The Future of Mining in South Africa: Sunset or Sunrise?
The Future of Mining in South Africa: Sunset or Sunrise?

Author: Valiani, Salimah

Publisher: MISTRA

Published: 2018-12-28

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 0639923828

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The future of mining in South Africa is hotly contested. Wide-ranging views from multiple quarters rarely seem to intersect, placing emphasis on different questions without engaging in holistic debate. This book aims to catalyse change by gathering together fragmented views into unifying conversations. It highlights the importance of debating the future of mining in South Africa and for reaching consensus in other countries across the mineral-dependent globe. It covers issues such as the potential of platinum to spur industrialisation, land and dispossession on the platinum belt, the roles of the state and capital in mineral development, mining in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the experiences of women in and affected by mining since the late 19th century and mine worker organising: history and lessons and how post-mine rehabilitation can be tackled. It was inspired not only by an appreciation of South Africa’s extensive mineral endowments, but also by a realisation that, while the South African mining industry performs relatively well on many technical indicators, its management of broader social issues leaves much to be desired. It needs to be deliberated whether the mining industry can play as critical a role going forward as it did in the evolution of the country’s economy.

Mining and the Law in Africa
Mining and the Law in Africa

Author: Victoria R. Nalule

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-22

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 3030330087

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​The mining sector has been an integral part of economic development in many African countries. Although minerals have been exploited for decades in these countries, the benefits have not always been as visible. This has necessitated reforms including nationalisation of mining activities in the distant past; and currently legal and regulatory reforms. This book gives an insight of these reforms and with reference to the fieldwork research undertaken by the author in some African countries, the book highlights the social and environmental impacts of mining activities in Africa. The central question of the book is, why the mining laws have worked in some countries but not others and what can be done to ensure that these laws are effective? Consequently, the book analyses the legal reforms made in the sector and highlights both the challenges and the opportunities for foreign investors as well as the African governments and local communities. The book will be of great interest to researchers and students in Energy and Geography related fields, as well as to practitioners and policy makers.

Mining in Africa
Mining in Africa

Author: Bonnie Campbell

Publisher: IDRC

Published: 2009-06-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 074532939X

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The continent of Africa is rich in minerals needed by Western economies, but rather than forming the basis for economic growth the mining industry contributes very little to African development Investigating the impact of the 2003 Extractive Industries Review on a number of African countries, the contributors find the root of the problem in the controls imposed on the African countries by the IMF and World Bank. They aim to convince academics, governments and industry that regulation needs to be reformed to create a mining industry favourable towards social, economic and environmental development. The book takes a multidisciplinary approach and provides a historical perspective of each country, making it ideal for students of development studies and development organizations.

African Artisanal Mining from the Inside Out
African Artisanal Mining from the Inside Out

Author: Sara Geenen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1317483227

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Artisanal mining is commonly associated with violent conflict, rampant corruption and desperate poverty. Yet millions of people across Sub Sahara Africa depend on it. Many of them are living in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), home to important mineral reserves, but also to a plethora of armed groups and massive human rights violations. African Artisanal Mining from the Inside Out provides a rich and in-depth analysis of the Congolese gold sector. Instead of portraying miners and traders as passive victims of economic forces, regional conflicts or disheartening national policies, it focuses on how they gain access to and benefit from gold. It shows a professional artisanal mining sector governed by a set of specific norms, offering ample opportunities for flexible employment and local livelihood support and being well-connected to the local economy and society. It argues for the viability of artisanal gold mining in the context of weak African states and in the transition towards a post-conflict and more industrialized economy. This book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduates studying natural resources and development as well as those in development studies, African studies, sociology, political economy, political ecology, legal pluralism, and history.

