We come to the conclusion of The Looting Machine Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth By Tom Burgis. The question that comes to me is, why does it seem the whole world turns a blind eye toward what is happening in Africa. It ought not to be this way...

..When Nchakha Moloi was looking for a name for his mining company he settled on motjoli. In Sesotho motjoli is the word for the leading bird in a V-shape formation, guiding the others toward their destination. Moloi had grown up in QwaQwa, a homeland beside the Drakensberg mountains of central South Africa to which the apartheid regime consigned Sesotho-speaking blacks. There were no mines in QwaQwa, but the menfolk would disappear for months on end to the mines of the Witwatersrand, under which lie the seams that have yielded a third of the gold mined worldwide over the past 150 years, returning only at Easter and Christmas to spend their wages.

Moloi took up one of the few places the authorities allotted for black students, at the prestigious University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, to study medicine. But he found cutting up cadavers too gruesome and decided to switch subjects. He had never heard of geology, but once university staff told him that it addressed “all the big questions” he was hooked. He studied the nature of the Earth out of fascination rather than any grand design for a career, but after graduation Moloi went to work as a prospector for Anglo American, the mining house that Ernest Oppenheimer had founded in 1917, which had grown to become the world’s biggest mining conglomerate. After a while Moloi moved to the Oppenheimer family’s diamond company, De Beers.

As they bumped around the diamond fields in their pickup truck, the members of Moloi’s team paid little heed to the different colors of their skin. But when he went to De Beers’s head office to make his reports, Moloi was subjected to the indignities apartheid imposed on black South Africans. He still recalls the strictures: “They can’t come here, they can’t go there. You get offended.”1 Ignoring his bosses’ objections, Moloi joined the National Union of Mineworkers, a bulwark of resistance to apartheid. His relationship with De Beers soon soured, and he took a job at Rio Tinto, working on a copper mine close to the Kruger National Park, where the racial division was even more apparent. “I was working on the mine, in production, and I was really exposed to how things are,” Moloi remembers.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/01/part-5-of-5the-looting-machine-warlords.html