Anglo American and South Africa’s Original Sin: Between Legacy, Liability and the Search for Closure
By Kirtan Bhana

27 November 2025
As the dust settles on the Johannesburg G20, a summit that laid bare the contradictions of a world in transition, South Africa finds itself grappling with a different kind of reckoning, one buried not in geopolitics but in the very rock on which the city is built. Johannesburg, the City of Gold, owes its existence to mining. Yet mining also represents South Africa’s most enduring wound. And at the centre of this paradox stands one company: Anglo American.










