Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  Once word got out that South African soil had begun disgorging these now-famed diamonds, enabling the greasy lifestyles of those like Rhodes, and enabling South Africa to depend on something other than agriculture to fuel its economy, the karakul farmers went into exile deep in the Karoo and the Kalahari, and European gem houses began sending emissaries to amass any still-available kimberlite claims as quickly as possible. Digging rules were legislated and amended, perpetuating such edicts as “No one shall be allowed to throw any ground, dirt, or filth on any other than his own claim,” “Any person depositing night soil within the camp other than in the public latrines or private conveniences, shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding Five Pounds Sterling,” “It is strictly forbidden for any person to purchase a diamond or diamonds from any servant (black or white), without a certificate from such servant’s master or mistress,” “No servant shall have drink unless he has a written permission from his master,” “No license to dig shall be granted to a Native,” and “The spot or locality for burial of carcasses and other filth shall be selected and pointed out by a Committee.”

  Barney Barnato, who falsified his name (he was born Barnet Isaacs) and his birthday (he claimed to share a birthday with Rhodes—July 5, 1853—but he was in fact born on February 21, 1851), initially came to New Rush to further his cigar business. He came of age motherless, as a child beggar and hustler, stealing theater passes and scalping them on the street corners of London. As teenagers, he and his older brother Harry would perform song-and-dance numbers at local music halls in matching sailor suits crafted from the fabric remnants that their father sold. Harry, the older brother, took top billing, and Barney (then Barnet) was always added as an afterthought onto the program as “ . . . and Barnet too,” a phrase that led to his adopted last name. When he arrived in South Africa during the diamond rush, having traveled in steerage, he had no money to pay for the coach to Kimberley, so he walked there. It took him over three months, and during that walk—through the deserts and the flatlands, the savannas and passes—he hatched his plans. On his journey, he saw animals die, and people die, the ants heaping their tailings over the corpses, the welts on his calves pulsing with insect venom.

  In New Rush, due to his unique breed of charisma born of desperation, Barnato’s cigar business was an unlikely success, and he used the proceeds to buy up a large number of claims, hire the most efficient diggers, and open a popular boxing club. Barnato himself was a keen boxer, and in many photos he appears swollen and slouching, puffy in the cheeks and bruised around the eyes—an odd mèlange of resignation and readiness. In the course of ten years, Barnato’s portion of the Kimberley mine equaled Rhodes’s portion of the De Beers mine. By the mid-1880s, streamlined corporate operations had replaced much of the wild-eyed excitement that had attended the settlement and its discoveries.

  The miners slated for the underground work—mostly native Africans—would line up single-file by 5 a.m., and trundle down the shafts. Underground, with shovels, one team heaped the pulverized kimberlitic ore (which they colloquially called “blue ground”) into the cocopans—the trolleys that ran along the narrow-gauge sunken railways. Another team of men chipped away at the rock with pickaxes. These men were charged with squeezing themselves into crevices so tight that they had to chip mere millimeters from their bodies. As such, toward the end of the shift, ghostly parades of human-shaped depressions were left in the rock, hard outlines of the men who once labored there.

  Around the tunnels’ curves, in the insufferable heat, another team, saddled with long-fuse dynamite, was busy blasting the chamber walls in order to liberate more ore, which would await the shoveling. Sometimes, no explosives were needed, as the chambers of ore were prone to collapsing under their own weight. Because no one had previously designed an underground mine, the first attempts, born of a rudimentary hastiness birthed in greed, begat collapse after collapse. In a process of trial and error, after so many perpendicular shafts (vertical shafts from which horizontal passages were hewn) collapsed, the company decided to try inclined shafts—not necessarily because this design was any safer, but because it was cheaper.

  Soon, designers began experimenting with a “gallery” method, cutting a series of arcades into the ore and leaving a few pillars of ore for support, until the underground mine evoked the ambiance of a pitch-dark honeycomb. With each new attempt, a team of fresh recruits would be deployed to remove the corpses of the previous crew who had drowned in rock, crushed in a deluge of diamond ore. Once finished with that, the recruits would be commanded to pick up their shovels. Hopefully, this time, the burrows would hold. If so, and once that particular level of earth had been deemed by the company to be “successfully mined,” the laborers sank deeper into the earth.

