A Metallic Odyssey

Elements #5: Mines and Magic

Also available here in audio format on the podcast this week! I began, but never finished, a ramble through the basic elements of nature and myth a while back; in a southern African context. Going to complete the cycle over the next few weeks, both here and on the audio versions.

Previous Element

As you drive up the Cape west coast towards the small town of Vredenburg, you pass rusting iron structures built to receive the train heading from Sishen to Saldanha at the coast. The original Portuguese Cape stopping point was once famous for guano - birdshit worth its weight in... etcetera; but its chief economic claim to fame these days is being the end of the rail line that takes South African iron out to export, on the longest trains in the world. Not a passenger in sight: although our Parliament has very belatedly proposed to prioritize rail travel, it comes from a very low base compared to anything Europeans are used to. Rail was put in by the British, once they arrived in Natal, for getting goods out to the merchant navy. One early colonial Governor in India described the purpose of the British administration as like a "sponge" - sucking up all the good stuff from the colonies and squeezing it over Lancashire where it could be turned into manufactured goods. In India, sophisticated local manufacturing first had to be smashed too, but in South Africa, where the people still lived what archaeologists confusingly call a small scale 'Iron Age lifestyle', it was comparatively easy for the empire to take its pickings back to the motherland and build plundering rail lines for the purpose.

Metal generally is so tainted in our minds with the industrial/colonial age of growth, pollution and destruction, that it's quite hard to picture it, as Chinese Taoists have been doing for aeons, as one of the essential five elements of natural life. You don't just come across metal-y outcrops or metallic pools. I can't tell you of drives through metallic woods. Those seam-streams are hidden treasure, needing extraction from ores in a manner at once more complex and more brutal than peeling a carrot; and when we hold them in our hands, it’s a little harder to remember that metal things are also part of Mother Nature. Of these treasures, iron is the most mysterious of them all. Way more part of earth’s crust than any other metal, so much so that the rest are all called “non-ferrous metals” in industry parlance. Magnetizing the core of the earth, scientists now think, and they've had to go through a lot of sorting and separating and analyzing to get to that conclusion, since nobody's actually been there to take a squizz. Sacred to the Egyptians and possibly forming the shiny caps of the pyramids, but supposedly only in the form of ore recovered from outer space meteorites, as the ore on earth was generally too deep to dig for and too complicated to access. (Those that could get hold of terrestrial iron had reached a whole new stage of human social development of course, that "Iron Age" I hinted at above). And yet iron is of course also hidden in our blood, in essential trace level quantities. We are metal too: again, it's notable for coming inside us in tiny, special packages; our bodies are wonderful mirrors for the earth herself in so many ways when you begin to scratch the surface and mine the depths.

In ancient times there were seven of these special, mysterious, shiny substances, a mystical quantity whose appearance was a natural rarity, and who brought a hard edge to many things. Identifying them, analyzing their distinctions and how they worked together was part of the lore of alchemy. Perhaps the consciousness of metal, so essential to our modern age, wanted us to separate things. There's something rather individualistic about metal: it doesn't tend to hang out in diverse underground metal rainforests. I wonder what it wants from us? Certainly one thing it's got from us, as iron, is the forge, and the force of the anvil, working with intensity of heat, led to blacksmiths, the original six-pack demigods, long before anyone thought up Virgin Active. Once we got how comparatively abundant it was, iron became much more central to our planet's development than the other ancient metals; and Mars is red because 15% of its crust is oxidized iron.

I have played in a forge a few times in a small way, and keep a crude cast iron bell on my shrine as a memory, clanging out its little call to prayer, made in a workshop where women too were exploring this aspect of their masculine sides. Because however much 'masculine' and 'feminine' might be cultural constructs, and however much we need to balance and access both sides, there's something particularly masculine about working in an iron smithy, which Mars would no doubt insist upon. Given the amount of upper body strength needed to work in a forge daily, to me at least it's clear why it has mostly fallen to the males of the species as a day job; also perhaps not surprising that men literally have more iron in their bodies than women do. The tools of the forge are iron too - themselves made in the forge. Of course it's a little comical to look back at myself in the late eighties, listening with pompous anger to dark metal with the boys (and occasional girl), when I had sprightly piano playing hands and would have been crushed by Astérix's village smith, Fulliautomatix. Inspired by Iron, we were, even if we were paradoxically listening to Iron Maiden.

Working with iron is perhaps the most wonderfully rough side of our creative technology through the generations. At Afrikaburn ten years ago, the intensely artistic desert party-ceremony-festival, the resident blacksmith always delighted in shooting an anvil into the sky as a rather provocatively noisy (if also rather obvious and macho) rebellious creative act. Add a little fire and you've got steel, ready to conquer the world, build Johannesburg skyscrapers, and make the shells for the elaborate boxes on wheels we've launched across the world for the past century and a half. Or pack tinned berries into for global transportation out of the Cape, as Cecil Rhodes did in one of his last insightful business ventures; tin cans have nothing to do with tin or its alloys, confusingly. Or build robots, which are basically artificial intelligence plus galvanised steel in most popular imagery.

