- Mineworkers have been absolutely central to South Africa’s economic development. Their labour built the cities, financed global industries, and fundamentally reshaped the country’s political trajectory. Yet the human cost of all that—the bodies underground, the shattered communities, the voices that never got heard—remains insufficiently reckoned with in public memory. And it’s slipping further away.
- Working closely with the AlbiVan Association, we proposed developing a robust, operationally and curatorially independent institution to properly honour that legacy. It would be endowed by Anglo American and provisionally titled The Mineworkers Memory and Futures Museum (MMFM). But the idea was to make it something more than just a place where you go to remember things.
- Located in Anglo American’s historic former head office in central Johannesburg, the museum would confront the country’s extractive past head-on while creating space for critical reflection, genuine dialogue, and actionable propositions rooted in lived experience and diverse knowledge systems. The thinking was to position memory not as nostalgia, but as infrastructure for more equitable and informed futures. It would celebrate mineworkers, yes, but also pay homage to the spirit of Johannesburg itself—and invest in what comes next.
- The outcome was a substantial body of research. It traced how language evolved, how contemporary urban cultures formed, and the political conditions that gave rise to the liberation movements that eventually led to majority rule—all grounded in the city of Johannesburg. The real move was positioning mineworkers not at the margins of this history, but squarely at its centre—as active agents within intertwined systems of labour, capital, migration, and resistance.
- The research also extended into the post-apartheid city, examining its spatial inequalities, its economic dependencies, the social fractures that never quite healed. It speculated on possible futures too, asking what an institution grounded in memory might actually contribute to a more just urban trajectory.
- A comprehensive project concept and initiation report was delivered to the client. But despite the significant time and resources invested, the initiative didn’t progress beyond that point. It remains unrealised.
- We learned something hard: ambition alone won’t carry you across the finish line. Large institutional projects are shaped by competing interests, shifting priorities, and actors who aren’t always pulling in the same direction.
- Without alignment on timing, without shared priorities, without genuine institutional backing, even genuinely strong ideas lose momentum. The timing of a project can be as decisive as the quality of the idea itself.
- The project itself didn’t advance, but the research and conceptual work that went into it hasn’t been wasted. It continues to inform how we assess what’s actually feasible, how we structure partnerships, and how we frame propositions to institutions working in similar spaces.
- It reinforced a hard lesson. There are real limits to relying on moral intent or a single corporate endowment to build something enduring in the civic realm. Diversified funding and governance structures have to be baked in from the beginning, not bolted on later.
Paul Hamilos
Arindam Jana
