February 2014
MODERN MINING
3
COMMENT
J
ust over a decade ago, journalist Matthew
Hart produced a spell-binding and highly
praised account of the global diamond-
mining scene entitled
Diamond: The His-
tory of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair
. He’s
now back with a new book, this time on gold
and the gold-mining industry, which exhibits
the same breezy, readable style and which, like
Diamond
, is based on intensive research and
travel to some of the most remote mining sites
in the world.
Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive
Metal
, Hart’s narrative of the gold industry,
starts and finishes in Africa, with the open-
ing chapter describing AngloGold Ashanti’s
ultra-deep Mponeng mine and the final chapter
dealing with the Kilo-Moto greenstone belt in
the north-eastern DRC and, in particular, the
Kibali mine of Randgold Resources (in which,
of course, AngloGold Ashanti is also a partner).
Being a mining writer myself, I’m fascinated
by the way in which Hart – who lives in New
York – is able to make mining come alive by
describing it in terms – and with analogies –
comprehensible to the layman. Here he is on
Mponeng’s cooling system: “It takes 6 000 tons
of ice a day to keep Mponeng’s deepest levels
at a bearable eighty-three degrees. They make
the ice in a surface plant, then mix it with salt
to create a slush that can be pumped down to
underground reservoirs. There, giant fans pass
air over the coolant and push the chilled air
further down, into the mining tunnels. Cool air
goes down at a temperature of thirty-seven and
comes back, heated by the rock, at eighty-six.
I walked past one of these hot air returns – a
black, growling tunnel that exhaled rank air
from the bottom levels.”
In between the opening and closing chap-
ters, Hart explores a variety of topics, touching
not just on the history of gold mining (in the
second chapter, for example, he has a superb
account of the Spanish interaction in the
1500s with the gold-rich Inca empire which
stretched from modern-day Chile to Colombia)
but also looking at the role gold has played
in the world’s economy over the centuries. A
particularly interesting chapter –
Camp David
Coup
– analyses in detail the circumstances
surrounding one of the seminal events in gold’s
history – President Nixon’s decision in 1971 to
decouple the dollar from gold, the so-called
‘Nixon Shock’ that liberated the precious metal
from the shackles of an artificially low price.
The discovery of the Carlin Trend in Nevada
and its subsequent development into one of
the greatest goldfields of modern times is dealt
with at length, an account which inevitably
also involves Hart delving into the history of
Barrick Gold, a company founded in 1983 by
Hungarian-born Canadian entrepreneur Peter
Munk. Barrick subsequently bought the hope-
lessly under-capitalised Goldstrike mine on
the Carlin Trend in late 1986, turning it from
a small ‘ma-and-pa operation’ – as one Barrick
executive described it at the time – into a phe-
nomenal million-ounce-a-year gold producer
that is still going strong today.
The emergence of China as the world’s big-
gest gold producer in 2008 also receives Hart’s
attention. As he points out, the remarkable
thing about this Chinese achievement is that
the country has no real world-class gold mines,
only a vast number of small gold mines (per-
haps 11 000 in all), plus thousands of artisanal
operations.
Hart has a flair for penning short pen por-
traits of the personalities within the gold
mining industry. He describes Randgold’s Mark
Bristow, for example, as “a fifty-two year old
South African with a PhD in geology and the
build and temperament of a Cape buffalo. He
has a weakness for such diversions as hurling
himself out of airplanes for a thirty-second free
fall; shooting Grade-V rapids on the Zambezi
River; and bungee jumping at Victoria Falls,
where you drop ninety-five feet before you
reach the end of the cord. He has homes in
London, Johannesburg and Mauritius and
the ski resort of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But
mostly he lives on a succession of airplanes,
crisscrossing Africa on the hunt for gold.”
I wouldn’t want to give my readers the
impression that
Gold
is an exhaustive history
of gold mining. Much is left out. The discovery
and development of the Witwatersrand gold-
field is largely absent, at least one major African
gold producer – Tanzania – is scarcely men-
tioned, and there is very little on gold mining in
Australia and Canada. But to cover everything
would have meant a much longer book. As it
is,
Gold
is an easy read – 229 pages (exclud-
ing references) in the paperback version – and I
highly recommend it to anyone with an interest
in mining. It is published by Simon & Schuster
and is readily available from local bookshops.
Arthur Tassell
All you ever
wanted
to know
about gold
Underground
metropolis
“Swarming the gold mines,
a skilled rabble of impov-
erished men and women
siphon off hundreds of
millions of dollars a year
worth of ore. …Once they
penetrate a mine, they
may stay down for months.
Deprived of sunlight, their
skin turns gray. The wives
and prostitutes who live with
them turn gray. In South
Africa they call them ghost
miners. They inhabit an un-
derground metropolis that in
some goldfields can extend
forty miles, a suffocating
labyrinth in which the only
glitter is the dream of gold.”
Matthew Hart on South
Africa’s illegal miners
