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

The ore body under this low Kalahari hillock, about 75 km from Kuruman, could supply the world’s manganese requirements for 5,000 years. In 2025, the smelter built to process it closed because South African electricity had become too expensive to run a ferromanganese furnace.

The ǀXam San knew this ground long before any geologist mapped it. Their territory ran through the scrublands and river courses of the Kuruman Hills. Wonderwerk Cave, 45 km away, records two million years of continuous human presence in the region. The first geological note on Black Rock appeared in 1908. The first shaft came in 1940.

Assmang was formed in 1935 through a partnership between African Mining and Trust and Anglovaal. In April 1940, they acquired the Black Rock outcrop. Three underground mines now draw from a single ore body: Nchwaning II and Nchwaning III, at depths of 421 and 500 m, and Gloria at 140 m. Nchwaning alone holds 323 Mt at 42.5% manganese. The ore is particularly low in phosphorus: a specification steel mills pay a premium for.

The smelter at Cato Ridge processed Black Rock ore for 66 years and employed 310 permanent workers and 290 contractors. On 31 August 2025, it closed permanently. Electricity costs had risen 930% since 2008. Making ferromanganese in South Africa had stopped making financial sense.

The smelter Assmang built in Sarawak from 2013, operational from 2016, remains open and expanding. It was built there because Malaysian hydroelectric power is reliably cheap. That is why Black Rock ore crosses the Indian Ocean to be processed in Borneo.

Sakura Ferroalloys, the Sarawak plant, is a joint venture with Sumitomo Corporation and China Steel Corporation. It produces approximately 240,000 tonnes of manganese alloys per year. Assmang’s relationship with Sumitomo dates to 1961, when the two companies established a marketing arrangement for Black Rock ore into Japan. In September 2025, Sakura broke ground on a new converter with US$82.5m of committed capital, targeting full production by mid-2027.

South Africa holds the world’s largest manganese reserves and exports almost all of them as ore. The electricity tariff that closed Cato Ridge makes domestic beneficiation uneconomic across the sector. Whether the cost of that has been counted is a different question.

African Rainbow Minerals Limited and Assore Group each hold 50% of Assmang Manganese Black Rock Mine Operations. In 2025, Assmang sold its 54.36% stake in Sakura to Assore for R2.1bn. ARM distributed R900m of those proceeds to shareholders. Assore now owns the Malaysian furnace.

The mines produced 3.7 Mt in 2025. South Africa exported a record 26.2 Mt of manganese in 2025. Assmang is part of a consortium of mining groups, bidding to build a new manganese export terminal at Ngqura, with planned capacity of 16 Mt per year, expandable to 22 Mt.

The constraint was never the ore.

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

Ernest Oppenheimer made the largest private capital bet in South African history. It rested on a fixed price. In July 1944, 44 nations signed the Bretton Woods Agreement and pegged gold at US$35 per troy ounce. For a generation, nobody had to guess what gold would be worth.

The land had been Basotho. Free State-Basotho Wars, 1858 to 1868. Treaty of Thaba Bosiu, 1866. British annexation, 12 March 1868. The dispossession created the dependency. The mines would follow 80 years later.

The gold beneath it was invisible. No surface expression. Thick sediment cover. No reef to follow down. Oppenheimer was financing something nobody could see. Anglo American was thirty years old. It had survived the Depression and a world war. Oppenheimer was not consolidating what Anglo had built. He was betting on what it could become.

Eight mines in production by 1955: St Helena, Welkom, Western Holdings, Free State Geduld, President Brand, President Steyn, Erfdeel-Dankbaarheid, Loraine. Eight mines in eight years. Built from featureless grassland at depths between 1,200 and 1,500 metres, with no industrial-scale road, rail or water infrastructure on the surface.

Oppenheimer turned the first sod on 16 May 1947. Anglo built Welkom for these mines. Workers came from Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi, the Eastern Cape. Matjhabeng, the Sesotho name the municipality carries today, describes a place different nations were forced to assemble.

Anglo maintained for decades that it had sought family housing for Black workers in Welkom, and that apartheid policy blocked it. It made that case again at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In more than a century of Anglo American's history, few decisions match this one in scale. Not the founding in 1917. Not the De Beers consolidation. Not the reach that eventually put two-thirds of the JSE under one family's influence. Nor anything since.

The bet worked. At peak, close to a fifth of free-world gold came from these eight mines. 180,000 workers. Applying the Minerals Council's current one to nine multiplier: an estimated 1.7 million livelihoods.

In August 1971, Nixon suspended Bretton Woods. The fixed price was gone. By 1989, gold had fallen from its 1980 peak of US$850 toward US$400. What had been built for a guaranteed price now faced a falling one.

The institutional heir to that bet was AngloGold Ashanti, formed from Anglo's 1998 gold consolidation and the 2004 Ashanti merger. In 2020 it sold its remaining South African assets and left. Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited and Sibanye-Stillwater remain, working shafts on declared end-of-life timelines. By the mid-2020s, around 30,000 workers where there were once 180,000.

Mining extracts a non-renewable resource. When the economics shift, operators sell. The gold runs out. The jobs and prosperity built around it go with it. The only question is what was left behind.

Welkom is still deciding how to answer that.

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

The Kalahari Manganese Field runs roughly 35km through the John Taolo Gaetsewe district of the Northern Cape. It holds more than 75% of the world's manganese. Two mines sit at its northern end, sharing the company town of Hotazel. One cuts from the surface. One goes 300 metres underground.

SA Manganese Ltd formed in 1926 to mine the Northern Cape deposits. In 1937, Dr H.J. van der Bijl, who founded both Eskom and Iscor, incorporated Amcor to process minerals into ferroalloys for South Africa's growing steel industry. Those two companies merged in 1975 to form Samancor Ltd, listed on the JSE.

By 1998, Samancor had become the world's largest ferroalloy producer, its reach extending from the Kalahari manganese fields to the ferrochrome smelters of the Steelpoort Valley. One company held both.

In 1998, Billiton (60%) and Anglo American (40%) bought out Samancor's minority shareholders and took it private. In 2005, BHP Billiton sold the chrome operations to the Kermas Group for US$469 million, separating the Steelpoort assets from the Kalahari ones. The manganese stayed. When BHP Billiton demerged South32 in May 2015, seeking a simpler portfolio focused on its Tier 1 assets, the Kalahari mines transferred with it. Anglo American retained 40%.

Mamatwan commenced operations in 1963. Terrace mining benches cut into primary carbonate ore at surface, currently producing approximately 2.91 million tonnes per annum, with around 15 years of mine life remaining. Dense medium separation and sintering upgrade the ore before export through Saldanha. In August 2025, HMM signed a 10-year export agreement with Transnet.

Wessels is different in every sense. The ore lies 300 metres down, reached through a vertical shaft and two inclines, recovered by mechanised bord-and-pillar mining. What it yields carries its own geological term: Wessels-type ore, the name given to the hydrothermally upgraded high-grade manganese found across the northern Kalahari. Grade: approximately 55% Mn. Reserve: 198.8 million tonnes. The mine gave geology a word.

In December 2024, South32 shut Wessels in response to poor manganese prices, reopening in January 2025. FY2025 combined output was 2.15 million tonnes at a realised price of US$3.71/dmtu FOB. When prices do not run, the underground operation feels it first. Ninety-four percent of South Africa's manganese exports go to Asia. The ore is priced in a market the producer does not control.

