On 21 March 1990, after decades of political and armed struggle, the Republic of Namibia earned its political independence from South Africa. For the newly elected government in Windhoek – led by the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) – it was quite important that it could formally declare in Article 1 of the post-apartheid Constitution that there was now an international border near the Orange River. For those who lived by the river, however, this new round of the politics of passports and permits was yet another move in reducing their pastoral and transhumant mobility. At the same time, independence and the end of apartheid legislation brought fundamental changes to those who lived by the river. They were now citizens of a new and independent country, and they were supposedly able to benefit from the privileges of that status. However, political independence brought challenges: independence came with deeply neoliberal policies, and the new government did very little to address the land question, especially during the first five years.
Most of the farms that stretched from the Orange River up to Warmbad and beyond remained in White hands, though most of these Whites were now Namibians. Many Whites, however, did not wish to live in a post-apartheid Namibia, and there was a rush of farm sales in the years between 1988 and 1995. Land in Namibia was sold for pennies on the dollar, the sellers returning to South Africa where apartheid would not let go for a few more years. Until the promulgation of Namibia’s Agricultural (Commercial) Land Reform Act of 1995, there were still no laws restricting foreign ownership of farmland, so many of these sales went to foreign individuals or businesses. Some of these new owners continued to run their properties as livestock or irrigation farms; others sought to diversify into nature conservation, tourism and trophy-hunting, sectors that were expected to grow dramatically in the post-apartheid years.
Driving southbound on district road 292, the road gradually rises over the Orange River mountains before descending for about 10–15 kilometres to the irrigated fields at Gaidip and Homsrivier Mission Station. At the very top of those mountains – where the road crosses from the southern boundary of Gaobis Farm to Ramansdrift Farm – there is a small steel placard on the left-hand side, pointing eastwards to a disused public road and a place called ‘Great River Game Ranch’. You might miss it if you drive too fast. Owned for many years by an eccentric Danish engineer, named Steen Severin, the Great River Game Ranch was a small tourism and trophy-hunting company and, as described at
A three-metre-high game fence built along the southern border of Homsrivier Farm
PHOTO: B.C. MOORE, 2021
…
Steen Severin was born on 14 April 1939 in Denmark to a prominent family, who were major shareholders in Det danske Stålvalseværk A/S, which operated the largest iron and steel foundry in Copenhagen.1 The Danish steel industry was closely tied to the boatbuilding and shipping industries in both Copenhagen and Odense. Severin and his father ran a Copenhagen-based company called Silikadan A/S, which manufactured and sold industrial products and machinery.2 Severin trained as an engineer, and for a final project as part of his studies he designed a new kind of industrial boiler for steam generators,
Born in 1942 in the small Italian village of Loneriacco, near the Slovenian border, Franka Cussigh lived a modest life. Her father had been a soldier in Mussolini’s army, but the family moved to Paris in 1952 because many demobilised soldiers who had fought for the old fascist regime were finding it hard to get work in the new Italy.4 Her father got a job as a stone mason, and Franka completed school, learning French along the way; she was then employed by the Printemps department store. Through her work, she became acquainted with a photographer named Raoul, who took her to the French Riviera in 1959. Recognising her beauty, he urged her to enter the Miss Côte d’Azur and Miss Film Festival modelling competitions, and to her surprise, Franka won.5 Sporting the new name Franka Bell – which Raoul considered more cosmopolitan than her own provincial surname – Franka moved to the Riviera, where she dined with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Le Corbusier, the Onassises and the Kennedys. Via connections with producer and publicist Angelo Rizzoli, she travelled for a year throughout Europe, acting in small films. She eventually invested her savings in the restaurant l’Eiffel in Zürich.
