The
mines Tavernier saw were probably in alluvially laid deposits, or the
matrix couldn't have been pounded up after two days' soaking, not even
by sixty thousand workers. In South Africa, nobody was able to crush by
hand, and so reckoning of a mine's resources in business circles always
gave first place to the tonnage of blue ground waiting on the floors.
Nowadays, no mine works on this basis. The blue ground is crushed and
processed as soon as it is brought out, and the extensive floors have
become a memory. When the change-over came to Kimberley it was a great
relief, because a lot of acreage was set free for building, and
Kimberley is a rather squashed town between its gaping pits. Today at
Koffeyfontein, however, about sixty miles away, where another great pit
yawns and there is no town waiting for space, the floors still exist,
complete with fences and guardrooms at the entrances, simply because
nobody wants to use them for anything else. During World War II,
however, they came in very handy as a ready-made concentration camp for
enemy aliens.
The
mechanization of underground mines went slowly, and while it was going
on a lot of mine managers found themselves in great difficulty with the
compound system. Mines that had not yet come into the prosperous
combine of De Beers Consolidated encountered particularly tough going.
The records of Mr. Walter Stanley Whitworth, who joined that same
Koffeyfontein in '93, give as good a picture as can be had of what it
was like to manage labor in these conditions. For his times, Whitworth
was an enlightened liberal. (Today his daughter is a social worker in
South Africa.) Nevertheless he found himself forced to participate in
practices that enlightened men do not approve. Koffeyfontein couldn't
depend on a steady supply of
Flickr
Stumbleupon
Scribd
