Rosh Pinah

Half a zinc mine for R510, and the daughter who fought back

“Ek gaan vrek.” I am going to die. That, his daughter said, is how Mose Kahan opened the talk in 1964 that gave away control of the mine he had spent his life looking for. The man across from him was Ben Alberts, head of mining at Iscor, South Africa’s state steel company. By her account the deal was 51 per cent of Rosh Pinah for R510, on a promise that Iscor would fund the mine and run it in good faith. Kahan’s own company, Moly Copper, kept a royalty.

Who exactly Kahan was depends on who tells it. The mine’s history has him in these hills from 1924. The Mail & Guardian, in 1996, called him a German Jew who fled the Nazis to prospect in Africa, which does not sit easily with that date. Even the name comes in two versions. The usual translation is cornerstone. His daughter gave it as headstone, the headstone of the Namibian economy. What nobody disputes is that the ore itself was found by a geologist, Dr Michael McMillan, and that Kahan died years before a tonne of it was milled.

The big fish and the small fish

As the Mail & Guardian told it in 1996, the partnership worked for 23 years and went sour after Iscor was privatised in 1989. Iscor said it would stop funding the mine and wanted the holding company wound up. Kahan’s daughter, Diane Lidchi, fought it through the Windhoek courts, arguing that the accounts had been dressed to make a good mine look worthless so it could be bought back cheaply. Iscor denied it.

In June 1994 Judge T.J. Frank ordered the liquidation but refused Iscor its costs, and said why. Big fish may eat small fish, he wrote, but a court did not have to hand the big one a further prize for doing it. Iscor did buy the assets. Then the Namibian government handed the mining rights to a small company with ruling party links instead, and when Iscor protested, the mines minister, Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, said he had given the rights away “and that is final”. In 1996 Lidchi was still suing Iscor for a billion Namibian dollars, running the case from her house near Zoo Lake in Johannesburg.

You can still read the cast list off the town. The mine’s address is 1 Kahan Street, and the guest house carries McMillan’s name. In 2012 a mine geologist, Gisela Hinder, opened a small Geo Centre after 13 years at the mine, with plans for a quiver tree garden and a bronze memorial to McMillan. Her sum was that eight tourists a day would pay for one permanent job. The rock she wanted to show off was laid down about 750 million years ago, when an old supercontinent tore apart.

Skorpion, the second mine about 25 km to the north-west, has its own odd start. An Anglo American subsidiary explored it from 1976 to 1982 and walked away, beaten by the metallurgy of the ore. When a plant was finally built, it pushed up the whole country’s electricity use by a quarter, by one trade profile’s reckoning.

A ferry that sat for 19 years

The pontoon at Sendelingsdrift last carried a vehicle in 1988, the year of a flood that stripped topsoil off the farms upstream and drove some growers off the land for good. It was rebuilt and put back to work on 17 October 2007, when the border post opened with a warning from the Namibian home affairs minister that any misuse could see it shut again. In January 2011 the river closed both the pontoon and the gravel road to Aussenkehr.

The tar is younger than most people expect. The 169 km from Aus were sealed all the way by December 2006, and the 90 km to Oranjemund only opened in October 2017. Before that Oranjemund was reached by air or by gravel. The new road was cut into the mountain where it squeezes against the river, about 25 km from Rosh Pinah, and after the February 2021 flood cracks opened in the shoulder there and kept widening. The whole road was shut for high water at the end of January 2022. In February 2024 an Oranjemund resident on a 4x4 forum reported repairs still going on about 30 km out, and another poster put it down to the stretch built into the river starting to slide.

Yellow flowers on a dying tree

The plant to know about is the giant quiver tree, also called the bastard quiver tree. It grows only on the upper slopes of the mountains either side of this stretch of river, taller and barer than the common kokerboom, with paler leaves and yellow flowers that hang below the rosette in spring. It is critically endangered. Botanists find almost no seedlings, and the Stellenbosch University garden’s record names mining at Rosh Pinah as one of the threats on the Namibian side. Its smaller cousin, the maiden’s quiver tree, is dying in numbers too. In September 2024 the climate scientist Wendy Foden went back to a Richtersveld site she had last seen in 2003, when the trees were in good shape, and found hundreds of them dead. The halfmens, with its tip bent north, flowers from August to October in the same mountains.

For animals, be realistic. A Geological Society of Namibia group on the river road in May 2026 reported a flock of pelicans resting on an island in the flooded Orange, and heaps of washed cobbles left by the diamond diggers. Hartmann’s mountain zebra, klipspringer, baboon and leopard are all listed for the Richtersveld mountains across the river, which tells you what lives there and not what you will see from a car. The best report of oryx comes from the far end of the tar: a resident of Oranjemund describes them walking the streets, with jackal and brown hyena on the golf course. That is one person’s account.