He later became curator of the Johannesburg Geological Museum which is now incorporated into Museum Africa. Max was appointed as consultant geologist to the Messina Copper Mines and was a friend and partner of Dr Hans Merensky who discovered the Bushveld Complex of platinum reserves. Over the years Max Weber developed a reputation for his ability to recognise different minerals and was regarded as a scientist of distinction", says Reid. Two portions were later bought by Max Weber in He subsequently married Freya, extending her farm with the addition of his two pieces - 5.
Max was described by author Juliet Marais Louw who lived on nearby Benmore Farm, as a "modest and self-effacing man". She described his laboratory as having the "air of an alchemist's den". The laboratory was later altered by Leo, Max and Freya's son, and became known as Railway Cottage because of the number of railway sleepers used in the alteration. It was demolished in There was a small shop and an official post office on the farm called "Post Office Freya".
The post office was located on the western boundary of the farm Now 14th St. Parkmore - off Louise Ave. Freya was an avid reader and according to Carruthers, "had a great sense of humour and a bubbling personality which endeared her to everyone who met her". Max's income from the Messina Copper Mines meant that the family didn't need to rely on farming to earn a living.
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Freya used to make trips to the Johannesburg library and bring back books for the family and her mother, who read in German, Afrikaans, English, Hollands and a bit of French. In response to mounting pressure from NGO's and members of the public, government has currently given an undertaking to address these risks and remediate pollution where necessary DWAF, An exception to this is the former No.
In many cases consolidation may have buffered possible effects of closure of smaller mines, through retaining staff and using existing infrastructure to supplement adjacent operating mines with services such as pumping, ventilation, hoisting, etc. By joining underground workings of different gold mines, vast interlinked mine voids are created, which, as recently proven by the Western Basin, will be difficult to model once mining has ceased and data have been lost. Creating up-to-date databases is further complicated by frequent changes in ownership, names and staff of mines and the accompanying loss of site-specific expertise, especially where the periods run over several decades.
With such 'loss of institutional memory' afflicting mining companies and governmental regulators alike, it is particularly challenging to retain sufficient data, information, knowledge and expertise for reliably predicting post-closure scenarios. Experiences from other goldfields suggest that mine closure will most probably be a gradual process, that can stretch over decades, during which mines cease operation at different points in time, according to their profitability.
During this extended period influxes of water from abandoned voids into operational mines proved to be a major threat to the profitability of affected mines, as examples from the East Rand ERPM and the Klerksdorp goldfields AngloGold Ashanti illustrate. Future plans for post-mining development must therefore take into account the implications of interconnected mine voids, by approaching mine closure proactively in a regionally-integrated fashion.
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Owing to the increased costs of mining ever-deeper gold reefs, the output of South African gold mines has continued to decline since but is still sufficient to make South Africa the 3 rd largest producer of gold in the world, surpassed only by China which overtook South Africa in and Canada Robb and Robb, ; Campell, ; West, Fuelled by rising demand for mineral resources from rapidly industrialising countries such as China and India, prospects are good that mining in South Africa will continue to be a significant foundation industry for decades to come Campell, In the case of gold this is underpinned by a historically unique situation in which an all-time price high is accompanied not by a strengthened Rand ZAR , as is commonly the case for currencies of mining-dependent economies thus reducing the USD -based revenue for South African gold mines , but by a local currency which continues to weaken.
Using current technology, South African gold mines can still access 15 t of gold with another 20 t available at depths greater than 3 km, for which a new ultra-deep mining technology is required Campell, As a result lifespans of gold mines in the Far West Rand have significantly been extended, in some cases by up to several decades. While gold output and number of employees may continue to decline, mine closure in the FWR is still 2 generations away.
An indication of the healthy state of gold mining is, for example, the operating profit of GF,L as a major mining house in the area, which rose from ZAR2. Renewed interest in uranium, following sharp rises for the radioactive metal since , may also revive the uranium mining for which the area was known.
With the re-opening of the former Western Areas North shaft to mine uranium, as well as plans for large-scale uranium extraction from tailings of almost all mining houses in the area, not only gold- but also uranium mining is set to continue in the WFS area for many years to come Hill, a; b. Before assessing the implications for urban development of closing gold mines, the extent of mining-related urbanisation is briefly outlined.
Settlements initiated or associated with gold mining in the FWR area include: Carletonville established , named after Guy Carleton Jones, the Canadian-born chief engineer of Gold Fields of South Africa , Blyvooruitzicht villages associated with the mine of the same name which started active mining in , West- and East-Driefontein villages associated mines were commissioned in and respectively , the Deelkraal and Elandsrand villages both mines of the same name later amalgamated to the Elandskraal GM , the Venterpos settlement est.
