Despite the plunging gold price some mines still have hope for the future. John Matshikiza reports from the Free State gold fields
The small Free State town of Virginia has had its share of knocks in the roller-coaster ride of gold prices over the years. Like the neighbouring town of Welkom, it began its great period of growth after the discovery of exploitable quantities of gold ore in 1950.
Virginia, and its sister town of Harmony, never grew to the size of Welkom, with its strange 1960s glamour of shopping malls and stone-faced insurance buildings. It remained containable, not much more than a village – with the obligatory additional black village, the township of Meloding, on its outskirts.
In the current climate of uncertainty, Virginia could survive, while Welkom totters over an uncertain future. Virginia could outlive Welkom because it does not have so far to fall.
Before gold fever struck, Virginia stood in the midst of farm lands. It was on a farm called Harmonie that gold digging began in earnest in the early 1950s. Like the farm De Beers in the Northern Cape, the farm gave its name to the company that was to exploit the riches beneath its soil: Harmony Gold Mining.
Today the name Harmony gives off a surprisingly optimistic ring. The town, and the mine, stand for the possible beginning of a new kind of harmony in a small corner of South Africa.
Not that Harmony is out of the woods. The reality is that if the gold price continues to tumble, even the success story of Harmony could turn from fairy tale to nightmare.
It is something of a fairy tale at the moment because the company, now independent of its parent company, Rand Gold, has always been one of the smaller players in the glamorous world of gold mining. Now, while the big guys like Anglo Gold are shutting down mines and getting out of the Free State gold fields, Harmony is happy to buy them out, and find ways of making the seemingly unpromising gold reserves profitable.
But only just. No amount of magic can change the fact that gold mining, like any other area of business enterprise, is about systems, balances and the marketplace. There is no such thing as alchemy.
Harmony survives because it is a lean machine. Like other mines, it happily rode the boom of 1980, when gold hit the record price of $850 an ounce. Of course, other factors helped make those prices outrageously profitable. The black mine workforce was cheap and relatively docile – the big upheavals of the late 1980s were still to come.
South Africa, relative to other gold producers like Ashanti in Ghana, has always had low-yielding gold seams. Exploitation depended on the availability of cheap and plentiful labour. Turning the system on its head was bound to have a seismic effect.
But as Harmony’s chief executive officer Bernard Swanepoel says, from the time of the lifting of legal restrictions on the advancement of black miners, the company decided on a policy of development of its workforce, albeit a little late in the day.
Today, he says, the culture of the company is built around the belief that each of its 10 000 employees on the mine (slimmed down from a chubby 45 000 in the last five years) is part of a team whose individual members have a shared stake in their own survival – both literal and financial.
That ethos, together with a cost-efficient, state-of-the-art technical environment, are the factors that give Harmony its edge in the tough landscape of Free State gold mining.
Harmony’s number four shaft is one of the newer shafts. It is 17 years old. It is not a high-yield shaft, but has given up its fair share of the 39-million ounces Harmony has produced in the past 50 years.
That kind of output comes at a price. Each ton of solid rock that is hauled to the surface yields only 3,5g (less than a 10th of an ounce) of gold. To make those kind of figures make business sense, Harmony four’s workforce of 960 men has to pull out 48 000 tons of ore every month.
How they do it is something to behold.
At 5am, in the darkness before dawn, the shift gathers at the mine head and dons its protective clothing – something of an overstatement, because the less you wear 1,5km under the ground, the more comfortable you are.
There’s a permanent tropical heat and humidity down there, and the men each spend an average of eight hours and 20 minutes on a shift, doing dirty, back-breaking work. A hard hat, a G-string and a pair of steel- capped boots would be ideal, but for the sake of cleanliness and decency, the men wear sweat-catching overalls as well.
The smarter ones also wear protective knee pads, and sometimes leather aprons worn back- to-front to protect the buttocks from the sharpness of the splintered rocks they work among all day.
To get to the level we visited, at 1 100m, you enter a cage attached to a very reliable- looking steel cable, and disappear into the earth. The cable is one of a twin set that governs the traffic of men, ore and mining materials into and out of the mine. As one cage descends, the other comes up, both travelling at a speed of 68kph – more than a kilometre a minute.
Standing at an intermediate level, waiting for our lift to arrive, we hear the cage that is travelling in the opposite direction approach, and watch in amazement as it shoots past us like a rocket disappearing into outer space. Except that the outer space down here is solid rock.
So the hoist driver, a huge Afrikaner with an ashtray overflowing with just-used Gunstons, who monitors the lift-calls by a series of coded bells and the help of the computerised console in front of him, sends us hurtling downwards.
The cage is narrow and functional. There are no benches and no handles to hold on to. As we pick up various groups of miners at different levels on the way down, they laugh among themselves at the wobbly sea legs of the newcomers. This is their world and they ride the cage like rodeo champions, totally at ease.
The white miners greet each other warmly in Afrikaans, immediately engaging each other in animated conversations about what’s going on in the mine. The black miners stand quietly in the corner, saying nothing. This is the legacy of mine culture that will still take years to break down.
The uniting factor is fanagalo. Even though it is a lazy mockery, made up mostly of simple Zulu and Afrikaans words strung together without grammar, it is a subterranean lingua franca that serves.
The white miners use it unconsciously even when they speak among themselves. One of the miners describes a recent mine accident to another, ending with the sentence “Ek hoor Boesman en die ander ou zonke twee het tshonile [I hear Boesman and the other guy, both of them died].”
At the bottom we march another kilometre before we reach the rock face, moving awkwardly down the curving passages, stumbling between the rail lines, the pools of grey water, and the tunnel wall. Black and white miners go scurrying past us, sure- footed as cats in the dark, in spite of being bent double in the increasingly narrow tunnels.
We reach the din of the rock face at last, too awed to be afraid. A row of men, black and white, are drilling into precise spots marked with red paint, slicing away with the delicacy of electric carving knives carving the Sunday joint.
Here, at last, is the meaning of it all. Pieces of black rock lie all around under our feet, waiting to be sent to the surface. Out of these unpromising shards comes the stuff that makes wedding rings and bullion bars.
Back up on the ground, life goes on as usual in Harmony and Virginia. People are concerned, because another fall in the gold price could change everything.
Charles Richmor, who has run the Harmony Hotel for 30 years, is not too happy because business has fallen away in the last few years. With things running as tight as they are on the mines, there is very little business for the sales reps, who used to be the hotel’s main clientele, to visit the area. Large hotels are becoming redundant.
But Harmony has been good to Richmor and his family, and even if they don’t manage to sell the hotel in the near future, Harmony is still a pleasant place to live.
The future is not certain, but why worry about something you can’t change? Virginia and Harmony prefer to take the bright view, and live by the belief that gold, like love, will always be around.