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Jeff LaMarca | all galleries >> Galleries >> Southern and Eastern Africa > Rustenburg Platinum*
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Rustenburg Platinum*

After three guys tried to carjack me outside of Johannesburg (they didn’t have guns and didn’t succeed), I decided to just quickly find a hotel and avoid navigating Johannesburg at night. I asked a guy at a gas station where I might find a hotel, and we got to chatting. He was contemplating moving his family to the US and wanted to ask me about quality of life, visas and the job market there. He offered to let me spend the night at his home, and after calling and getting the OK from his wife (who took considerable convincing – they had three small daughters at home), I accepted. These people would be more interesting than watching TV in a hotel.

They were upper middle class white South Africans, Boers. The guy ran small manufacturing outfit, and luckily for me, he was planning on going down into Rustenburg’s platinum mine the next day to bid on a contract. When I explained my fascination with mines, he invited me to come, but I would need to pose as a contractor. So I got suited up with a hard hat and overalls, and sat through a meeting explaining the job before going deep into the world’s largest platinum mine. We went into a shaft 3km underground, from which dozens of auxiliary tunnels branched out like tentacles, all angled upward so that ore could be moved back to the central shaft and brought to the surface. The whole mining complex consisted of perhaps ten such central shafts spread out over dozens of square kilometers. The whole complex of tunnels, if viewed in 3-D, would look like a grove of two to three-kilometer tall trees, the tips of their branches sometimes connecting. I was instructed that photography was prohibited, but managed to snap a few shots.


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