  Those who survived their shifts emerged only to be invasively searched by security guards who were empowered by the new “stripping clause” of the Rhodes-endorsed Diamond Act of 1882. The act decreed that the laborers were to be presumed guilty of diamond smuggling until proven innocent. Two separate search houses—one for the black workers, one for the white workers—were erected at each mine, and the workers were forced to pass through them upon both entering and leaving the property. “Unless this evil is crushed,” said one mining manager at the time, justifying the clause, “the mining industry will be swept away altogether.” For enacting and enforcing said clause, Rhodes has been commended by contemporary De Beers magnates with the words, “the madness and mayhem of Kimberley would have remained just that were it not for the ambition, enterprise and vision of individuals like Cecil Rhodes.” The strip-searched men, in countless photographs, almost uniformly exhibited the symptoms of proptosis, their eyes bulging, swollen and wild, ruined by the dark.

  By 1888, back up on the earth’s surface, Chairman Rhodes seduced Barnato into a partnership by bestowing onto him the title of Life Governor, and making him the largest shareholder in what would be known as De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. In a matter of months, they monopolized the world diamond market, controlling the release of the gems, which they claimed to be their moral obligation, as “should the fields be thrown open to everyone, the market could be flooded with diamonds, rendering them worthless . . . [We must] take measures to prevent such a disaster.” In this way, De Beers fabricated a narrative of preciousness, permanence, and rarity, in order to invent and fictionally justify obscene prices. When De Beers says, today, of Namaqualand, “There cannot be any doubt that [the early Khoisan people] must have picked up some shiny stones and that their children played with the stones without realising their value,” they are of course under the spell of their own narrative, themselves not realizing that if or when these children were playing with these stones, they were, indeed, very much worthless.

  I wonder what spells Barnato cast over himself; if he, having finally graduated from street hustler to tycoon, mused on his days on the stage alongside his brother, entertaining crowds with energetic renditions of “I Know a Pair of Hazel Eyes,” “The Pig Song,” and (heartbreaking for all involved) “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.”

  *

  IT’S UNNERVING, THE DEGREE TO WHICH KIMBERLEY’S MOTHERS AND fathers aim to preserve the atmosphere that once hung over New Rush, having restored it today to the point of an oppressive bucolia, adorned with vintage mirrors and signage and richly stained wood. In suffocating the old horrors of this place in the name of attracting tourists, Kimberley’s councilfolk have opted to beat us over the head with quaintness; have opted to erect a marble headstone “in loving memory [of those] who died while working as labourers at the Kimberley ‘Big Hole’ Mine,” underscoring the tribute with such platitudes as, “In death there is life, in bondage there is freedom, our grandchildren will honour you.” The only grandchildren I saw there were too busy honoring their blue raspberry snow-cones purchased at the Big Hole Coffee and Dried Fruit Shop.

  Present-day Kimberley (now asking in its brochure the very good question, “What better place to hold your corporate functi
on than the Big Hole?”), in wanting to evoke a fictive past, reads like an objection to the lives actually lived here. The dead have been raised only to be costumed in the sort of chintz one can confuse with romance. Tourists long to occupy the center of what was once a historical repugnance, and, should the archival girdle be sufficiently cinched, mistake it for delicious and dramatic, if not authentic. In this way, Kimberley is a tart, rouged beyond shabbiness and vacancy. While tourists scramble for rooms and rump steaks at the Shooting Box (Cecil John Rhodes’s old hunting lodge), ancient and forgotten Khoisan petroglyphs give in to erosion.