According to Franka, ‘after that meeting in Zürich’ with Steen Severin she fell pregnant with his child. A few years later, in 1965, they got married, and Franka moved to Copenhagen with the Severin family.6 Steen Severin continued with his family business while Franka raised their child, took Danish language classes and studied fine arts. Through the family’s longstanding connections with the Danish Steelworks, from the late 1960s Severin’s main business was shipping raw materials from South America and Africa to foundries and factories in Denmark.7 By 1970, Severin had purchased two major shipping vessels, which would make return journeys from Rotterdam to Cape Town; he named them the Tinou Bell and the Franka Bell, after his wife. According to one of Severin’s former business partners, he used them to ship coal from South Africa and engaged in ‘sanctions busting’ by shipping Rhodesian chrome to
Gittelil, later renamed Tinou Bell after Severin purchased it
PHOTO: H. PETERSEN, 1965. REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF M/S MARITIME MUSEUM OF DENMARK
After their second child, Sabine, was born in 1972, Franka began to involve herself more in Severin’s businesses. They founded Steen Severin A/S in 1975 to consolidate their shipping and trading operations.11 During the 1970s, Western Europe was facing a shortage of metallurgical coking coal and thermal coal for energy production. In the wake of the OPEC embargo and 1973 oil crisis, the International Energy Agency (IEA) initiated policies to get Europe to transition to coal again, as well as promoting scientific research into liquification and gasification schemes.12 Coal use expanded across the developed world throughout
While Steen may have been the engineer, Franka had the personality and skills to drive business relationships, and she was often the face of their operations.13 Franka helped negotiate a partnership with Les Houillères du bassin du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, a division of the French national coal company, Charbonnages de France (CdF), in which Steen Severin A/S would supply CdF through its southern hemisphere suppliers, as well as buy coking coal and chemical fertiliser from CdF.14 This arrangement was successful for a few years, though by 1977, the coal reserves in northern France were increasingly depleted and CdF was looking to increase imports from other countries. Steen Severin A/S was given a contract to investigate possible coal exports from South America and South Africa. Steen and Franka decided that, given their existing connections in southern Africa, they would forge additional relationships with the coal mines in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province to supply CdF.
By the end of the decade, the Severins wanted ‘complete control’ over the coal production and shipping arrangements – they wanted their own mines. In her biography, Franka reflects on the family’s decision to move to the Republic of South Africa. It was driven by high Danish taxes and, ‘for political reasons which are beyond me’, the Danish government would not allow a Danish company to invest in South Africa: ‘I am not hostile to a form of solidarity’, Franka wrote, concerning anti-apartheid sanctions, ‘but it seemed abusive to me’.15 Just before leaving for Johannesburg, Franka bought a show apartment in Monaco (the Monte Carlo Star), presumably as a fall-back option in case things did not work out. Nevertheless, in 1979, the Severins emigrated to South Africa with their children, with the intention of buying a coal mine.
…
Having purchased a villa in Sandton, in Johannesburg, and enrolled their children at the French school, the Severins got busy scoping out mining opportunities. They hired a geologist, Louis Carroll, to assist them in surveying and acquiring a coal mine, offering him payment in shares in their new South African company, Severin Minerals Corporation (Pty) Ltd.16 With a ZAR
Steen Severin was not a geologist, but his skills in engineering and metallurgy – related to his work with Det danske Stålvalseværk – made him a fairly successful mining engineer. With steady cash flow coming in from their coal sales as well as from their operations in Denmark, he took a tour of recently decommissioned mines in South Africa to see what he could get on the cheap. Many of South Africa’s older gold mines were no longer profitable using traditional extraction methods, and some of the shafts were nearly a century old by that stage. Severin visited Rand Leases, west of Johannesburg. Although the mine shafts were not likely to be profitable, Severin was impressed with the tailings and overburden on the property.19 He was about to do something very different in the mining sector: hydrometallurgy and heap leaching.
At its most basic, hydrometallurgy is the process of using liquid acids and alkalis to extract metal from ore; in prior years this was done in the intense heat of furnaces. Cyanidation of metallic gold has been known about since at least the eighteenth century. However, the application of hydrometallurgical principles to leach ore on a larger scale is a moderately new phenomenon, developed after the Second World War as metallurgists came to understand better the properties of acids, reagents and lixiviants, and the pressurised systems for treating ore.20
Once finely crushed ore is removed from the shaft or open pit mine it is piled into massive tailings or ‘heaps’ laid on an impermeable, often plastic surface. Sprinklers and pumps spray a lixiviant solution (depending on the metal, this could be sulphuric acid, sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid or even just water) onto the heap, which permeates the crushed ore and chemically reacts with the metals in the material, absorbing some of the gold, copper, zinc, etc. into the liquid itself. The pregnant leach solution then seeps down to vats at the bottom of the heap, where it is either repumped to the top to repeat the process
Heap leaching is a far more profitable extraction of metals from low-grade ore than via mechanical and thermal means.22 As it relates to average gold leaching operations, heap leaching can make ores of less than 0.5 grams of gold per metric tonne viable (though this does not include the economic and environmental costs of between fifteen and thirty billion litres of water per year needed for both the lixiviant and dust suppression).23 Furthermore, it has the capacity to drastically reduce the physical labour needed to mine valuable minerals like gold, copper, lithium, uranium and others. Additional electricity costs are needed in the metallurgical plant, however. Given the fact that the Rand gold mines were quite low grade to begin with, and viable only because of the apartheid regime’s cheap labour polices, heap leaching was a means for Severin to overcome some of these limitations.24
When Severin bought Rand Leases in 1985 – registering it under his new company, Severin Mining & Development (Pty) Ltd – it had been barely mined at all since 1971. Many observers in the industry welcomed the decision to dig open-cut mines and reopen two of the mine shafts to extract more ore,25 though it was clear that the main purpose of Rand Leases was to focus on the heap leaching of the existing tailings, which dated back to the early 1900s. Severin spent more than ZAR 16 million on the hydrometallurgical plant on site to treat the pregnant leach solution.26 The mine resumed operations, and between 1985 and 1986 the workers extracted approximately 35,000 tonnes of ore per month, which were then added to Severin’s heap system.
