A portable sign
Alongside the crane in the panoramic view note the conveyor coming up from ground level. On the right notice how the concrete tunnel of the delivery conveyor has been graded. Soon there will be grass growing over that mound. That position is where people will be able see the sign; minor imperfections will not show.
The bumps on the sign are where the steel tie rods went through to prevent the shutters on either side of the 40 mm thick end wall from bulging. On the left leg of one miner is a blob of concrete, on the ‘I’ another, the smudges on the ‘e’ and the ‘l’ show that some cleaning of the sign had taken place. It is now clean. The rains are here; they will help to keep it clean.
Isibonelo (Zulu) means we are showing the way. On the left and at the top you can see the shadow caused by the sun, highlighting the frame of concrete that was created around the sign, with radii in the corners. That’s chutzpah, to take a little from a lot of concrete and make it do precisely what one wants.
The ‘I’ of Isibonelo is 750 mm high; if it had been 1 metre the sign would have been 4 × 8 metres. The backing plates are there because the site engineer wanted them. We can also make a sign where poured concrete forms the background. The miners and text weigh 60 kg, can be flown anywhere in the world, the sign created on site. It’s a portable sign, one in which site work gets undertaken by the main contractor.
