They are the kinds of prices that would make Cecil Rhodes grin in his grave. More than 120 years after he founded Gold Fields of South Africa during the Transvaal gold rush, the price of the metal is hovering around $1,000 an ounce.

Ian Cockerill, chief executive of Gold Fields, the modern successor to Rhodes’s company, talked to the Financial Times just before his resignation. He thinks the gold price will go far higher.