New work by Kevin Lester is published here. Explore the complete catalogue at archive.kevinlester.co.za. Independent advisory work is at kevinlester.co.za.

It is organised in three collections.

Mining is Human is a series of stories about mining in southern and central Africa — its geology, capital, labour, infrastructure, decisions and consequences across time. The stories are published in arcs. Each arc follows a commodity, a region, or a theme, from the first concession to the current owner, mine by mine. Arcs can overlap: a mine that appears in the Northern Cape arc may also belong to the copper arc. The same ground, read differently each time.

The Institutional Record tells the institutional stories of Southern African business — the versions institutions have told about themselves, the versions the archive tells, and the versions that emerge when institutions are called to account. Same records. Different eyes.

Other posts and media is a collection of materials from an independent advisory practice — notes, essays, presentations, and a podcast recorded with various collaborators and produced by Solid Gold Podcasts. Written and recorded for General Counsel, senior executives, and Chairs in mining and other regulated sectors. Listen on Apple Podcasts or iono.fm.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 5 November 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Lubambe Copper Mine, Zambia: The concentrator started two months early. Thirteen years later, JCHX reported break-even. (Mining is Human, Story 95)

In October 2012, Lubambe’s concentrator started two months ahead of programme. It was designed for 2.5 Mt of ore and about 45,000 t of contained copper a year.

The main challenge lay underground.

Published production figures are sparse, but they help show how the operation developed. In the year to June 2015, Lubambe mined 1.60 Mt of ore. Reuters reported copper output of about 15,000 t in 2023, against design output of about 45,000 t a year.

Lubambe was never a simple orebody. A mineralised shale horizon 3 to 14 m thick folds around the Konkola Dome, with oxide mineralisation complicating recovery. Water added another constraint. The feasibility study anticipated material inflows from about 325 m. In September 2014, Ramp 5 met groundwater at about 250 m, estimated at 5,000 m³ a day.

ARM had already reported concentrate-quality problems in its year ended June 2013. Of 17,878 t of concentrate delivered to the smelter, 2,618 t had been smelted.

The ground itself had been mined before. South Limb production dates to the 1950s, with some stopes within about 54 m of surface. Chililabombwe’s council identifies the Lamba as the area’s indigenous settlers and traces the district’s name to Kililabombwe, croaking frogs that local tradition links to ancestral spirits.

ARM and Vale approved the modern mine in August 2010 and began construction the next month. ZCCM Investments Holdings Plc took 20%; ARM and Vale held 40% each.

Ownership changed as the mine worked through those challenges. In 2017, ARM and Vale sold their combined 80% to EMR Capital for US$97.1m, including shares and shareholder loans. In July 2024, JCHX Mining Construction Group Co.,Ltd took EMR’s 80%. Reuters reported agreed consideration of US$1, alongside assumption of about US$857m of project debt. Later disclosures put JCHX at 70% and ZCCM Investments Holdings Plc at 30%.

By 2014, the development contractor’s team numbered about 405, roughly 12% expatriates, with Zambians working as surveyors, operators and officials.

Lubambe also built the Konkola Health Post and donated it to local government.

Employment moved with the mine’s fortunes: more than 400 contract workers lost their jobs when two contracts ended in 2020, and in 2022 the Mines Minister challenged a proposal to make 178 workers redundant.

By 2025, the operating story had changed.

JCHX’s 2025 annual report says Lubambe reached its overall break-even objective, while concentrator recovery rose from 81.84% to 83.21%.

The concentrator was ready in 2012. Thirteen years later, JCHX reported that Lubambe had reached its overall break-even objective.

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

The Rand did not begin southern Africa’s gold story. Earlier routes converged there.

The Dutch East India Company hunted bullion for their cash-strapped empire at the Cape from 1654. None of it paid.

Then came Tati, in today’s Botswana. Archaeologists recorded about 200 ancient workings in its greenstone belts. When the rush began in the late 1860s, 220 to 250 Europeans arrived, with African labour. By 1872, many were moving towards the diamond fields.

Gold was found at Eersteling, near Polokwane, in 1870. By the end of 1871, about 30 prospectors had staked claims. Imported machinery followed. By January 1875, recovery had reached 10,107 grams. A chimney and a monument remain.

In May 1873, the Lydenburg goldfields opened as public diggings, 60 km from the town. By year’s end, reports put about 1,000 diggers at Mac-Mac and 1,500 around Pilgrim’s Rest, holding some 4,000 claims. Named diggers came from Kimberley and Natal. No one has counted who came from where.

Pilgrim’s Rest outlasted the rush. The town survives.

Wagons used the Delagoa Bay road mainly between May and September. During the rest of the year, the Lowveld was dangerous for people and draught animals. The Transvaal republic and the Pedi under Sekhukhune contested control. Wars followed in 1876 and 1878–79.

Prospecting in De Kaap began in the 1870s. In 1884, a reef gave Barberton its name. The Gold Exchange building opened on 13 April 1887. Prospectors also found older workings in the belt. Nobody has established who made them.

The geologist David Draper followed the diggings from Kimberley to Lydenburg and Barberton, then reached the Rand.

At Tati and De Kaap, the workings themselves showed that the arriving prospectors were not first. I hold in mind the Bakalanga and Basarwa of Tati, the Pedi under Sekhukhune, the Swazi rulers who often understood their concessions as limited grants, and whoever worked that older ground.

There was a brief return to the Cape. Millwood near Knysna became public diggings in January 1887, but its gold was scattered and the rush soon collapsed. On Lion’s Head, a proposed company’s share offer failed. Neither amounted to much.

And then Langlaagte.

On 16 November 1886, George Harrison sold Claim 19 for £10. The buyer resold it three months later for £50. The reliable record then goes silent.

George Harrison Park preserves part of the Main Reef outcrop and its early workings.

We began these gold stories at Langlaagte on 2 June, with Story 36. We end them here too.

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Today, southern African gold is almost inseparable from the Witwatersrand. Its mines built Johannesburg and produced extraordinary value, but 1886 was not the beginning. It was the industrial chapter of a regional history that archaeology is only gradually bringing back into view.

Between about 1250 and 1290, a goldworker at Mapungubwe covered a carved wooden rhinoceros with hammered gold foil. The object weighs 37.4 g and predates the Witwatersrand goldfields by about six centuries.

