The Witwatersrand gold rush of 1886 marked the start not only of a century of gold mining in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni but also of massive transformations in the landscapes of these South African cities. Once natural grasslands, the Witwatersrand — Afrikaans for “the ridge of white waters” — rapidly became a region of bustling boomtowns. The Witwatersrand Basin was responsible for over 40 percent of total global gold production and continues to be a major producer of gold. Over the past century a range of factors — fluctuating international gold prices, changing demands for mining labor, the construction of infrastructure and the need to dispose of mining waste — has shaped the development of what is now the most urbanized province in South Africa. In particular, the 80-kilometer mining belt between the two cities is riddled by deep-shaft mines, where companies built an extensive network of underground tunnels and moved large amounts of earth to the surface. These operations have weakened geological strata, disrupted natural drainage patterns and altered ecological habitat. The original semi-arid grasslands ecology is now converted to an urban forest, and sediment from mining waste has blocked natural waterways, unexpectedly creating wetlands with rich bird habitat. Massive mine dumps, many upwards of 30 meters tall, have become landmarks of Johannesburg — or eGoli, “the place of gold,” in Zulu.
In the 1970s the gold mines moved from Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni to the rural areas of the Witwatersrand, and informal settlements began to occupy the vacant mining lands in the heart of the city. The end of apartheid, in 1994, brought a large influx of rural residents — mostly blacks or foreign Africans — seeking opportunities in Johannesburg and joining family and friends in existing informal settlements along the mining belt. Currently 25 percent of the population in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni live in informal settlements, and approximately a quarter of them — 400,000 people — are in the mining belt. The settlements range from 100 to 40,000 people, with the largest communities in Ekurhuleni, where the mining companies have expended fewer resources to police the land.
Not surprisingly, the settlements face myriad obstacles. Local zoning laws prevent them from receiving municipal services such as water, electricity and sanitation. Having no secure right to the land, the settlers construct homes from scrap metal and found wood; and despite such resourcefulness, they’ve encountered degraded environmental conditions that seriously hampered efforts to improve living standards and achieve formal municipal status.
Changing ownership structures and bankruptcies in the mining industries have made it difficult to determine who is responsible for the environmental remediation of the old mining land (despite strict environmental regulations). Shallowly undermined land — caused by underground mines close to the ground surface — makes it technically difficult to construct permanent buildings and basic infrastructure, while the fine dust from neighboring mine dumps poses health risks such as respiratory disease and cancer. To complicate the situation, new extraction technologies and rising gold prices are enabling the recovery of gold from mine dumps. Massive topographical and hydrological operations have been set in motion once again; the old mine dumps are disappearing, gold slurry and water are piped throughout the region and waste has been transferred to new “super dumps” on the periphery. Newly freed land is being redeveloped for light industry and recreation; yet the population of greater Johannesburg is projected to double over the next 20 years, creating a significant housing shortage. This has created tension over land; but it’s also led to unexpected partnerships between the mining companies and informal settlements.
In January 2010 we traveled to Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni to study the rapidly changing mining belt. We visited eight informal settlements, numerous mine dumps, the nearly complete FIFA World Cup Stadium, gold processing plants, and even a defunct-mine-turned-theme-park called Gold Reef City. Through our discussions with informal settlers, non-profit organizations, government officials, academics, real estate developers, mining experts and mine operators, we uncovered a complex web of ecologies that will determine the future of the gold mining belt. Our investigation documents the relationships between the current mining operations, the infrastructure that supports them and the informal settlements that inhabit defunct mining sites. In this slideshow, we hope to show that these relationships open up possibilities for the rehabilitation of a post-gold industrial landscape into a socially, economically and environmentally productive urban environment.