The town of Hotazel exists because these two mines do. In June 2024, NUM signed a five-year wage agreement with HMM. At the Hotazel Manganese Mines consortium level, South32 holds 44.4%, Anglo American holds 29.6%, and BEE entities hold 26%.

SA Manganese (1926) to Samancor (1975) to Billiton/Anglo (1998) to South32 (2015). The field was here before any of the names. It is still here.

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

In 2013, GOLD FIELDS handed its South African gold to someone else. Kloof, Driefontein, Beatrix: unbundled into Sibanye-Stillwater. International assets, mechanised operations, growth profile. That was the direction. It kept one SA mine.

South Deep sits near Westonaria, 45km south-west of Johannesburg. BaFokeng and BaKwena Sotho-Tswana people built stonewalled settlements here from at least the 15th century. Mzilikazi's forces depopulated the region in 1823. The Voortrekkers found land that looked empty. It was not. The workers named South Deep's solar plant Khanyisa. In Setswana: Light Up. The prior claim travels in the language.

Gold Fields was founded in 1887 by Cecil Rhodes and Charles Rudd. Johannesburg Consolidated Investments was founded two years later by Barney Barnato. Two of the oldest houses on the Witwatersrand. South Deep came through the JCI line: developed by Western Areas before Placer Dome of Canada took a 50% joint venture in 1999. Barrick acquired Placer Dome in 2006 and sold the stake within a year. Gold Fields paid US$1.525 billion for that 50% in 2006, then bought out Western Areas in 2007. Total: US$2.5 billion. Not a conventional mine.

The Upper Elsburg Massives reef runs up to 120 metres thick. Every other mine on the West Wits Line works reefs averaging less than two metres. The ore sits 2,800 to 3,300 metres down, by design. The seventh deepest mine in the world. At those depths, rock temperatures reach 50 degrees Celsius before refrigeration. The reserve stands at 28 million ounces. South Deep was built for machines. Gold Fields stopped conventional mining in 2008. It had always been the plan. It took twenty years to execute.

Transitioning from labour-intensive to mechanised mining was always going to be difficult. The machine version of South Deep needed fewer people, differently skilled. Targets were missed for nearly a decade. The 2017 Rebase Plan reset the programme. Westonaria is a town where mining accounts for 52% of economic activity.

The model eventually worked. Gold Fields posted 309,000 ounces in 2025, 16% higher year on year, and generated R9.1 billion in free cash flow. Khanyisa provides 24% of the mine's electricity and saves R123 million a year. The life of mine runs to 2101. South Deep is ramping up.

Every other South African asset Gold Fields held, it sold or unbundled. South Deep it kept. It invested in new ore reserves south of a major fault, in renewable power, in depth. That is not an exit position.

When Gold Fields walked away from the conventional Witwatersrand in 2013, it held on to one thing. The thing it had spent twenty years and US$2.5 billion believing it could finally make work.

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

Tshipi é Ntle is Setswana for "beautiful steel." Manganese hardens and refines steel — without it, the metal is brittle and unworkable. The name encodes what the ore does before the mine existed.

The name arrived before the mine. In 2003, nine Black South African investor groups formed Ntsimbintle Holdings. The following year, once the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act came into force, they applied for prospecting rights on ground between Kathu and Hotazel that the established operators hadn't claimed. Without the Act, the application was legally impossible.

It took eight years to get to first ore.

The ground is in the Kalahari. Dry, flat, enormous. The Northern Cape sun on pale calcrete and red sand, far from any city, in a field that holds more than 75% of the world's manganese resource. Two operators had worked it for decades. Ntsimbintle applied for the ground they'd left between them. Semi-carbonate ore, medium grade. Not the deepest seam in the basin. Not the richest. But unmined, and now legally available, and theirs if they could hold it together long enough to build a mine.

In November 2010, The Pallinghurst Group, acting through Jupiter Mines, acquired 49.9% for A$245 million. Jupiter raised a further A$150 million the following January. The capital arrived from Australia. The mine became real.

Tshipi Borwa was commissioned in 2012. Year one: 1 million tonnes. Year two: 2 million tonnes. By 2018 it was South Africa's largest single-mine manganese exporter.

At the 2011 sod-turning, Saki Macozoma — former political prisoner, anti-apartheid activist and BEE investor — said words to the effect that "Only a few years ago it would have been impossible for a Black group like ours to have created this."

He wasn't being rhetorical. The MPRDA had existed for eight years. Ntsimbintle had spent every one of them building toward that moment. What Macozoma named as impossible wasn't the geology or the capital. It was the legal right to try.

The mine paid. Across 2017 alone, Tshipi distributed R1.5 billion to its shareholders, Ntsimbintle and Jupiter alike. FY2025 production reached 3.6 million tonnes, a record. Mine life in excess of 100 years on the resource base. In September 2025, Tshipi signed a ten-year rail capacity agreement with Transnet, securing the corridor to port.

Then, on 13 May 2025, Exxaro Resources announced it would acquire the Ntsimbintle and OM Holdings stakes for R11.67 billion. The transaction closed 27 February 2026. R10.6 billion cash. Exxaro, itself a BEE vehicle created by the earlier Kumba Resources unbundling, now holds an effective 60.1% of the mine economics. Jupiter retains 49.9%, with both parties now exercising joint control.

The mine Macozoma celebrated as a breakthrough is now owned by a company that was itself made possible by the same policy logic.

That is the system working.

A note on this version. The original LinkedIn publication contained two substantive errors. It placed these three mines under Gold Fields ownership at some point in their history, which never happened, and attributed Sheba’s depth and grade record to the Royal Sheba orebody, which was in fact shallow and low-grade. The true depth producers are the Main Reef Complex and Zwartkoppie.

Both corrections came from readers who worked the ground directly: David Scott, a former senior geologist at Sheba, and Richard Hornsey and Roger Dixon, who worked through the Anglovaal and Metorex years. The exact year in which Fairview and ETC merged remains unresolved between two credible first-hand accounts and is flagged here rather than guessed at.

This work is AI-assisted—read about how I work.

It started before the Witwatersrand. A decade before.

In 1874, prospector Tom McLachlan found alluvial gold in the De Kaap Valley. Word crept out through disputed farm grants. By 1884 the rush had come.

Two Barber brothers and their cousin struck reef near Rimer’s Creek on 21 June 1884. A Gold Commissioner smashed a bottle of gin on the rock and proclaimed a township. Eight thousand people arrived within months. Two stock exchanges opened. In 1885, Edwin Bray found the Golden Quarry — 10km from Barberton as the crow flies, on the ground above what would become Sheba Mine. By 1887 the bubble had burst. Eureka City, 5km away, became a ghost town.

Three mines did not close.

The rock Bray was looking at had crystallised 3.5 billion years ago. The Barberton Greenstone Belt is the oldest substantially intact geological sequence on Earth. The gold sits in shear-zone quartz veins in ancient volcanic rock, not in riverbed gravels. That separates it from the Witwatersrand, which is 500 million years younger and works on a different principle entirely. The same mechanism runs north through Zimbabwe and into Tanzania. The same rock preserves microbial fossils 3.47 billion years old. UNESCO inscribed these mountains as a World Heritage Site in 2018.

The mines that stayed open in 1887 are still open.

Sheba Mine, operating since 1885, now works past 1,000 metres. The depth producers are the Main Reef Complex and Zwartkoppie, both running at roughly 20 to 30 grams per tonne. Sheba’s geology carries at least five distinct styles of mineralisation, with local grades running past 1 oz/ton in places — a district that has never stopped surprising the geologists who work it.

