By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 04

A town built for one mineral, and long defined by it, is quietly acquiring a second industrial identity.

Arandis has only ever had one story. The town was built in 1978 to house workers for the nearby Rossing uranium mine, gained its own administration in 1994, and its fortunes rose and fell with the uranium price. The green-iron plant near the Valencia deposit, which installed its electrolysers in November 2024, gives the place a second industrial identity beside the first.

A mono-industry town gains a second name

For a town of around 7,600 people that has lived entirely by uranium, a plant making iron from sunlight and hydrogen is a real change of character. It does not replace the mines around Arandis, but it adds a different kind of work, and a different pride, to a place long described only by the ore beneath it and the boom-and-bust of a single commodity.

A town known for one mineral is quietly learning to tell a second story about itself.

What a first-of-its-kind draws in

A plant billed as a pioneering green-iron site also changes what outsiders come to see. A town once passed through on the way to the coast now has a reason to be visited for itself, by the officials, engineers and travellers a landmark project attracts. A place that hosts something the world has not built before earns a line in its own story that uranium alone never wrote.

Being first at something gives even a working town a reason to be visited, not just passed.

For the municipality or anyone invested in Arandis, the plant is more than an employer; it is a chance to widen a town’s sense of itself beyond a single mineral. The decision it invites is whether to build a local identity around being the place that made green iron first, not only the place that mined uranium.

Sources: HyIron – Oshivela electrolysers; Arandis, Namibia (Wikipedia); Roessing uranium mine (Wikipedia)