Steen Severin hired Peter J. Cox as one of his geologists in 1986; Cox was not long out of university and had earlier worked for the mining company, Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Co. Ltd (JCI). ‘When Steen Severin arrived in South Africa, the mining industry was incredibly centralised: JCI, Anglo American, RandGold, Goldfields, AngloVaal dominated everything’, Cox said, reflecting on those years. ‘Severin was basically the first “small mining company” in the region which was really going fairly successfully, and Severin’s
The US company General Electric (GE) had bought Utah International in 1976 for more than USD 2.1 billion (see chapter 6). This gave General Electric overseas exploration and production assets in South America, Australia and southern Africa. The GE acquisition of Utah – which was done partly as a means to access uranium and other rare-earth minerals to supply its nuclear division and partly as a hedge against inflation by obtaining Australian coal assets and thus Australian dollars – was the largest corporate merger in American history at the time.29 But not long afterwards, rotating chairmanships led to changing priorities, and GE sought to sell assets and cut labour. The first task was to sell the Utah division. At the same time, the Australian mining giant, Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP), was seeking to expand beyond down under, not only to increase profits and foreign reserves but also to try and buy back domestic coal assets owned by foreign mining ventures. Between August 1982 and January 1983, GE and BHP negotiated a USD 2.4 billion merger. BHP would take most of GE’s mining assets in Australia, Chile and the USA, as well as its coal shipping vessels.30 The deal would include Utah/GE’s southern Africa assets, bundled under the subsidiary company Southern Sphere Mining and Development (Pty) Ltd, which owned a coal mine in KwaZulu-Natal, Eersteling Gold Mine near Polokwane and Tantalite Valley Mine in southern Namibia.31 BHP completed the merger with GE’s Utah by April 1984.32
Severin’s heavy investment in Rand Leases, Eersteling and heap-leaching technology meant that it took him quite a while to even visit the smaller assets held by Southern Sphere, which included some coastal diamond prospecting licences in Namaqualand and Tantalite Valley Mine in southern Namibia.35 Peter J. Cox was seconded from JCI to join Southern Sphere, and in November 1987 he and Severin took their first visit to Tantalite Valley. ‘There was really very little going on at the time’, Cox reflected. ‘The mine had been closed for a while, and a guy named Boet Adriaanse was the caretaker there on Umeis and Kinderzitt. There were some folks renting grazing for sheep, but that was it’.36 Severin was not that impressed with the mine, and he did not feel that it had much potential except during times when tantalite prices were quite high.
According to Cox, Steen Severin was far more impressed, even enamoured, with the landscape of Tantalite Valley, and for that reason he looked to southern Namibia as his personal retreat. Steen and Franka Severin, Rand Leases geologist Louis Carroll and their top mining engineer, Ian Preston, were all appointed directors of Peter Weidner’s old company, Tantalite Valley Minerals (Pty) Ltd, in place of the BHP directors.37 At the time, the assets of Tantalite Valley Minerals included the mining licence, the equipment and the actual land: Kinderzitt and Umeis farms. By 1989, Severin changed this relationship
…
At the turn of the 1990s, when the gold price was volatile, life in South Africa had changed for the Severins. Their daughter, Sabine, had finished school and gone to the University of the Witwatersrand to study mining engineering – one of the first women to be able to enrol in that degree. Rand Leases was far less profitable than it used to be, and Franka was feeling increasingly unsafe in crime-ridden Johannesburg.39 She wanted to focus more on her art and painting; the bohemian Franka wanted a somewhat simpler day-to-day life. Severin would sell Rand Leases to Brett Kebble of JCI for just ZAR 0.01 per share, bringing in just ZAR 40,000 in revenue. In reality, the ZAR 4 million valuation of the mine was a gross overestimation, because the company was riddled with debt and owned old, unproductive shafts, tailings and heaps that had been treated with as much cyanide as possible, rendering them an ecological ticking time-bomb.40 Rand Leases was a giant liability, and Steen was happy to scrap it.