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As the first settlers arrived during the gold rush in 1886, Johannesburg and many smaller mining communities grew along a linear mining belt at the northern edge of the Witwatersrand Basin. Over the past century, gold mines and associated facilities, such as mine dumps, have occupied prime real estate in central areas of Johannesburg and its sister city, Ekurhuleni, setting the stage for current land use tensions along the mining belt. The Top Star mine dump, shown here, was constructed from 1899 to 1939, reaching a height of 50 meters and containing 5.1 million metric tons of chemically processed mine waste. In the early 1960s, Top Star was converted into a drive-in movie theater, which showed movies until 2006, when it was shut down by DRD Gold to extract latent gold in the mine waste. The mine dump’s dramatic height within Johannesburg’s urban core offered spectacular views of the Central Business District. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
Most underground gold mines ceased operations in the 1970s, leaving large tracts of land vacant in the mining belt. Since then, many of these areas have been converted to light industrial uses and have become important employment centers. Informal settlements have encroached on non-developed mining land, with residents living in close proximity to abandoned mining equipment and waste. The settlement shown here took over vacant land at the foot of a mine dump in Ekurhuleni. Due to low property values, mining companies had little incentive to spend money policing their unused land holdings, and after decades of illegal occupation, it is now very difficult for government entities in South Africa to relocate these communities. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Today approximately 1.6 million people — 25 percent of the population — in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni live in informal settlements throughout the metropolitan region. Of this number approximately 400,000 people live in informal settlements in the mining belt that traverses the two municipalities. [Census data from Statistics South Africa, the City of Johannesburg and Slum Dwellers International; illustration by Dorothy Tang based on information from Statistics South Africa, the Harvard Geospatial Library, GIS information from the municipalities of Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni and Google Earth]
This image from the 1950s offers a view to the west across the mining belt and illustrates the scale and enormity of the landscape transformation. Deep shaft gold mining and associated mine dumps across the 80-kilometer mining belt altered the topography, hydrology and ecology. Toxic chemicals from mine dumps polluted groundwater and soils. Mining companies created numerous dams and reservoirs to prevent polluted water from entering the rivers. Rich neighborhoods were located north of the mining belt, on the right side of this photo, to avoid the dusty wind blown to the southeast. The historically black township of Soweto was located across the mining belt from downtown Johannesburg in the only area to the south that was not affected by the dust. [Image courtesy of AOC Geomatics]
Mine dumps throughout Johannesburg have become landmarks that are featured prominently in popular media such as the movie District 9 and the magazine National Geographic. Soccer City stadium, the main venue for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, is located in the midst of three of the largest mine dumps and was seen in television broadcasts around the world last year. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
New extraction technologies and escalating gold prices have spurred the mining industry to extract latent gold from the tailings of old mine dumps. As the tailings are reprocessed to capture additional gold, the network of mining infrastructure shifts. Today mining companies transport the reprocessed tailings to new super dumps in remote locations — where it is stored for future advances in processing technology — while they clear the old dumps to create opportunities for the real estate market. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
Tailings from old mine dumps are excavated and hydrated on site to form slurry, which is then pumped to centralized gold processing plants. Unlike deep shaft mining operations, the hydration process requires only a few skilled workers operating standard excavating machinery. The most critical parts of the process are the mixers and pumps, which ensure that the slurry moves smoothly through the extensive network of pipes. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Mining infrastructure in the early 1900s was based on rail connections between mineshafts, processing plants and dumps. Railroads were located along a natural shelf parallel to the mines, forming an east-west corridor that moved tailings, people and goods between mining facilities. Later, technological advancements in gold ore processing resulted in tailings with finer particles. Tailings were hydrated into slurry, and pipes replaced trains as the primary mode of transportation. The new method uses an extraordinary amount of water to move slurry through the pipes. These diagrams show the movement of slurry, waste and water in a massive gold reprocessing chain. Hydrated tailings are moved from older mine dumps — typically closer to existing urban areas — to reprocessing plants. After being reprocessed, the tailings are rehydrated and moved to new super dumps at the fringes of the city. [Illustrations by Dorothy Tang & Andrew Watkins]
