which provided him with both ‘a convenient place to...

Magalies Memoirs focus on incidents in the Magaliesberg region and perhaps not everyone knows that it was here, in the heart of the Magaliesberg Biosphere Reserve, that gold was first discovered in the Transvaal, decades before diggers rushed to Barberton or George Harrison stumbled on the Witwatersrand Main Reef. “Discovered”, of course, needs to be qualified. We know from artifacts found at places like Mapungubwe and Thulamela that gold has been mined, treasured and traded for more than a thousand years – probably much longer. It was rumour of pre-colonial gold workings that lured 19th century prospectors into the interior of southern Africa. So this memoir really tells of the first re-discovery of gold in the Transvaal – an event that ultimately led to the metal becoming the backbone of the South African economy for the next century and a half.

Journey to the Magaliesberg

That important discovery was made by Pieter Jacob Marais, son of a wealthy Paarl family, well educated, enterprising and, although suffering from mild epilepsy, an intrepid adventurer. In 1847, aged 22, he left the Cape on the start of a voyage that took him around the world. First, he went to Liverpool where he heard about the California gold rush and immediately re-embarked for America. He failed to strike gold, and like many Californian diggers, he moved on to the newer goldfields in Australia. He returned to southern Africa in 1853 intent on applying his prospecting experience on home territory. The Sand River Convention, granting...

I am delighted that one of the Johannesburg Glimpses interviews conducted in the early 2000s by Mike Alfred was with Kenneth S Birch a giant of a mining man (click here to read). I have been aware of the work of Kenneth Birch for some time. Unfortunately I never met him. I know that the Birch archive was deposited with the University of Pretoria.

There are a number of framed, named, dated and signed paintings hanging on walls in the Academic Information Service, Special Collections Unit at the University of Pretoria. These are all originals.

There are more pictorial records in Birch's sketch books which are housed in the Archives at the main Library at Unisa. The K S Birch collection consist of 93 water-colour sketch books, folios, 19 family and personal photograph albums and what was called his 'Civilizations Book', comprising approximately 400 scholarly publications dealing with the great civilizations of the last 4 500 years.

Birch was a benefactor of his high school (Jeppe Boys and the Birch Block at Jeppe Boys High School) commemorates him.

Birch was an architecture graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1936 and was a junior student to some of the Transvaal Group. Birch was a benefactor of Wits and supported the Barnato Hall of Residences on the West Campus and the Faculty of Engineering. He donated a piano to the School of Music. Following fund raising efforts in 1976, the Kenneth Birch Chair of Family Health was established at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Birch paintings of Johannesburg...

The tiny town of Marikana (established in 1870) was never much of a town and for a long time was really no more than a railway station and a collection of shops. In fact, the outside world would not have heard of Marikana at all if it were not for the notorious Lonmin Marikana platinum mining strike and shooting, where 34 striking Lonmin miners were shot and killed by police in 2012. I visited Marikana three times for a research project on visual activity, looking to record visible signs of the 2012 atrocity - graffiti, posters, stencilled signs saying “Remember Marikana” - but there is no visible trace and no memorial. There is only the shabby town in the shadow of Lonmin’s platinum processing plant within whose ambit, thousands of people live in poverty. So much platinum has been hauled out of the ground, you would think the place would be electroplated in money, but it is not.

Stencilled sign

A few shops and a railway station

The current form of the town of Marikana reflects an early white Afrikaner farming history, with small shops and a railway station on the early Pretoria-North-Midway line. In about 1910, the farmers from the area around Marikana requested the railway siding on this line so that they could transport their agricultural goods to urban markets in Pretoria. To this...

In its heyday, black African competitive cycling on South Africa’s gold mines received little publicity either locally or internationally. Nevertheless, it flourished for nearly three decades, beginning in the late 1950s and extending into the mid-1980s. Today it has been almost totally forgotten. However, a recently published biography of a leading South African cycling personality of the period, entitled Basil Cohen: South Africa’s Mr. Cycling, vividly recalls this lost history of Black South African cycling.

Drawing extensively on this biography and supplemented by several other related sources, this article traces the rise and then the decline of black cycle sport on South Africa’s gold mines in the latter half of the 20th century. Basil Cohen’s central role in this development warrants an outline of his biography.

Basil Cohen (1939-2014): South African Cycling personality extraordinaire

The 2013 biography by Igor Broes is a tribute to Basil Cohen as an indefatigable cycling enthusiast, ambassador and entrepreneur. Nevertheless, Basil’s name remains largely unknown to all but the cognoscenti of South African competitive cycling. The book itself is a profusely illustrated, privately-produced limited edition volume distributed exclusively amongst Basil’s family and his close cycling friends of the time, making it a rare piece of Africana sporting history. 

Born in Johannesburg in 1939 into a middle class Jewish family, Basil Cohen did not excel at school either academically or in sport and, in his early teens, he found solace in riding his first racing bicycle. This was an imported blue Phillips ‘Phantom’ built from...

During the reign of Queen Victoria the then British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli once told the House of Commons, ‘More men have been knocked off balance by gold than by love” but to be fair to the man he also said on another occasion “We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end”.

Gold has always had a fascination for humankind and golden artefacts have been discovered across the globe, on every continent, from the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Central America (the Mayan people). There was no interaction between these civilisations (except perhaps the first two mentioned) but they all had one thing in common in that their craftsmen worked to make ornate jewellery with a yellow metal that we know as Gold (Au).

The question to be asked then is, why was gold held in such high regard by them and considered nobler than any other metal element found in the earth’s crust? Well the hit song by Spandau Ballet “Gold” (sung by Tony Hadley, in 1983) said it all in one line “You’re indestructible!” Gold does not tarnish or rust (like iron) and does not react with acids, except for Aqua Regia (a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids in the ratio 1:3).

Gold was to be found as alluvial deposits in the streams of the foothills of mountains and because it was yellow, bright and shiny it was easily detected. When gold was found to be easy to...

Very few people have heard of the first borehole sunk in an effort to prove that there were payable deposits of gold in the Free State. This is its story.

Soon after the major discoveries of the Witwatersrand and its expansion east and west the search went further out into the Free State in the hope of finding the continuation of the reefs. Already in the 1890s there was speculative buying of farms to the south of Klerksdorp over the Vaal.

One of the early prospectors to venture far down into the Free State was Archibald Megson. He noticed an outcrop near the present day Allanridge on the farm Aandenk which looked very similar to the ones of the Witwatersrand. Geological wisdom at that time told him to dig here and he started to dig an exploration shaft down 100 feet (30m). On the way down he found some gold, not enough to start a mine, but enough to make him carry on until he ran out of money. In good old prospectors fashion he placed all remaining dynamite at the bottom of his shaft to stop other people from interfering with 'his' dig.

Exploration shaft (The Gold Miners)

And onto the next chapter of the story of the borehole. In Johannesburg there were two young men, both...