For the Severins, Namibia appeared an acceptable place for Franka to practise her art and for Steen to retreat into the stunning landscape. Sabine Severin remembered that, even from the late 1980s, the family would take holidays in Namibia, where they would hike in the mountains, ride Yamaha motorbikes and escape from the hectic life of Johannesburg.41 These visits would increase during the early 1990s, when Steen and Franka made the decision to establish a permanent residence at Tantalite Valley. In May 1991, together with geologist Louis Carroll and the controversial Swiss finance manager Pierre Hafner, the Severins founded a Namibian company Tantalite Mining & Exploration (Pty)
According to Severin’s geologist and long-time business partner, Peter Cox, although Severin intended to prospect for tantalite, the price was very low at the time, and outside of Tantalite Valley itself, the other mineral reserves in the area simply were not economically viable; the company’s purpose shifted simply to land speculation. Cox reflected, ‘the Severins would regularly visit Europe, and both moved in elite circles. Steen apparently got into a competition with Prince Rainier of Monaco to determine who owned the largest farm’.43 The Monégasque royal had apparently been accumulating land in Tunisia, and Severin tried to counter with land deals in Namibia. Umeis and Kinderzitt – owned by Tantalite Valley Minerals (Pty) Ltd – together covered more than 16,000 hectares, but that would not be enough to surpass the assets of European royalty.
In the immediate aftermath of independence in Namibia, many White farmers were selling land cheaply in order to move some of their assets to South Africa, and this was certainly the case in southern Karasburg District. Severin went on a shopping spree. He bought several farms from Pauline L. du Toit (née Baard), whose father was one of the largest karakul farmers in the area. In April 1991, she sold Severin both Sandfontein and Sandfontein West for ZAR 288,515, and they were officially transferred to his new company in September of that year.44 Du Toit’s other parcel at the Orange River, Girtis, was sold for only ZAR 5,000; the property was registered in Franka’s personal name.45 With the independence of Namibia, the Catholic church had to establish a new diocese in Keetmanshoop – it was no longer appropriate to have the southern Namibian church still reporting to Keimoes in South Africa. This required cash to build the Pastoral Centre and hire staff, and Severin therefore offered to buy Homsrivier in October 1991 for ZAR 610,000, transferring it to his company early the following year.46 In less than a single year, Severin had increased his Namibian landholdings to more than 73,000 hectares, sufficient for his wife to allege that they had defeated Prince Rainier, and she was told that she had acquired the
Although the size of the consolidation of land ownership was indeed new, what was most significant to most of the residents of southern Namibia – especially the Bondelswarts and the river-folk – was that these new owners were not interested in farming, or indeed in using the land at all. The Severins were gradually establishing a residence at Tantalite Valley, likely staying in Weidner’s old compound, while still travelling between Europe and Johannesburg. The bulk of their 73,000 hectares simply existed on paper; Severin rarely ever saw them. While the caretaker Boet Adriaanse was supposed to be maintaining the fences and patrolling the boundaries, this was a farm larger than even Prince Rainier of Monaco could manage, so people began to cross Severin’s properties with their livestock.
During the mid-1990s, Severin was touring some of his western properties, possibly Homsrivier or Sandfontein West, and he discovered that local Black pastoralists – probably river-folk – were grazing herds of goats on his properties and had taken up temporary residence there. He warned these ‘squatters’ to leave the farms immediately, otherwise he would kill the goats. He returned a few days later to find that the herders had not trekked the animals away, and, as the story goes, Steen Severin shot dead an entire herd of goats.48 This quickly sent the message that absentee (or at least semi-absentee) landlordism did not mean that these private properties would become usufruct Bondelswarts communal lands. Severin had other plans.
