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FIRE IN THE EARTH
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spend whatever money was required for its "development" and the maintenance of order and good government.
Thus
it may be understood how and why De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd.,
during the fifty years of its existence, helped to open up Rhodesia,
why it had direct and indirect association with gold mining on The
Rand, ran the tramways and electricity supply of Kimberley, inspired
road building and railways, founded villages, set up fruit farms and
stud farms, and established great dynamite works—the greatest dynamite
works in the world. This last, the least known of its adventures, was
one of its most important, certainly its most interesting.
Dynamite, it seems, sends masses of gold ore crashing into the stopes of The Rand mines every day. About twelve million ounces of fine gold are mined in the year, thanks to explosives. These explosives also are useful in diamond mining.
In
1889, however, complaints were being made about the quality of
Transvaal dynamite. A government commission inquired into the validity
of the complaints. In 1892 it became a state monopoly. A factory was
built for the supply of dynamite. But the high price of dynamite was a
great burden to the mining industry almost from the beginning.
Early
in 1900 Rhodes said that the uncertainty of the dynamite prices of the
European monopoly and the growing interests of De Beers in Kimberley,
The Rand, and Rhodesia made it increasingly necessary for the company
to manufacture its own explosives. The Anglo-Boer War delayed the
erection of the factory planned, but in 1903 De Beers ordered dynamite
from the Nobel Trust (Nobel, of the Peace Award) for the last time.
Five months later a factory went into operation.
But the dynamite concessions which had been granted to
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