Insatiable lust for riches and plentiful cheap labour - the twin driving forces behind the mining industry - remain a toxic cocktail 150 years after the first diamonds and gold emerged from the Reef's red soil.
The industry that built our economy, sowed many of apartheid's most invasive seeds and dealt post-democratic South Africa one of its worst blows in the form of the Marikana massacre, continues to soak our landscape with blood.
In a sense the modern-day gold rush unfolding on the East Rand takes the brutality surrounding mining back to its 19th-century roots. Unregulated as they venture into abandoned shafts, an estimated 30,000 men are competing for the gold left behind when it became too expensive for big companies to extract it.
The humanitarian record of the early mining magnates - Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato and their ilk - has not been treated kindly by history, and rightly so, but in comparison with the "big men" pulling the strings of today's illegal miners, the old randlords look like Sunday school teachers.
The new breed are typically in charge of ruthless international criminal syndicates who want their share of the $7-billion-a-year illegal gold haul at any cost.
As it turns out - and because this is mining, we should not be surprised - that cost is tallied in human lives. More than 200 zama zamas have been killed in the past four years and 14 were murdered at the weekend on the East Rand.
Disturbingly, multiple sources say police officers are involved in the syndicates, and it remains to be seen whether investigations by the Hawks will end the bloodshed.
In the meantime, we are left to ponder the golden coin tossed in our direction millions of years ago in the form of bountiful mineral deposits. Heads, you win a thriving economy. Tails, you lose your humanity.
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