Impressions of South Africa

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Great is the contrast when, on reaching Elandsfontein, on the main line of railway, one finds one's self suddenly in the midst of the stir and bustle of industrial life. Here are the tall chimneys of engine-houses; here huge heaps of refuse at the shafts of the mines mark the direction across the country of the great gold-reef. Here, for the first time since he quitted the suburbs of Cape Town, the traveller finds himself again surrounded by a dense population, filled with the eagerness, and feeling the strain and stress, of an industrial life like that of the manufacturing communities of Europe or of North America. Fifteen years ago there was hardly a sign of human occupation. The Boer ranchman sent out his native boys to follow the cattle as they wandered hither and thither, seeking scanty pasturage among the stones, and would have been glad to sell for a hundred pounds the land on which Johannesburg now stands, and beneath which some of the richest mines are worked.

The Witwatersrand (Whitewatersridge) is a rocky ridge rising from one to two or three hundred feet above the level of the adjoining country and running nearly east and west about thirty miles. Along its southern slope the richest reefs or beds containing gold (except that near the village of Heidelberg) have been found; but the whole gold-basin, in various parts of which payable reefs have been proved to exist and are being worked, is nearly one hundred and thirty miles long by thirty miles wide. It is called a basin because the various out-cropping reefs represent approximately the rim of a basin, and dip to a common centre. But there are many "faults" which have so changed the positions of the reefs in different places as largely to obliterate the resemblance indicated by the term. It would be impossible to give either a geological account of the district or a practical description of the methods of working without maps and plans and a number of details unsuitable to this book; so I will mention merely a few salient facts, referring the curious reader to the elaborate treatise of Messrs. Hatch and Chalmers published in 1895.

The Rand gold-mining district at present consists of a line of mines both east and west of Johannesburg, along the outcrop of the principal reefs. It is about forty-six miles long, but "gold does not occur continuously in payable quantities over that extent, the 'pay-ore' being found in irregular patches, and (less frequently) in well-defined 'pay-shoots' similar to those which characterize quartz-veins."[59] There are also a few scattered mines in other parts of the basin. On this line there are two principal reefs—the Main Reef, with its so-called "leader," a thin bed just outside, and parallel to it, and the South Reef, with several others which are at present of much less importance. The term "reef" means a bed or stratum of rock, and these Rand reefs are beds of a sort of conglomerate, consisting of sandy and clayey matter containing quartz pebbles. The pebbles are mostly small, from the size of a thrush's egg up to that of a goose's egg, and contain no gold. The arenaceous or argillaceous stuff in which they lie embedded is extremely hard, and strongly impregnated with iron, usually in the form of iron pyrites, which binds it together. It is in this stuff, or sandy and ferreous cement, that the gold occurs. The Boers call the conglomerate "banket" (accented on the last syllable), which is their name for a kind of sweetmeat, because the pebbles lying in the cement are like almonds in the sugary substance of the sweetmeat. The gold is pretty equably diffused in the form of crystals or (less often) of flakes—crystals of such extremely small size as to be very rarely visible to the naked eye. Here and there, however, the banket is traversed by thin veins of quartz rock, and nuggets, mostly quite small, are occasionally found in this quartz.

The "Main Reef series" consists of several parallel beds of varying size and thickness, which have not been correlated throughout their entire length; at some points two may be workable; at others three. The Main Reef bed varies from one to twenty feet in thickness; its "leader," which is richer in gold, from three inches to three feet; and the South Reef, also generally rich, from three inches to six feet. The Main Reef proper, however, is of too low an ore grade to be profitably worked under present economic conditions, though at two or three mines a percentage of it is milled in conjunction with the richer ore from the other beds.

Where these beds come to the surface, they are inclined, or "dip," as geologists say, at an angle of from 60° to 30°, and the shafts are now usually sunk to follow the line of dip. But as they are followed down into the earth, the angle diminishes to 30° or 25°, and it appears certain that at a still greater depth they will be found to lie nearly horizontal. This fact is extremely important, because it promises to make a much larger part of the beds available than would be the case if they continued to plunge downward at a high angle, since in that case they would soon attain a depth at which mining would be impossible, because the heat would be too great, and probably unprofitable also, because the cost of raising the ore would be extremely heavy. The greatest depth to which workings have been carried is about 2400 feet, but skilled engineers think it possible to work as deep as 5000 feet, though labour becomes more difficult above the temperature of 100° Fahrenheit, which is reached at 3000 feet beneath the surface. No difficulty from temperature has been felt at 2,400 feet, and the water is found to give little trouble; indeed a very experienced engineer (to whose courtesy I am indebted for these facts) tells me that he thinks most of the water comes from the surface, and can be taken up in the upper levels of the mine which is being worked at the depth mentioned. I have given these details in order to show how enormous a mass of ore remains to be extracted when the deep workings, which are still in their infancy, have been fairly entered upon. But a still more remarkable fact is that the auriferous banket beds appear, so far as they have been followed by deep borings, to retain, as they descend into the earth, not only their average thickness, but also their average mineral quality. Here is the striking feature of the Rand gold-beds, which makes them, so far as we know, unique in the world.