But of course there are other ancient metals we've used for a different kind of beauty. Getting copper out of the ground in recent decades in Africa was done from gigantic mines, many further north in the copper belt of Zambia and the DRC, built once Europeans had broken through the closely guarded secret of their locations, already known to the medieval kingdoms of the region. In Bryce Courtenay's classic South African novel, The Power of One, the young, somewhat impossible intellectual-boxing hero is led towards a Dante's Inferno job in a fifties copper mine, when Zambia was still Northern Rhodesia, and just after apartheid proper had been instituted (as opposed to the prior 150 years of regular British and Afrikaner institutional racism, and the 150 years before that of Dutch-led casually racist capitalist opportunism). A book of anger, brutality, separation, and intensely damaged men: and highly creative problem-solvers. A very metal book. But once the copper is out, it's such a source, a softer metal, taking the magnetic framework of iron and instead conducting messages of all kinds elsewhere, like through the hardware you're probably reading this on, or bringing electricity from the solar panel on my roof; then there's the soft warm beauty of bronze (copper mixed with tin), and of course my personal favourite, the huge sounds of brass. Copper was once used extensively in hospitals because of its invaluable role as an antimicrobial, but steel-frame beds are cheaper and thus "practical", if the modern proliferation of hospital-borne bugs is really considered practical. Perhaps playing brass is good for the health; I personally love the rich colours of copper a little more than flashy gold: but there I go, separating and comparing. Copper is of course present in higher quantities in women's bodies than in men, and even more so during pregnancy - and traditionally alchemists associated it with Venus.

Gold, with its unrufflable gold-ness, was also magical, a powerful lodestone, worth seeking out but needing wariness, capable of turning hearts towards love or greed. Today there are toxic heavy metals in underground streams on the Witwatersrand. And Midas is no longer a gold-obsessed king but a South African shop for car parts and accessories. Much of the allure has vanished, and Jozi is to blame.

I have a deep fascination with our biggest city, Johannesburg the upstart, eGoli the city of gold and tacky soap operas, and it would need another whole article or two to do it justice. In the new South Africa I arrived in it had an edgy reputation, so much so that one poor friend from England got a taxi to Pretoria rather than wait, terrified, in OR Tambo international airport when I was late picking him up after a gig. It had previously taken me 18 months of Capetonians warding me off before I myself had first made it up and in to Johannesburg, to find a far more interesting place than I'd been led to believe (as well as being a lot greener than I’d been told, at least in the wealthy north of the city with its lush tree cover).

California had its Wild West gold rush just after the USA Civil War, Australia likewise, and South Africa had its Wild East one too at that time: around Barberton (where Courtenay's hero grew up), or further north along the Escarpment in saloon towns like Pilgrim's Rest. I visited these ghostly places twenty years ago, when touring Mpumalanga province with a Glenn Miller tribute big band (Miller's railroad song, Chattanooga Choo Choo, was awarded the first ever gold record during World War II). But it was decades after that classic gold rush that the imperially sponsored Randlords pulled in to create the grid for the wealthiest place in Africa: methodical in comparison with what came in previous decades, already backed with crazy levels of finance out of managing the diamond rush, as well of course as creating the levels of dispossession in Black culture that birthed our insane national levels of inequality. The imperial hut tax, or how to force people who have no need of your currency to become wage slaves. Rhodes and co had hands on government as well as in business, corruption on a scale most modern politicians can only dream of, and of course sparked our biggest southern African war too through their capitalistic quests.

Joburg is really a city of the second stage of industrial revolution, the one that brought electricity and concrete with reinforced steel girders and deep-level mining with fearsome modern tools, and separated and reconfigured chemicals, including quite a few of those lethal metal-based concoctions that poison the drainage systems. (Two of the other seven ancient metals, of course, are lead and mercury, about whom many cautionary fables could be told).

It's not easy to find poetry in Joburg's gold. The gold mine dumps start appearing on the roadsides as you pass north through the Free State, where my children's grandfather once worked as a geological engineer; they surround the centre of the old city, adding additional, confusing, somewhat bland hills to the rolling highveld landscape: none of the precision of pyramids. There have been other places and periods, mostly before Jozi was ripped into being, when gold was all about incredible jewellery, as practiced by India still today. Indian religious iconography and glitzy couture shows off an insatiability for beautiful shiny stuff. In Jozi, that's best spotted at the Oriental Plaza, where I've whiled away many an hour between samoosas, jewellers and tailors (and immaculate Italian shoe collections, the footwear equivalent of gold teeth). Perhaps you can tell the health of a culture by how much gold is on display above ground, compared to those cultures that lock it in bars and vaults; is bling really a bad thing? It is, after all, part of us too, literally found in its highest trace level concentrations around our hearts.

