Without the aid of large-scale industrial plants, artisanal gold miners on the West Rand, in Johannesburg, use labour- and knowledge-intensive skills to process gold ore, says former University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) anthropology professor Robert Thornton.

“Artisanal gold miners in South Africa mine gold ore and process it through to pure gold with nothing more than that which fits into a backpack,” he noted during his presentation at the latest session of the Wits Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry’s ongoing Artisanal and Small Scale Mining Seminar held last week.

He added that, with artisanal miners using a number of methods to mine gold without the use of proper mining operations, they left no trace of the mining they undertook, which made it difficult to label it a crime.

Although it was a means through which these artisanal miners generated an income for themselves, Thornton pointed out that all labour involved in the mining was occasional, temporary and distributed through an entire community. This involved men, women, children and a network of other actors; however, the mining was never fully regularised into permanent social institutions.

Moreover, the involvement of such a wide range of people in the process focused more on the level of labour needed for the processing of the ore than on the mining itself. In the processing, more women were involved and had developed an art of processing the ore into a product suitable for the market to use.

“Without any capital investment, artisanal mining in this area takes place outside social and residential areas. As a result, it makes it accessible to migrants and typically involves small groups of related individuals from South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” Thornton explained.

The patterns that were evident in the mining methods of the artisanal miners and in the processing of the gold ore, mirrored the knowledge involved in methods used in the Ancient Mediterranean in early Medieval Europe. Also, he noted that, in the first and early second millenniums, gold mining in Southern Africa, as revealed by archaeology, also used a similar mining method.

Owing to this, Thornton concluded that, while the act of artisanal mining was viewed by some as a crime, to the miners involved, it served as a livelihood that was a form of national heritage.