Everywhere else gold-mining is a comparatively hazardous and uncertain enterprise. Where the metal is found in alluvial deposits, the deposits usually vary much in the percentage of gold to the ton of soil which they yield, and they are usually exhausted in a few years. Where it occurs in veins of quartz-rock (the usual matrix), these veins are generally irregular in their thickness, often coming abruptly to an end as one follows them downward, and still more irregular and uncertain in the percentage of gold to rock. For a few yards your quartz-reef may be extremely rich, and thereafter the so-called "shoot" may stop, and the vein contain so little gold as not to pay the cost of working. But in the Witwatersrand basin the precious metal is so uniformly and equally distributed through the auriferous beds that when you have found a payable bed you may calculate with more confidence than you can anywhere else that the high proportion of gold to rock will be maintained throughout the bed, not only in its lateral extension, which can be easily verified, but also as it dips downwards into the bowels of the earth. It is, therefore, not so much the richness of this gold-field—for the percentage of metal to rock is seldom very high, and the cost of working the hard rock and disengaging the metal from the minerals with which it is associated are heavy items—as the comparative certainty of return, and the vast quantity of ore from which that return may be expected, that have made the Rand famous, have drawn to it a great mass of European capital and a large population, and have made the district the object of political desires, ambition, and contests which transcend South Africa and have threatened to become a part of the game which the great powers of Europe are playing on the chessboard of the world.

It is believed that the banket or conglomerate beds are of marine origin, but it does not follow that the gold was deposited pari passu with the deposition of the beds, for it may have been—and skilled opinion inclines to this view—carried into the conglomerate seams subsequently to their deposit. In this respect they resemble auriferous veins of quartz, though in these banket reefs the gold-bearing solutions would seem to have come up through the interstitial spaces of the conglomerate instead of in the more or less open fissures of the gold-bearing quartz-veins. The chemical conditions under which gold is thus deposited are still conjectural. Gold has long been known to exist in sea-water, in the form of an iodide or a chloride; and one skilful metallurgist at Johannesburg told me that he believed there was as much gold in a cubic mile of sea-water as the whole then annual output of the Rand, that is to say, nearly £8,000,000.

Had these deposits been discovered a century ago, few, if any of them, would have been worth working, because miners did not then possess the necessary means for extracting the gold from its intractable matrix. It is the progress of chemical science which, by inventing new processes, such as the roasting with chlorine, the treatment in vats with cyanide, and the application of electrical currents, has made the working profitable. The expenses of working out the gold per ton of ore sank from £1 15s. 5d. per ton in 1892 to £1 8s. 1d. in 1898, while the dividends rose from 8s. per ton to 13s. 2d.; and the proportion of gold won which was paid in dividends rose from 19 to 32 per cent. Further improvements in the processes of reduction will doubtless increase the mining area, by making it worth while to develop mines where the percentage of metal to rock is now too small to yield a dividend. Improvements, moreover, tend to accelerate the rate of production, and thereby to shorten the life of the mines; for the more profitable working becomes, the greater is the temptation to work as fast as possible and get out the maximum of ore. The number of stamps at work in milling the ore rose from 3740 in 1896 to 5970 in August, 1899. The total sum annually paid in dividends, which had in 1892 been £794,464, had in 1898 risen to £4,847,505.

The duration of the mines, as a whole, is therefore a difficult problem, for it involves the question whether many pieces of reef, which are now little worked or not worked at all, will in future be found worth working, owing to cheapened appliances and to a larger yield of gold per ton of rock, in which case the number of mines may be largely increased, and reefs now neglected be opened up when the present ones have been exhausted. The view of the most competent specialists seems to be that, though many of what are now the best properties will probably be worked out in twenty or thirty years, the district, as a whole, may not be exhausted for at least fifty, and possibly even for seventy or eighty, years to come. And the value of the gold to be extracted within those fifty years has been roughly estimated at about £700,000,000, of which at least £200,000,000 will be clear profit, the balance going to pay the cost of extraction. In 1896 the value of the Witwatersrand gold output was £7,864,341.[60] In 1898 it was £15,141,376; and in the first eight months of 1899 £12,485,032. Assuming a production of £15,000,000 a year, this would exhaust the field in about forty-six years; but it is, of course, quite impossible to predict what the future rate of production will be, for that must depend not only on the progress of mechanical and chemical science, but (as we shall presently see) to some extent also upon administrative and even political conditions. In the five years preceding 1896 the production had increased so fast (at the rate of about a million sterling per annum) that, even under the conditions which existed in 1895, every one expected a further increase, and (as already noted), the product of 1898 exceeded £15,000,000. With more favourable economic and administrative conditions it will doubtless for a time go still higher. The South African Republic now stands first among the gold-producing countries, having passed the United States, which stands a little behind her, Australasia being a good third, and the Russian Empire a bad fourth. The total annual output of gold for the whole world was in 1898 about £59,617,955.

Among the economic conditions I have referred to, none is more important than the supply and the wages of labour. On the Rand, as in all South African mines of every kind, unskilled manual labour is performed by Kafirs, whites—together with a few half-breeds and Indian coolies—being employed for all operations, whether within the mine or above the ground, which require intelligence and special knowledge.