Mapungubwe was a political and trading centre, not a mine. Its gold probably came from rivers and reefs across the wider Limpopo region, where miners washed river gravel and crushed reef quartz. Many also farmed, planting with the rains and turning to gold in the dry season. At Chumnungwa in Mberengwa, archaeologists found a clay mould for gold beads and a crucible fragment still holding a droplet of gold. The miners’ names have disappeared, but their work has not.

Follow the metal in the other direction and the story runs east. Gold moved by relay from producers to inland markets, through rulers and merchants, and towards the coast. Mapungubwe flourished from about 1220 to 1300; Great Zimbabwe reached its height from about 1200 to 1450; Khami and Mutapa followed. Gold was never their only source of wealth, because cattle and grain mattered too, but it connected these changing centres to a commercial system that reached far beyond them.

Sofala became a major outlet. In 1331, a merchant at Kilwa told Ibn Battuta that gold dust reached the port from a country inland. Kilwa became the leading Swahili intermediary, although its control was neither continuous nor exclusive.

From Kilwa, the commercial network extended to Gujarat in India, Oman, Aden and the Persian Gulf, with Aden linking it to the Red Sea and Cairo. Gold helped pay for Indian cloth, beads and other return cargoes. Chinese celadon reached Mapungubwe, while Chinese and Persian ceramics and coins from Kilwa reached Great Zimbabwe. We cannot trace a particular parcel of plateau gold to China, but the objects found inland make the scale of the Indian Ocean system visible.

When the Portuguese established themselves at Sofala in 1505, they did not open this road; they entered one that was already old. The following year, Diogo de Alcáçova told King Manuel that gold reached the port from an inland kingdom and claimed that access to the diggings depended on the ruler’s permission.

Gold has been worked around the Limpopo for at least 800 years, while the Witwatersrand has been mined for 140. The Rand was not South Central Africa’s first gold road. It was a much later industrial chapter in the region’s long relationship with gold.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 29 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Sicomines Copper Mine, DRC: Can Mining Help Build a Country? (Mining Is Human, Story 92)

In 2008, the DRC tried something remarkable.

It had copper and cobalt. It also had a vast post-war infrastructure backlog and limited access to conventional finance. The Sicomines agreement tried to turn one into the other.

This was not simply a mining project with infrastructure benefits attached. Gecamines S.A. contributed access to mineral resources near Kolwezi. China Railway Group Limited and SINOHYDRO GROUP LIMITED were the original Chinese partners; Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co.,Ltd joined later in 2008.

The ambition ran to 6,538 km of roads, hospitals, health centres and two universities. Under the 2009 repayment design, mine profits would first repay urgent infrastructure loans. In the next phase, 85% would successively service mining and remaining infrastructure loans, while 15% could go to shareholders.

Operationally, the mine worked.

Sicomines produced its first copper in 2015 and expanded. When power constrained the operation, the 240 MW Busanga hydroelectric plant was built.

That raises the more interesting question.

Does the capability that can build a great mine, and the infrastructure needed to make it work, translate into an ability to address a developing economy’s wider infrastructure backlog?

Sicomines has been testing that proposition for nearly two decades.

Infrastructure was built. A 2021 evaluation counted 43 infrastructure projects, but found only 15 conformed to the original project list. Congolese institutions have since reported different totals for infrastructure expenditure, and the accounting remains disputed.

The human record is also contested. Communities near the mine have reported damaged fields and polluted water; Sicomines has denied responsibility, and a reported 2022 DPEM inquiry attributed the discharge to another concession.

In 2024, the bargain was recalibrated. The ownership remained 68:32, but a copper-price-linked total infrastructure envelope of US$7bn through 2040 included earlier investment, interest and accepted costs. Gécamines also gained a revenue royalty and the right to market part of Sicomines’ production.

There is a pattern within the pattern.

The DRC’s 2002 Mining Code was designed to attract mining investment. In 2018, it was revised to make more of mining’s value flow to the State, Congolese participants, provinces and communities.

Sicomines had been testing a contractual version of that broader idea since 2008.

In March 2026, the Congolese agency overseeing the agreement commissioned a comprehensive technical and financial audit covering the arrangement from 2008 to 2024.

The mine is real. So is some of the infrastructure.

The larger experiment is whether the capability to build what a mine needs can also help build what a country needs.

Eighteen years later, that account is still being drawn up.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 27 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Rand Refinery, South Africa: The refinery South Africa’s mines built for themselves (Mining is Human, Story 91)

For 35 years after the Witwatersrand goldfields were proclaimed, South Africa mined the gold but London finished it.

The mines smelted their output on site. What left the reduction works was bullion, still alloyed with silver and base metals. Final refining centred on London.

In 1909, the Transvaal Chamber of Mines took a first step towards changing that. It established the Witwatersrand Co-operative Smelting Works to treat gold- and silver-bearing by-products. But the industry still lacked a central refinery for its gold.

In London, the Royal Mint Refinery was operated by N M Rothschild & Sons. Refiners there could advance an estimated value against bullion, settling the balance after refining and transport charges. From September 1919, Rothschild sold the pooled gold output of approximately 54 South African producers.

The London refiners resisted the prospect of losing this business. The mines nevertheless decided to bring final refining home. The change was about more than geography. Refining at Germiston meant the mines no longer had to send their bullion overseas for its final treatment, with the associated transport, refining charges and settlement arrangements.

On 27 November 1920, the Chamber and its members registered Rand Refinery Limited. Initially, only Chamber-member gold companies could hold shares. Germiston offered rail connections and a position near the centre of the goldfields.

Building the refinery required technical knowledge as well as capital. The Chamber consulted Sir T. K. Rose on refining methods. R. G. C. Pearson, who had managed refineries in Ottawa and London, advised on the new plant. It adopted the Miller chlorine process, suited to treating large volumes of bullion.

Rand Refinery began operating in 1921, with an annual design capacity of 12 million troy ounces, about 373 t of fine gold.

In 1926, the South African Reserve Bank replaced Rothschild as the producers’ gold-selling agent. Another part of the chain had moved home.

Rand Refinery remains at Germiston, an independent private company owned by South African gold-mining companies. Its 2025 sustainability report records more than 57,000 t of gold refined since 1921, which the company describes as nearly a quarter of all gold ever mined. By April 2025, it had also published more than 1,700 provenance records through the Gold Bar Integrity system.

