Strategic Metals

Sinclair and Parker 1983 (Arlington House)

pp. 15,16

"In no area of policy is the issue of critical and strategic materials more crucial than in U.S. relations with the nations of Africa, and in particular those in the continent's southern third. The great plateau of Southern Africa, extending from South Africa's Transvaal province to Zaire’s Shaba province, shelters the world’s richest treasure in critical and strategic materials, rivaled only by the riches of Soviet Siberia. Southern Africa is frequently called the Persian Gulf of minerals, and South Africa its Saudi Arabia. 

...

This for the West is also a region of vital importance, the funnel end of a lifeline that provides most of the chromium, manganese, platinum and cobalt consumed by the industrial West. It has importance for the deposits of other critical minerals that are scattered through the region, some developed, some discovered but undeveloped, others only a gleam in the eye of geologists. 

South Africa is a land rich with gold and platinum; with enough diamonds to adorn the women and edge the cutting tools of the world for centuries to come; with lead, zinc, tin, silver and uranium; with cadmium, copper, columbium, tantalum, coal and iron. It produces more than 50 minerals from some 900 mines and quarries Without doubt it could further expand its known resources by the simple expedient of searching them out with the sophisticated tools of modem geology, or in some cases by reworking old mine dumps."

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