There was also a time in many places when golden adornment extended to buildings, like I witnessed in Mexican churches; or rings of power, in many global myths and stories. In Africa there's the romance of the medieval Ghanaian Ashanti fields, or the fabled search for King Solomon's mines (which Barberton's "Sheba" mine tried to recall). But I would suggest that renowned golden rhino from Mapungubwe (these days in Limpopo province) is actually a reminder of the way the medieval search for gold altered trade. Gold wasn't even that admired in much of pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa; those who got rich and powerful with it, like at great Zimbabwe, did so by trading with places more dazzled by gold than the average African (though brass was often pretty popular - same colour, less fatal, according to some African cultures).

And then all the gold - or at least much of it - got prosaically melted down into bars as new capitalist empires arose and new banks built their promises on it. So that by the time Johannesburg was rising on the back of deep digs, the most valuable, renowned things out of the new city weren't any examples of breathtaking sculptures of metallic peacocks by artisan goldsmiths; but Krugerrand coins, destined for Swiss bank vaults. The Romans (who the Victorian and Edwardian British state emulated as much as the Italian fascist one that was soon to appear on the scene) did much the same: conquering people for their gold, which they turned into prosaic coinage, symbols of a centralizing power. The Dacians of modern Romania, who the Romans essentially exterminated as a culture, buried some of their incredible gold work (particularly their bracelets), only found again in recent years. The ferocious but nomadic Huns interestingly did the reverse, turning their haul of Rome's coffers back into fine jewellery. Today Sandton rises north of the old city centre of Jozi, north of the modern glass and metal of the JSE on Diagonal Street, as tacky as Gold Reef City theme park outside Soweto, but taking itself a lot more seriously. And during my lifetime our money system has floated nebulously around numbers rather than actual metal weights, even the gold bar standard abandoned, paper notes no longer promising to pay the bearers the equivalent in precious metal on demand. Joburg at times is still the wild west, the place for hustlers and gamblers it's always been. An attractive energy for a while, as long as you can see through the glitter that isn't gold.

Today, South Africa's gold mining heyday may be past, but platinum, chromium, titanium, uranium are still pulled out of the ground by big name brands. All those Latin names, for metals without mythologies, in a place of wealth for wealth's sake. Over the years I've played one or two gigs for the boringly rich, a class of people that pop up in places here in SA. Unimaginative millionaires, many down in the Cape, where they keep their yachts (just because they think they're supposed to have yachts, not because they love water). I have no doubt it's possible to be rich, creative and humble: I've met some wonderful people in that category too, but these weren't. One businessman's 50th birthday party was so full of himself explaining how good he was at golf that the band eventually got paid off (after having our fill of caviar) when midnight rolled around and the main course had yet to be served. Of course, there's philanthropy around too, but that old Randlord money keeps on coughing up down the generations. Rhodes only gets away with being remembered for his lovely legacies and sponsorships and botanical gardens and stuff because he didn't actually have any dependents ready to get their hands on his loot. The Gates/Bezos/Musk of his day still sits untouched looking out to the north east from a great viewpoint below Devil's Peak in Cape Town where his memorial is placed. As far as I know, nobody's particularly noted the mountainous irony, though personally I hope he's been getting a few good karmic doses of sweatshop mining to rectify what he caused, however much he was inspired by metallic individualism.

And yet, while people still search for the mysterious missing Kruger millions, digging holes across the escarpment where President Paul Kruger was in hiding, there are deeper mysteries in the earth. Old gold diggings and shafts, ancient tiled tunnels, reportedly made by no known means, stumbled upon by modern engineers for Anglo American and co. Who bury them and move on. Michael Tellinger would suggest they're hundreds of thousands of years old, maybe from the distant times of the Mayans' first sun; who knows? At least such stories suggest there's more magic at play in the South African interior than the currency markets want to know about.

And then there's silver. The moon mirror, the incredible healer (especially in its colloidal form), quietly dug out on the Rand too from time to time, though it plays a much less flashy role in our national story. I wear some right now around my neck, to balance the gold of my ring. The Dutch thought they'd found it on the Table Mountain range: fortunately they failed, and instead we have the misleadingly named Silvermine natural area, one of my favourite places to be present, float in the water, feel the cool peace of the earth, untouched by brash diggers of any kind. Oh, silver has caused its fair share of heartache and pain too I've no doubt, especially during the conquest of Latin America; but it lifts the imagination (perhaps too much at times, with all of our cinematic worlds produced upon the silver screen); reminds us to dream. Even as hungry multinationals keep trying to descend upon our region's mineral wealth, it's good to take time out to reflect, so we can hold on and fight back for what really matters.