The future of one of South Africa’s oldest operating mines, the Thabazimbi iron-ore mine, in the North West, is under scrutiny, owing to the drastic slump in iron-ore prices over the past 12 months having rendered the mining of the deposit in the current manner distinctly unprofitable.

Kumba Iron Ore, the Anglo American subsidiary that has operated the mine since 2001, is reviewing various options regarding the future of the operation, including mining the deposit differently so that the operation is more cost effective, placing the mine on care and maintenance, selling it or closing it altogether. While such news may be quite disconcerting, especially for the town of Thabazimbi, it is little wonder that Kumba is considering such options, given that iron-ore prices are not likely to improve within the next year owing to a considerable supply surplus.

As the fate of the Thabazimbi mine is currently hanging in the balance, and given the South African government’s fixation on encouraging mineral beneficiation, it will be a worthwhile exercise to examine the historical circumstances that led to the establishment of the operation.

The South Africa of the early 1920s was characterised by racial, economic and social tensions. Perhaps the defining characteristic was the growing competition between poor Afrikaners, who had been forced off the land, and black migrant workers for unskilled and semiskilled jobs in an economy that was still very much dominated by the mining sector. However, the mines themselves were under severe pressure owing to rising working costs and falling grades. Such tensions culminated in the 1922 Rand Revolt, a three-month-long strike that brought the country to the very brink of a socialist revolution.

The seething anger felt by the general white public in the wake of Prime Minister Jan Smut’s brutal suppression of the revolt caused a significant shift in the political arena and resulted in the election of an entirely new political dispensation in 1924 led by the socialist and Afrikaner-centric Pact government.

At the helm of this new government was Barry Hertzog, an ardent Afrikaner nationalist whose main priority was to facilitate an economic and political revolution among his people. Significantly, Herzog and his Pact government recognised that social and economic upliftment could best be achieved by implementing a policy of industrial development. Apart from creating a vast number of new jobs, the fundamental motive driving the new policy was the aspiration to make South Africa more self-sufficient. Further, Herzog’s government realised that, because the mines would eventually be exhausted, it was necessary in the long term to replace them with a sector such as manufacturing as a major primary source of production, employment and government revenue.

The Pact government understood that the local manufacture of iron and steel was essential for industrialisation. It was on that basis that, in 1928, Hertzog’s government decided to intervene more directly in the development of industry by establishing the State-owned Iron & Steel Industrial Corporation (Iscor).

Iscor was intended to be more than just a manufacturer of iron and steel, with its activities extending to mining its most essential input commaodity – iron-ore.

For the next three years, Iscor undertook a colossal amount of work to set the stage for South Africa’s industrial development. The supply of iron-ore, dolomite, coking coal, water and other raw materials had to be assured; experts had to be engaged; the requirements of South Africa in iron and steel products had to be ascertained; the probable trend of world prices had to be studied; the type of plant most suitable for South African conditions and demand had to be considered; and, finally, having determined the plant specifications, the cost of production had to be worked out item by item and in detail for each section of the work.

By early 1931, Iscor had determined that the country had a natural advantage for the manufacture of iron and steel and, more significantly, that it had a viable market for the disposal of such products. Thus, it was in that year that Iscor began the construction of a steelworks in Pretoria with an initial capacity of about 160 000 t/y of ingot steel.

It was in that same year that the company began to develop an extremely pure hematite deposit boasting about 68% metallic iron, situated near Vliegpoort on the Crocodile river, as the main feedstock for its new Pretoria steelworks. The most valuable portion of that deposit was concentrated within a 1 800-ft-high mountain – hence, the origin of the name, Thabazimbi, a Sotho word that roughly translates as ‘mountain of iron’. Interestingly, that deposit had first been ‘discovered’ – although archaeological evidence indicates the site was worked by precolonial miners – in 1919 but, owing to the 200 km distance from the Witwatersrand industrial complex and the then limited demand for iron-ore, the deposit was left undeveloped.

Given the remoteness of the deposit, Iscor had to negotiate an agreement with the Railway Administration to extend the line from Northam, on the Rustenburg–Middelwit line, to the mine to facilitate the transportation of the ore. All preparations were completed by early 1934 and opencast mining subsequently started at a rate of about 300 000 t/y. Perhaps the most significant feature of the new operation was that the conditions of the logistical agreement and the mining facilities were such that the ore could be landed in the bunkers of the blast furnace at Pretoria for less than 10 shillings a ton, which made both mining and the manufacture of steel ingots an extremely attractive proposition, even in an economy still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression.

Such a history should offer much food for thought for mining and industry stakeholders in South Africa’s current economic climate.