Look into a fire under a sweep of stars. The dry wood crackles and sparks play longjump with each other. A glowing orange log shifts, throwing Tinkerbelle gold against the African night. Your eyes lift beyond the reach of the Earth, towards the Heavens, and you notice the great bicycle wheel of stars and systems spinning around our own. Why are we here?
The Bushman believe that the stars are great hunters. Their Africa was a continental darkness deeper than space, filled with the tiniest pinpricks of flickering firelight. The light of the fire playing against the sky and the throwing of long shadows against sandstone rock perhaps first prompted these faraway people to wonder, Where does it all come from? and Why are we are here?
Thousands of years passed, and now we walk in their domain. We find faded red ochre on rocks scattered throughout the wilderness. But our reason for coming to Africa was written long before his first work of art dried on a bare rock. Our reason for being here lies in the deep vaults of space.
When the first ships began to sail around the Cape, ancient cousins looked so different they would not recognize each other. Why were they sailing to Africa? Well, they were actually headed towards the Far East, in search of spices. Africa was a barrier better avoided. But there was a need to setup a hotel so captains could freshen up and sailors and shipmates could resupply with fresh water, fruits and vegetables. That was the original reason why Europeans came to Africa at all - to set up a refreshment station, something like the Shell Ultra City's of our time. Most people who manned the station couldn't wait to leave, not least of all, Jan van Riebeeck, who was used to the refinements of Europe.
Believe it or not, people first streamed to the country not because of the discoveries of gold or diamonds, but because of religious persecution. They were aware that a new frontier had been touched upon by the Dutch East India Company, and the idea of a faraway place wilderness without impediments drew large flocks. These settlers might have been left well enough alone, alone to explore God's own country - a wide wide land filled with herds of springbuck that took days to pass.
But then something happened. Gold was discovered. And we all know what happened after that. The British came to start a war. It was really a squabble over mine dumps from Kimberley to Komatipoort. When the Empire had laid its foundation (setting up agency companies like De Beers and Anglo American) it 'gave back' the country to the National Party, who followed the British model of exclusion to a T, and did arguably a better job at running the country into the ground. Years (and a number of Nobel Prize laureates) later, South Africa has emerged as an African powerhouse, with a bigger economy than its three biggest African rivals combined, a powerful military and banking infrastructure. Chances are, without this mineral wealth, Cape Town would look like Addis Abba or Zanzibar and the rest of the country would have had a once upon a farm infrastructure (a la Zimbabwe and Kenya).
The question Why are we here? is a relative one. A large proportion of the population continues to thrive, and to exist at all in this thirsty sundried country at all, because gold is here. Fantastic resources of it - so much that South Africa is the world's biggest exporter of the stuff. And we are world leaders in the export of other minerals too, like platinum and uranium. The reason South Africa has such a mother lode of gold is literally written in the stars.
Today the gold price is about $560, and that means a lot of money is flowing into our glittering country.
We can thank our lucky stars that a space rock 10km wide, and bigger than Table Mountain, walloped into the Earth with a thousand megatons, about 100km south west of present day Johannesburg. The blast of energy melted rocks in 3 great rings, creating the Wiwatersrand, and excavating a crater 20km deep and 275km in diameter. 70 cubic kilometers of rock vaporized, but the impact probably also provided the catalyst behind the development of oxygen and multicelled organisms. It's possible that life got a kickstart here. This extreme impact event happened about 3 billion years ago, and is the oldest and best preserved impact site in the world. Before this period the atmosphere was still forming and large space projectiles simply got swallowed up in molten goop - like croutons in soup.
There are two other comparable sites in Mexico and Canada.
Scientists from all over the world are fascinated by the clear horizontal outcrops near Parys in the Free State. This amazing geological feature - called the Vredefort Dome - was declared a World Heritage Site on the 14th of July, 2005.
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