Fairview Mine opened in 1887 and produces 49% of Barberton’s underground output. In 1986 it became the birthplace of the BIOX process: bacteria naturally present in the rock oxidise the sulphide minerals that lock gold away from ordinary leaching. Recovery rate: 98%. That process now runs on six continents.

New Consort has operated since 1887. Peer-reviewed literature calls it one of the oldest recognised orogenic gold deposits on Earth.

None of these three mines was ever a Gold Fields asset. The real chain runs through two separate corporate houses that only later converged. Fairview came down through Federale Mynbou, then General Mining, then Gencor — which commissioned BIOX at Fairview in 1986. Sheba and New Consort sat inside ETC, an Anglovaal Group holding from 1948, carried through the Avmin/Avgold structure in the 1990s. The two chains met when ETC and Fairview came together under one operating structure — the date is contested even among people who were there at the time, with informed accounts placing it anywhere from 1988 to 1998; this piece won’t assert a date it can’t stand behind. Metorex acquired the combined division from Avgold in June 2003. Barberton Mines (Pty) Ltd then operated with Shanduka holding 26%. Pan African Resources acquired 74% in 2007 and the remainder in 2009, and holds all three mines today, along with a tailings plant treating 100,000 tonnes of historical waste a month.

Gold Fields Limited enters this story only once, and only at arm’s length: after 1998, as licence holder for BIOX technology it inherited through the Gencor merger. Never an owner here.

FY2025 production: 83,772 ounces. Witwatersrand operations run at 1 to 2 grams per tonne. Barberton runs at 5.87 g/t. Total gold from this belt since the 1880s: roughly 11 million ounces. Life of mine: 23 more years, to 2051. An 8.75 MW solar plant at Fairview came online in 2024.

Nearly 150 years of production, and 23 more to come. The rock has not exhausted itself. It keeps offering, reef by reef, in the oldest gold mountains on Earth. No other district can say that.

A scientist reads microbial mats in chert on the Makhonjwa ridgeline, 3.47 billion years old. Six hundred metres away, a headgear turns. Both are reading the same rock.

Edwin Bray found gold here in 1885. The micro-organisms left their mark 3.47 billion years before him. The rock kept both.

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

The JSE was founded in 1887. DRDGOLD Limited listed in 1895.

Every other company from that era, every Randlord structure, every house, every syndicating vehicle from the first rush, has been absorbed, renamed, dissolved, or relocated offshore. Rand Mines, the oldest mining house on the Rand and the house DRDGOLD descended from, restructured its gold interests into Randgold & Exploration in 1992. Brett Kebble looted it. JCI, through which DRDGOLD shares were misappropriated to fund the looting, did not survive it. DRDGOLD did, barely, and is the only one that did.

Anglo American built plants on the same dumps and sold them; Harmony Gold built itself from what the houses were selling.

DRDGOLD is still there, producing gold - from the surface.

DRD was a West Rand deep-level operation. Underground gold production began in 1898. The last shaft ran until 2001, on borrowed time against prices that made depth uneconomic. By 2012 it had left underground mining altogether.

Anglo commissioned Ergo in 1977 to recover gold from East Rand dumps. It produced 8.19 million ounces before closing mid-decade. DRDGOLD revived it from 2008, took full control by 2015, and built the world’s leading surface tailings operation around it.

Witwatersrand milling over 140 years deposited six billion tonnes of residue across 400 to 500 square kilometres of Gauteng. The original mills recovered 40 to 60% of the gold. Modern carbon-in-leach recovers up to 90% of the same material. The dumps are not waste. They are a deferred resource.

In 2018, Sibanye-Stillwater transferred West Rand surface tailings to DRDGOLD for a 38% stake. Reserves increased 82% without a single drill hole underground. Sibanye took its option to 50.1% majority in January 2020; by then the investment had risen 147%.

Today DRDGOLD operates Ergo near Brakpan and Far West Gold Recoveries near Carletonville, combined capacity 1.8 million tonnes per month. FY2025: 155,288 ounces at 0.189 g/t, 44.7% operating margin, 18th consecutive dividend, 903 permanent employees. The Brakpan plant runs on a 60 MW solar array providing about half its power.

A 2024 Stellenbosch University study estimated up to 420 tonnes of gold remain locked in the tailings, in pyrite that carbon-in-leach cannot reach. DRDGOLD’s research partnership with Wits is working to reach it. If Wits cracks the chemistry, the company will have reinvented itself again. That is the only thing it has ever done.

Underground became surface and waste became reserve, against odds that closed every mine around it. Each worked-out section is rehabilitated, savannah grass returning to ground that held slimes for decades. Every company that listed beside it in 1895 is gone.

The last alongside it was a brewery, founded the same year to slake the same rush, now sold and delisted. DRDGOLD is still here, in Johannesburg, making money from what the rush left behind.

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

The Gamagara Ridge in the Northern Cape holds haematite 2.4 billion years old. The Griqua and the Korana knew this ground long before a steel corporation arrived to measure it. Four mines were built on it. Three draw from it now. Sishen is the one the world knows. These three run alongside it.

Assmang Beeshoek opened in 1964. Assmang built it, then jointly owned by Assore Group and Anglovaal, to supply a single customer, not the open market. Iscor bought the ore, converting Northern Cape rock into the steel that built South African cities. That arrangement held for 61 years. It ended in July 2025, when ArcelorMittal South Africa stopped buying. Not because Beeshoek’s ore had changed. Because the electricity needed to turn that ore into steel had become too expensive to justify. There was nowhere else for it to go.

In November 2025, Assmang Beeshoek, jointly owned by African Rainbow Minerals Limited and Assore, placed the mine on care-and-maintenance. Six hundred and twenty-two workers were retrenched by month’s end. A community built around one mine across six decades absorbed the news. The NUM called it a body blow to Postmasburg.

ArcelorMittal lost R5.1 billion in 2024. Eskom tariffs had outpaced inflation for years. Cheap imported steel filled the gap the domestic industry could no longer defend. The long-steel plants at Newcastle and Vereeniging closed in late 2025. South Africa’s steel output is now roughly half what the country produced in the early 2000s. The ore still travels 861 km to Saldanha Bay on the railway Iscor built in 1974. The furnaces it was built to serve are dark.

Assmang Khumani was engineered for 14 million tonnes a year. It produces around 12. Not because the deposit is shallow. Because the Ore Export Channel runs at roughly half its design capacity. Multiple derailments disrupted the line in 2024 alone. Khumani’s 14 million tonne capacity is intact; the constraint is the railway, not the mine. South Africa opened the line to private operators in April 2025. The upside is defined.

Kolomela Mine, owned by Kumba Iron Ore under Anglo American, produced 10 million tonnes last year and is building forward. In early 2026, Kumba declared Heuningkranz: a substantial new resource adjacent to the current mine, grading higher than ore already being shipped.

The miraculous Maremane dome has not run out. South Africa’s iron ore belt is world-class by any measure. It is not exhausted. It is unserved.

Beeshoek was built for furnaces that electricity prices made unaffordable. Khumani and Kolomela were built for a railway moving ore below the pace the belt warrants.

Two infrastructure challenges, pulling in opposite directions, on the same geology.

Against that backdrop, Kolomela has declared a new resource and is investing forward. That kind of confidence, on this belt, at this moment, is worth something.

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

The Kalahari does not announce itself. The camel-thorn trees stand in red sand as they have for ten thousand years. Beneath the ground at Kathu Pan, the /Xam San shaped hand axes from rock that was already a million years old. The desert holds its silence. Then Iscor came with a mandate from the South African state, and in 1953 planted the first blast in ground that would become one of the largest open-pit mines on earth.