One of Severin’s mining engineers working in South Africa with the Southern Sphere assets, a Frenchman named Michel J. DuRocher, would regularly come to Tantalite Valley and the other properties during the 1990s on holiday. According to Steen’s daughter, Sabine, ‘Michel fell in love with the place’, and although DuRocher was technically a miner, he urged Steen and Franka to build up some sort of tourism operation on the properties.49 DuRocher began surveying the grounds for the kinds of game that were available to hunt, and allegedly he was the one who kraaled ostriches in the former Catholic church at Homsrivier. Signage described Severin’s properties as Great River Game
A year after DuRocher’s tragic death in a car accident on Sandfontein Farm in May 1999,50 Severin founded a new company, Great River Game Ranch (Pty) Ltd. It was to carry out Du Rocher’s vision, being officially a tourism and hospitality company that offered traditional trophy-hunting trips and photographic safaris, targeting primarily the Scandinavian market. Severin partnered with a fellow Dane and hunting enthusiast, Günther Hadsbjerg, who was for many years the Johannesburg representative for the Swedish electrical company Allmänna Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget. He had presumably come into contact with the Severins as chairperson of the Danish Society of Johannesburg during the 1980s.51 Hadsbjerg would also join the board of Tantalite Mining & Exploration (Pty) Ltd.52
By the late 1990s, Steen Severin wanted to make Tantalite Valley his home for good, and therefore needed to build a house. It would, in the words of Peter Cox, have to ‘make a statement’. Franka lived a very social life, and even though she was moving away from the business and mining life of Johannesburg, she did not intend to give up her lifestyle, and neither did Steen. They saw Tantalite Valley becoming a cosmopolitan place where people could visit them, socialise, hunt, anything. In 1999, they hired the South African architect, Conrad Margoles, to build Casa Severin, a villa nestled in the mountains on Umeis Farm about five kilometres south-east of the Homestead pegmatite outcroppings at Tantalite Valley. The architects and builders were tasked to complete construction before the end of the year. Timber and joinery was brought in to Karasburg by train, then transported to Umeis by truck. Severin had his private quarters and office on the south side of the building separated from many guest rooms by a vast foyer and lounge. A twenty-metre lap pool runs along the north side of the house, and date palms grow within the compound.53 This was
Casa Severin on Umeis Farm
PHOTO COURTESY OF CONRAD MARGOLES ARCHITECTURAL STUDIO
Steen Severin sips coffee in the sitting room of his new villa
PHOTO COURTESY OF CONRAD MARGOLES ARCHITECTURAL STUDIO
‘Franka was a very social person, and she always sought to build relationships which would add value’, said Peter Cox. ‘That house was intended as a
From 1992, Sabine Severin brought her Wits University friends to Tantalite Valley for regular holidays – including Finn Behnken, Heye Daun and her then-boyfriend Sean Gilbertson. They would stay at Tantalite Valley and explore the farms that Severin had recently bought. In Gilbertson’s words: ‘I was blown away – I loved it’.58 Though he and Sabine stopped dating in 1994, Gilbertson kept in touch. He got along well with Steen Severin, and he would still occasionally visit. In Peter Cox’s assessment, the relationship between Gilbertson and Severin gives credence to the lasting relationships that Severin formed, for whom ‘a handshake was as good as a contract’.59 Casa Severin was completed in time to ring in the year 2000, an event that had close to eighty people staying at the villa and on the property. Sabine, Steen, Sean, the university mates – everyone was there. For them, the twenty-first century started in southern Namibia.
All was not necessarily well at Tantalite Valley, however. In Gilbertson’s words, ‘Severin’s health had been deteriorating, and he was increasingly estranged from his wife’.60 Franka describes the situation more bluntly in her autobiography. Steen Severin had apparently been drinking heavily for quite a long time, and Franka had warned him in 1998 that he had to make a choice – drink or family. She gave him two years to get his act together. He was unable to break his habits, and in 2000 Franka divorced him and returned to Monte Carlo.61 In her words, ‘our masquerade of married life was no longer bearable to me’.62 These problems clearly had been going on for some time, since Franka had resigned her directorship with Tantalite Valley Minerals (Pty)
…
The year 2000 was clearly a difficult year for the Severins. At age 27, Sabine moved to Tantalite Valley to join her father, presumably to look after him in his ill-health, but also because she had been assigned by the family to ‘dispose of the assets’ in Namibia: namely the Tantalite Valley mining licence.65 In January 2000, the price of tantalite oxide was about USD 20.50 per kilogram: a very low rate. However, the price rose throughout the year, eventually hitting USD 136 per kilogram by the end of 2000. In this context, Sabine thought it was the time to get a buyer for the mine, and she was in discussions with Marubeni Corporation of Japan, which was apparently sourcing raw materials for Japanese capacitor manufacturers, such as Hitachi and Samsung.66 Marubeni wanted an offtake agreement, though they were willing to front some of the costs to refurbish the mining equipment at Tantalite Valley. After all, the mine had not been fully operational in almost two decades.
