A hardhat and a torch
You are supplied with a hardhat and a torch – you’ll need the torch. You’ll walk past the mine manager’s station, where each miner placed his identity card in a large box. If a blast did occur, miners picked up their cards in their rush to the surface, and any cards remaining told the manager who was missing.
Further down the shaft sits a lone miner, with a candle and a large drill. Prepare for a loud sound burst – the miner will give you a blast of the drill, and suddenly you forget about the dark and the damp – the sound fills your world. Thank goodness it only lasts five seconds. Miners are supplied with earplugs and if they don’t wear them, will eventually go deaf.
You get to look up several stopes with their bluegum timber supports – they are at a 35-degree angle and don’t offer much head room.
“If the electricity fails, you will have to take a walk up a wooden stairway up one of those stopes. It will take over an hour to slowly walk up, bent over, in
the heat,” says smiling Henrietta Mohapi, guide for the underground tour.
You walk past the dynamite box with its red-painted angled lid to prevent miners standing a candle on it, for obvious reasons.
Fanagalo
And you will learn about fanagalo, the miners’ language created because miners came to the mines with 50 different languages and had to have a means of understanding one another. Developed in 1910, it consists of 2 000 words, 500 of them swear words.
“It would be insulting to use Fanagalo above ground,” says Mohapi.
Near the mine manager’s station is a board with rows of 10 holes across and down. Miners placed a peg in a hole for each cocopan filled – most of the men in the early days could not read or write and this was a way around the problem. One cocopan takes 1 ton of rock, and that produces 4 grams of gold.
“Thousands of men have died in this mine, for that gold. In the mid-1900s, 1 500 men died in a methane
explosion,” adds Mohapi.
There is still gold in the mine, but at the current gold price, it is not profitable to mine. When the mine closed, people showed an interest in buying sections, to open a disco or a restaurant, but mine management was against it.
“So now from the 19th to the 57th levels, the mine is flooded,” says Mohapi. What this in fact means is that the water at those levels is no longer pumped out. Normally 2 000 litres of water are pumped out each hour.
Once above ground again, take in the gold-pouring display. 12,5 kilograms of 88% rough gold and 12% silver is poured into a gold bar mould. And you can take it home . . . if you can pick it up with two fingers on your first attempt.
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