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.