At the time of establishment of many of the towns, apartheid policy forced Black job seekers and workers not living on mine property to settle in townships such as Bekkersdal associated with Westonaria , Khutsong associated with Carletonville and several smaller 'locations' next to 'White' mining towns. In view of the fact that a census for Khutsong alone established a population of compared to a figure of 68 reported by DWAF , this population estimate is most likely too low. Since limited access to resources generally increases the need for cheap alternatives, inhabitants of townships are commonly more likely to use polluted media water, soil, tailings , even in cases where they are aware of potential dangers or where this is illegal.
This, again, increases exposure to pollutants in the very population which is most vulnerable owing to inadequate medical and health care, malnutrition, poverty and related stress such as drug abuse as well as effects of other environmental stressors including indoor air and dust pollution. Many of the towns and, to a lesser extent, the townships benefited from mining-related infrastructure, such as hospitals, schools, sport facilities, and 1 st class infrastructure including 4-lane highways, well-maintained reticulation systems for water and electricity and a range of recreational sites such as dams and golf courses, etc.
Adding to the bleakness of such prospects of economic collapse and unemployment is often a mining legacy of environmental degradation and social problems such as increased HIV infection rates and xenophobia, both linked to the migrant labour system employed by mines for decades Turton, Combined with slow or lacking progress in service delivery, this has already fuelled social unrest and riots in Khutsong, a township mostly populated by foreign migrant workers who did not return to their home country.
It is therefore conceivable that bleak future prospects are, indeed, a real threat, not only to the economy but also to the social fabric and political stability of mining-dependent communities in the entire area. The near-hysteria evoked by the recent media attention to mining-related pollution of the WFS may well be a subconscious indicator and a means for the venting of such fears.
This could be especially true for the WR, where former benefits from mining in the form of employment and income are fading, while environmental degradation becomes more apparent by the day. Ad hoc interviews of residents in Carletonville, where mining still exists, about their perception of mining-related risks such as sinkholes and water pollution, revealed that the overwhelming majority preferred to either ignore such risks or discount them for benefits derived from the mines NWU, Judging by the dire consequences that the uncontrolled re-watering in the WR has had on the environment, it is of utmost importance that effects associated with the flooding of the much larger mine void in the FWR, and subsequent re-watering of dewatered dolomitic compartments, are well understood before they are allowed to happen.
Aspects of particular concern include:. Owing to the interconnectivity of the different mine voids in the FWR, similar problems to the ones recently encountered in dolomitic parts of the East Rand and Klerksdorp goldfields, as mentioned earlier, are to be expected. Owing to difficulties in apportioning water volumes to different voids, it is often problematic to find amicable solutions for sharing pumping costs, especially for non-revenue generating mines Winde et al.
In growing recognition of the degree to which different mines are impacting on each other, governmental authorities such as the DWA and the Department of Mineral Resources increasingly demand regionally-integrated approaches from different gold mines applying for water use licences and closure certificates, respectively Van der Merwe, Over more than a century of deep-level gold mining the WFS catchment has been profoundly impacted both positively as well as negatively. While providing 1 st class infrastructure and income to a large number of people in a previously underdeveloped area, mining also adversely affected natural resources through large-scale land degradation as an unforeseen side effect of dewatering karstic aquifers as well as through long-term pollution of the environment.
In view of the adverse impacts of uncontrolled re-watering currently experienced in the mined-out WR goldfield, it is of utmost importance that comparable impacts are avoided in the FWR, where a much larger interconnected mine void and higher volumes of potentially decanting mine-water could have even more catastrophic effects.
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To this end it is recommended that data, expertise and information needed for reliably modelling and predicting the effects of future re-watering are secured, for as long as the mines hosting most of this information are still operational. In developing concepts related to mine closure it is necessary to adopt an integrated regional approach taking into account accumulating and combined effects of individual mines on natural resources such as surface water and groundwater, as well as impacts on each other.
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Overcoming potentially devastating effects of mine closure should be the first and most important step in securing sustainable post-mining development. Opportunities for the latter are discussed in Part 2 of this paper Winde and Stoch, The Star 4 August. Mining Weekly online, 28 May URL: www. Mining Weekly online , 22 May Ngonyama News 27 October Mining Weekly online , 27 July Mining Weekly online , 9 May The government should commission a thorough and independent study of the extent of and reasons for violence on farms, including violence against women, based on interviews with farm owners, workers and residents in all nine provinces, as well as members of the police, army, and court officials.
As currently planned, the South African Human Rights Commission SAHRC should hold comprehensive hearings on the issue of conditions on farms in different provinces in South Africa, with the aim of establishing the patterns of violence and abuse, as well as the extent of racial bias in the handling of cases by the criminal justice system, and making recommendations to government for these issues to be redressed. The Commission on Gender Equality CGE should, in partnership with groups involved in programs for women on farms and in coordination with the SAHRC, conduct a detailed study of the situation of women farm workers and residents: in particular, it should document cases of rape by farm owners, managers, or other farm residents, and make recommendations to government to ensure that discrimination and violence against women farmworkers is ended.
