/ 17 February 2023

Heritage, legacy and loss in a city built on gold

Gettyimages 1229604874(1)
Photo: Getty Images

A few weeks ago, an outraged Facebook post by the Johannesburg Heritage portal broke the news that the Crown Mines Head Office, built in 1909 and a protected national monument, had been illegally demolished by an unknown developer. 

The site, just southwest of central Johannesburg, was at one time at the heart of thriving mining operations on the Witwatersrand basin. The building was designed by Sir Herbert Baker, the eminent British architect who forged his celebrated career in South Africa between 1892 and 1912, and featured a brick façade, with crafted, arched wooden window frames and landscaped gardens. 

The site included research and development laboratories for the mining industry and a striking brick assay chimney stood tall testament to industrial endeavour. 

Nothing was said about the state of the place or its occupants before the demolition. Pictures showed a site scraped clean. 

Formal mining activities around Johannesburg have been in steady decline since the latter half of the 20th century. 

Most of the many hundreds of shallower operations have closed. A few deep shafts to the west of the city continue to produce gold. 

The mine dumps, a fascinating feature of the landscape of my childhood, are all but gone, the older ones containing enough gold to warrant reclamation, the fine yellow sand used for landfill and building.  

Drive through: The last grains of sand on the mine dump that used to house the iconic Top Star drive in Johannesburg South. Photo: David Edwards

The Crown Mines offices were taken over and refurbished by Rand Mines sometime during the 1970s. I was a teenager at that time, living in Bedfordview, to the east of Johannesburg. The mines in that area had closed many decades previously but the frequent earth tremors were a reminder that mining continued close by. 

Mine dumps, in various forms, mostly fully stabilised and grassed, covered the area that is now Bedford Centre and the apartment buildings beyond. Kids were warned to keep off the dumps. Some years before, a local boy, digging a tunnel in play, had been buried by collapsing sand. 

In my riding days, a long, grassed slope up a tall, cone-shaped dump, with a reservoir at the top, provided the only place in the neighbourhood where the horses could stretch to a gallop. The thrill of it is with me still.

In the early seventies, the trucks and diggers came and carted the sand away. Bedford Centre and the flats were built. In keeping with the style of the many shopping malls constructed around suburban Johannesburg at that time, all the shops faced inward. 

The building’s façade was a windowless blank with only the entrances opening outwards; a reflection of the angst of middle-class white communities. 

My friends and I were the first generation of mall rats, haring the wrong way up the escalators, mesmerised by lava lamps and fibre optics in the window displays, shuffling up static on the nylon carpets and passing on electric shocks with much hilarity.  

Across town, less than 10km from the Crown Mines Head Office, where my black peers lived a strange parallel reality in the township of Soweto, student riots broke out and were violently suppressed in the suburb of Orlando East.

When one explores Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand basin from the safe vantage of Google Earth, the remnants of the mine dumps, the slimes dams and the weird yellow of the toxic sand are visible from Springs in the east to Krugersdorp in the west. The dumps have been scraped, scarred and etched, the stabilising vegetation long gone. 

These are areas with a burden of toxic waste, heavy metals and radioactive material constantly leaching into the air and water. 

The sprawl of low-cost housing and chaotic informal settlements encircle and encroach on the yellow waste. Communities are intrinsically linked to the legacy of mining by the very air they breathe. 

Formal mining has left a vast and dangerous warren of shafts and tunnels which are exploited by gangs of zama zamas living a precarious and brutal life illegally mining the leftover metal. Murders and violence between rivals are frequent, as are deaths from flooding and tunnel collapses. These are people scratching for life beyond the circles of justice and journalists and the true number of deaths will never be known. The zama zamas bring more crime to areas already overburdened. 

Gold dust: While mining declined in the second half of the 20th century, the mine dumps of Joburg formed part of many a Boomer and Generation Xer’s mental backdrop of the city. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy

Last year in July, eight women, who were part of a crew filming a music video on the dumps, were raped by a gang of men who attacked and robbed the party. The perpetrators have not been caught. The local community, long living in fear, responded with vigilante justice. 

There were 82 arrests but the case was bungled and the accused released, some with minor charges.

This appalling Wild West tale of an innocent creative jaunt turned to waking nightmare played out near Krugersdorp. This area of the western Witwatersrand basin has enormous challenges with acid mine drainage.

Mines abandoned by the companies who made untold millions from the earth, and the cheap labour and lives of others, now leach their toxins into the groundwater. 

The long-term environmental, health and agricultural implications are potentially catastrophic. A study published in the South African Journal of Science in 2017 found elevated levels of heavy metals in the blood and urine of people living near mine dumps and linked this exposure to a range of health problems, including neurological, kidney and cardiovascular damage.

I understand the outrage at the illegal destruction of cultural heritage. We have a long and shameful history in this regard. Johannesburg has always eaten its own tail, demolishing anything older than 50 years or so in the cause of development and the illusive idea of progress. 

There is a pang of regret at the craft lost and history obliterated, once again. Impossible, though, to contemplate this lost heritage without trying to grasp the complexities of the legacy all citizens of Johannesburg continue to inherit. 


This piece was originally published on deirdreberkovic.com.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.