South African gold, honestly measured

Why the famous share is out of date

The 40% figure was not invented. Decades ago, when far less of the world’s gold had come out of the ground, the Witwatersrand’s share of it really did approach that number. What changed is not the reef but the denominator. The World Gold Council’s best estimate is that about 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of history, and that roughly two-thirds of it has been dug since 1950. As the world kept mining, a share that was once near 40% slid toward a quarter, though the reef never gave back an ounce. The number did not shrink; the world’s total grew around it. Publishing the corrected figure instead of the flattering one is the whole point of this page.

The reef that built a city

In 1886 a prospector named George Harrison found gold on the farm Langlaagte, on the open highveld south of Pretoria. The reef he had stumbled onto was the Witwatersrand Basin, the single richest source of gold ever found, and public diggings were proclaimed that September. A mining camp went up where no town had stood, and within a decade it had outgrown Cape Town. Its Nguni name says plainly what it is: eGoli, the place of gold. Johannesburg is not a city that happened to find gold. It was conjured out of the ground by it.

The century South Africa ran the gold world

For most of the twentieth century, no country mined more gold than South Africa. At the 1970 peak it produced about 1,000 tonnes in a single year, on the order of two-thirds of all the gold mined on Earth that year. No producer of any commodity holds that kind of dominance now. The descent since has been steep but not shameful: the ore that remains is deeper, older and harder to reach, not gone. China overtook South Africa as the world’s largest producer in 2007. By 2024 South African mines turned out about 99 tonnes and ranked twelfth in the world, third in Africa. The country that once mined most of the world’s gold now mines a small fraction of it, and still knows the metal better than almost anywhere.

Germiston, where a purity dispute is settled

Since 1920, almost all of that gold has passed through one town. Rand Refinery was built in Germiston to refine South African gold at home rather than ship it to London. It is one of the largest single-site precious-metals refineries in the world, and one of only five LBMA Good Delivery referees, the handful of laboratories the London market trusts to settle a dispute over a bar’s purity. It is the only LBMA-accredited gold refinery on the African continent, and it supplies the gold for every bullion Krugerrand. When a bar of gold anywhere is stamped good delivery, part of what makes that stamp mean something is a laboratory in Germiston.

The deepest gold on Earth

The reef does not surface politely. To follow it, South African miners have dug the deepest holes humans operate. At Mponeng, west of Johannesburg, work reaches roughly four kilometres below the surface, the deepest mine on the planet. The gold this country is known for has been chased further down than anywhere else on Earth, and the price a reader sees still carries the cost of reaching it.

None of this is nostalgia. It is why, when you want to know what a Krugerrand is really worth or what gold is doing in rand, the most credible answer comes from here. The coin that carries the story has its own Krugerrand history, and today’s number sits on the Krugerrand price. How we work, including how we correct famous figures like the two above, is set out in our methodology.

The Goldza desk

Sources and further reading: World Gold Council, SA History Online, Rand Refinery and the LBMA. Figures are cited on-page; where a famous number is out of date, we publish the corrected one.