The Ultimate Conflict Mineral

Driven by world-wide demand, the South African Mponeng gold mine is a small city consisting of an underground network of tunnels and chutes that goes down 2 ½ miles, all to mine a vein of gold 30 inches wide. About 4,000 men a day make the descent into what is the deepest man-made hole on earth, but some people are already there. An ensconced criminal sub-enterprise within the city is manned by “ghost miners,”so called because they stay down for so long their skin turns grey. Employed by powerful syndicates, the ghost miners are tolerated because, as Matthew Hart, author of  “Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal” explains in his interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, “in a mine, you can hear someone coming a long way off, and these people are armed.” Gold, says Hart, “has a grip on people’s imagination that other substances don’t.”