South Africa holds an unrivaled historical distinction in global mining history as the single largest cumulative producer of gold the world has ever seen. For much of the twentieth century, the prolific Witwatersrand Basin supplied a staggering percentage of all the gold mined across human history, peaking during the late 1960s and 1970s. While nations like China, Australia, and Russia currently lead annual extraction volumes, South Africa's historical output remains unmatched in total cumulative tonnage extracted from the earth.