Mine excursion
Australian company West Wits Mining is
breathing new life into a historical mining
area, writes Leon Louw.
T
he August wind in Johannesburg is dry, cold, and it cuts right through
the bone. With its onset, those living amid the dusty dumps and
remains of a once thriving gold mining industry shut their doors
and their windows and hope they are sheltered against the swirling winds of
change. Although the icy winter wind carries with it a perpetual layer of dust
on the windowsill, it also brings hope. It cleanses the air and prepares the City
of Gold for dreamy, hot, and dust-free spring days.
Many miners in Johannesburg have faced these winds, stuck it out and
made money, or packed it up and left for greener pastures. Big names built
empires on the most prolific gold-bearing reef the world has ever known.
Randlords like Cecil John Rhodes, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and Barney
Barnato shaped the future of this mining town. It was to become a megacity,
built on gold, so to speak. Later on, companies like JCI, Durban Roodepoort
Deep, Harmony Gold, AngloGold Ashanti, and more recently, Sibanye Gold,
would become synonymous with a thriving industry during a gold mining
super-boom the world is unlikely to experience again.
Modern mining legends like Bernard Swanepoel, Neil Froneman, and
Mark Bristow breathed life into what was slowly becoming a degraded ‘moon
landscape’ in the 1990s and early 2000s. By then, the gold-bearing seams of
the West, Central and Eastern basins had been relentlessly worked for more
than 120 years, and illegal miners, colloquially known as zama zamas, started
scavenging the leftovers.
Ghosts linger
A few years ago, loitering gangs of zama zamas controlled West Wits, off
Main Reef Road, to the east of Roodepoort. As a result, this has affected the
community, developers, land owners, and the City of Johannesburg, among
others. The area forms part of the Sol Plaatjies township.
Roger Kebble and his son Bret’s companies, Durban Roodepoort Deep
(DRD) and Johannesburg Consolidated Investments ( JCI), once owned
this part of the Central Basin. In fact, West Wits played a pivotal role in the
rise and eventual demise of the Kebble empire. Since 2008, an Australian
company called West Wits Mining owns the prospecting rights to what
was once the property of Roger Kebble’s DRD. Since 2001, when DRD
(after