Iscor had two iron mountains. The other was Thabazimbi — meaning mountain of iron in Setswana. It opened first, in 1931, feeding South Africa’s blast furnaces for 85 years. Multiple life extensions, each a decision to keep investing in a mine running low on ore. A slope failure in June 2015. Transferred to ArcelorMittal for R1 in 2018: not abandonment, a search for one more chapter. Mines close. The resource is finite. What communities are left with is the only question that matters. Thabazimbi’s answer is still being written.

The pit at Sishen is now 14 km long — one of the seven largest open-cast mines on earth. Reserves of 598.6 million tonnes of high-grade hematite; a resource exceeding one billion tonnes. In 2025 it produced 25.3 million tonnes, loaded onto trains running 861 km to Saldanha Bay — the longest production trains on earth, as we told in our earlier story, Distance Decides.

In December 2001 Iscor unbundled its mining assets into Kumba Resources. Anglo American acquired 20.1% for R2.4 billion in March 2002, effective control at 67% by December 2003. November 2006: Kumba split in two. Iron ore became Kumba Iron Ore, listed at R115 per share, market cap R36 billion — one of the largest BEE deals in South African mining history, with Exxaro Resources, community, and employees each taking a stake.

Then the mine was attacked. ArcelorMittal failed to convert its undivided interest in the Sishen mining right before the MPRDA deadline. The Department of Mineral Resources awarded it to Imperial Crown Trading — a politically connected entity whose principals would later be implicated in state capture. Kumba fought to the Constitutional Court. In December 2013 the Court confirmed Kumba’s exclusive right to apply for the residual share. By October 2016 it was back in SIOC’s hands.

The town of Dingleton, 3,400 people, stood 500 metres from the blasting boundary. Kumba spent approximately R3 billion relocating every household to Siyathemba.

The R11.2 billion UHDMS upgrade begins production this year, trebling premium-grade output to 55%. In 2025 Sishen realised US$95 per tonne against a benchmark of US$85. Life-of-mine extended to 2044.

Acquired from Iscor, restructured into one of the largest BEE deals in South African mining history, defended at the Constitutional Court against capture, upgraded for the next two decades: Sishen is one of the great mines of the modern world.

The iron mountain endures

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

There are two buildings in central Johannesburg that command historical weight. JCI House on Harrison Street. Corner House, a few blocks away, where Rand Mines once sat. Both facades remain. Both companies are gone.

Barney Barnato founded JCI in 1889 using the De Beers stake he received at Kimberley. The house arrived with diamond capital, already large. Barnato did not live to see what it became. On 14 June 1897, he went overboard from the Scot near Madeira. He was 46. His death was recorded as suicide. Control passed to three nephews.

What the nephews inherited was not only gold. By the 1930s, Randfontein Estates ran 600 stamp mills and was the largest gold producer in South Africa. JCI also held steel, engineering, financial services — an industrial conglomerate few mining houses attempted. After 1994, it became one of the first major BEE vehicles in the South African economy, industrial in scale.

Corner House was built by Julius Wernher and Alfred Beit — Barnato’s great rival from the Kimberley diamond fields, now his Rand contemporary. Their vehicle, Rand Mines, was incorporated in 1893. In 1971 it was absorbed into Barlow Rand. In 1992 its gold interests were spun out as Randgold and Exploration. It was from here, in 1995, that a man named Mark Bristow left to build in Francophone West Africa what the legacy might have become. Barrick acquired his Randgold Resources in January 2019 for US$18.3 billion. Bristow’s path diverged long before the turmoil that overtook both houses.

Instead, what followed for both houses was Brett Kebble. In the early 2000s, Kebble controlled JCI and Randgold and Exploration simultaneously, using scrip-lending of listed shares as collateral. The scale of the theft was never definitively established. The number that entered the record was R26 billion. Court proceedings in 2006 confirmed R500 million missing from JCI alone. The company filed no audited accounts for years. Its most valuable mine, South Deep, survived only by passing to Gold Fields.

On 27 September 2005, Kebble was shot in his car in Johannesburg. The NPA later characterised the death as an assisted suicide. By then, he had been removed from both entities. Both houses were hollow before he died.

Randgold and Exploration’s one surviving thread runs through DRDGOLD Limited, the tailings retreatment company founded in 1895, which survives on the JSE — reclaiming gold from dumps, not rock. JCI’s platinum assets passed into Anglo American’s structure and emerged in 2025 as Valterra Platinum.

What these houses left behind was not a mine, not a listing, not a surviving descendant company in the ground. A man who left before the collapse and built what the house had stopped being. A PGM company, newly independent and carrying forward assets JCI once held into another century. A story of what once was, and two grand facades.

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

The Hunz Mountains of southern Namibia. Twenty-five kilometres up the valley from Rosh Pinah, which is still running. Anglo American approved US$454 million to build something here in 2000.

A zinc oxide deposit. Near surface. High grade. Unlike anything else here.

Skorpion’s ore was zinc oxide, not zinc sulphide. That distinction determined everything.

Sulphide zinc — at Rosh Pinah, at Black Mountain and Gamsberg on the South African side — needs a smelter. Crush, float, ship, smelt. Value captured elsewhere.

Oxide ore needed a different process. Anglo dissolved it directly in sulphuric acid, then recovered zinc metal by solvent extraction and electrowinning. No smelter. No concentrate shipment. Special High Grade zinc, 99.995 percent pure, produced at the mine — the first time anyone had done this at commercial scale, anywhere.

First metal: May 2003. One of two zinc refineries in Africa. Nameplate capacity 150,000 tonnes per annum.

Vedanta Zinc International acquired Skorpion in 2010, part of a US$1.338 billion package that included Black Mountain and Gamsberg. The oxide ore ran to approximately 2015. A life-extension programme targeted secondary mineralisation in Pit 112. Slope failures ended that. Vedanta placed it on care and maintenance in May 2020. From 1,800 to thirty-five.

Five years on care and maintenance. The refinery has not restarted.

The acid plant is commissioning. About 1,000 tonnes per day of sulphuric acid for Namibia’s uranium and copper operations, replacing imports. Not zinc yet, but alive.

The refinery cannot process Rosh Pinah’s sulphide concentrate. Cannot process Gamsberg’s. All sulphide, requiring a roaster or pressure oxidation circuit ahead of the existing plant. That conversion costs US$160 to US$220 million. It requires power at refinery scale — approximately 100 megawatts — that southern Namibia’s grid cannot yet reliably or affordably supply.

Ten kilometres from this refinery, jointly owned by the two mine operators in this valley, a sulphide deposit called Gergarub holds 10.1 million tonnes of zinc, lead, and silver ore with a defined reserve and a designed underground mine. Discovered in 2008, five years after Skorpion opened — ore that arrived too late for the original investment case and too early for the next one.

Three things need to align: a zinc price that justifies the conversion capital, the capital itself, and a power solution. All three. In the same window.

Some imagine it. The circuit closes. Rosh Pinah concentrate follows Gergarub into a converted refinery. At scale, a destination for Gamsberg and Black Mountain that is not a smelter on another continent.

The refinery is still here, built for ore that ran out. Ten kilometres away, Gergarub is still here, waiting for a refinery converted to take it. Not geology. Price, capital, and power — none has moved. Yet.

This version expands on the original LinkedIn publication, which focused on the Witwatersrand, by incorporating additional information about the geology of all the major gold-mining districts in Southern Africa. You can also read the comments on the original post. This work is AI-assisted—read about how I work.

