Lessons from the past
Kumba Iron Ore’s Sishen mine in the Northern Cape province is one of
the oldest and most prolific iron ore mines in South Africa.
Unearthing SA’s iron ore
Despite the
closure of
the historic
Thabazimbi
iron ore mine,
South Africa
still boasts
significant
deposits of
iron ore.
Edited by Leon Louw
H
istorically, the bulk of South Africa’s
iron ore was produced by four
mines on the Maremane Dome
in the Northern Cape, namely Kumba Iron
Ore’s Sishen mine and Assmang’s Khumani
mine along the northern margin of the
dome, as well as Assmang’s Beeshoek mine
and Kumba’s Kolomela mine in the south.
Another significant iron-producing mine was
Kumba’s Thabazimbi mine in the Limpopo
province, which is now in closure phase.
An article by Smith and Beukes (2016)
gives an exhaustive account of the history
of iron ore mining in South Africa. The
following is an extract from the informative
article.
The extraction and use of BIF-hosted iron ore in
South Africa can be dated back to between 800 and
1200 AD when Khoisan miners extracted specularite
from Doornfontein in the Northern Cape (Caincross et
al., 1997). Other pre-colonial mining activities include:
the extraction of specularite used for cosmetic purposes
at Blinkklipkop close to Postmasburg in the Northern
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Cape by local Tswana inhabitants (Caincross et al.,
1997); and mining shafts and furnaces dating from
1500 AD in the Thabazimbi area (Netshiozwi, 2002).
However, industrial production of BIF-hosted
iron only commenced in 1931 when a company with
the name of South African Manganese, from which
Samancor later developed, supplied 1 400 tonnes of
hematite iron ore from the Maremane dome to a
blast furnace at Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal, for the
production of pig iron. Prior to that, all production of
iron ore for pig iron in South Africa came from oolitic
iron ore deposits of the Timeball Hill formation of the
Pretoria Group of the Transvaal Supergroup at Pretoria
(Caincross et al., 1997). This operation was initiated by
an engineer named Cornelius Delfos in 1916. It was
also from these oolitic iron ores that the first steel was
produced in South Africa by the Steel Corporation of
South Africa (Iscor) in the early 1930s. However, very
soon these deposits could not keep up with demand for
ore from the Steel Works and in 1931, the Thabazimbi
Iron Ore Mine was opened (Netshiozwi, 2002) to
supply high-grade BIF-hosted hematite ore to the steel
works, a function it still performs after eight decades,
though now on a small scale.