Sabine and Steen partnered with Peter Cox, Severin’s long-time friend and former geologist at Southern Sphere, to get the machinery up and running and train workers. Cox remembered the situation somewhat differently – that the mine was reopened only after threats by the Namibian state to withdraw the mining licence after such a long time of inactivity.67 Nevertheless, Sabine was appointed managing director of Tantalite Valley Minerals,68 and they formed a new subsidiary, Tantalite Valley Mining (Pty) Ltd, to handle the expected 1.5 tonnes of Ta2O5 (tantalite oxide) concentrates per month over eight years of mine life. Tantalite Valley mine was officially recommissioned by then Namibian President Sam Nujoma in July 2001, after nearly two decades of closure. After reopening, Tantalite Valley mine employed about 120 people, of whom
Sabine explained that the price fluctuations in Ta2O5 were scaring away the Japanese buyers, who were no longer speaking to the Severins. Also, when the Severins had declared that they would reopen the mine, she started getting letters and phone calls from other mines elsewhere in Africa, asking if Tantalite Valley would market their production as Namibian tantalite. ‘There wasn’t really a global oversight process for tantalite at the time, leading to a lot of “conflict tantalite”. A lot of these mines were in Mozambique, and I suspected that this could be the case’.70 Reopening the mine, while helping the company keep its mining licence, was clearly not successful or well-orchestrated to any reasonable degree. Sabine remarked that ‘it was a very sad sort of period’ when the decision was made to close the mine. The workers were given very little notice, only one month, and she did not return to Tantalite Valley for a long time after that because she felt unsafe, given the workers’ grievances.
Sean Gilbertson did not really believe in Tantalite Valley mine, but he did believe in Steen Severin and his daughter Sabine. He and Heye Daun learned in early 2000 of the offer for sale of Norechab Farm, located just north of Tantalite Valley, and their love of the southern Namibian landscape was reason enough for them to buy it in December 2000.71 According to Peter Cox, it was also conditioned by the fact that Sabine had joined her father at Tantalite Valley, and Sean wanted to be near them.72 Each of the excursions of his Norechab Sand & Tent Club would start and end at Tantalite Valley airstrip and Casa Severin. Steen’s luxurious villa and swimming pool was a welcome relief from days in the bush, and additional time spent with Steen and Sabine was always enjoyable.
But there would not be any more mining in Tantalite Valley for the Severins. In August 2001, just a few days after declaring that the mine would be closed, Tantalite Mining & Exploration (Pty) Ltd officially changed its company name to Sandfontein and Houmsrivier Properties (Pty) Ltd, dropping all mention of mining from its articles of association and declaring the main purpose of
The Norechab Sand & Tent Club would routinely dine on the terrace at Casa Severin, taking a refreshing dip in Severin’s lap pool
PHOTO COURTESY OF CONRAD MARGOLES ARCHITECTURAL STUDIO
Around 2003, Franka Severin thought that it was time to sell off the properties, given Steen’s declining health, and Sean Gilbertson agreed to help facilitate the sale of Great River Game Ranch.76 Together with Norechab Club member Murli Bhamidipati, Gilbertson took out an advert in The Economist, with the heading ‘Exceptional Game Ranch, Southern Namibia’. It described the property as ‘57,700 hectares, licenced and fenced with 18
This vast area is unsullied by fences or any sign of human habitation, except for some lonely Bushman grave cairns, and ‘The Ghost Town’ on the banks of the Orange River – once a thriving Catholic Mission Station, which was abandoned when the Orange River became the border between South Africa and Namibia, and the congregation was no longer free to cross the river to attend services … The photographer or hunter must use all his wiles to get close enough for a good shot. Cover is sparse and the game is wary.82
Although the church in the ‘Ghost Town’ described on the Sandfontein website in 2004 was not holding Mass anymore – perhaps it was still holding ostriches – the Orange River area was never a land of ghosts, even after Severin consolidated all this farmland. Perhaps frightened off by Severin’s massacre of a herd of goats in the mid-1990s, or perhaps because grazing was better elsewhere, the Bassons and other river-folk were moving a little farther upriver, near KumKum, Kambreek, Pelladrift and Pelgrimsrust.84 They still recognised Severin’s properties as their ancestral lands, but they chose the path of least resistance and moved a bit upriver for the time being.85 However, Severin’s purchase of Homsrivier was not the last time that the river-folk would pass by their old church building or seek grazing north of the river.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023). Cox believed that the Severins were somehow connected to the Danish royal family, which is possible, because Prince Axel was a shareholder in Det danske Stålvalseværk.