The gold arc of this series opened two weeks ago with the 1886 discovery at Langlaagte. Last week it covered the six houses that built the industry. This is the geology post, written by someone still working out what it means.

I am a lawyer interpreting a field I have not studied, working from research and from limited conversations with people who have spent careers in it. These geology posts are the hardest ones I write. My first attempt at this register was Two Giant Rock Formations, One PGM Story, posted 19 March. This is my second. Earlier in this series I ran into difficulty with the deep geological survey history at Mingomba in Zambia, a reminder that this is exactly the kind of territory where I can get things wrong. I approach these posts with a measure of anxiety for that reason.

There are geologists and technical experts in this audience, from South Africa to Zambia to Australia, Canada, the USA and beyond. I rely on their frankness. If something here is wrong, simplified beyond usefulness, or missing something that matters, the comments are the place. A layman’s view is all I can offer. What makes posts like this work is the people who know better saying so.

One sedimentary basin in southern Africa has produced approximately one-third of all gold ever mined on Earth. The Witwatersrand is 350 kilometres long. From reefs that average less than two metres thick. Roughly 50,000 metric tonnes in total. No other geological structure is close.

The first thing that surprised me: the gold is not igneous. It did not come from magma or from heat below. Between 2.9 and 2.7 billion years ago, rivers eroded gold-bearing highlands, highlands that no longer exist, and deposited the load in gravel bars. Heavy material sinks. The gold settled. Those bars are now stone. Compressed riverbeds, tilted sideways, buried deep. Every digger who arrived from California or Victoria had learnt to follow the vein. There was no comparable vein here.

But there was a precondition. Around 2.0 billion years ago, an asteroid approximately 20 kilometres across struck the earth 120 kilometres southwest of what is now Johannesburg. The largest confirmed impact structure on earth. The force folded and lifted the basin rim, bringing buried reef edges back toward the surface. The prospectors at Langlaagte in 1886 were walking on ground the asteroid had prepared. Without it, the reefs stay flat and deep. The starting point is the impact.

From that starting point, the reef dips inward. Following it means going down. The Carbon Leader Reef, roughly a metre thick, up to 12.6 g/t in the West Wits fields, runs for hundreds of kilometres into the earth. The Ventersdorp Contact Reef at Mponeng averages 78 centimetres across its channel. Narrower than a human shoulder span. Both require following them deeper.

At Mponeng today the working face sits between 3.16 and 3.74 kilometres below surface. Rock temperature exceeds 60 degrees Celsius before refrigeration. That is not an operating choice. It is what the reef requires. The R7.9 billion extension project now underway will take Mponeng to 4.2 kilometres. The deepest mine in human history will go deeper still.

Not every South African gold story reaches that scale. #MiningIsHuman started in November last year with an odd one: a gold discovery on Lion’s Head in Cape Town in November 1887. A syndicate struck traces of gold in pyrite veins, sank a 45-metre shaft, then found nothing worth mining. Not quite a scam. More a genuine discovery that the geology refused to confirm.

In 1876, James Hooper found alluvial gold in the Karatara River in the Knysna forest, reportedly while searching for grit for his ostriches. A town appeared briefly, with hotels and a newspaper. Total recorded production: 3,170 ounces. The Witwatersrand proclamation in 1886 drew the prospectors away before Millwood had properly started. Mine ruins at Jubilee Creek are preserved by SANParks today.

Between Lion’s Head and Millwood and the Witwatersrand, the distance is at least 1,000 kilometres, and about as large a gap in geological significance as exists anywhere on Earth. One failed to prove up. One was real but small. One changed the world. All human, all worth a mention. Gold fever in southern Africa ran ahead of the geology more often than the textbooks suggest.

Gold appears in other geological systems across the region too. Barberton’s greenstone belt at 3.5 billion years old. Zimbabwe’s craton with more than 4,000 recorded deposits. Tanzania’s Lake Victoria goldfields. Kibali in the northeast Congo. Otjikoto in Namibia’s Damara Belt. Different formations, different ages, different mining traditions.

The Witwatersrand is the dominant one. What makes it dominant is not just the gold already taken. At least half the basin’s gold is estimated to remain, at depth, unreached. It is how far down the reef goes, and the fact that people have kept following it.

That is the dominant system. It is not the only one. Six geological systems put gold into the ground across this region, and each one got there a completely different way.

Barberton produced gold before anyone had heard of the Witwatersrand. The rush there started in 1884, prospectors following alluvial colour upstream into the Sheba Hills, finding reef gold in ancient volcanic rock. A town appeared almost overnight. The De Kaap valley filled with diggers. For two years, Barberton was the centre of South African gold.

Then the Witwatersrand was found. Barberton didn’t disappear. Fairview and Sheba mines operated through the twentieth century and still produce today. But it was eclipsed so completely that most people don’t know it came first.

The Barberton Greenstone Belt is 3.5 billion years old, the oldest intact surface geology on Earth. The gold sat there long before the Witwatersrand basin existed.

Zimbabwe has more than 4,000 recorded gold deposits. Not mines, deposits. Across more than two dozen greenstone belts running from Bulawayo to Harare and beyond. Most have been worked in some form since pre-colonial times, and pre-colonial here means a very long time.

The Great Zimbabwe civilisation, at its peak between 1100 and 1450 AD, built its wealth on gold. Not on mining at industrial scale, but on controlling the trade routes that moved gold from the plateau to the coast. The port of Sofala, in present-day Mozambique, was the conduit. From Sofala, gold moved north to Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania, one of the great Swahili trading cities, described by the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta in 1331 as among the most beautiful in the world. From Kilwa it entered the Indian Ocean economy. Zimbabwe’s gold reached Arab, Persian, and Indian markets before a single European prospector arrived.

The colonial rushes followed the same ancient workings. Blanket Mine in Gwanda has operated since 1904. Caledonia Mining still runs it today.

The geology that put gold there 2.7 billion years ago has outlasted every political arrangement placed above it.

Tanzania’s gold is the same age as Zimbabwe’s but sits in completely different rock. In the Lake Victoria goldfields, the gold is not in volcanic shear zones. It is in banded iron-formation, ancient seafloor sediment, layers of iron-rich rock laid down before complex life existed, later cracked by tectonic movement. Gold settled into those cracks. A different trap, in the same ancient era.

The result is a different kind of mine. Geita, on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, is operated by AngloGold Ashanti and produces over 500,000 ounces a year. North Mara and Bulyanhulu mine the same system further east. Tanzania holds over 60 million ounces in identified reserves. The fields are far from finished.

The system does not stop at the Tanzanian border. The same greenstone belts extend into Kenya and Uganda. Shanta Gold’s West Kenya project, an hour from Kisumu, completed its feasibility study in 2025 and has commenced project financing, $510 million committed. The geology crossed the border long before the border existed.

The DRC carries two gold systems with almost nothing in common.

The Kilo-Moto goldfields in the northeast have produced gold since 1903, when prospectors found colour in the Ituri River. The geology is Congo Craton greenstone, the same ancient volcanic rock as Barberton and Zimbabwe, with some gold in conglomerate layers that faintly echo the Witwatersrand mechanism. Kibali is the formalised version of that history. Opened in 2013, owned 45% by Barrick, 45% by AngloGold Ashanti, and 10% by SOKIMO for the Congolese state. For most of its history Africa’s largest gold producer: 673,000 ounces in 2025, 99.6% of DRC’s formal gold exports. It has contributed over $6.3 billion to the Congolese economy since opening.