The mines built Rand Refinery to finish their gold at home. More than a century later, the Germiston refinery remains a testament to the scale of what they established.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 22 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Kisanfu Copper-Cobalt Mine, DRC: One deposit. Two different portfolio decisions. And 2024 cobalt output equivalent to over a quarter of the worlds cobalt mine production. (Mining is Human, Story 90)

In December 2020, CMOC and Freeport described the same asset in strikingly different terms.

CMOC called Kisanfu strategic. Freeport called it “a large, undeveloped cobalt and copper resource” that had been “no longer strategic” since it sold neighbouring Tenke Fungurume in 2016. That was a judgement about Kisanfu’s place in Freeport’s portfolio, not about whether the deposit itself was significant.

CMOC paid US$550m, including the special capital-gains tax payable to the DRC, for the two Freeport holding companies that owned 95% of the project company. The DRC government held the other 5%.

Four months later, CMOC agreed to sell 25% of KFM Holding to a company controlled by Chinese battery maker CATL for US$137.5m. That equated to 23.75% of the mine.

At acquisition, CMOC used Freeport’s database to estimate a 365 Mt resource at Kisanfu, grading 1.72% copper and 0.85% cobalt. Across the whole project, that contained about 6.28 Mt of copper and 3.10 Mt of cobalt. In contained-metal terms, that cobalt was equivalent to more than ten years of total world cobalt mine production at the 2024 rate. But that was an estimate of what was in the ground, not what could necessarily be mined, and more than half of it still needed further drilling to confirm its scale and grade.

Kisanfu sits in Lualaba Province, about 33 km southwest of Tenke Fungurume.

Construction stripping began in April 2021. In 2024, CMOC Kisanfu Mining reported 200,013 t of copper cathode and 85,917 t of cobalt contained in hydroxide. USGS put world cobalt mine output that year at 302,000 t. Kisanfu’s output was equivalent to 28.4% of that.

CMOC says Phase II is expected to start production in 2027, adding 7.26 Mt/y of ore-processing capacity and about 100,000 t/y of copper.

Freeport had already stepped away from Tenke Fungurume and no longer saw Kisanfu as strategic to its portfolio. CMOC made a different judgement. Four years later, Kisanfu was producing cobalt on a scale that mattered globally.

#MiningIsHuman #Copper #DRC
Image: Kisanfu website

Originally published on LinkedIn on 20 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Crown Mines, South Africa: The strange afterlives of a Johannesburg gold mine (Mining is Human, Story 89)

Gold Reef City did not replace Crown Mines. It grew around the mothballed No. 14 Shaft, one part of a much larger mine.

On 1 July 1909, Crown Reef, Crown Deep, Langlaagte Deep, Robinson Central Deep, South Rand, Paarl Central, Langlaagte Royal and further deep-ground interests were brought together. The amalgamation created one of the Witwatersrand’s largest mining undertakings. It brought together about 2,000 intact claims and 2,200 ha of freehold land, with combined milling capacity reported at about 137,700 tons a month.

Its labour system helped build Johannesburg: skilled and supervisory work reserved for white miners, with a far larger African migrant workforce housed in controlled compounds. In February 1920, Crown Mines workers joined about 70,000 African mineworkers in a strike across the Rand, demanding higher wages.

In 1941, a young Nelson Mandela arrived in Johannesburg and worked briefly at Crown Mines as a mine policeman, often remembered as a night watchman.

Underground mining ended in stages during the 1970s. By the late 1970s, No. 14 Shaft was mothballed. The later Crown Gold Recoveries surface operations were consolidated into DRDGOLD’s Ergo business in 2012.

But the place did not disappear. No. 14 Shaft remained. Heritage development began around it in the late 1970s; 1987 is generally given as Gold Reef City’s formal opening year. Hotels and a casino followed.

On a recent trip to Johannesburg, I made a pilgrimage back to Gold Reef City to see what had become of this piece of Crown Mines.

I am not convinced by the theme-park idea as a second life for a mine. The precinct has lost some of its sparkle.

But the precinct became more than a hotel, casino and theme park.

Beside it stands the Apartheid Museum. It emerged from the casino-licence process, backed by businessmen who had built part of their fortune on skin-lightening creams marketed to Black South Africans. The museum remains a place of deep remembrance.

And inside it is a red Mercedes-Benz.

NUMSA members at Mercedes-Benz’s East London plant built it in unpaid overtime for Nelson Mandela after his release in 1990. The same Nelson Mandela who, nearly fifty years earlier, had arrived in Johannesburg and briefly worked as a mine policeman at Crown Mines.

Crown Mines has several afterlives. One shaft became entertainment. Beside it, a museum remembers the system within which the mine operated. And inside that museum sits a car built by workers for a former Crown Mines employee who became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

I am still not sure Gold Reef City answers the question #MiningIsHuman so often asks: what should a mine leave behind?

Perhaps no single place can.

In South Africa, the ironies of our past are intensely human.

#MiningIsHuman #Gold #SouthAfrica
ImageL CMallwitz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Open a bottle of Zevenwacht’s Tin Mine White and the name on the label leads below the vines.

The estate and local histories connect it to a real tin mine near Kuils River, on the former farm Annex Langverwacht. Miners worked lode and alluvial cassiterite there during the early twentieth century. A local account says the mine produced more than 700 t of concentrate before closing in 1956 and employed nearly 300 people at its height. Open adits and partly filled shafts remain.

The mine has almost disappeared from Cape Town’s memory. Its name survives on a bottle.

There was another tin mine closer to the city. In 1911 and 1912, the Vredehoek Tin Company followed quartz veins through slate on the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak. It produced just 4 tons of concentrate at 70% tin. The scale was small, but the workings were not slight: a 150 m adit, a vertical shaft and concrete flumes survived when a Council for Geoscience researcher documented the site and proposed preserving it as mining heritage.

Four tons. On Devil’s Peak.

These Cape deposits formed around granite that cooled roughly 500 to 540 million years ago. South Africa’s deeper tin history lies much farther north, in the Bushveld granite of Limpopo. That rock is about 2,050 million years old. The mines at Rooiberg and Zaaiplaats sit within it.

