The dark side of the sparkling stones
Botswana may soon own the company that kept diamonds out of African hands.
Duncan Money
To gain greater control over the diamonds that made it rich, Botswana wants to buy a majority stake in diamond company De Beers. President Duma Boko claimed this week that the deal will be done by the end of October to secure “economic sovereignty for Botswana”.
There is a supreme historical irony here. Control over diamonds is what made De Beers successful in the first place, but for a century it was enforced at the expense of African people.
The value of diamonds was always partly about their scarcity. Owning a large transparent stone that has no purpose beyond looking beautiful is one of the ultimate status symbols – unless everyone else has one too. To be valuable, diamonds have to be scarce.
Their scarcity, however, is not a natural phenomenon.
Diamonds were once genuinely scarce objects, but that changed with the 1871 discovery of an enormous deposit at a small hill in Kimberley, South Africa. In the ensuing rush, diggers gouged out the hill into a yawning pit known as the “Big Hole”, and flooded the market with stones, depressing prices by the 1880s.
It was at this juncture that key players in the industry, including notorious imperialist Cecil Rhodes, had the insight that they could make more money by selling fewer diamonds. All they needed to boost the price was to control the supply. The newly founded company De Beers set about doing just that.
Over the following century the industry forcibly prevented people in West and southern Africa – where the greatest sources of natural stones were found – from mining and selling diamonds, to keep them scarce.
De Beers faced two challenges. The first is that diamonds are an ideal object to smuggle: small, lightweight, durable and, until recently, extremely valuable. Miners could make much more money keeping the stones themselves. In 1886, De Beers began forcing African miners to live in prison-like compounds. Miners moved under guard or through closed passages from the compound to the mine and were strip-searched on the way back. This compound system was soon imposed at other mines too.
The second challenge was that people kept discovering diamonds – elsewhere in South Africa at first, then in Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and across West Africa. Each new source of supply was brought into this same system of control, either with De Beers taking over the mine or reaching agreements with other mining companies to restrict supply.
The level of control these companies exercised over their mines was extreme.
Miners, for their part, used homing pigeons, crossbows, hollowed-out Bibles, and fake glass eyes to try to smuggle diamonds out of the mines.
Things were different in West Africa, where diamonds were discovered in the 1920s in gravel beds near the surface, not deep underground. The industry adopted a different strategy: keeping people out, rather than keeping them in.
This entailed imposing harsh movement restrictions on communities around new diamond mines in Ghana, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. In the latter, no one except a British diamond company, could legally mine or sell diamonds and there were regular mass expulsions from the area around the mines. The names given to these expulsions in the 1950s are telling: “Operation Parasite”, “Operation Stranger”, and “Operation Spring Clean”.
The diamond industry’s tactics changed only in the 1970s. Mining companies increasingly had to negotiate with independent countries, not colonies, and sources of diamonds outside the African continent became more important.
It is a great historic irony that a company first established to stop African miners gaining access to diamonds could become a symbol of African economic sovereignty.
Literally no single private buyer wanted DeBeers. Botswana serves as an Israeli colony and this purchase cements their status. Madness. Woe to the people of Botswana.