Twangiza-Namoya is something else. A 210-kilometre belt in South Kivu and Maniema, formed about a billion years ago when two ancient landmasses collided, heating the rock and driving fluids upward into quartz veins. A fifth geological system. Nothing else in this arc replicates it. Measured and indicated resources across the belt exceeded 7 million ounces at peak.

Twangiza is currently occupied by rebels. The geology has not changed. The gold is still there.

Namibia’s gold is the youngest in this arc, and the most different from everything else in it.

The Damara Belt formed about 550 million years ago when three ancient cratons collided and crumpled the rock between them. The heat and pressure that followed pushed fluids through the rock, and those fluids left gold behind, in marble, in schist, in quartz veins. It is the same basic idea as Barberton’s shear zones, but the rock is completely different, and the event that caused it happened more than two billion years later.

Nothing else in this arc works the same way. The Witwatersrand is river gravel turned to stone. Barberton and Zimbabwe are ancient volcanic rock cracked by pressure. Tanzania is old seafloor. The DRC carries two systems: Congo Craton greenstone at Kibali, and hydrothermal veins in younger rock at Twangiza. Namibia is none of those. It is a collision belt, half a billion years old, that has more in common with gold deposits in Europe than with the mines to its east.

The deposits are modest. But as a sixth geological system, it completes the picture. That is the whistle-stop tour of the major gold geological systems of southern and eastern Africa: six different ways the same element ended up in the ground.

One more number, to close. Southern Africa holds around 8 to 10% of the world’s identified gold reserves. Meaningful. Not the dominant number.

The same region holds around 70% of the world’s manganese, 90% of its platinum group metals, 75% of its chrome, and significant shares of vanadium, cobalt, uranium, fluorspar, zinc, copper, lithium and antimony. Gold is not the headline mineral story of southern Africa. It never was.

But gold and diamonds captured the global imagination, and that capture proved durable. It shaped the investment narrative, the colonial architecture, the infrastructure corridors, and the city that grew up above the Witwatersrand reef. Popular sentiment follows the stories it was first told.

Southern Africa’s mineral wealth is not gold. But if gold is the frame the world insists on, it still holds more than most people know. Six systems. Three billion years of range between the oldest and the youngest. And a basin that, a hundred and forty years on, is still not finished giving it up.

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

The Hunz Mountains of southern Namibia are far from everything. Rosh Pinah Zinc sits here, twenty-five kilometres down the valley from Skorpion Zinc, which has been on care and maintenance since 2020.

Rosh Pinah is still running.

A German-born prospector arrived here in 1924 and spent forty years searching the Namibian desert. He gave the place its Hebrew name — rosh pinah, cornerstone. He died in 1964, the year after a geologist found the ore.

First production: May 1969. Rosh Pinah is Namibia’s oldest continuously operating underground mine.

The ore sits in the Rosh Pinah Formation — rock approximately 750 million years old. It formed in a rifting basin as two ancient continental cores pulled apart, zinc and lead sulphides settling on the seafloor, folded and faulted into their current shape over geological time. The process is called SEDEX — sedimentary exhalative — which is a precise way of saying the sea did the mineralising and the earth did the rest.

Across the Orange River, 246 kilometres south, Aggeneys and Gamsberg sit in rock almost twice as old, formed by an entirely different geological event. The river marks more than a border.

The ownership chain tells you what zinc does to marginal operators. Iscor ran it from 1969. A zinc price collapse in the early 1990s sent the mine into liquidation. Iscor bought it back. Restarted. Iscor restructured into Kumba Resources; the non-iron ore assets became Exxaro. Exxaro sold to Glencore in 2012. Glencore sold to Trevali in 2017. Trevali went bankrupt in 2022.

Appian Capital Advisory acquired the mine from the Trevali insolvency estate in June 2023. It is the third owner since 2012.

The expansion Trevali had designed and never built is over ninety percent complete. RP2.0 targets a deeper ore body via a new decline. The physical infrastructure is nearly complete. When the plant commissions in the second half of 2026, throughput will nearly double. Funded by a N$2.6 billion bank facility and US$125 million upfront from a silver stream sold to Versamet.

815 people work here. The town of Rosh Pinah, population 7,000, is managed by a private company jointly owned by this mine and Skorpion. When Skorpion went dark, the town lost half its revenue base. Over 2,000 people left. Rosh Pinah kept it from losing everything.

Fifteen kilometres away, between this mine and Skorpion, a zinc-lead-silver sulphide deposit called Gergarub sits undeveloped. Discovered in 2008. Jointly owned by both mine operators. It needs a zinc price, committed capital, and power that this part of Namibia cannot yet reliably supply. Three conditions. None yet met.

The prospector named it cornerstone before a metre of ore had been drilled. The ore is still here. The next chapter is ninety percent built.

Waiting for conditions that have nothing to do with the geology.

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

While the Corner House ran the Rand’s first gold operations from the corner of Commissioner and Simmonds Streets, the genealogy of gold formed around it. Barnato’s JCI and Rhodes’ GOLD FIELDS staked rival claims on the Witwatersrand.

Anglo American emerged as the Oppenheimers’ answer to both. Anglovaal would be the first house capitalised entirely in South Africa. Gencor the last, born from Afrikaner and German threads merging in 1980. Six houses seeded today’s gold producers.

The Witwatersrand gold industry carries more history than most can hold: shafts, strikes, silicosis, unbundlings, fraud. What remains resolves as lineage, not map.

Gold Fields of South Africa is the oldest surviving house — Rhodes and Rudd, 1887. It absorbed Gencor’s gold assets in 1998, consolidating two lineages into one listed entity. In 2013 it unbundled KDC and Beatrix as Sibanye, retaining South Deep alongside international assets in Australia, West Africa, and the Americas.

Sibanye-Stillwater is Gold Fields’ South African heir — the mines Gold Fields no longer wanted, now the largest gold producer operating on South African soil. Since 2020 it holds majority control of DRDGOLD Limited — the JSE’s oldest listed share, founded 1895 as Durban Roodepoort Deep, now retreating the Witwatersrand’s residue one tailings dam at a time. Sibanye carries a Gold Fields, a Gencor and a Rand Mines legacy.

Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited is the consolidator. Rand Mines founded it in 1950. Anglovaal merged its Virginia and Merriespruit mines into it in 1973. It grew by absorbing what others discarded — ARMgold, Avgold and Target, and the remaining AngloGold Ashanti mines, including Mponeng, in 2020. Built as much by acquisition as inheritance, it remains the most South African of the survivors.

Anglo American was founded in 1917 as a coalition — Oppenheimer, Newmont Company, JP Morgan — built around gold. It unbundled AngloGold in 1998 and progressively sold down its stake through the following decade, exiting the commodity that made it.

AngloGold merged with Ashanti Goldfields in 2004. By 2020 it had shed its South African assets. In 2023 it moved its headquarters to Denver. Its South African gold chapter closed. AngloGold remains an African operator — Mali, Ghana, Guinea, DRC — just no longer from here.

JCI — Barnato’s vehicle, 1889 — produced no living gold vessel on South African soil. Fraud consumed both JCI and Randgold and Exploration, the Rand Mines heir at Corner House. The platinum thread survived as Valterra. The gold did not.

The neighbours: Pan African Resources PLC in Barberton, Village Main Reef on the Rand. And to the north, Lonrho, RioZim and Falcon Gold — once houses in their own right, now absorbed or dormant.

On the Witwatersrand, six houses started. Three survive on South African soil. One departed to Denver. One dissolved into fraud. One works the residue.

The ground endures.

