Kortnek

On Tuesday morning Nick sent me to check out Kortnek, a small artisanal gold mining prospect about 5 miles north of Klipwal. The Kwazulu-Natal University geology class is scheduled to visit there and he wanted to me to check out if it was safe, and said Kortnek can sometimes be “quite the experience.”

I was driven by Hans, the metallurgist who works in the plant lab. He’s the one the produces Klipwal’s finished product: sponge gold. In a controlled laboratory, he takes the gold concentrate after it has done its rounds in the processing plant and separates the gold from the waste material by using Mercury. The resulting sponge gold doesn’t looks a little bit like a cork made of gold, with numerous air holes and small imperfections. The gold color is not as bright and shiny as you would expect, but the sponge gold itself is about 95% pure and a cork-sized piece of sponge gold will fetch around $10,000 dollars with today’s gold prices.

Along with Hans, Leonard and Phillimon would once again accompany us to Kortnek, as they have been there on numerous occasions sampling soil over the past 5 years. With my backpacked full of food, water, and a few geological accessories I went to sit in the Land Rover and wait for Hans. Leaning against the passenger seat was a rifle, which was a bit surprising to see. Hans eventually finished with whatever he was doing and hopped in the driver’s seat. I asked him if the gun was necessary, and he said “just in case” while hiding a slightly creepy grin. Apparently the artisanal miners, who technically are illegal miners as the Kortnek prospect is owned by Lloyd and the Klipwal mine, have been known to be hostile in the past.

Up the dirt road we drove, leaving Klipwal to the west. The road eventually bends north and meets the road to Kortnek about 5 miles later. This road shoots east from the main plateau towards the Pongola river valley. We were nearing Kortnek, and the outskirts of any sort of civilization, when Hans stopped the rover at a small cement building called “The Restaront”. He asked for a cold drink, and apparently they didn’t have any, because no sooner than he asked, a woman ran out of the shop, down the road, and returned about five minutes later with a big 2 litre bottle of coke. That’s some dedicated service just to sell a coke.

Less than a mile after the shop, we turned off the main dirt road, which was ending just ahead anyway, and continued down a much less travelled road that skirted the side of a steep hill. The road continued to steepen until we had dropped a good 100 meters of elevation in a very short amount of time. With hillside to our right and a steep drop-off to our left, Hans methodically guided the rover over an awful dirt track. It was only about 8 am but the sun was already high enough in the sky for it to be hot out.

With the river bed and small hut-like dwellings hiding in the distance, Hans stopped the rover at the end of the drivable portion of the dirt track. A large, parched tree rose to about 30 feet with sprawling branches filled with various man-made curiosities. One of the was a cane-like stick with a spiralling Kudu horn attached to one end. We all exited the vehicle, Hans carrying the rifle over his shoulder and I with my backpack. It took about 5 minutes of walking down the dirt track before running into the first artisanal miner. Leonard and Phillimon immediately broke into conversation with him in Zulu and from his body language he motioned for us to look around. In the side of a hill was an enormous 4-foot wide, 10 foot long, and who knows how deep hole in the rock. They had been hand-drilling this with electric drills for over a year apparently, and it eventually yielded nothing.

As I would continue to discover upon walking around in Kortnek, life as an illegal artisanal miner requires extreme amounts of work in horrible living conditions for very little reward. Various groups of people, all working for themselves, employ a mining process that was used over 100 years ago. The men bash at the rock with hammers and drills while the women sit by the river grinding the rock into smaller, finer pieces. They then use homemade mills to get the pebbles into a fine enough material to process. Next, using dams and ramps constructed out of rocks in the river, the fine material is floated in water down the ramp which is covered in cloth towels. The cloth towels that they use have ridges, and the heavier gold particles sink and are caught between these ridges while the lighter material floats down the river. Ultimately, they use old, inefficient techniques for processing rock which they have very little geological understanding of. The little gold they produce is sold off to black market purchasers, usually coming in from Swaziland or Mozambique to the north, at a fraction of the market price.

The living quarters at Kortnek were simple shelters with plastic bags and tarps used for roof and wall cover. With all this talk of the artisanal miners being dangerous, I have to say I completely disagree. I could tell from being there that they were a group of people who probably knew nothing else in life than mining for gold. Their parents and grandparents would have been doing the same thing at Kortnek for the past century. The truth is that with artisanal mining practices, there is only so much you can get out of the ground. It’s quite clear that the easy stuff has already been mined at Kortnek so the miners are working much harder now for smaller returns. That is why Lloyd’s plan is to develop Kortnek into a working commercial mine, and aims to employ the artisanal miners that have been working there for years. I’m not sure if that will work, or how well the artisanals will take to working for a paycheck, but these miners have had it so tough that they might welcome it with open arms. I am struggling to think of a more difficult way to make a living.

It was an eye-opening experience indeed, but what happens at Kortnek is known to happen all around the world where there is gold. It goes to show the great lengths which people will go to try to get rich off the metal. I’m enjoying my experiences here so far, but I can’t say I’ve really been hit by the gold fever yet. Who knows, that may change a couple months from now.