Politicians, representatives of commercial agriculture, farmworkers' unions, nongovernmental organizations NGOs concerned with land or farmworkers' rights, and other interested parties, should consistently, unambiguously, and evenhandedly condemn all forms of violence on farms in South Africa, whether committed against farm workers and residents or against farm owners. Organizations should take steps to make clear to their members their opposition to violence, and should put in place procedures to respond to allegations that an employee or member has committed or incited a violent crime.
An entire history of colonial conquest and dispossession, of cheap labor and systematic exploitation, and of segregation, apartheid and white supremacy has created a society in which 60, capitalist farmers own 12 times as much land as over 14 million rural poor. Fundamental to the construction of an unjust, inequitable, repressive and brutal social order is an unjust, punitive and untenable allocation of land and rights to land.
Unequal access to land, enforced by law, underpinned white control of power in South Africa during both the colonial and apartheid eras. From the date of the first European settlement at the Cape, founded by Jan van Riebeeck in , the indigenous peoples of South Africa — the Khoi and the San the Bushmen and subsequently the Bantu language-speaking peoples to the north and east of the Cape — were, at first gradually, and later more comprehensively, driven from the land from which they had previously derived their livelihoods.
Although the dispossession of peasant producers is a process common to many modernizing societies, South Africa saw a particularly extreme and violent version of this process. Land was acquired by force of arms, a cash economy and cash taxation system forced peasant producers into debt and alienation of their land, and laws were passed to benefit the property-owning classes. In the British Cape Colony, the nineteenth century saw a series of wars between settlers and different African chiefdoms which opened up most land west of the Kei river to white settlement by the s.
Several small reserves for Africans who had supported the whites in the wars were created amongst the white farms, but most Africans had no choice but to live on white-owned farms as full-time workers — and were integrated into the structures of settler society far earlier and more extensively than elsewhere in southern Africa. From the s, land east of the Kei was annexed and brought under British rule as African reserves.
In Natal, from the s the British administrators created a series of small reserves from land deemed undesirable by settlers. When the Zulu kingdom was annexed by the British in , a similar system of reserves was applied there, with the remaining land opened up for white settlement or declared to be state land. By contrast, the early settlements of whites in what became the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State now Mpumalanga, Northern, North-West, Gauteng, and Free State Provinces , were established with the permission of the chiefs.
But, following the first British occupation of the Transvaal , the Transvaal government launched a series of wars of conquest against the independent chiefdoms on the still ill-defined borders of the republic. Little land was designated as "reserves" for the African population, because of the resistance of white farmers, for whom land was the only major economic resource available.
In the Orange Free State, an even smaller proportion of the land was left under African control. By the end of the nineteenth century, the process of conquest was almost complete. Yet in many areas blacks continued to farm on white land through systems of land tenure that allowed some independent African production. These systems included cash tenancy; labor tenancy, by which people secured access to land in return for the labor of some of the members of the family for an agreed proportion of their time; and sharecropping, pejoratively known by whites as "kaffir farming," by which Africans obtained the right to farm with their own implements and livestock, on condition they gave a share of their crop to the white owners of the land.
Some Africans succeeded in accumulating sufficient cash to purchase land from whites; these areas of African freehold came in later years to be called "black spots" by the National Party government which took power in Together, these developments produced a small but growing class of African smallholders and market farmers — peasants — who supplied the small towns of South Africa with much of their food and provided a growing economic challenge to white producers.
The mineral discoveries of the late nineteenth century and the development of the gold mining industry in the Transvaal in the s brought major economic changes, and with them political restructuring. Tensions between the Transvaal Boer republic and the British-dominated mining and industrial companies over control of the wealth of the Witwatersrand led to the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer, or South African, War in The eventual military victory of the British led in turn to the creation of the Union of South Africa, incorporating what were by then the four British colonies south of the Limpopo, in The rapid growth of an urban population with these developments encouraged white commercial farming, and white farmers used their political strength to bring pressure on the independent black producers, and force them into working on white farms.
As early as , the Orange Free State government passed a law designed to limit the number of rent-paying or sharecropping African families allowed on each white-owned farm; and taxes, rents and other fees were generally raised. At the same time, the mining industry was anxious to force Africans into wage employment, favoring a migrant labor system where Africans had their primary homes in tribal reserves, and the young men entering the wage economy could be paid low wages on the basis that their families could make a living off land in the reserves.
Farmers, on the other hand, disliked the reserves, which preserved the possibility of independent African agricultural production.