Ministeriet for Handel, Industri og Søfart, Registreringstidende for Aktieselskaber, Forsikringsselskaber og Foreninger (no. 10 of 1955), pp. 472–3.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
Hélène Fincker (ed.), Franka: Une Femme Affranchie: Chronique d’une vie (Paris, Éditions Balland, 2018), p. 35.
Ibid, pp. 57–60.
Ibid, pp. 99–102.
Severin’s ships would also import animal feed to Denmark. See US Department of Agriculture, ‘Exports’, Journal of Commerce (1988), p. 12B.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
Dansk Søulykke-Statistik, 1971 (København, Handelsministeriet, September 1972).
Museet for Søfarts Billedarkiv File 51700: M/S Gittelil.
Danske Erhvervsstyrelsen File A/S60693: Steen Severin Aktieselskab.
H. Türk, ‘From Oil to Coal? The International Energy Agency and International Coal Policy since the End of the 1970s’, in L. Bluma et al. (eds.) Boom-Crisis-Heritage: King Coal and the Energy Revolutions after 1945 (Berlin, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), pp. 81–92.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
Fincker, Franka, pp. 111–113.
Ibid, p. 114.
Ibid, p. 120.
Ibid, p. 124.
A.L. Giraud, ‘Energy in France’, Annual Review of Energy, 8 (1983), pp. 165–191.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
F. Habashi, ‘A Short History of Hydrometallurgy’, Hydrometallurgy, 79 (2005), pp. 15–22.
M. Nicol, Hydrometallurgy: Volume 2, Practice (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2022), pp. 22–26.
M. Nicol, Hydrometallurgy: Volume 1, Theory (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2022), pp. 1–13.
D.I. Bleiwas, Estimated Water Requirements Gold Heap Leach Operations (US Geological Survey, 2012), p. 11.
See, J. McCulloch, South Africa’s Gold Mines and the Politics of Silicosis (Oxford, James Currey, 2012).
West Wits Limited, ASX Initiation Report (June 2022), p. 7
Savannah Environmental (Pty) Ltd, Final Basic Assessment Report: Rand Leases Extension 15, Industrial Township (November 2014), p. 5.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
Sabine Anderson (née Severin), interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 2 January 2023).
P. Thompson and R. Macklin, The Big Fella: The Rise and Rise of BHP-Billiton (Sydney, William Heinemann, 2010), p. 149.
BHP-Billiton, ‘The Utah Acquisition’ (28 January 1983), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKzBsAE7_lw
Thompson and Macklin, The Big Fella, p. 160. See also A. Cooper and M. Tusenius, International Investment in South Africa (Washington DC, Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1987). R. Knight, Unified List of United States Companies Doing Business in South Africa (New York, The Africa Fund, 1990).
‘BHP now a “Moderate Sized International Company”: Takeover Deal for Utah Completed’, The Canberra Times (4 April 1984).
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
Fincker, Franka, pp. 147, 153.
Ibid, pp. 147–148.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
BIPA File 1952/0590: Contents of Directors, Auditors, and Officers (CM–29) – 20 January 1988.
BIPA File 1989/088: Inhoud van Register van Direkteure, Ouditeure en Beamptes (CM–29) – 8 March 1989. His two Geneva-based associates were Raymond Felix and Pierre Hafner. Severin would technically become a director of Kindermeis only in 1999. See BIPA File 1989/088: Contents of Register of Directors, Auditors and Officers (CM-29) – 8 April 1999.
J-P. Ceppi, ‘Portait: Ils ont largué les amarres Franka Severin: Croqueuse de pépites du Tyrol à l’Afrique du Sud, elle a été comptable, ou starlette, avant de chercher de l’or au pays de l’apartheid’, Libération (17 August 1996).
B. Sergeant, The Kebble Collusion (Auckland Park, Jacana Media, 2012), p. 23.
Sabine Anderson (née Severin), interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 2 January 2023).
BIPA File 1991/0173: Memorandum of Association (CM–2) – 13 May 1991.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
WDO File T3413/1991: Sandfontein no. 131 and Sandfontein West no. 148, Deed of Transfer – 16 September 1991.
