Gold

Phew... made it to the Christmas break. This isn't a blog about work, otherwise I'd have some stories to tell; suffice to say I'm ready for a holiday - and apologies to anyone I haven't emailed, or to whom I've only sent cursory uninformative emails - or in other words, apologies to everyone who knows me.

Last Sunday I did manage to get out and do something - I went to the Gold Reef City theme park, not to go on any of the rides (although the background screams of people riding the Anaconda and the Tower of Terror were quite distracting) but to do the tour of a gold mine - the site of the theme park was a functioning gold mine employing 30,000 people until 1977, when mining was discontinued, not because the seam had run out (you can see and touch the gold ore - it's a band of black rock about a metre wide) but because they'd gone so deep that it was no longer economically viable to mine it - they'd got to level 57 at 2,500 metres underground, and it took the miners two hours just to get to get there. (And this isn't the deepest - Western Deep, also in Joburg, is the deepest in the world at 4,000 metres and is still active.) At Gold Reef City you go down in a miners' cage to a mere 220 metres but it's still a fascinating experience - you see and hear a demonstration of drilling (it's loud), and at the end of the tour you see a gold bar being poured - you're also allowed to pick one up (not the hot one but one that's cooled down) - you're told that if you can pick it up with one hand you can keep it - but as it weighs 14 kilos and it's a stretch to get your fingers around it, they're not risking much...

What's striking about the whole experience is how much sheer effort goes into getting gold out of the ground - even with dynamite they can only move forward in a shaft one metre a day, and before they had electricity everything was done by hand - it took six hours just to hammer a hole in the rock big enough to put a stick of dynamite in... A ton of ore produces a mere four grams of gold... the temperature at the rock face at four kilometres underground can reach fifty degrees (air has to be refrigerated and pumped down so the miners can breathe it) ... and the human cost has been staggering, running at about 160 deaths a year (not counting related deaths like silicosis) until safety standards started to improve in the past ten years - SA has always had a poor safety record for mining in general (240,000 workers went on strike just last year to protest at bad conditions across the industry). Apartheid and its legacy has also had a role in this, of course, as most rockface workers were black and worked long hours and years for a pittance - a very small museum in Gold Reef City (not included in the tour!) documents the appalling conditions and statistics of decades of exploitation very close to slavery. By the time I left Gold Reef City I felt that in a rational world gold would undoubtedly stay in the ground where it belongs.

(Above: the minehead; pouring molten gold.)