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

Inselbergs rise from a sea of red sand. The gravel plains between them carry sparse shrubs and little else. Bushmanland is probably the most inhospitable area in South Africa — and beneath it sits one of the most concentrated base metal packages on earth.

The Nama called this place ‡akeis. Colonial cartographers couldn’t hold the click consonant so it became Aggeneys, a town that didn’t exist until 1976, built because a mine needed people near it.

The mine came first. It always does out here.

Sixty-five kilometres west of Pofadder, four orebodies in a single 1.2 billion-year-old formation. Lead. Zinc. Copper. Silver. All in the same Bushmanland sequence.

Drilling began in 1970. Anglo American assembled the portfolio over subsequent decades — the Deeps and Swartberg underground operations at Black Mountain, and twenty kilometres east the Gamsberg deposit: 214 million tonnes at six percent zinc. One of the largest undeveloped zinc deposits on earth.

Anglo mined Black Mountain. But Gamsberg sat untouched for thirty years. A deposit that size, that remote, requiring that much capital — it needed zinc pricing, project finance, and the right buyer to align at the same moment. For Anglo, that moment never came.

In May 2010, Anglo sold the entire package — Black Mountain, Gamsberg, Lisheen in Ireland, and Skorpion in Namibia — to Vedanta Zinc International for US$1.338 billion. Exxaro Resources holds 24.4% of Black Mountain Mining as the BEE partner. For Vedanta this was never a small bet.

Vedanta commissioned Gamsberg in 2019. Phase 2 is now 94% complete. R7 billion approved. A second concentrator. When it doubles throughput — commissioning expected this quarter — Gamsberg will rank among the five largest zinc mines in the world.

That’s R7 billion on Phase 2 alone. On top of the acquisition. On top of Phase 1. The deposit Anglo found too remote and too capital-intensive is becoming one of the largest zinc operations on earth under the leadership of a South African engineer who started at Anglo, led the building of this mine for Vedanta, and now runs the whole Vedanta group.

Asked in 2014 what she hoped for, she said: to use mining to positively shape South Africa. Gamsberg was “the first step.”

Zinc is also the chemistry in the batteries the energy transition needs — zinc-air, zinc-ion, chemistries that exist today but not yet at scale. If they get there, Gamsberg will be one of very few deposits on earth with the resource to supply them for a generation.

The town of Aggeneys, including its schools and social infrastructure, exists because the mine does. For another half century.

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

In Africa, settlers and colonists often called something a “discovery” when local people had known it for centuries. Johannesburg was no different.

We know now that Tswana speaking people had inhabited this ridge for centuries before the first prospector set foot on it. Old diggings and smelters have since been discovered. Missionaries passing through in the 1860s wrote of indigenous tales of gold as if it were legend. The riches beneath their feet were hidden only from those who would lay claim to everything as their own find.

The Struben brothers had been prospecting the ridge since September 1884. They assembled a stamp battery at Wilgespruit, twelve kilometres from where the Main Reef would be found. They were processing rock from the wrong formation. Nothing followed.

George Harrison came to Langlaagte looking for work and found it as a builder. Then he broke open a piece of banket conglomerate. In his affidavit of 24 July 1886, he wrote: “I have long experience as an Australian gold digger and I think it a payable goldfield.” That was his authority.

The Transvaal Government proclaimed the goldfields on 8 September 1886. Within weeks, 3,000 people were on the site.

Johannesburg was proclaimed in October 1886 and grew to 102,000 within six years. The basin has yielded more than 50,000 tonnes of gold — somewhere between a quarter and 40% of all the gold the world has ever mined, from a single ridge. More than that still sits underground. After 140 years, the Witwatersrand is not yet half empty.

One man who did stay: Col. Ignatius Ferreira, who had chased diamonds at Kimberley and gold at Barberton without finding either, viewed Harrison’s outcrop, and built the first organised camp on the ridge. That camp became Ferreirasdorp. The oldest suburb of Johannesburg.

Harrison sold his Discoverer’s Claim on 16 November 1886 for £10. He was not seen on the Witwatersrand again. He was not heard of anywhere else either. He told someone he was heading to Barberton. After that, nothing.

The cyanide process arrived in 1890 and saved the field. Capital organised. The city was built.

In March 2026, South Africa poured first gold from its first new underground gold mine in 15 years. The mine is called Qala Shallows, owned by West Wits Mining, on the same goldfield Harrison found. Qala is a Zulu word. It means to begin. Nobody knows the exact date Harrison made his find. The 140th year is 2026. Qala Shallows opened in it.

Harrison’s name is on a park in Johannesburg. Most people drive past it without stopping.

George Harrison disappears from the record after November of 1886. 140 years later, in 2026, his field opened a new mine.

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

Tharisa Mine sits on the farm Rooikoppies, 35 kilometres east of Rustenburg on the Western Limb of the Bushveld Complex. The country is flat, dry highveld. Red soil. Thornveld pressing against the fence lines. Open pits cut into the earth. In March 2026, the Apollo portal fired its inaugural underground blast. A junior miner had just extended its life by more than fifty years.

The family behind Tharisa has been in South African mining for decades — a Cypriot-born dynasty that came to the Bushveld three times. The first attempt, in the 1980s, was ended by a platinum price collapse. The second produced Eland Platinum, assembled from ground the majors had not developed and sold to Xstrata in 2007 for approximately US$1 billion. The third time was Tharisa. Founded 2008 on prospecting rights over the MG chromitite layers. Genesis Plant commissioned 2011. The balance sheet no longer reads like a junior’s.

The reef selection was the insight. Tharisa mines the MG chromitite layers, not the UG2. In MG ore, PGMs sit in silicates, physically separate from the chromite. Spirals pull the chrome out first. Flotation recovers the PGMs from what’s left. No furnace required. Someone else carries the smelting cost. Someone else carries the electricity risk. The Vulcan plant, developed in-house, was the first in the world to recover chrome from ultra-fines at scale.

When Eskom tariffs hit R1.36 per kilowatt-hour against a ferrochrome viability threshold of 62 cents, integrated smelters curtailed output or went to care and maintenance. Tharisa had no smelter to switch off. FY2024: 1.7 million tonnes of chrome concentrate, a record. Revenue: US$721 million. Roughly two-thirds from chrome, one-third from PGMs.

Fujian Wuhang, a Chinese stainless steel producer, was among the investors who put US$95 million into Tharisa in 2011. The customer became a shareholder. The founding family holds a significant controlling stake. The Tharisa Community Trust was established the same year, originally holding 6% equity in the operating company; that stake was restructured in 2022 as part of a broader BEE transaction. Approximately one-third of the workforce is drawn from host communities.

The $547 million underground transition adds more than fifty years beyond the open pits.

Tharisa holds an effective 68% interest in Karo Platinum, in Zimbabwe, 80 kilometres south-west of Harare. That operation targets first ore in 2027.

The majors worked the UG2 for platinum and sold chrome as a credit. Tharisa chose a different reef and built a mine around what that choice made possible.

Across Southern Africa, juniors are finding value in ground the majors priced, passed, and left. Tharisa is a clean example of what that looks like when the geology, processing, and patience align. Copper, gold, PGMs, chrome — the junior story across Southern Africa is one to watch.

iSince this story was published, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) approved a concessionary electricity tariff of 62c/kWh for Samancor Chrome’s smelters. The story was first published on LinkedIn on 26 May 2026, where you can read the original post and comments. This work is AI-assisted—read about how I work.

