South Africa’s commercial capital, Johannesburg, owes its existence to the discovery of a gold-bearing reef on a farm in the Witwatersrand basin in 1886. Over time, gold-mining on the Witwatersrand reef developed to sustain a “minerals–energy complex” that formed the basis of apartheid’s racialized capital accumulation model.2 While many of the major gold-mining houses have long-since decamped due to the depletion of gold reserves and declining profitability of these mines since the early 1990s, the landscape is still emblematically littered with numerous gold-colored mine dumps, or tailings dams, which provide a very visible reminder of the history of gold-mining in the area.3