Over one thousand kilometers of pipeline connect the historic mine dumps, gold processing plants and new super dumps in a vast network that covers the region. Under 45 bars of pressure, the pipe network delivers new gold slurry to processing plants and reprocessed waste to super dumps. Roughly 30 percent of the water used in this cycle is lost to evaporation or seepage. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Unemployed residents in informal settlements make a living by scavenging scrap metal and selling it to recycling companies throughout the mining belt. The new slurry pipelines are exposed targets for scrap metal recyclers. In the last several years, mining companies have reached informal agreements with communities to protect the exposed pipes from theft and vandalism; in exchange the companies provide back-up security in the settlements when required. In one particular settlement, Makause, the mining company developed a soccer program and organized games between settlers and miners as a way to bolster trust between the two groups. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Gold slurry is washed and chemically processed in five gold processing plants across the mining belt. The average grade of the mine dumps in the region is approximately 0.3 grams of gold per ton; current technology will recover half of this amount. The ERGO processing plant in this photo, located in the south of Ekurhuleni in an area called Brakpan, is projected to extract up to 1.67 million ounces of gold — worth 2.25 billion U.S. dollars — from mining dumps in the region. After primary refinement, the extracted gold bullion is transported by helicopter to the Rand Refinery in Germiston, the largest town in Ekuruhleni, for final refinement. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Waste slurry from the gold processing plants is pumped to three major tailing deposition sites, or super dumps, at the periphery of the metropolitan area, administered by DRD Gold, a conglomerate of several remaining mining companies. There are three super dumps in the Witswatersrand: Brakpan, Crown Tailings and Dragonfontein. Brakpan, the largest of the three, covers 791 hectares of land and contains over 890 million metric tons of mining material. By consolidating mining waste, DRD Gold is able to more efficiently monitor and environmentally manage the waste in compliance with South African mining regulations. If gold prices continue to rise and extraction technology advances, the waste will be reprocessed again in the future. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
As the gold industry has shifted from deep shaft mining to reprocessing waste, much of the original mining land in Johannesburg has been redeveloped for recreational, commercial, or light industrial uses. If all mine dumps are reprocessed, 5,500 hectares of land will be freed for development. The theme park Gold Reef City, built in 1987 and located just eight kilometers from downtown Johannesburg, was one of these developments. The 12 hectare park is built on the site of shaft number one and offers amusement rides themed with old mining equipment such as retired headgear, stamp mills and rail equipment. For an extra 80 Rand (11 U.S. dollars), the park also gives tours of the historic but now defunct mine shaft. In 2001, the Gold Reef City developers built a casino and, as a condition of the casino license, an adjacent Apartheid Museum, which is now the pre-eminent museum documenting 20th-century South Africa history. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Mining operations in South Africa involve a series of complicated land-right relationships. Surface rights allow landowners to build as they please, but the minerals themselves belong to the federal government, and mining companies obtain permission from the government for prospecting and mining. These relationships are further complicated by informal settlements that are home to approximately 400,000 “squatters” who have no legal rights to the land but have occupied it for decades. [Illustration by Dorothy Tang & Andrew Watkins]
The social landscape of Johannesburg is closely related to the gold mining industry. Many historic slums originated as the dormitories of once active mining sites, like the gold mining hostel shown here. During the apartheid era, tight controls over rural to urban migration helped maintain labor for gold mining. Unskilled laborers from rural areas, mostly men, came to work in the mines. After the industry’s decline in the 1970s, many miners stayed in Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni and worked in other industries; some were eventually joined by family members. With the end of apartheid in the 1990s, migration laws were loosened, and migrants from rural areas moved to the cities to seek better employment opportunities. The Johannesburg metropolitan area grew 30 percent between 1994 and 2004, and much of this growth is reflected in the informal settlements. [Image courtesy of Museum Africa]
In Roodeport, an abandoned mining hostel next to the mine’s dump has become an informal settlement. Children play in the remaining open space, and a small public school has been established adjacent to the community. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Informal settlements in the mining belt consist of shacks built of scrap metal and wood. Many are not built to be permanent because of the fear of eviction. Water is available at communal standpipes or delivered weekly by truck, and electricity is tapped illegally or provided by car batteries. Communal latrines provide sanitation, although some residents have self-built toilets. Waste disposal is usually non-existent. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Many informal settlements have strong community structures and are composed of multiple districts, each encompassing a distinct spatial area and often correlating to a time period of settlement. Elected district heads manage the spatial organization and growth of the community. Demonstrating the ability to control growth is key to receiving aid from the municipalities. Some informal settlements have not grown for years due to the strict oversight of the district head. In addition to this self-governance, informal settlements are connected across the nation by grassroots organizations such as the Community Organisation Resource Centre which hope to create political awareness of the needs of their communities. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
The Witwatersrand gold reserves exist in a one-meter thick “reef” that is remarkably deep, requiring mining shafts that reach up to four kilometers below the surface. Historically, horizontal tunnels were built to connect vertical shafts to the gold bearing reef, as the reef extended further underground at an angle. In deep mines, the main vertical shaft shifted several times to stay close to the reef. Although there is an abundance of gold ore within the region, the low gold content in individual reefs necessitated the removal of a large amount of earth. Over the past century, over 1.7 billion metric tons of material have been removed from the earth and deposited in mine dumps. [Image from “Witwatersrand Gold—100 Years,” edited by E.S.A. Antrobus, 1986, courtesy of the Geological Society of South Africa.]