The Steelpoort valley sits at around 900 metres, thornveld and ridges of ultramafic rock, the Drakensberg escarpment to the east. Drive through Burgersfort on the R37 and the valley opens below you. The chrome trucks on every road are Samancor’s. So is the smelter on the R555, two kilometres south of Steelpoort town.

You’ve probably never heard of the company. That’s not an accident.

Samancor Chrome is the world’s largest integrated ferrochrome producer. Unlisted. More than 1.8 billion tonnes of chrome ore in the Bushveld Complex — over a century at current mining rates. Six smelting plants across the eastern limb. Taken private by Billiton and Anglo American in December 1998.

In 2005, BHP Billiton and Anglo American sold it to Kermas Group, a vehicle created for the transaction, for US$469 million. What followed was fourteen years of Kazakhstani investor groups, Mauritius holding structures, and Cayman Islands entities. In 2022, Sinosteel acquired control. In 2023, China Baowu absorbed Sinosteel. The world’s largest steelmaker, wholly owned by China’s central government, now controls the world’s largest ferrochrome operation. It is not a secret. It is simply not discussed.

The Ndizani Workers’ Trust holds 5.6%, structured to deliver dividends to the workforce. AMCU’s 2019 application alleged over US$100 million diverted from the Trust — the first time a South African union used company law to force a private company to open its books. Litigation continues.

Electricity is the existential cost.

South Africa’s proposed tariff relief for ferrochrome producers is still awaiting final NERSA confirmation. Long-term solar PPAs now price at 40 to 50c/kWh. Across six smelting plants, that gap is hundreds of millions of rands a year. Samancor and CGN Africa Energy — Chinese, state-backed — have signed a 100 MW solar PPA at Tubatse, co-financed by the China-Africa Development Fund. The Chinese state is not waiting for NERSA. It is building the energy stack now.

CGN’s solar plant solves Samancor’s cost. The tariff it sidesteps is the same grid that built this industry — when South Africa had some of the cheapest electricity in the world, and the mines that ran on it employed hundreds of thousands of people.

That era ended. Nobody has replaced what that time made possible for industry in South Africa.

Not for the mines. Not for the Bapedi and Ndzundza Ndebele who were in this valley before any of it arrived.

Since this story was published, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) approved a concessionary electricity tariff of 62c/kWh for the Glencore-Merafe Chrome Venture’s ferrochrome smelters. The story was first published on LinkedIn on 21 May 2026, where you can read the original post and comments. This work is AI-assisted—read about how I work.

Three weeks ago this series stood in Burgersfort and looked down at the Steelpoort Valley from the PGM side: chrome trucks on every road, a corridor capital arrived to transform and only partly did. The chrome seams are the other side of that story. The Koni, predecessors absorbed into the Bapedi state, were iron-workers here from at least the 1600s. Tjate, royal capital of Sekhukhune I, thirty kilometres from the smelter site, carries iron-smelting remains from around AD 700 and is a Provincial Heritage Site. The forge was not merely industrial. Specialist smiths. Defined taboos. Transformation of ore to metal treated as an act of creation.

Thousands of years on, the valley still transforms ore to metal. The Glencore-Merafe Chrome Venture runs five ferrochrome smelters and seven chrome mines across the Eastern and Western Limbs of the Bushveld Complex. Installed capacity: 2.3 million tonnes per year, the single largest ferrochrome production complex on earth. Twenty-two furnaces. The Lion Smelter at Steelpoort uses Premus kiln technology, drawing 37% less electricity than conventional processes. When the tap hole opens, molten ferrochrome runs into the ladle at 2,800 degrees, sparks.

The venture formed on 1 July 2004. Glencore, then Xstrata, had built its chrome position through acquisition: Chromecorp in 1994, CMI in 1998 for $215 million. Neither party sold assets to the other. They pooled operations into a notarial pooling and sharing venture, splitting EBITDA: Glencore 79.5%, Merafe (JSE:MRF) 20.5%. The Competition Tribunal validated the structure. Roughly 30% of global output. Glencore absorbed Xstrata in 2013; the structure carried over.

South Africa holds 72% of the world’s chrome reserves. China holds none. China now produces more ferrochrome than South Africa. Not because the ore ran out. Not because demand fell. Since 2008, South Africa’s industrial electricity tariff increased by more than 900%. Tariff required for viability: 62 cents per kilowatt-hour. What the venture was paying in late 2025: approximately R1.36. Output fell to 586,000 tonnes: 25% of capacity, down 63%. Section 189 notices to 1,200 to 1,400 workers. Wonderkop and Boshoek to care and maintenance. Burgersfort’s boom came partway and stalled. The chrome valley’s constraint was different: not geology, not capital. Electricity.

Lion Smelter tapped its first ferrochrome on 16 February 2026, on an interim tariff. The 62-cent permanent rate awaits NERSA approval, expected by 15 June. The S189 process has been extended three times. Workers at the idled smelters remain on full pay, status unresolved.

The valley’s relationship with metal is not new. What is new is that whether the furnaces run is decided in Pretoria, on a price negotiated with a state utility. The forge was sacred here. Now it is precarious.

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

The road from Gweru south to Shurugwi passes through plateau country. The grass is pale here. The kopjes push shoulders through the soil like the first hints of the Great Dyke beneath.

Anglo American (Amzim) had been operating in Zimbabwe since the late 1940s. By the 1980s they were a conglomerate: nickel at Bindura; sugar at Hippo Valley and Mkwasine Estates; gold; food manufacturing; ferrochrome. They were more of a mining house than a collection of mines. A mining house in the traditional Southern African sense.

They began their retreat at the AGM in London in May 2000. The chairman announced a divestment program in Zimbabwe.

Bindura Nickel was sold to Mwana Africa in 2003 for US$8 million. Then Freda Rebecca gold mine also to Mwana. Slow disposals of food and industrial assets to indigenous consortia. Mkwasine was expropriated under Section 8 on 90 days’ notice, in breach of bilateral investment protection agreements. Hippo Valley was sold to Tongaat-Hulett in 2006. Zimbabwe Alloys was gone.
By 2008 all that remained was one asset: a platinum mine under construction in the Great Dyke.

Anglo’s assessment, in June that year at the height of international controversy over another disputed presidential election, was blunt. “If development at Unki is stopped, the project will be lost,” they said. The underground portal on the east side of the Chironde Range had already been driven. Six hundred and fifty personnel were on site. Anglo decided to retain Unki and absorb the political risk.

The concentrator was commissioned in Q4 2010. First refined metal followed in early 2011. US$500 million-plus was invested into mining and social infrastructure. The smelter: $62 million invested to meet Zimbabwe’s requirements for beneficiation. It produced first matte in September 2018.

In 2019, Unki became the first mine in the world to sign up to independent IRMA audits. It was the single biggest employer in Shurugwi District. And the Tongogara Community Share Ownership Trust was seeded with $10 million. Its benefits spread over 22 rural wards belonging to three different chieftainships.

Amzim’s residual interest was folded into Anglo American Platinum. Anglo demerged Amplats, renamed Valterra Platinum, effective 31 May 2025. The connection to Anglo American, present since the late 1940s, was then fully severed.

Today Unki sits under Valterra’s majority. The Tongogara Trust, an employee scheme, strategic partners, and the National Indigenisation Fund hold their stakes alongside it.

It’s a modern, mechanised and IRMA-certified mine. In Zimbabwe. Producing 210,000 to 240,000 PGM ounces a year from one of the richest parts of the Great Dyke.

The operating environment is still complex. Anglo could not leave this mine in 2008. Today, it no longer owns it. The mine life runs to 2060.