Mining Language
Mining Language

Author: Allison Margaret Bigelow

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1469654393

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Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

Strategy for African Mining
Strategy for African Mining

Author: John Strongman

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 1992-01-01

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 9780821321928

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This report examines the reasons for the demise of Africa's mining performance, and proposes a strategy for accelerating mining sector growth so that the sector can make a greater contribution to economic activity in the region. The report draws heavily on the experience of World Bank mining work in Africa as well as other regions. The report includes an analysis of mining legislation and taxation arrangements in five countries which have been relatively successful in attracting new private sector mining investment. It also makes use of the results of a survey of the decision making processes and criteria of over forty mining companies regarding exploration and investment in developing countries. At various stages, key insights and findings from the report have been reviewed and discussed on a selective basis with industry experts, potential investors, interested government officials and the academic community.

Governing African Gold Mining
Governing African Gold Mining

Author: Ainsley Elbra

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-31

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1137563540

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This book takes a fresh approach to the puzzle of sub-Saharan Africa’s resource curse. Moving beyond current scholarship’s state-centric approach, it presents cutting-edge evidence gathered through interviews with mining company executives and industry representatives to demonstrate that firms are actively controlling the regulation of the gold mining sector. It shows how large mining firms with significant private authority in South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania are able to engender rules and regulations that are acknowledged by other actors, and in some cases even adopted by the state. In doing so, it establishes that firms are co-governing Africa’s gold mining sector. By exploring the implications for resource-cursed states, this significant work argues that firm-led regulation can improve governance, but that many of these initiatives fail to address country/mine specific issues where there remains a role for the state in ensuring the benefits of mining flow to local communities. It will appeal to economists, political scientists, and policy-makers and practitioners working in the field of mining and extractives.

Mining and Social Transformation in Africa
Mining and Social Transformation in Africa

Author: Deborah Fahy Bryceson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1135051984

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After more than three decades of economic malaise, many African countries are experiencing an upsurge in their economic fortunes linked to the booming international market for minerals. Spurred by the shrinking viability of peasant agriculture, rural dwellers have been engaged in a massive search for alternative livelihoods, one of the most lucrative being artisanal mining. While an expanding literature has documented the economic expansion of artisanal mining, this book is the first to probe its societal impact, demonstrating that artisanal mining has the potential to be far more democratic and emancipating than preceding modes. Delineating the paradoxes of artisanal miners working alongside the expansion of large-scale mining investment in Africa, Mining and Social Transformation in Africa concentrates on the Tanzanian experience. Written by authors with fresh research insights, focus is placed on how artisanal mining is configured in relation to local, regional and national mining investments and social class differentiation. The work lives and associated lifestyles of miners and residents of mining settlements are brought to the fore, asking where this historical interlude is taking them and their communities in the future. The question of value transfers out of the artisanal mining sector, value capture by elites and changing configurations of gender, age and class differentiation, all arise.

Digging Deep
Digging Deep

Author: Jade Davenport

Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 1868424049

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Before the advent of the great mineral revolution in the latter half of the 19th century, South Africa was a sleepy colonial backwater whose unpromising landscape was seemingly devoid of any economic potential. Yet lying just beneath the dusty surface of the land lay the richest treasure trove of gold, diamonds, platinum, coal and a host of other metals and minerals that has ever been discovered in one country. It was the discovery and exploitation of first diamonds in 1870 and then gold in 1886 that proved the catalyst to the greatest mineral revolution the world has ever known, which transformed South Africa into the supreme industrialised power on the African continent. Here for the first time is the complete history of South Africa's phenomenal mineral revolution spanning a period of more than 150 years, from its earliest commercial beginnings to the present day, incorporating seven of the major commodities that have been exploited. Digging Deep describes the establishment and unparalleled growth of mining, tracing the history of the industry from its humble beginnings where copper was first mined on a commercial basis in Namaqualand in the Cape Colony in the early 1850s, to the discovery and exploitation of the country's other major mineral commodities. This is also the story of how mining gave rise to modern South Africa and how it compelled the country to develop and progress the way in which it did. It also incorporates the stories of the visionary men - Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, Sammy Marks and Hans Merensky - who pioneered and shaped the development of the industry on which modern South Africa was built.

A Ritual Geology
A Ritual Geology

Author: Robyn d'Avignon

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-07-11

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1478023074

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Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology.