Our children in our schools to this day labour under the misconception that mining in South Africa started with the discovery of diamonds in the 1860s. James Baily (1973) writes, “When I asked one of the heads of Anglo American mining group whether there was evidence that their mines had been worked by prehistoric miners, he replied that it was true for almost all, adding that a number of present day mines had been started merely by finding the old workings and looking down them to discover what the other people had been after. He cited the Rooiberg tin-mine north of Pretoria as an example of this” (Baily, 1973, p. 186). The current mining operations in our country simply took over from where Africans had been mining, possibly for centuries before. This provides historical credence to the argument that mines should be nationalised and socialised.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 18:43:38 +0000
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