Between Grootfontein and Tsumeb there is a deep hole in the earth, the remains of what was once considered the world’s richest vanadium mine. Namibia’s very own ‘Big Hole of Kimberley’ . .
Or so I thought when I came across it several years ago. Now a water-bottomed pit surrounded by bushes and trees, it was a busy operation in its heyday. I stood there and imagined the activity of hundreds of contract workers who walked the rocky path into its depths every day.
Rich in minerals, Namibia has myriad mining operations. Travelling around the country I’ve noticed that there is hardly an area where you don’t find either active mining or the remnants of some kind of mining activity. Abenab fascinated me.
I read up on its history and learned that Abenab was one of several farms where mining occurred. It operated as an open pit and underground mine from 1923 to 1958 by the London-based ‘South West Africa Company Ltd’, and had a deposit of high-grade vanadium ore that was recovered by blasting and hand-sorting. By 1923 the mine was yielding up to 2000 tonnes per year.
The rare silver-grey mineral, mainly used to produce steel alloys for high-speed tools, was named after ‘Vanadis’, the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and fertility because of its shimmering range of colours. It was first discovered in 1801 in a lead-bearing mineral in Mexico by Spanish mineralogist, Andrés Manuel del Rio. When French chemist Collet-Descotils (incorrectly) declared his findings as being an impure sample of chromium, Del Rio retracted his claim. However, in 1831 Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the same element in iron ore, choosing a name for it that began with a ‘V’ and had not yet been assigned to an element. In 1867 Henry Enfield Roscoe obtained the pure chemical element. Interestingly, the first large-scale use of vanadium was in the steel alloy chassis of the Ford Model T in the early 1900s.
One of the major vanadium mines in the world, the Abenab mine was 100-metres deep and 200-metres wide. The operation ran like a small town with its own post office, swimming pool, cricket club, school and clubhouse.
Imagining the pulse of life emanating from the area, I did some more research and found an article written by someone who spent almost a decade there. He explained that before the days of diesel (and environmental awareness), the power plant was run on wood and that thousands of trees, mainly tamboti, were chopped down between Grootfontein and Tsumeb to fuel the industry. One of the early residents described his experience of riding to Tsumeb as riding through a forest. Many farmers in the area supplemented their income by delivering wood to the mine. Today, very few trees remain.
By the 1950s vanadium had been discovered in several other countries. The operation was no longer viable and the mine was sold to the South African-based company ‘Goldfields’. They closed the mine in 1958 and moved most of the machinery to a new mine outside Grootfontein called ‘Berg Aukas’. The land was resold and reverted once again to agricultural land. Any remaining machinery was dismantled and sold as scrap metal. China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and the United States are now the main producers. Some exploration has taken place at the mine over the years, but production wasn’t resumed.
All that is left today is the hole in the earth, a few remaining walls that barely suggest the size of the settlement, and the old photographs that reveal the neat houses, the path down the mine with its cable railing and the production centre of the once-bustling enterprise.
(Sources: Abenab Mine History | Golden Deeps Limited, Abenab vanadium shows significant potential for new operations – International Mining (im-mining.com), Vanadium – Wikipedia, the unpublished memoirs of Wolfgang Bauer)