155 West African Goldfields M. Robertson1 and L. Peters2 The MSA Group, 20B Rothesay Avenue, Craighall Park, 2196, South Africa E-mail:
[email protected];
[email protected] DOI: 10.18814/epiiugs/2016/v39i2/95773 The West African region has long been known for Introduction its gold endowment and gold production. Apart from The gold potential of West Africa has long been known, with the last 20 to 30 years, this production was largely informal artisanal mining having taken place for centuries. However, derived from informal artisanal workings covering modern systematic exploration and commercial scale mining have large areas of West Africa. For a period of over a only come into their own relatively recently. Ghana has long been the thousand years until 1500 AD, West Africa was the second largest gold producer on the African continent after South world’s most important supplier of gold, much of Africa, having produced 2.85 million troy ounces (Moz) in 2013. The increasing importance of West Africa as a gold producing region which formed part of the trans-Sahara trade with is reflected in Mali and Burkina Faso which have become the third the Arab world, whose monetary system was based on and fifth largest African producers respectively, the former having gold. Artisanal gold mining is still widespread across yielded 1.42 Moz and the latter 0.77 Moz in 2013. West Africa and a significant number of modern gold The majority of gold deposits on the West African Craton are hosted in Palaeoproterozoic rocks of the Birimian Supergroup, and mines in the region were founded on artisanal mining are temporally and spatially related to structures formed during the sites.