At Rooiberg, the story begins long before a mining company arrived.

In 2015, three archaeologists examined two crucible fragments from Rhenosterkloof 3, near the Rooiberg deposits. The fragments belonged to the Eiland phase, conventionally dated to AD 1000 to 1300, and carried evidence of bronze production. That finding moved the evidence for tin-bronze working in the area several centuries earlier than the previously accepted starting point of about AD 1450.

It did not date a particular shaft. It showed that metalworkers near Rooiberg had access to tin in the early second millennium.

The direct evidence from the better-known smelting sites is later. Archaeologists studying Rooiberg slag and ceramics dated the material they examined to about 1650 to 1850. The glassy slag was rich in tin oxide. At one site, smelters treated alluvial cassiterite. At another, they worked hard rock.

Provenance studies carry that tin beyond the valley. Lead-isotope evidence is consistent with Rooiberg as the source of tin in some bronzes from Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. Isotopes cannot tell us when a shaft opened, and they do not prove that every regional bronze came from Rooiberg. They do show that the valley belonged to a wider system of mining, metalworking and exchange.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the world around Rooiberg was being remade. Expanding settler power from the Cape, new African states, conflict and commercial forces reaching inland from the Indian Ocean reordered authority and trade across the interior. The archaeological record of local tin smelting falls silent within that upheaval. It does not identify the particular pressure that stopped the furnaces, but this was not a quiet disappearance.

Modern miners reopened old Rooiberg workings in 1905. A later mining-industry address put earlier extraction at between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of tin, although that remains a historical estimate rather than a production return. At Zaaiplaats, near Mokopane, miners worked cassiterite from the Bobbejaankop and Lease granites until 1989.

Both modern operations depended on a metal price decided far beyond Limpopo.

For years, the International Tin Council tried to support that price by buying tin into a buffer stock. On 24 October 1985, it ran out of money and stopped supporting the market. Prices collapsed and remained weak. Zaaiplaats closed in 1989. Gold Fields closed Rooiberg in 1993.

A contemporary United States Geological Survey account placed Rooiberg’s closure in the context of very low tin prices. A former Rooiberg manager later argued that a cost structure suited to a large gold mine had burdened a much smaller tin operation. His account was that payable ore remained. It was informed testimony, not a reserve statement, but the evidence does not establish that Rooiberg closed because its tin had run out.

South Africa has not returned to commercial primary tin production. In 2014, Bushveld Minerals proposed restarting work at Zaaiplaats, initially through its old tailings and later through a hard-rock study. Neither plan reached production. The United States Geological Survey’s world tables record no South African tin mine or smelter production from 2018 to 2022, and the material examined for this story identifies no commercial primary producer from 2023 to 2026.

That does not mean there is no prospecting, dormant right or small-scale recovery. It means a tin history whose surviving evidence spans almost a millennium, from early second-millennium metalworking to twentieth-century mines, has disappeared from the production tables.

Its physical record has not disappeared. Archaeologists still read Rooiberg’s slag. The Vredehoek adit and flumes remain on Devil’s Peak. Near Kuils River, old adits survive beneath the name carried by a wine.

The industry vanished. The label still says The Tin Mine.

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

In 1919, the Cape Copper Company closed its Namaqualand mines after copper prices collapsed.

The infrastructure remained. The shafts remained. The people remained. The wages did not.

The district’s copper history reached much further back. The Nama knew the deposits before colonial expeditions examined them. Cape merchants established commercial mining in the 1850s; British finance and technical management subsequently supported mines, transport and company-built settlements.

By 1919, generations had built lives around that undertaking.

The whole district did not fall silent at once. The separate Namaqua Copper Company at Concordia continued, increasingly intermittently, until operations stopped in 1931. But for settlements dependent on Cape Copper, the loss of employment reached far beyond the mine gates.

American interest preceded the eventual revival. The Cape properties were optioned to American Metal in 1926. In 1928, American Metal and Newmont formed the South African Copper Company to explore and develop them. The undertaking included mineral holdings, equipment, the railway to Port Nolloth and the jetty. Falling copper prices interrupted the programme.

In 1937, the O’okiep Copper Company was formed with Newmont Mining Corporation as its dominant shareholder. It acquired the South African Copper assets and, in 1939, the remaining Namaqua Copper leases. The two old corporate domains came together.

Mining resumed in 1940. The new concentration and smelting complex at Nababeep was commissioned across 1940 and 1941.

Over four decades, Newmont rebuilt the district into a functioning modern mining complex. New mines opened. Exploration added deposits. Annual copper output eventually reached as much as 40,000 t.

The method mattered as much as the change of ownership.

The earlier industry had selected exceptionally rich ore for shipment overseas. Flotation now concentrated copper from much lower-grade material. Shared treatment facilities allowed separate deposits to contribute to one operating system.

The old names remained, but their roles changed. Nababeep became the processing centre. Carolusberg developed into a major producer. Okiep, Spektakel and other workings contributed at different times.

The district’s strength lay in a collection of mines, linked by exploration, treatment capacity and common ownership. One deposit did not have to sustain the whole undertaking.

Dividends were paid. Wages were paid. For two generations, that continuity anchored life in Springbok, Okiep and Nababeep.

What Newmont brought was patience, expressed through repeated exploration, development and expenditure over decades. Its stewardship gave the district a period of stability that the earlier American attempt had not achieved.

In 1984, Gold Fields of South Africa assumed managerial control of O’okiep Copper. Newmont retained an equity interest for several more years and disposed of its remaining stake in 1988. The district passed into another ownership period, carrying the mines, infrastructure and communities assembled during the American decades. Gold Fields transferred O’okiep Copper to Metorex in 1998, before mining wound down again in the early 2000s.

Subsequent revival efforts have returned to the district’s workings, geological records and remaining copper. They inherit a practical idea demonstrated during the Newmont years.

Separate intrusions supported separate mines. Their ore fed shared concentration and smelting capacity centred on Nababeep.

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

The town became Musina in 2002, restoring the indigenous name. Industrial mining had ended a decade earlier. The name reached back beyond the company.

African miners had worked copper in the Limpopo valley for centuries. Oral histories identify the Musina and Makushu clans with particular workings: the Makushu at Zwamokale, later Harper, and the Musina at Greater Musina, later Messina. Miners followed the ore from the surface into shafts and underground excavations. Knowledge accumulated and passed between generations.