WDO File T284/1992: Girtis no. 109, Deed of Transfer – 27 January 1992.
WDO File T402/1992: Remainder of Farm Homsrivier no. 133, Deed of Transfer – 31 January 1992.
[‘On m’a dit que j’avais acquis la plus grande propriété privée au monde aux mains d’un particulier’]. Fincker, Franka, p. 147.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
Sabine Anderson (née Severin), interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 2 January 2023).
Republic of Namibia, Government Gazette (no. 2416 of 29 September 2000) and (no. 2424 of 13 October 2000). Also see Acte de décès en Namibie, 1999. It appears that donations were made to the village school in Warmbad in his name, hence its name, Michel DuRocher Primary School.
‘Günther Prien Hadsbjerg: Utilities Executive’, Marquis: Who’s Who Database (Accessed 13 April 2023).
BIPA File 1991/0173: Contents of Register of Directors, Auditors and Officers (CM-29) – 27 August 2004.
Conrad Margoles, ‘Casa Severin: Tantalite Valley, Namibia’. https://conradmargoles.com/portfolio/casa-severin/ (Accessed 1 May 2024).
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
Sabine Anderson (née Severin), interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 2 January 2023).
Fincker, Franka, p. 170.
Sean T. Gilbertson to Bernard C. Moore (7 January 2023), letter in the authors’ possession.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
Sean T. Gilbertson to Bernard C. Moore (7 January 2023), letter in the authors’ possession.
Fincker, Franka p. 110.
[‘notre mascarade de vie de couple ne m’est plus supportable’]. Ibid, p. 169.
BIPA File 1952/0590: Contents of Directors, Auditors and Officers (CM-29) – 22 November 1995.
BIPA File 1991/0173: Contents of Register of Directors, Auditors and Officers (CM-29) – 17 April 2001.
Sabine Anderson (née Severin), interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 2 January 2023).
E. Brandt, ‘Tantalite Mine Opens on Back of Favourable Market’, The Namibian (1 August 2001).
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 15 January 2023).
BIPA File 1952/0590: Contents of Directors, Auditors and Officers (CM29) – 28 August 2000.
E. Brandt, ‘Tantalite Mine in South Closes “Temporarily”,’ The Namibian (9 January 2002).
Sabine Anderson (née Severin), interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 2 January 2023).
BIPA File CC/1996/0628: Amended Founding Statement (CC-2) – 1 December 2000.
Peter J. Cox, interview with Bernard C. Moore (telephone, 25 March 2023).
BIPA File 1991/0173: Certificate of Change of Name of Company (CM-9) – 11 September 2001.
BIPA File 1952/0590: Application for Change of Name of Company (CM-9) – 14 November 2001.
Government Gazette of the Republic of Namibia, no. 2780 (2 August 2002). Government Gazette of the Republic of Namibia, no. 3820 (5 April 2007).
Sean T. Gilbertson to Bernard C. Moore (7 January 2023), letter in the authors’ possession.
‘Businesses for Sale’, The Economist (17 January 2004).
IAWB: ‘Details about Great River Game Ranch in Namibia’ (21 January 2004). https://web.archive.org/web/20040121033318/http:/www.greatrivergameranch.com:80/prop_details.htm
IAWB: ‘Location of Great River Game Ranch in Namibia’ (21 January 2004). https://web.archive.org/web/20040121033336/http:/www.greatrivergameranch.com:80/location.htm
Sean T. Gilbertson to Bernard C. Moore (7 January 2023), letter in the authors’ possession.
IAWB: ‘Sandfontein Game Ranch: Contact Us’ (7 December 2004). https://web.archive.org/web/20041207064111/http://www.sandfontein.co.za:80/contact_us.htm
IAWB: ‘Sandfontein Game Ranch: About Us’ (7 December 2004). https://web.archive.org/web/20041207063631/http://www.sandfontein.co.za:80/about_us.htm
IAWB: ‘Camelthorn Adventures: Sandfontein Lodge’ (15 May 2006). https://web.archive.org/web/20060515233746/http://www.camelthorn.net/Sandfontein.htm
LAC BCF: Bondelswarts Traditional Authority Councillor to Director for Land Reform, Ministry of Lands and Resettlement – 31 July 2006.
LAC BCF: B.E. Simboya, Pella ‘Verblyf teen die Oranjerivier’ – 16 July 2004.