May 2014
MODERN MINING
3
COMMENT
T
he latest book to cover South Af-
rica’s mining industry, Jade Daven-
port’s
Digging Deep
, is a formidable
read – in fact, it’s taken me nearly
three months to finish it after re-
ceiving a review copy from Jonathan Ball Pub-
lishers in early February.
Coming in at around 460 pages (excluding
the extensive notes and bibliography),
Digging
Deep
is a serious attempt – primarily based on
secondary sources – to cover the epic story of
South African mining in a single volume and is
apparently the first history of its kind. Even so,
Davenport freely admits that her book is by no
means comprehensive and that it concentrates
on just seven commodities – copper, diamonds,
gold, coal, iron ore, platinum and uranium.
It’s probably worth pointing out that in
practice diamonds and gold get the lion’s
share of attention. Having said this, the other
metals and minerals are for the most part cov-
ered in reasonable detail although I did notice
that nowhere (unless I somehow missed it) is
Palabora – surely one of South Africa’s land-
mark mines – mentioned. As it is, copper
mining in South Africa seems to have started
and finished in Namaqualand in Davenport’s
account.
Davenport is well qualified to write on
South Africa’s mining history. She studied
at the University of Cape Town and has a
MA (cum laude) in Historical Studies – her
dissertation, I understand, was on the evolu-
tion of mining legislation at the Cape from
the mid-1800s to 1910. She has also worked
as a journalist and correspondent for
Mining
Weekly
since 2005 and indeed it was her min-
ing history column in this publication which
led to Jonathan Ball Publishers inviting her to
write a full length book.
Her writing is immaculate and has been
complemented by excellent proof reading as I
didn’t see a single spelling error anywhere in
the book. As far as I could tell, there are few fac-
tual errors either, the only one I picked up being
a reference to Eskom operating a generating
fleet of “13 massive coal-fired power stations
each with a capacity of over 34 000 MW”.
One of the problems of a book like this is
that it necessarily has to devote a great deal of
attention to what one might call the heroic age
of South African mining – roughly the period
from the late 1860s to around the end of the
century which saw, in succession, the dia-
mond rush on the northern frontier of the Cape
Colony, the gold rushes in the then Eastern
Transvaal at Pilgrim’s Rest and Barberton,
and finally the greatest gold rush of all on the
Witwatersrand.
The story of these events – and of the colos-
sal personalities such as Rhodes and Barnato
connected with them – has been told so many
times by so many writers that it is difficult for
a new author to bring anything fresh to the
table. Still, Davenport does a marvellous job of
re-telling the story and is particularly good in
explaining and making sense of the labyrinthine
negotiations and deals which consolidated the
diamond mines in Kimberley in the late 1870s
and the 1880s, putting an end to the short-lived
– and chaotic – era of the small digger.
On the subject of the opening up of the
Witwatersrand, I was amused to read that
Gardner Williams, an American engineer who
was an adviser to Rhodes and who became the
GM of De Beers, visited the emerging goldfield
in its early days – before mining really started
in earnest – to assess its prospects. His verdict:
“If I rode over these reefs in America I would
not even get off my horse to look at them. In
my opinion they are not even worth hell room.”
Williams in fact was a very able man by all
accounts but this statement must surely rank as
one of the most spectacular misjudgements in
the history of mining!
Davenport takes her history through to 2002,
the year marking the 150th anniversary of the
start of commercial mining in South Africa
(the first Namaqualand copper mine was estab-
lished on the farm Springbokfontein in 1852)
and also the year that the MPRDA was promul-
gated. Her coverage of the last decades of the
20th century struck me as being a bit on the
light side – given the major restructuring of the
industry that occurred in the 1990s in particu-
lar – but I can well appreciate that space was an
issue and that it was important to keep the book
to a manageable length.
Aside from this quibble, I would rate
Digging
Deep
as a very fine piece of work and I certainly
can’t imagine that anyone with an interest in
South African mining history will want to be
without their own personal copy.
Arthur Tassell
New history
recounts
the story of
SA mining
“If I rode over
these reefs in
America I would
not even get off
my horse to look
at them. In my
opinion they are
not even worth
hell room.”
Gardner Williams,
adviser to Cecil Rhodes,
commenting on the
newly discovered
Witwatersrand
goldfield
