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Passing of Sydney Simango
Submitted by Andrew du Toit on Wed, 05/05/2021 - 15:32
Sydney was a well known and active member of the geological community.
Sydney joined the Geological Survey in 1981 as a graduate from Aston University in Birmingham, UK with a BSc (Honours) Degree in Geology. Sydney was assigned as counterpart to the British Geological Survey team and sent to map the country between Rushinga and Nyamapanda (Bulletin 92, 1991)where he was responsible for mapping that section of the area north of Sutswe and Chikwizo. Here he supervised field teams in the stream-bed geochemical sampling of his area, which included copper and zinc mineralization.
Sydney was sponsored by the BGS to complete his Masters Degree at Leicestershire University, the results of the geochemical campaign forming the basis of his thesis. He returned to the Survey and was promoted to the post of Economic Geologist, a post he served in between 1987 and 1988 before leaving to work in the Zimbabwe mining industry.
After spending 7 years at Zimasco in the chrome industry he moved on to become Technical Services Manager at Ashanti Goldfields Zimbabwe - Freda Rebecca Mine for 3 years. He then joined Zimplats and worked at the Ngezi operations from its start in 2001 where he was in charge of the geology and grade control functions in trial mine and later the highly succesful open pit mine . Sydney was instrumental in the development and mining of the underground mining operations as Technical Services Manager to this rapidly expanding, world class operation at Ngezi. He held this post until 2014 when he decided to face new challenges as General Manager of Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation and later founded SBS Consulting as an adviser to the greater mining industry across Zimbabwe. In 2018 Sydney joined TriMinZim (Pvt) Ltd as Country Manager which was the post he held at the time of his death.
Sydney will be remembered and missed by those he worked with for his wisdom and systematic approach and for the energy he put into mentoring many young geologists over the years.