In 1903, Colonel John Pascoe Grenfell investigated the ancient workings after being directed to them by prospectors whose information ultimately derived from local knowledge. Two years later, the Messina (Transvaal) Development Company was established in London. Industrial mining followed ground already worked by African miners.

Namaqualand’s mines were still producing. Musina’s emergence extended South Africa’s copper industry into another district rather than marking a clean transfer from one centre to another.

The company also carried an early American connection. Herbert Hoover, the mining engineer who would become President of the United States, served on its board from 1914 to 1916.

The undertaking operated for nearly ninety years. It extracted about 700,000 t of copper from 40 Mt of ore, with workings descending close to 1 km below surface.

Its industrial ambition extended beyond extraction. A reduction works was producing high-grade copper matte by 1914. During the 1920 market collapse, mining was suspended while the company expanded its concentration capacity and erected new smelting and refining works. Operations resumed in 1922. Investment had reached the ground before the market could support its use.

The company’s influence reached into life outside the shafts.

Historian Felix Malunga describes the compounds at Messina, Harper, Campbell and Artonvilla, and the use of sport and ethnic divisions to manage African labour. Recreation offered relief from mine work, but management also sought to use it to preserve ethnic separation, weaken unified labour action and contain conflict. Workers maintained families, associations and ambitions that exceeded the place assigned to them by the company.

Mining ended in the early 1990s, with the last operation closing in 1992. The shafts stopped producing, but the consequences remained above ground. A study published in 2022 described an estimated 87.8 hectares of unrehabilitated tailings at the abandoned Messina Mine.

Descendants of the copper miners also pursued a land claim, seeking recognition of a history in which their ancestors had been producers, not merely a source of labour for somebody else’s mine.

The town recovered its name. The claim concerned the ground.

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

A makeshift truck assembled from Chevrolet and Buick parts helped fill the gap left by a cancelled road service. They called it Plaatjie.

The transport business would grow far beyond Namaqualand. It began with a problem the copper mines had faced for generations: moving people and material across a district where traffic was sparse and distances expensive.

The Nama had known the copper before commercial extraction began. When Phillips & King started mining at Springbok’s Blue Mine in 1852, recognising the ore was no longer the principal difficulty. Getting it to a buyer was.

Export ore travelled by wagon to Hondeklip Bay. Teams struggled across the Hardeveld, through mountain passes, river crossings and deep coastal sand to a surf-bound anchorage where workers ferried ore offshore. In 1857, government geologist Andrew Wyley reported that carriage to Hondeklip Bay cost nearly as much as all the other costs of producing the ore put together.

The colonial government began engineering a road through the dry country. From February 1867, convict gangs worked on the Messelpad–Wildeperdehoek route towards Hondeklip Bay. The Cape Copper Mining Company supplied their transport and accommodation. The road programme was overtaken by another solution: a railway from Port Nolloth.

Port Nolloth offered a better anchorage.

In 1869, the company obtained authority to construct a railway and jetty there. The first rails were laid that September. By January 1876, the line reached Okiep: roughly 150 km of narrow gauge connecting the Atlantic coast to the mines.

Mules provided the principal early traction. Two small locomotives tried on the lower sections proved unreliable and were withdrawn in 1876. Steam returned gradually as stronger rails were laid, and the first steam-hauled train completed the full journey to Okiep in 1893. Ore could travel from the inland workings to Port Nolloth, then by ship to Britain.

Ore travelled towards the coast; food, coal, machinery, tools and explosives moved inland. The distance remained, but the time, cost and risk of crossing it diminished.

The line needed station staff, mechanics, platelayers, muleteers and, later, locomotive crews. The harbour needed boatmen and cargo handlers. Moving copper created work far beyond the shafts. It also made the mining company responsible for much of the infrastructure through which the district obtained supplies and reached overseas markets.

For Springbok, being “far away” shaped who could earn a living, reach services and markets, or supply a mine.

In 1930, South African Railways withdrew its uneconomic Bitterfontein–Springbok road service. Local traders responded. Joe Jowell and Jaap du Plessis had opened a Chevrolet dealership the previous year. Du Plessis assembled Plaatjie from Chevrolet and Buick parts, and the partners began carrying passengers and goods.

Jowells grew into a national carrier and developed into the group later known as Trencor, with interests extending into trailer and shipping-container manufacture and international container leasing.

The mining railway had connected the district to the sea. A business responding to another local transport gap found customers far beyond the mines.

Its first truck had been assembled to replace a service that no longer ran.

This story is exclusively available on Substack. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Phillips & King’s Blue Mine, Springbok: What the £50 Purchase Secured

Additional Mines Stories | AMS 3

In 1850, Phillips & King paid £50 for 10 morgen and 351 square roods of copper-bearing ground at Springbokfontein.

The agreement reached much further than the outcrop. It secured mineral rights across the farm, access to water, grazing for working animals, roads and space for works. Those rights helped make a mine possible.

The Nama knew the district’s copper before colonial expeditions reached the Koperberg. What arrived in the 1850s was capital, and capital arrived with terms.

Phillips & King were Cape merchants. Their enterprise connected the Phillips and King families, local agents and overseas markets. John King had already participated in the unsuccessful South African Mining Company of 1846. The later undertaking drew on commercial experience as well as knowledge of the ore.

Its foundation was Melkboschkuil, the farm around Springbokfontein held by the seven Cloete brothers. The £50 purchase secured the initial parcel and its accompanying rights. Between 1851 and 1853, Phillips & King assembled the remaining interests in the farm for recorded consideration totalling £2,344 10s.

The mine did not arrive on empty ground. The initial deed transferred a limited parcel, while its accompanying rights gave the purchasers access to minerals, water and working space across a much larger property.

Commercial mining at the Blue Mine began in 1852. Copper ore left through Hondeklip Bay that year. Before Kimberley’s diamonds and the Witwatersrand’s gold, the Springbok district was moving into sustained industrial production.

The copper was rich. The logistics were brutal.

Moving bulk ore by ox-wagon across dry country was expensive enough to make even promising deposits difficult to work. A merchant’s ability to organise supplies, transport and sales mattered alongside the miner’s ability to raise ore.

