With this precious metal glistening as brightly as ever, we trace its rich history – and that of Johannesburg, South Africa’s swashbuckling City of Gold.
Photographs: rand refinery
by Richard Holmes
Its lustrous glow has entranced humankind for more than 5 000 years. It has sparked wars, inspired awe and led to treachery. It has shored up governments and toppled dictators. A symbol of wealth and power since time forgotten, its subtle beauty led the Romans to name it aurum, Latin for ‘glowing dawn’. But it was long before the Roman Empire stretched its tendrils across Europe that gold first came to enchant humanity. Civilisations have mined and fashioned the precious metal for millennia, but it was the ancient Egyptians – worshippers of the sun god Ra – who first truly fell in love with the dark yellow treasure dug from beneath the sands of Africa. More than 5 000 years ago Egyptian artisans were the first to smelt gold, using clay blowpipes to heat furnaces to the enormous temperatures required to transform metal into liquid. A thousand years later, the goldsmiths of ancient Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – created what was perhaps the first piece of intricate gold jewellery; a burial headdress with leaf-shaped gold pendants. But it was the death of a child-king that enshrined the reputation of gold as the precious metal for eternity. Fashioned 1 000 years before the birth of Christ, the solidgold funeral mask of Tutankhamen remains a triumph of ancient craftsmanship, and still draws thousands of visitors to its display case in Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. And in southern Africa its allure has been just as irresistible from the earliest civilisations. Excavations at Mapungubwe – a UNESCO
World Heritage site in South Africa’s Limpopo province – have revealed intricate works; most famously an 800-year-old rhinoceros crafted from leaves of the ‘glowing dawn’. But it was an unremarkable winter afternoon in 1886 that was to change the course of South Africa’s history. The earth beneath the Witwatersrand – the ‘ridge of white waters’, today known as the modern-day metropolis of Gauteng – was about to reveal its secrets. While the full details of that day are lost in time, it was most likely one George Harrison – an Australian miner of dubious reputation – who paved the way for South Africa to become the world’s leading gold producer, and the economic powerhouse of Africa. The Highveld in July is a dry and dusty place. It would have been months since the summer thundershowers soaked the fields of Langlaagte farm. Today, those fields are covered by the suburbs of Mayfair and Fordsburg, but back then it was a rocky landscape with only cornfields to break the monotony. As George Harrison wandered across the land belonging to the widow Oosthuizen, his eye caught a rocky outcrop that looked familiar from his time in the mines Down Under. Together with two other prospectors he crushed the rock, sifted for gold and marvelled at the seam of glittering wealth that shone back at him. Harrison hurried to Pretoria, home to the government of the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek, to register his claim and the area was declared open for prospecting. Claims were staked,
The gold mining industry employs thousands of South Africans, who work in some of the world’s deepest mines.
Gold is key to SA's story Opulent Living
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