system.
But the contribution which the mining industry makes to South African
finances cannot be measured solely by the direct payments made by it:
thirty years ago Prof. H. S. Frankel 'prepared an estimate for the Low
Grade Ore Commission which indicated that, broadly speaking, 50 per
cent of the government and provincial revenues was directly and
indirectly derived from the Witwatersrand gold-mining industry'.14
This refers only to the contribution made by the gold-mining industry,
not to mining as a whole. Whether quantitatively the same position
holds today is an open question. Certainly whether smaller or greater,
the contribution must still be a very important one.
♦ IV ♦
When
Ernest Oppenheimer came to South Africa in 1902, the mining world was
still under the full control of the pioneering generation. Cecil
Rhodes had just died, but he had become a highly contentious political
figure rather than a continuous participant in the development of
mining enterprise. His most subtle opponent in the diamond industry,
and later his colleague at De Beers, B. I. Barnato, had committed
suicide in 1896, but his firm continued to be a powerful influence both
in gold-mining and in diamond-mining circles. But Wernher and Beit,
Robinson and Abe Bailey, Farrer and Albu, the Taylors and many others
were still vigorous and active, and some of them continued to be so for
many years. These men, and their like, had by that time brought
together the necessary financial and technical resources to transform
the mining industry, so far as gold and diamonds were concerned, from a
'diggers' democracy' of small, independent producers into a highly
complex, highly capitalized, technically advancing organism.. Though
the South African War was to throw the industry into a temporary
decline, it had become clear by the turn of the century that the
Witwatersrand was to take pride of place as the leading producer of
gold in the world:1" the supremacy of South
This
is a fifteen-fold increase: dividends declared in 1913 were, from all
mines, £12-6 million and in 1958 £60-7 million —a five-fold increase.
(These figures are all taken from the Jubilee Volume already referred
to, Sections Mining and Public Finance.)
14 H. S. Frankel, op. cit., p.
115. The document referred to is Statement No. 8 in a submission
presented to the commission by the Gold Producers' Committee.
15 In
1898, that is, before the picture was distorted by the outbreak of the
South African War, out of a total world production of 13,874,000 fine
ounces, the contribution of the leading producers was as follows:
