A few weeks ago, the highly controversial story that the government of Georgia has given Russian-backed Rich Metals Group (RMG) approval to continue its mining project at a site believed to host the world’s oldest gold mine made headlines and provoked an outburst of moral indignation in inter- national conservationist circles.

It is worth reflecting on this story, as it has considerable resonance with South Africa’s often horrifying disregard, at least from a historical perspective, of matters of cultural interest when pitted against projects of economic gain.

At the heart of the controversy is Sakdrisi-Kachagiani, a 9 ha gold-rich site near the small village of Dmanisi, 95 km south-west of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Interestingly, that part of the country is widely acknowledged to be the most significant archaeological site outside Africa relating to the study of early species of humans.

According to Eurasia.net, Sakdrisi came to prominence in 2004, when archaeologists from the National Museum of Georgia and the German Mining Museum excavating a site several kilometres from Dmanisi unearthed caves and mining tools believed to date back to the third millennium BC. Because the age of the mining tools predate Egyptian mining artefacts, the remarkable find suggests that Sakdrisi could be the oldest gold mine in the world. It was on that basis that, in 2006, Georgia’s Culture Ministry awarded the Sakdrisi archaeological dig the status of a permanently protected historical site.
However, it is understood that before that remarkable discovery was made, the gold subsidiary of RMG, a company that has been mining in Georgia since 1975 and is currently accountable for 10% of the country’s exports, had begun exploiting its opencast gold operation at a site adjacent to the protected Sakdrisi hillock. According to the company’s estimates, the Sakdrisi area has a resource of some 20 t, which, at today’s gold price, is worth just over $903-million.

Since part of that resource and original mining permit extend into the preservation site, RMG was hindered in terms of the law from exploiting the entire gold deposit. Thus, it came as little surprise when, in early 2013, RMG’s supervisory board chairperson wrote to the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashbili to urge that Sakdrisi’s status be revoked because the economic interests of the State and of investors outweigh the site’s historical significance.
Since RMG is such an influential and economically important company – it reportedly employs some 3 000 workers and provides 85% of the local budget of the region of Kvemo Kartli through licensing fees and royalties – an 11-member commission was established to investigate the matter.

After just one month of deliberations, the commission concluded that no grounds existed to justify the ‘illegal’ title. The commission’s findings, which, it has been argued, were based on the grounds that everything should be done to support the economic interests of the country, prompted the Culture Ministry to revoke permanent protection for Sakdrisi.

Although the decision prompted considerable protest, with many local nongovernmental organisations petitioning government to preserve the site’s protected status, it would appear that the economic gains from mining the resource are just too attractive and government has effectively ignored the public outcry.

The Georgian government’s support of RMG and its commitment to economic growth were cemented in February, when it officially gave the company the go-ahead to extend its operation into the formerly protected site. It argued that it “considers it impracticable to impede employment of thousands of people and improvement of the business environment based on a myth”.

The reason why this story resonates so strongly with South Africa is that a multitude of prehistoric and pre-colonial mining sites were destroyed, particularly during the latter half of the nineteenth century, under similar circumstances.

It is known, with a fair degree of certainty, that South Africa had an extensive and vibrant mining and metallurgical industry before the arrival of white settlers in the midseventeenth century. Indeed, archaeological evidence, albeit scanty, suggests that primitive man began exploiting minerals such as ochreous haematite, specularite and pyrolusite more than 40 000 years ago and that, from the fifth century onwards, highly specialised communities began mining and smelting iron-ore, copper and tin at various locations in northern South Africa ranging – from Phalaborwa to Rooiberg and Musina.

Unfortunately, not much evidence of these activities remains today. For the horde of pros-pectors and miners who traversed South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in search of fortune, the perceived value of many of those ancient and precolonial mines or metallurgical sites was that they indicated the presence of economically viable mineral deposits – no more than that. Thus, most of the sites and the artefacts they contained were destroyed by those philistines during their prospecting and mining endeavours. It is for that reason that, even though South Africa is widely acknowledged as one of the oldest mining jurisdictions in the world, it does not boast a complete archaeological record to support its mining and metallurgical history.

Of course, there is a notable exception to that general trend, which concerns the oldest mining site in the world, Lion Cavern, located on the north-western border of Swaziland, and it is an exception that RMG should consider quite carefully.

Lion Cavern was uncovered in 1964 by South African mining giant Anglo American, which had just begun mining an iron-ore deposit in the Ngwenya mountain range. Much to its credit, the company ceased its mining activies in that area to allow archaeologists to investigate the site. While Anglo continued to mine that iron-ore resource because of the company’s sensitivity to matters of cultural and historical interest, steps were taken to preserve the ancient mining site at Lion Cavern for posterity. Today, the Ngwenya Mine and Lion Cavern, at the southern end of the Malolotja Nature Reserve, is one of Swaziland’s main tourist attractions.