The Special Collections Book of the Week this week is:

Digging deep - a history of mining in South Africa 1852-2002 by Jade Davenport.

Digging deep chronicles South Africa’s great mineral revolution. The lucky strikes and the struggles of prospecting in the late 1800s; the rushes to boom and bust towns in the Eastern Transvaal Goldfield; the dubious beginnings of the Witwatersrand (the largest and richest goldfields in the world, with lowest grade ore); and the stories of the visionary men like Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, Sammy Marks and Hans Merensky, who pioneered and shaped the industry on which modern South Africa was built. Digging Deep is the only account in a single volume of how South Africa’s gold, diamonds, platinum, coal and a host of other metals and minerals transformed a colonial backwater into the greatest industrialised power on the African continent.

Access: UnivofPretoria.on.worldcat.org/oclc/871516534

This book is available at Special Collections, housed on level 5 of the Merensky 2 Library, and is part of our Africana (ZA) Collection.

The Special Collections unit of the Department of Library Services plays a stewardship role in the acquisition and preservation of the Library's rare and valuable information resources, making them accessible to students, staff and researchers, as well as safeguarding them for future generations.