How this chronology was built Methodology & sources

This page sets out what is in the chronology, what is not, where the dates and figures come from, and how to get an error fixed. It exists so that anyone citing or linking to the chronology can judge how much weight it will carry.

What this is, and what it is not

The chronology is a secondary synthesis. It is compiled from the published record; statutes, commission reports, company filings, industry annual reports and established historical scholarship; and it involves no original archival research. We have not consulted mine records, union archives, personal papers or unpublished material.

That distinction matters for how you use it. The chronology is a reliable orientation and navigation tool: it will tell you what happened, roughly when, and where to go next. It is not a citable authority for any individual fact. If you are writing something that will be fact-checked, peer-reviewed or edited to Wikipedia's sourcing standards, follow the pointers in each entry back to the underlying material and cite that.

We publish the methodology rather than assert authority because the second is not available to a compilation of this kind, and claiming it would be misleading.

Scope

The chronology covers mining in the territory that is now South Africa, from the identification of the Eureka diamond in 1867 to the present. It is deliberately short; sixty-three entries across 159 years; because a chronology that includes everything is a chronology nobody reads.

What earns an entry

An event is included if it meets at least one of these tests:

• It changed the industry's structure. The event altered who owned what, who could work where, or how the ore was got out; cyanidation, the 1911 colour bar, the MPRDA, the Anglo break-up.
• It changed the industry's scale. A discovery, technology or price movement that materially shifted output or employment.
• It is a fixed reference point. Events that later accounts consistently anchor to, whether or not they changed anything by themselves; Marikana, Coalbrook, the Rand Revolt.
• It is currently live. Recent items are included where they are already shaping decisions, even though their significance is not yet settled. These are marked by their recency, not by any claim to durability.

What is excluded

• Individual mine openings and closures, unless they opened or closed a field.
• Routine wage rounds and short stoppages. Strikes appear where they were nationally significant in scale, duration or consequence.
• Most fatal accidents. The industry has killed tens of thousands of people; the chronology carries the disasters that changed law, practice or public understanding, which is a different and much smaller set. Their presence is not a ranking of loss.
• Commodity price movements as such, except where a specific move had a discrete, traceable effect.
• Mining in Namibia, Zimbabwe and the wider region, and offshore petroleum.

Source hierarchy

Where sources conflict, we prefer them in this order:

Reference works and encyclopaedias were used to locate material, not as sources for it.

Date conventions

Timelines fall apart on the question of which date to use. Ours:

• Legislation is filed under the year of enactment, with the date of commencement given in the entry where the two differ materially. The MPRDA appears at 2002 and notes that it came into force on 1 May 2004.
• Discoveries are filed under the year of the find, not of proclamation or first production, with the later dates in the entry text.
• Strikes and disasters are filed under the year they began.
• Corporate transactions are filed under announcement, with completion noted separately. A deal announced in one year and closed in another may therefore appear earlier than you expect.
• Multi-year processes are filed at their opening year and described across their span rather than split into several entries.

Contested figures

Several of the casualty counts in this chronology are disputed, and the disputes are substantive rather than clerical. Our practice is to give the range or the composition of the figure inside the entry rather than to adjudicate:

• The Rand Revolt (1922): estimates run from roughly 150 to over 250 depending on whether commando casualties, civilians and post-suppression deaths are counted. We give an approximate figure and say it is approximate.
• The 1946 African Mine Workers' Union strike: official and union counts differ; we give the lower, better-documented figure with the qualifier "at least".
• Marikana (2012): we distinguish the 34 killed on 16 August from the total of 44 across the week, because collapsing the two is the commonest error in secondary accounts.
• Stilfontein (2024–25): recovered bodies, rescued survivors and estimates of the number underground are three different figures that are routinely conflated. We give the first two, which are documented, and not the third, which is not.

Category definitions

Each entry carries one thread. Events that could belong to two are assigned to the thread that carries their principal consequence; the 1922 Rand Revolt is labour rather than law, though it produced legislation two years later.

Known gaps

Stated plainly, because a methodology page that lists no weaknesses is not a methodology page:

• The record is thinner on black labour than on white. This reflects the documentary record itself: white miners had unions, newspapers and parliamentary representation for most of the period, and their disputes generated paper. African mineworkers' experience before 1970 survives mainly through the accounts of the institutions that controlled them. Entries in that period should be read with that asymmetry in mind.
• Coal is under-represented relative to its share of output and employment, because its history is less punctuated by discrete datable events than gold's and platinum's.
• Environmental history is largely absent. Acid mine drainage, the radioactive Witwatersrand tailings legacy and the derelict-mine liability are processes rather than events, and the chronology's format handles them badly. They deserve separate treatment.
• The most recent entries are provisional. Items from the last two or three years have not been through the sifting that gives earlier entries their shape, and some will look overweighted in five years' time.
• Artisanal and informal mining appears only at Stilfontein, which understates a sector employing tens of thousands of people.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Send the entry, what is wrong with it, and a source. Corrections of fact are made promptly and recorded in the changelog below; matters of interpretation and selection are noted but not necessarily changed.

Every substantive change increments the version number. Citations should include the version, so that a reader can tell which text was consulted. Superseded versions remain available on request.

Changelog

Reuse

The chronology is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may republish, adapt, translate or build on it, including commercially, provided you attribute it and say if you changed it. The embed code on the chronology page carries the attribution automatically.