Imagine you’re a Parisienne and morning by morning, as you sit on your balcony sipping cappuccino, you notice that the Eiffel Tower is slowly getting shorter. One morning you almost swallow your croissant whole when you discover that it’s no longer there. It’s been dismantled and no longer exists. The city’s signature has become memory.
Imagine if the Statue of Liberty were airlifted out of New York or the pyramids bulldozed. Ridiculous, impossible. Perhaps in Paris, New York and Cairo. But in Johannesburg anything’s possible.
Most of us are so busy making a buck, surviving another day, living, loving and keeping the kettle boiling that we fail to notice that the city’s prime icons are dissolving beneath our very noses. The mine dumps are being recycled and with them the city’s identity is inexorably changing.
Where a 40-million-ton yellow-white massif of mineral-rich dust once lay, a new commercial district is now springing up. And slowly but surely these strange, distinctive forms, once the unequivocal symbols of Johannesburg’s dazzling wealth and industrial prowess, are disappearing from the cityscape begging the questions: where are they going and what does this mean for the City of Gold?
Charles Symons is general manager of Crown Gold Recovery, one of the head honchos in the gold reclamation field. “When the gold price increased quite substantially in the early 1980s and it went up to around $800 an ounce, various mining companies started looking at recycling these dumps to remove the residual gold that was in there,” he explains.
In the early mining days, processing plants weren’t as efficient as they are today, but the development of new carbon technology in the late 1970s maximised the amount of gold that could be extracted making it economically feasible to recycle the dumps.
Symons explains that there are two types of dumps. Sand dumps cover a fairly small area and are very high with steep sides, and the coarser-grained slimes dams are lower and wider – more geometrically exact in shape.
Symons’s plant is one of three operations in the Durban Roodepoort Deep (DRD) stable that jointly treat about 30-million tons a year.
The intention is threefold, says Symons. The first is to extract as much gold as possible out of the operation.
“Secondly, each of the hundreds of little dumps along the reef encompasses a piece of land which sits within a property area and there’s real estate value to it. We’re clearing land which can then be used for commercial/ industrial/residential development.”
Rand Mines Properties, says Symons, has a plan to create economic continuity between Johannesburg and Soweto through the removal of the dumps and the development of land.
“Then there’s the environmental aspect. Once the gold has been removed, we redeposit the material on three existing slimes dams with grades too low to recycle. By consolidating all that material on one site, we are able to employ the latest techniques in dam-building, grassing and environmental controls.”
But why are the three slimes dams chosen for cumulative deposits on Soweto’s doorstep? “These dumps were in existence long before the residential area of Soweto actually came about,” says Symons. “But we are very acutely aware of this. They have all been grassed. They are all kept moist on the top because they’re active. So the amount of wind-blown dust is far less than what comes off any of the other dumps.” The dust is rigorously monitored and curbed.
This is confirmed by environmental consultant Graham Trusler of Digby Wells and Associates. Trusler says Johannesburg is the first place in the world where people learned how to vegetate such hostile environments and that grassing changed the face of Johannesburg, allowing more businesses to grow up close to the dumps.
“Look at old photographs of Johannesburg. It looked like a beach. When the wind blew it was horrendous. The south side of the railway lines became a very poor area because there was so much dust blowing around the streets. In Marshalltown about 60 years ago there were sand drifts in the middle of the road,” he says.
But beyond engineering, science, environmental controls and modern-day concessions for profit lies another tale – the symbolic signficance of these dumps in the history of this ever-evolving metropolis.
As Trusler says: “One of the things that is difficult to measure is this loss of a landmark. What is it worth? Nobody pays to have a landmark there but when it’s gone people complain that they used to drive past it every day and now it’s not there anymore.
“Take the Top Star Drive-In. I don’t know of any other place in the world where there’s a drive-in on the top of a sand dump where you can see a good view of the big city. I’ll be sad if it does go. But what is it worth? That’s a value that’s difficult to evaluate.”
Difficult to calculate? Yes. But undoubtedly real, I’d argue. The mine dumps are reminders of the very essence of what Johannesburg – this City of Gold, this home for wild gamblers, passionate entrepreneurs and brave visionaries – is all about.
These are the forms capable of taking us back metaphysically to October 4 1896, the date officially accepted as this city’s birthday, when the first stands were laid out on a farm called Randjeslaagte.
With 28% of total output, the Transvaal was the world’s largest gold producer by 1898. After the setback of the Anglo-Boer War, this position was regained in 1906 (26,7% of world production). In those days, Johannesburg was well insulated against the negative effects of local and international upheavals through the constant demand for its gold. And, arguably, no city on earth has grown up as quickly as this one.
The mine dumps have always been unmistakable landmarks in the cityscape and they were there when the first nine-storey skyscrapers appeared around 1903 to cut into the sky above the city.
Lionel Phillips wrote in 1905: “Entering the Golden City for the first time, one is struck by the curious spectacle of huge structures upon the American pattern, standing side-by- side with modest double-storied buildings, and in the immediate vicinity of wood and iron shanties.”(Johannesburg, 100 Years). Together with the mine dumps, these forms symbolised the financial power of the private sector.
But the dumps also have darker resonances. Once the stronghold of everything that made this city great, they are also the key to the suffering, division, fear, vengeance (and diabolical urban planning) that plagues contemporary Johannesburg. For in the mines lie the seeds of apartheid.
Apartheid might have modernised the system of cheap migrant labour and perfected the instruments of labour coercion, but the structures of segregationist labour control grew out of the state’s response to the needs of Johannesburg’s mines.
Gazing at the mine dumps, I am reminded of Stimela, that unforgettable anthem by Hugh Masekela. Between inexpressibly moving saxophone solos, he sings: “There’s a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi. There’s a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe. There’s a train the comes from Angola and Mozambique – from Lesotho from Botswana from Swaziland. From all the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa, this train carries young and old African men who are conscripted to come and work on contract on the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg and its surrounding metropolis.
“Sixteen hours or more a day for almost no pay. Deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth when they are digging and drilling for that shiny mighty invasive stone or when they dish the mish-mash-mush food into their iron plates with the iron shovel.
“Or when they sit in their stinky, funky, filthy, flea-ridden barracks and hostels and they think about the loved ones they may never see again because they might already have been forcibly removed from where they last left them or wantonly murdered in the dead of night by roving and marauding gangs of no particular origin.” Like this song, the saga of the city continues.
And the dumps are disappearing, perhaps symbolic of the lessening significance of gold in South Africa’s economy, or the evolution of the economy out of a past that craves to be forgotten.
Living in older, more established cities one draws comfort from all that endures: an ancient cathedral, a cobbled street. Yet Johannesburg – even in its most precious signature of shifting sand and wind-blown dust – is a city in flux: constantly learning, growing and reinventing itself.
It is said that Johannesburg has been entirely rebuilt three times in the course of this century. And that’s probably the thrill of living here – the idea that you can partipate in its tumultuous evolution.