Prospecting pushed outward from Springbok towards Okiep, Concordia and Nababeep. Phillips & King secured interests at Spektakel, Nababeep and Okiep; the Namaqua Mining Company developed a competing undertaking around Concordia. The district acquired more workings, employers and settlements.

The early years were volatile. Promoters floated more than twenty companies during the 1854–55 boom. Then geology and distance answered back. Bad roads, scarce water and difficult shipping helped break the speculative rush. The surviving undertakings required sustained finance and practical mining capability.

Phillips & King built Springbokfontein as a private company settlement, with houses, stores and workshops serving the mine. The company controlled residence there. In 1862, the settlement became a public village: Patrick Fletcher surveyed it and residential plots were auctioned.

Springbok became the administrative and logistical heart of the district; Okiep developed into its principal mining centre. Shops, services and transport businesses grew around the mines’ requirements.

In 1862–1863, Phillips & King’s mining properties passed into the Cape of Good Hope Copper Mining Company, promoted in London by John Taylor & Sons. John King joined its board, and King & Sons continued to manage its Cape affairs. British finance and technical management strengthened the undertaking while some of the earlier mercantile interests remained.

The Blue Mine’s richest ore was substantially exhausted by 1861, but it had begun a much larger industrial history. Springbok subsequently developed a broader role as a regional service centre, while the surrounding mining settlements experienced successive periods of production, closure and renewed investment.

The original £50 purchase secured a piece of copper-bearing ground. The accompanying rights helped determine who would control the water, roads and working space of the industry that grew around it.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 15 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Gecamines S.A. opened Kamoto’s underground mine in 1969. Annual ore output passed 2.5 Mt by 1974 and reached 3.29 Mt in 1989. Then a cave-in in September 1990 brought production to a halt. By closure that October, the mine had produced a reported 59.3 Mt of ore averaging 4.21% copper and 0.37% cobalt. It would remain closed for seventeen years.

The return began with a 2004 joint venture. Gécamines contributed mining rights and existing assets; Kinross-Forrest undertook the rehabilitation financing. They formed Kamoto Copper Company S.A. in 2005, bringing together the underground mine, concentrator and Luilu metallurgical plant. Production resumed in 2007.

Reopening was only the first challenge. Kamoto’s sulphide, oxide and mixed ores require different treatment routes. Whole-ore leaching was designed to improve recoveries and lower costs compared with the inherited flotation-and-roasting route. In September 2015, KCC deliberately stopped copper and cobalt production again to change how suitable ore was processed. Whole-ore leaching bypassed substantial parts of the older route. The first new copper cathode emerged at Luilu on 11 December 2017. An integrated acid plant followed in 2020, supplying roughly 2,000 t of sulphuric acid a day for copper leaching, as well as liquid sulphur dioxide for cobalt recovery.

Ownership changed. Katanga Mining succeeded to Kinross-Forrest’s interest and combined with Nikanor in 2008. Glencore built control from there and took Katanga private in 2020. Historically, KCC was held 75% through Katanga, 20% by Gécamines and 5% through Gécamines’ vehicle SIMCO. The later system linked Kamoto underground, KOV and T17 to the concentrator and Luilu.

On 27 June 2019, galleries used by artisanal miners collapsed in the KOV area inside the KCC concession. Forty-three artisanal miners were reported killed. KCC maintained that the collapsed galleries were unauthorized and not linked to its operations.

A 2023 report recorded 6,144 employees and 5,416 contractors at KCC.

In 2025, KCC produced 188,700 t of copper and 22,900 t of cobalt. In February 2026, Glencore and Gécamines signed an agreement intended to provide KCC with additional land for tailings and waste rock and to support further recovery at KOV and T17. Lease registration was outstanding at announcement. Glencore says the additional space could support annual copper production of up to 300,000 t into the 2040s.

Kamoto’s next phase may depend less on finding copper below ground than on making room above it for the waste rock and tailings that recovery creates.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 13 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

In 2025, its last open-pit year, Otjikoto produced 199,139 oz of gold. By the first half of 2026, the pit was closed, but the mine was not. Wolfshag underground ore and stockpiles produced another 47,967 oz, while the plant that milled 3.44 Mt in 2025 kept running.

Gold was not what first brought drill rigs here. In 1998 and 1999, Avdale Namibia was exploring for base metals when it drilled a 9 km magnetic anomaly beneath calcrete and hit visible gold. B2Gold Corp. filings record no known earlier gold or base-metal production on the property. The deposit sits in the Pan-African Damara Belt, deformed roughly 580–500 million years ago.

Otjikoto lies south of the later veterinary boundary, within the wider central Namibian area administered as the colonial Police Zone.

Ovaherero pastoralists used the wider Waterberg–Otjozondjupa region; Damara and San communities also lived there. Colonial proclamations in 1906 and 1907 expropriated Ovaherero and named Nama groups. By 1913 German settlers held 1,331 farms and about 90% of the cattle in the Police Zone. The corporate and technical records reviewed do not identify the original grants or provide a complete prior-title chain for the five farms now consolidated in B2Gold Namibia.

B2Gold acquired Otjikoto through its merger with Auryx Gold Corp. in December 2011. Namibia granted mining licence ML 169 in December 2012. Groundbreaking followed on 26 April 2013. First gold came on 11 December 2014, about 19 months later.
B2Gold owns 90% of Otjikoto through B2Gold Namibia. Namibian empowerment partner EVI holds 10%.

By then, Otjikoto had already found what came next.

Wolfshag, discovered in 2012, delivered its first stope ore at the end of November 2022 and is expected to run into 2027. In 2022, deeper drilling guided by three-dimensional magnetic modelling found Antelope, 3–4 km from the original pit. B2Gold approved development on 15 September 2025. Its Springbok zone carries an inferred mineral resource of about 390,000 oz.

The transition has a human cost. B2Gold reported that 98.5% of its Namibia employees were Namibian nationals in 2024. As open-pit mining ended, employee headcount fell to 399 by the end of 2025.

Some of the work around Otjikoto is already aimed beyond closure. B2Gold began supporting Ombili Primary School in 2019, replacing tent classrooms. In 2025 it reported NAD19m invested and another NAD12.6m budgeted for expansion; the school then served 1,319 learners. On Erhardtshof, one of the five farms, a 30 ha irrigation proof of concept grew to 180 ha by the end of 2024. B2Gold proposes that the land keep producing and help fund community work after the mine closes.

