Gold in South Africa: Lessons from the Apartheid Era

This chapter considers gold at its most recent historical epi-centre—i.e. South Africa during the colonial and apartheid era. For over 130 years gold in Africa has been synonymous with the Witwatersrand which has produced an estimated 40% of the gold that was ever mined. From 1887 until 2018 1.7 billion ounces of gold were extracted from the South African mines, mostly in the Witwatersrand. In 2018, South African gold production had been eclipsed by Ghana. Despite this, South Africa still remains the country with by far the largest mineral deposits in the world even with the decline in gold. Aside from reviewing and highlighting South Africa’s gold mining history, this chapter considers issues of vital importance that enabled South Africa to attain its economic preeminence in the gold mining sector. The western support for apartheid South Africa has long been viewed as being based largely on political motives—that South Africa represented the best bulwark against communism on the African continent. Yet there was also a strong economic basis for the support in the 1960s that was more significant than just the size of the South African economy. We then argue that there exist two key dates in the demise of apartheid—1971-73 and 1989. The former is when the Bretton Woods system came to an end and the economic basis of the western support for the apartheid regime came to an end with it. The second was 1989 when the Berlin Wall was brought down and the eonomic and political system that was called communism in Eastern Europe came to an end.