The community ofKwaMachi, near Harding in the South Coast of KwaZuluNatal has in recent times claimed to have found gold in the area. The Council for Geoscience (CGS) being the custodian of all geoscientific information in the land, was then tasked by the Minister of Mineral Resources Hon. Gwede Mantashe to investigate the veracity of the purported gold. In June 2018, the CGS conducted investigations in the Harding quarry where the aggregate was mined to maintain local roads and where the local community claimed to have found a gold deposit. In the first investigation, rock samples were collected from the quarry andanalysed at the MINTEK Laboratory in Johannesburg. The 150 m by 150 m quarry was used primarily as a source of aggregates for improving the condition of the local roads. Although the first set of results showed that the quarry did not contain gold, the CGS decided to conduct further investigations.

The Council for Geoscience, as the national custodian of all geoscience data in South Africa, has embarked on the development of an updated and digitally interactive geological map of South Africa. This map takes advantage of fundamental geological data that has been collected over a period spanning more than a century and is presented on a scale of 1:1 000 000 scalable to a resolution of 1:250 000. Several previous inconsistencies were noted and have been resolved using advanced technological intervention and/or targeted field work.