Otjikoto’s open pit has ended. Its next question is whether Antelope can extend the life of the mine that grew around it.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 9 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Gold explains why Johannesburg appeared. It does not explain how quickly everything else followed.

Standard Bank began operating in Johannesburg in October 1886. By February 1887 there was an official market and the Diggers News. A telegraph office followed in April. The Eastern Star, later The Star, moved to Johannesburg in October.

Then, on 8 November 1887, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was founded. By the end of that month its Official List carried 68 companies.

In little more than a year, a new gold settlement had acquired banking, a market, newspapers, long-distance communications and a securities exchange.

But Johannesburg was being built on different clocks.

It did not become a municipality until 1897. The Rand Water Board was constituted in 1903 and became fully operational in 1905. Waterborne sewerage only began to be introduced in 1906.

Johannesburg could have substantial banks, hotels and commercial buildings while still collecting human waste by night-soil cart.

And the faster institutions were not necessarily the finished ones.

The JSE had been created because share trading needed somewhere to happen. It then had to learn how to be an exchange. By July 1890, more than half the companies that had traded during the preceding year had become insolvent or bankrupt and disappeared from the list. Its rules kept developing.

Water took another route. Private suppliers came first. The sanitary board had limited powers and did not control the water supply. Sources proved inadequate. Eventually the answer became regional: a statutory Rand Water Board bringing together government, municipalities and mining interests.

Nor did the slower clock simply catch up. Johannesburg became an extraordinary economic machine while parts of the city continued to live with developmental failures that eroded basic quality of life. Some things never came right, certainly not for everyone.

That matters when we look at Johannesburg now.

The city does not need to invent a stock exchange, a municipality or a bulk-water institution. But its present difficulties are not simply the story of institutions that once worked perfectly and then declined. In 2026, the City itself acknowledges historical underinvestment in water infrastructure, while audit reporting describes inadequate maintenance and financial pressure.

The remarkable thing about early Johannesburg was not that somebody built a city in fifteen months. They didn’t.

Some things were built remarkably quickly. Some took generations. Some never came right.

And those that did still had to be maintained.

Perhaps that is the harder story of Johannesburg at 140: not how quickly a city can be built, or even how quickly it can deteriorate, but how difficult it is to build one that works for everyone and then keep it working.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 8 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

In 2019, the world’s largest cobalt mine went quiet. Not because the ore ran out. The price did.

Mutanda had produced 27,300 t of cobalt in 2018, about a fifth of global supply, alongside 199,000 t of copper. Then cobalt fell from highs near US$40/lb to about US$12/lb. Glencore put the mine on care and maintenance. It was, the company said, “no longer economically viable.”

Copper had been worked and traded across Katanga centuries before industrial mining. The Basanga are among the earliest documented copper-working people of the wider region. Their paramount chief, Mpande, controlled access to mining places and received payments from those who worked them. Copper production in the Copperbelt dates to roughly the fourth century CE, more than 1,400 years before 1906.

Later, Luba and Lunda systems moved copper through Central Africa. Then came industrial mining. Union Minière du Haut-Katanga was formed in 1906, transforming the scale of extraction and building a colonial labour system around the same mineral wealth.

Gecamines S.A. held the Mutanda mining titles and geological records when MUMI was created in 2001. Plant construction began in 2009 and mining in 2011. Glencore entered the ownership chain in 2007 and reached 100% in 2017. After the 2022 permit renewals, the DRC State received a 5% interest in MUMI.

Mutanda and Kamoto Copper Company received the Copper Mark in 2025, becoming two of only five copper-mining operations in south-central Africa now holding the Mark, all of them in the DRC.

Then the economics changed again.

Stockpile processing at Mutanda resumed in 2021 and mining restarted by 2025. But its return has increasingly become a copper story.

In 2025, Mutanda and KCC produced 247,800 t of copper. In H1 2026, their combined copper production rose 66% year on year to 138,400 t.

Cobalt moved in the other direction.

After suspending cobalt exports, the DRC introduced quotas in October 2025. Glencore’s H1 2026 cobalt production from the two operations fell to 8,700 t as it prioritised copper and retained some cobalt in solution.

And then geopolitics arrived at the mine gate.

In February 2026, Glencore and the US-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium signed a non-binding MOU under which Orion may acquire 40% of Glencore’s interests in Mutanda and KCC. The proposal implies a combined enterprise value of about US$9bn.

Seven years earlier, falling cobalt prices had helped close Mutanda. Now copper is driving production higher, the DRC is restricting how much cobalt reaches the market, and US-backed capital is seeking an interest in the assets.

The ore did not change.

The calculation around it did.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 6 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

Gold drew people to Lupa long before Shanta Gold Limited. Alluvial gold was found there in 1922. African diggers, including migrants from what are now Malawi, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe, worked the Lupa Goldfield’s alluvial deposits. By the mid-1930s, the field’s population had passed 20,000.

Reef mining followed. East African Goldfields began at Saza in 1935. New Saza Mines then produced 270,770 oz from 1.1 Mt of ore between 1939 and 1956. Small-scale mining continued after it closed, but decades passed before the field produced at modern scale again.

New Luika brought large-scale production back. It produced first gold on 20 August 2012. By 31 March 2013 about US$125m had been spent building it; Shanta dates commercial production from 1 April 2013.

Singida came next. Shanta’s 2020 plan was US$26.4m of construction capital and US$10.4m of pre-production stripping, initially funded from operating cash flow. In July 2022 Stanbic Bank Tanzania added a US$20m facility. Singida poured first gold on 30 March 2023 and reached commercial production on 1 June.

At New Luika, Shanta reported in 2019 that about 40% of the workforce came from surrounding communities. By 2024, acquisition documents described about 1,040 employees and contractors at the mine, approximately 99% of them Tanzanian.

Singida’s land process took longer to settle. In April 2016, HakiMadini and villagers from Mlumbi were still pursuing complaints about compensation connected with Shanta’s land access. By January 2025, Tanzania’s Ministry of Minerals told Parliament that 284 people had been compensated for 1,655 acres. Twenty-six relocated families received new homes, water and road infrastructure, and five acres of land each. A 2025 academic study nevertheless records continuing concerns among some residents about services and the adequacy and explanation of compensation.