  The derelict mining village of nearby Blyvooruitzicht (“Happy Prospect” in Dutch) is far more representative of what happens when the industry exhausts the land (and the people) and moves on. There, as the mining company no longer has an interest in paying for the village’s utilities, the local government has cut the water supply. Resident Dolly Burnet—an octogenarian who cares for her quadriplegic son—speaks of a municipal water truck that visits the outskirts once a week. She speaks of hours-long lines as locals queue up to fill as many plastic buckets and containers as they can manage for the kilometers-long walk home. She speaks of old men and old women who tire while waiting, and come prepared with threadbare blankets and pillows. Those at the back of the line are often out of luck, as the supply runs out, which has spawned an underground market, run by folks who used to be hairdressers and construction workers, teachers and students. Burnet speaks of hitchhiking through the mine dumps to her daughter-in-law’s place to trade what little money she has left, or the doilies she’s taken to knitting, for water. “Water is the most precious thing to me,” she says, “Nothing else matters. It’s like gold, diamonds . . . When I came here [fifty-six years ago], we had free water, free houses, free electricity. The mine did everything for us. Now, there’s nothing.”

  “They [live in] mining villages that don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the municipality,” says Chris Spies, municipal spokesperson. “We’re not supposed to deliver services there.”

  Recently, in the night, portions of the village’s old water pipeline were stolen for scrap, and the municipality considers it a fool’s errand to attempt replacement and restoration. “Even if we did, there’s too much crime in the area now, and the water would be poisoned,” Spies says. In the abandoned mineshafts, bands of illegal miners colloquially known as the Zama Zamas search for anything of value, all manner of weapons strapped to their hips, their faces cloaked in ski masks.

  “To me,” Burnet says, “the future looks bleak.” She picks at the tire of her son’s wheelchair, before stepping outside into the street. Uranium dust hangs in the air. “There is no future,” she says, surveying the neighborhood houses. Inside them, in the living rooms and kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms, nothing with which to wash, to flush the toilets. Nothing to boil. On the stoops, heaps of empty containers.

  Traversing the cute, dusty streets of Kimberley, on the other hand, I see a non-threatening bygone electric railway car, and the luxury Pullman coach once used by the De Beers directors as they traveled back and forth between South Africa and Rhodesia. There’s a sign discussing how a little local boy, Erasmus Jacobs, found on the bank of the Orange River in 1866 what soon became known as the Eureka Diamond, a 21.25-carat stone that Jacobs used as a toy in a game of knucklebones and planned to gift to his little sister (who liked pretty rocks), before the local adults claimed it, spread the word. There’s the sign titled “The Star of South Africa,” referencing the 85-carat white diamond plucked by a semi-nomadic shepherd boy in March 1869 from the Orange River, who sold it for five hundred sheep, ten oxen, and an anorexic horse to a local farmer who eventually peddled it to a government official. By the end of 1869, the Star was a fixture of the South African parliament, where Sir Richard Southey, Cape Town’s colonial secretary, bellowed, “Gentlemen! This is the rock on which the future of South Africa will be built!” There are, too, the now-defunct two thousand streetlamps that were once lit with thirty-two candles each.

  All the old businesses are here, stripped, of course, of proprietors and customers and actual things to sell beyond glimpses of their shiny restored voids; their walls curiously hung with sepia photographs of old mining hells—the stepped pits and men with whips, and men with gaunt faces and dirty beards and broken glasses, and caved-in hats; close-ups of bent forks and barbed wire and dangerous ladders and empty dishes; buckets, bandannas, wheels, and diamonds; mangy dogs, sick cats, dead birds, progress.

