Patrick John Fann was born on Saturday, 13th February 1965, the fourth child to Nigel and Amy Fann on the banks of the Sabie River in the old Eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga Province. After years of farming, Mr Fann senior moved his family to the rural surroundings of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal where Patrick attended Durban High School. After Mr Fann senior passed away in 1980, Patrick and his mother moved to Port Elizabeth to be closer to the rest of the family and he matriculated from Grey High School in 1982 with a first class certificate and decided to immediately attend the University of Port Elizabeth, now Nelson Mandela University.

 

Patrick enrolled for a Bachelor of Science degree and majored in Physics and Geology before going on to complete his Honours degree in Geology in 1986. He achieved a distinction in his Honours Dissertation entitled “Two Braided Stream Depositional Environments: Recent Deposits of the Groot River and Mesozoic Enon Conglomerates”. 

 

After university, the mandatory two years of national service was required due to conscription in South Africa at the time. Patrick spent these two years at the South African Infantry Corps' Infantry School in Oudtshoorn and completed his national service as a first lieutenant.

 

His first professional appointment was as a Section Geologist on the Anglovaal Ltd owned Loraine Gold Mines in the Northern Freestate. Here an intimate working knowledge was gained of the world-renowned Witwatersrand sedimentological gold deposits, before moving to Barberton to become the Senior Geologist at Sheba Gold Mine. This mine was one of the three mines in the area owned by Eastern Transvaal Consolidated Mines, also an Anglovaal Ltd company. A great love and appreciation was instilled for Archean gold deposits and this opened doors for explorative work in East Africa with the division of Anglovaal Ltd which had become Avgold Ltd. Visits to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania were conducted, before a decision was made in 1998 to set up an office on the shores of Lake Victoria in Mwanza, Tanzania. Unfortunately, this was soon followed by a recession in the gold industry and Avgold recalled Patrick to South Africa where he took up a position at Hartebeestfontein Gold Mine, in Stilfontein outside Klerksdorp, North West Province.

 

In 1999, Durban Roodepoort Deep Ltd (DRD) bought Hartebeestfontein Gold Mine from Avgold Ltd and started to investigate low-grade gold opportunities in the area. Given a very small budget as Senior Exploration Geologist, Patrick delivered a resource of over 1Mt at about 1g/t on the Black Reef deposit. After a job well done, and the gold industry still under duress, Patrick decided that a move into the platinum field was in order.

 

Impala Platinum offered Patrick a job, and he moved to Rustenburg in September of 2001. During this year he enrolled with the University of the Witwatersrand for their “New Managers’ Program”, the Program in Principles of Business and Management. He completed this course in four months with distinctions in all modules. After only a year with Impala, an opportunity arose to pioneer some new departmental structures with Anglo Platinum. Here he found an exciting and stimulating environment where, in addition to new geological challenges, human capital development played a huge role in his professional fulfilment. During his time with Anglo American, he assisted in developing the program for inducting and developing new geological graduates into the Anglo-fold.

 

While in Rustenburg, and while being stimulated by his development and mentoring roles with Anglo, Patrick discovered a new interest in youth development and coaching. He began to investigate non-profit sectors of opportunity and assisted in the establishment of two Section 21 companies which he registered as Non-Profit Organisations (NPO’s). These were both involved in working with underprivileged children and youth at risk. He involved himself in a small local football club, Athletico Football Club (AFC), and began working on a life skills program for the young players aged between 10 and 18 years. Years later, in 2019, he would return to Rustenburg and assist in establishing AFC Rustenburg as a Section 21 company and an NPO, while formulating a formal life skills curriculum and database systems for the club to use in developing its young footballers.

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