Shanta itself is no longer public. In May 2024 Saturn Resources, a subsidiary of ETC Holdings, acquired Shanta and its AIM admission was cancelled.

The latest mine-level production figures located in Shanta’s public reporting before it went private were for Q1 2024: 13,022 oz at New Luika and 8,654 oz at Singida.

Both mines have since expanded or are expanding. Singida’s capacity increased to 730,000 t/year in the first half of 2025. Shanta’s current operator pages say a New Luika expansion approved in late 2025 will lift primary-crusher capacity to 5,000 t/day, add a fourth mill and raise overall throughput by about 40% by the end of 2027.

New Luika returned modern-scale gold production to an old field. Singida made Shanta a two-mine Tanzanian producer. Under private ownership, one has completed a plant expansion and the other has approved another.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 1 October 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

The ground near Kolwezi sat outside the edge of the known Copperbelt in 2004. The deposit was blind beneath Kalahari Group sediments. Ivanplats flew a geophysical survey over 7,900 km² of it anyway.

Copper production in the wider Katanga–Upemba region reaches back to the early centuries CE. Copper crosses entered the archaeological record much later and eventually circulated as currency across south-central Africa.

By 2006, drilling had begun. In 2008, geologists identified copper mineralisation. Ivanplats announced the discovery at the World Copper Conference in Santiago in April 2009: "a major copper discovery of historic importance." The first Kakula resource followed in October 2016.

By March 2026, the Mineral Reserve stood at 466 Mt grading 2.82% copper. The Indicated Resource: 1.3 Bt at 2.65%, for 34 Mt of contained copper. Wood Mackenzie ranks it the world's fourth-largest copper deposit by contained metal. Kakula's mine plan projects grades averaging over 5% copper.

In December 2015, Zijin Mining Group paid US$412m for a stake representing 39.6% of the project. Ivanhoe Mines retained 39.6%. The DRC government holds 20%: 5% under the DRC Mining Code in 2012, and 15% more in November 2016 as a non-dilutable stake. Total investment exceeded US$6bn by 2024, Kamoa Copper S.A. said. Ivanhoe reported approximately US$1bn paid to the DRC in 2024 in taxes and royalties.

Ivanhoe reported 22,844 employees and contractors in 2024, about 91% local. In September 2023, President Tshisekedi addressed 5,500 workers at the mine. The Kamoa Centre of Excellence trains young Congolese for technical and leadership roles in mining. A women's sewing cooperative, owned and operated primarily by local women, now sells beyond Kamoa's own needs. Company estimates put the contribution at 4%–6% of DRC GDP.

Africa's largest copper smelter, 500,000 tpa direct-to-blister, began heat-up in November 2025. First anodes: 29 December 2025. Kamoa-Kakula had previously sold copper as concentrate. The first anode sale was announced in February 2026; the shipment reached Lobito before quarter-end. In June 2026, Kamoa-Kakula copper anodes arrived at the Aurubis refinery in Olen, Belgium: Kamoa-Kakula's first DRC-smelted anode shipment to reach a European refinery via the Lobito Corridor. It runs predominantly on hydroelectricity. Ivanhoe reported 2022 Scope 1 and 2 emissions of 0.16 tCO₂ per tonne of copper: among the lowest reported by any major copper mine.

From small crosses to cathode, from Lualaba sand to Belgian refinery: the Lualaba basin has been working copper for seventeen centuries.

Twenty-two years after Ivanplats flew its first survey over this ground, that copper reached a European refinery as anode.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 29 September 2026. This work is AI-assisted - read about how I work.

North Mara’s Gokona underground runs at about 5 g/t gold. Bulyanhulu’s narrow reefs average about 6 g/t, higher still at depth. The potential was never the problem.

In 2017, Tanzania banned concentrate exports and presented Acacia Mining with a US$190 billion tax bill, roughly four times the country’s GDP. Acacia’s market value collapsed. North Mara kept producing, but Bulyanhulu’s underground operations stopped. The ore had not failed. The relationship around it had.

Sukuma miners had worked numerous pits at Bulyanhulu. Tanzania’s High Court issued a temporary injunction restraining their eviction while the underlying case was pending. Tanzanian police and Kahama Mining Corporation, Sutton Resources’ local subsidiary, nevertheless carried out a forced eviction in August 1996. At North Mara, Kuria communities had also mined gold before Placer Dome arrived.

Barrick Mining Corporation acquired Bulyanhulu from Sutton in 1999 and North Mara through Placer Dome in 2006. It listed African Barrick Gold in London in 2010; the company became Acacia Mining in 2014. By 2017, the company at the centre of Tanzania’s confrontation with its mining industry was Acacia.

The Tanzanian government refused to deal with it. Barrick returned to the table.

In 2019 Barrick bought the 36.1% of Acacia it did not already own in a transaction valued at about US$1.2 billion, agreed a US$300 million settlement and formed Twiga Minerals: 84% Barrick, 16% Tanzania, with economic benefits shared equally after the recoupment of capital investment.

But an agreement did not restart Bulyanhulu. People and machinery did.

Twiga rebuilt the shafts, winders and plant. More than 600 workers joined from January 2020; underground ore returned that year. In October 2021, MSALABS commissioned Africa’s first Chrysos PhotonAssay laboratory at Bulyanhulu. At North Mara, extensions to the Gokona underground and Gena open pit drove reserve growth in 2024.

Together, the mines first produced more than 500,000 oz in 2021. Barrick now describes them as a combined Tier One complex. In 2024 they spent US$573 million with Tanzanian suppliers, 83% of total in-country procurement. Of Twiga’s 6,185 workers, 96% were Tanzanian and 53% came from nearby communities.

Human Rights Watch reported six deaths in 2024 linked to Tanzanian police at and around North Mara. Barrick says its own guards are unarmed, the mine holds no weapons, and police remain under state command. MiningWatch nevertheless calls them “mine police”.

Bulyanhulu’s growth case now reaches into Deep West, where drilling has encountered high grades at depth. The deposits did not change. Government intervention stopped one mine; Barrick rebuilt the operating capability, and Twiga restored the agreement that allowed both to work.