The Barberton Greenstone Belt of South Africa has been mined extensively for close to 150 years, but there is still a lot of gold to be found, writes Leon Louw.
Historically, mining companies working in the Barberton Greenstone Belt were only interested in the deposits of at least 10g per tonne of higher. Often sample results yielding less than 5-10kg per tonne were ignored. In other words, there is potentially a lot of metal in the ground. Mining in the Barberton area dates back to the 1870s, when prospectors started venturing into the Lowveld region and discovered alluvial deposits in the Jamestown Schist Belt, followed by the discovery of lode gold deposits in quartz vein systems in the Barberton Mountainland.
Carl Anhaeusser's paper, Archen gold mineralisation in the Barberton Mountainland (1986), explains that this discovery led to the development of the De Kaap-Barberton goldfields between 1874 and 1884. Anhaeusser notes that the "initial discoveries were eclipsed by Edwin Bray's fabulously rich 'Golden Quarry' discovery adjacent to the Sheba Fault, close to present-day Sheba mine". This deposit made Barberton famous worldwide and led to one of South Africa's most colourful gold rushes.
Anhaeusser writes that the town of Barberton was founded in 1884 following numerous gold discoveries in the mountains northeast of the town, including the currently operating Sheba-Fairview, New Consort and Lily gold mines. "The first three are related to the Sheba Fault and the last one to the Lily Fault." Other mineral deposits exploited in the Barberton-Swaziland region include magnesite, barite, iron ore, tin and chrysotile asbestos.