Informal settlements that inhabit former mining land must often build around artifacts of the mining industry. Here, a mining tower stands in the middle of Makause, an informal settlement of approximately 10,000 people occupying a defunct mining site near Germiston in Ekuhurleni. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
In 2007 Joyce Shongwe, a Makause resident, fell into a sinkhole caused by an unmarked mine shaft. She was later found dead, 80 meters below the surface. Homes in the immediate vicinity were removed and piles of rubble were placed to mark the site and prevent future settlement. The incident revealed the precarious living conditions and politics of a geotechnically unstable landscape. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
The accident prompted the municipality to relocate 30 percent of Makause families to the community of Tsakane, 40 kilometers away. Although they were given plastic shacks to live in, they were much further away from employment centers, and the majority eventually moved back to Makause. The 2007 eviction created a large open space at the heart of the settlement, which community leaders have preserved; the municipality has promised that eventually it will be converted into a park. However, a history of broken promises and slow action casts doubt on whether Makause might have a central park in the future. [Photo by Andrew Watkins]
Most households in informal settlements such as Henry Gwala, in Ekurhuleni, have a pit-latrine toilet adjacent to the house, consisting of a hole several meters deep, a toilet stool and a small shack for privacy. As the pit fills up, the family digs another nearby, and the toilet shack migrates over time. The constant disturbance of earth adjacent to houses causes geotechnical instability. When there is no longer space near the house, the toilets move to the edge of the community. The municipality recently installed chemical toilets in Henry Gwala but the community was outraged at the limited numbers: ten families were required to share one toilet. Residents united and brought the case to high court. Ekurhuleni eventually apologized to residents but acknowledged that the municipality did not have adequate resources to provide more services. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
Beginning in the early 1900s, the city of Johannesburg introduced large shade trees to alleviate airborne dust from the mining belt. Originally a semi-arid grassland ecosystem, Johannesburg now boasts the largest urban canopy in the world. Most trees are alien species from other parts of the world, such as Jacaranda, Eucalyptus and English Oak, and many require large quantities of water for irrigation, an added burden to a region with limited water resources. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
The native Australian tree Eucalyptus was introduced by Australian gold miners to provide strong timber support for deep shaft mining and related construction. In addition, its high evapotranspiration rate encouraged mining companies to plant it near the foot of mine dumps to capture excess contaminated run-off. Today eucalyptus presents a hazard in informal settlements because of its short life span; the falling limbs and trunks of overgrown mature trees are a hazard in communities that do not have the means to manage their growth. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
The unique gold ore of the Witwatersrand Basin requires a cyanide extraction process called carbon-in-leach because carbon is used to separate gold from a cyanide solution in the final stages of processing. Although free cyanide breaks down rapidly when exposed to sunlight, other cyanide-based chemical compounds are toxic and may persist in soils and groundwater for decades. The chemical properties of mine dumps change over years with exposure to sun, resulting in highly alkaline soils on the surface and extremely acidic soils at the base. Mine dumps that are reprocessed leave a polluted site that must be remediated before the land can be redeveloped. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
In addition to contaminated groundwater, one of the most severe environmental dangers at a regional scale is Acid Mine Drainage (AMD), produced by naturally occurring sulfuric compounds in the earth that are exposed to oxidation during mining and dissolved in water. The heavy metals in AMD are harmful to humans and the ecosystem. Since deep shaft mining has ceased, it is no longer financially viable for mining companies to continue to maintain low water tables in the mines. As a result, the groundwater table rises at one meter per day, submerging abandoned shafts and tunnels in the Johannesburg area. At this rate, experts estimate that AMD will begin to surface in Johannesburg in 2012, threatening the drinking water of the entire urban region and even communities downstream in the major international watersheds of the Orange and Limpopo Rivers. Mining companies in the Witwatersrand have formed an alliance, the Western Utilities Corporation, to propose solutions to treat AMD at a regional scale. [Photo by Dorothy Tang]
Gold in the Witwatersrand has been the source of opportunities and challenges. While Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni face grave environmental challenges, including contaminated soils, acid mine drainage, undermined land and scarce water resources, it is also important to recognize the possibilities found in the existing regional infrastructure of pipelines and the large quantities of land being released for use. Currently operating gold mining companies recognize the environmental challenges they face and are actively pursuing more sustainable mining practices. Informal settlements are finding productive political strategies and are maintaining a positive entrepreneurial nature. The scarce water resources of the Witwatersrand are a critical entry point for landscape interventions, especially in relation to the provision of sanitation and the remediation of acid mine drainage. Can gold mining and informal settlements, two seemingly disparate players in the region, provide solutions for the future development of the “Ridge of White Waters”? [Illustration by Dorothy Tang & Andrew Watkins]
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