  There’s R. Dixon’s old music shop, where he professed the spiritual benefits of banjo-, violin-, and mandolin-playing. There’s G. Verheyen’s old shop, advertising his services as Signwriter and all-around High-Class Decorator, and the calligraphically etched windows of E. J. Lee: Practical Gun and Cycle Maker, and I. R. Trieber: Diamond Mounter and Seller; the Occidental Saloon with its balconied second-floor apartments, and the voluptuous awning of the Goodchild and Rothschild Auction Mart. There’s William Shilling’s Soda Water and Lemonade Factory, fine purveyor of herb beer and ginger beer, and there’s Mr. J. Perilly’s Famous Hand-Blended Cigarettes. There’s the coffin workshop filled with so many tiny coffins (no longer able to compete with Bakgat Caskets or Makumba Funeral—the active coffin workshops in contemporary working Kimberley). There’s Wernher and Beit and Company, the Licensed Diamond Buyers, named after the famed art collector and impulsive political schemer, respectively. There’s the Victorian cast-iron bandstand upon which no band plays. And, oh: there’s the site of the old Kimberley Baths, where folks of Rhodes’s and Barnato’s status could choose among the varieties—Turkish, Russian, Swedish Hot & Cold, Shower, Massage, Electrical, the Gents’ Entrance off Old Main Street, the Ladies’ Entrance off the Diamond Market. All of these clapboards, restored and shellacked, sit atop the ravished dust that once held the stones the ancient Romans believed were splinters of fallen stars, and the ancient Greeks, tears of the gods.

  What we don’t see are the miners’ “closed” compounds—the tents and other rudimentary shelters set up within a corrugated iron enclosure, itself roofless but covered with wire netting in the way of a chicken coop in order to prevent the laborers from fleeing with company diamonds, from having contact with illicit traders. Historians have described these caged settlements-within-settlement, trapped within the iron perimeter (the first of which was introduced in Kimberley in 1885), as resembling everything from concentration camps to beehives. The corporations defended such living conditions, stating that “allowing labourers [to be] free to roam around town encouraged IDB [illicit diamond buying]. In a final bid to eliminate IDB, labourers must be confined to the compounds throughout their contracts. They only leave to go to work, otherwise all their needs are supplied within the enclosures by their employers,” who themselves lived close by, in real houses made of wood, with their bidets and hand-cranked dough-rollers.

  There are no regal plaques etched with stories of malarial camp fever, lack of sanitation and clean water, medical tents blown upward at the mercy of the weather, shortages of doctors and nurses and medicine, a total absence of beds, and other lacks endemic to the diamond field camps. We see no testaments to the all-important compound canteens and soup stalls, the most popular of which was run by an old Zulu man known only as Roast Beef, an ex-miner turned stew chef (reportedly using his mother’s recipes) after his leg was blown off in an accident that saw over four thousand laborers trapped in the underground walls. We don’t see what the more poetic and dystopian of the brochures refers to as “A vast heaving crater. A world of dust, drought, dysentery, and flies, disease and despair, where some dug up a fortune, and others dug their graves.”

  In order to further demonstrate their loftiness here, and to deprive those who lived in this “vast heaving crater” of even the most meager of distractions, Rhodes and Barnato once kidnapped as many of the diggers’ pet pigeons as they could. With these abducted birds, they staged “gentlemen’s” shoots with visiting magnates on the muddy street
s around the corner from Barnato’s boxing club (the restored heartwood floor of which still bears the silver crescents of many coin edges pressed between the slats, and, in one corner, an amoebic spread of white threads that appear to be the barbs of a 130-year-old pigeon feather, coffined in shellac). Rhodes and Barnato believed they’d live, if only in the corporate argot—like the diamonds themselves—forever. Of course, these men were neither diamonds nor jargon bannered across countless pamphlets, and they too died, begetting controversial statues of their likenesses which inspired protests, the hurling of buckets filled with excrement both human and animal, and, according to the Guardian, a lot of “soul searching in South Africa.”

  In 1897, Barney Barnato may have been doing some soul searching himself. Now a very rich man—clad, as was typical, in his brown suit, bow tie, diamond lapel brooch, diamond cufflinks, and small oval blued steel spectacles—he boarded a ship from South Africa back home to England. Though the ship did not wreck, it did make a wreck of Barney Barnato, who, in an action variously interpreted as freak accident or suicide, fell (or leapt) overboard near the island of Madeira, his body filling with seawater as he sank to the floor of the Atlantic. Part of his corpse was recovered and buried in London, and the remainder is still preserved in the coral forests and seabed silt that lurks beneath so many old stub-routes of trade, and the shipbound men of dwindling conscience who pinned their stories to them.