When the Witwatersrand Sea retreated, the basin continued to fill in with sedimentary and volcanic rock. Three billion years ago, the basin held a sea, into which flowed rivers carrying sediment eroded from the surrounding greenstone belts, as well as, possibly, placer gold. Whether the mineralization process responsible for the Witwatersrand’s gold deposits involved placer deposits or hydrothermal precipitates, or both, is still debated. Yet, it’s more than just a picturesque geologic formation - Witwatersrand is home to the world’s largest gold deposit. The ridge’s abundance of cascading waterfalls gave the scarp its name, Witwatersrand, which means “ridge with white waters.” The Witwatersrand Basin stretches in an arc across 350 kilometers between Johannesburg and Welkom and covers an area about the size of West Virginia. In the Gauteng Province of modern-day South Africa, a 56-kilometer-long ridge reaches heights up to 1,700 meters. The Langlaagte gold mine is seen here in 1893. Gold was discovered on the Langlaagte farm in 1886, setting the stage for the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902. In July 1886, Harrison stumbled upon outcrops of conglomerates featuring rounded pebbles chock-full of gold on the Langlaagte farm outside present-day Johannesburg. The stage was set for a second conflict, however, when Australian prospector George Harrison discovered gold in the South African Republic. In 1877, Britain annexed the South African Republic, but a few years later the colony declared, and won, its independence in a series of skirmishes in 18 collectively known as the First Boer War. Diamonds were discovered in Kimberley near the Vaal River and the Orange Free State border in 1870. The discovery of valuable natural resources escalated these tensions further. In the 1830s, the Boers began trekking farther into African tribal territory to find new land, eventually establishing two republics: Transvaal, also called the South African Republic, and the Orange Free State.įor decades, the two new Boer republics lived alongside their British neighbors, albeit with minor fighting amid escalating tensions. The Boers resented Britain’s emerging antislavery policies and the Anglicization that British rule brought to the colony. In 1806, Britain took control of the Cape Colony during the Napoleonic Wars. From its beginning, the Cape Colony enslaved indigenous African populations. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a colony in what is now Cape Town to control trade routes from Europe around the Cape of Good Hope to India and other eastward destinations. The Boers were farmers, part of the population of Afrikaners descended from early Dutch settlers who arrived in southern Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. ![]() The consequences of the war, including gold mining’s lasting environmental legacy, and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism that reinforced apartheid, are still felt today. The war resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people, including tens of thousands of Boer women and children who died in British concentration camps. But gold, and diamonds, also fueled the Second Boer War, one of the most destructive armed conflicts in Africa’s history. ![]() The 1886 discovery of gold on a farm in the Witwatersrand region of southern Africa drove the growth of Johannesburg, and gold mining has aided the South African economy for more than a century since. Credit: painting by Charles Davidson Bell, 1898. In the 1830s, in what is now South Africa, the Boers - farmers descended from Dutch settlers who bristled against British rule in the Cape Colony - began trekking farther inland into African tribal territory to find new land.
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