Anglo American’s planned departure from South Africa is not just a corporate manoeuvre, it is a turning point that forces the nation to confront the unresolved legacy of its most powerful company. For over a century, Anglo built its global fortune from South Africa’s mineral wealth and human labour, shaping both the economy and the social order that underpins it.
Founded in Johannesburg in 1917 by Ernest Oppenheimer, Anglo American was more than a mining firm; it was an institution that intertwined itself with the state, banks, and policymakers. Its influence helped define South Africa’s industrial and financial architecture, an architecture that still reflects the stark inequalities of the past. The gold that filled the company’s vaults came at the cost of lives spent in the country’s deep-level mines, where migrant workers endured harsh and dangerous conditions. Those men helped build a corporate empire, yet few saw the prosperity their work created.
Now, over a century later, Anglo has announced a merger with Canada’s Teck Resources to form Anglo-Teck, with headquarters shifting to Vancouver. The move is framed as strategic repositioning in the global minerals market, but for many South Africans, it feels like an abdication of responsibility, a quiet withdrawal from the country that made Anglo what it is.
In an opinion published on TimesLIVE, former Statistician-General Dr. Pali Lehohla argues that Anglo’s wealth was built alongside the social and environmental destruction it left behind: polluted rivers, derelict mining towns, and communities marked by poverty and illness. The company departs, he writes, “without accountability,” leaving a landscape that bears the scars of extraction.
Civil society voices echo this frustration, asking why the government has met Anglo’s exit with silence. Is this silence a sign of political weakness, or a symptom of a deeper complicity between state elites and corporate power?
Anglo’s relationship with South Africa has always mirrored the country’s contradictions. The company thrived under a racially exclusive economic system that channelled cheap labour to the mines, but it also presented itself as a pragmatic moderniser, especially during the transition to democracy.
In the early 1990s, Anglo sponsored the Mont Fleur Scenarios, a project that sought to imagine inclusive economic futures for a post-apartheid South Africa. Yet its current retreat suggests that those aspirations have faded. The firm that once called itself a “nation-builder” now appears to be turning away from the nation’s unfinished project of transformation.
Anglo’s exit cannot be seen in isolation. It comes amid growing investor unease about South Africa’s economic stagnation, unstable energy supply, and governance failures. The departure reflects how global capital increasingly seeks distance from risk, geographic, political, and reputational. But it also raises a deeper question: what does it mean for a democracy when the companies that profited most from its past feel no stake in its future?
Lehohla’s provocation “What could be worse than apartheid that has offended Anglo?” captures the dissonance of the moment. The company stayed through decades of authoritarian rule and violent repression, yet departs now, during a democratic era struggling to correct those legacies. Its timing suggests that equality and justice, the very goals of transformation, are perceived by global capital not as moral imperatives but as constraints.
Still, the challenge is not only Anglo’s. The South African state has struggled to compel corporations to account for environmental damage and social harm. Regulatory weakness, political patronage, and fragmented policymaking have allowed the mining sector to externalise costs while privatising gains. Anglo’s departure exposes the fragility of a governance system that remains dependent on the goodwill of multinational corporations rather than the rule of law or public accountability.
There is merit in Lehohla’s call for new mechanisms of responsibility whether through a formal debt register or legal claims in international forums. But lasting justice requires more than litigation; it demands that South Africa reimagine how it balances economic growth with historical redress. The country’s mining belt from the goldfields to the platinum and coal regions still holds communities defined by unemployment and environmental decline. Anglo’s name may fade from company registers, but its imprint on those landscapes endures.
To be sure, Anglo has made contributions to education, health, and housing over the years, and its corporate social programmes are not insignificant. Since 1994, the mining giant has completed more than 40 empowerment transactions with a collective value exceeding R71 billion. Long before the introduction of the Mining Charter in 2004, the company played a pioneering role in establishing some of South Africa’s most prominent empowerment enterprises.
Yet, such efforts cannot offset the structural inequalities that the mining economy entrenched. What matters now is how South Africa uses this moment to insist that future investment foreign or domestic operates under clearer social and environmental obligations.
Anglo American’s departure thus symbolises both an ending and an exposure. It closes a chapter in South Africa’s industrial history while revealing how incomplete the country’s economic transformation remains. The company may relocate its headquarters across the Atlantic, but the moral and material debts it carries are not so easily exported. South Africa must ensure that the next century of its mining story is not written by those who leave, but by those who stay to rebuild.
