The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World. - book reviews

Insight on the News, Oct 25, 1993 by Helle Bering-Jensen

As South Africa proceeds painfully along the road to democracy, and as the good news of political agreements is marred by the bad news of growing violence, to outside observers it can all seem confusing. How and why did this piece of land, so far away, gain such prominence as a symbol of intolerable racial injustice?

A big part of the answer to that question is diamonds. Without diamonds - and gold and the other precious resources that the nation's soil holds in such abundance - no South African state could be here, at least not the one we know.

In The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), veteran Time magazine editor Stefan Kanfer has found a suitable subject for his considerable narrative skills. He tells a story of greed, passion and cruelty, but also of shrewdness and vision. The men who dug, cut and traded the diamonds were also the men who founded a country.

Kanfer begins in 1867, when the first diamond was discovered in South Africa. At the time, the country was a dusty tract of land, just about the end of the world, settled by a hardy race of Dutch farmers, the Boers, whose ancestors had arrived 200 years before and who looked to literal readings of the Bible for guidance.

Though the European powers had scrambled to colonize Africa north of the Limpopo River, southern Africa attracted little interest. As historian Sir John Robert Seely put it, Britain had acquired South Africa in "a fit of absence of mind," annexing it after Waterloo mostly to keep the French from taking hold. In 1815, the British paid the Dutch 6 million pounds for the tract, and an uneasy relationship between British rulers and Dutch settlers began.

After 1867, no one was to pooh-pooh South Africa anymore. Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs, who changed the world by discovering South Africa's first diamond, was a 15-year-old farmhand at the time. As he told the story, he was taking a nap under a tree on the banks of the Orange River, northwest of Cape Hope: "In the glare of the strong sun [I noticed] a glittering pebble some yards away. . . . I, of course, had no idea that the stone was of value. I was at the time wearing a corduroy suit, and simply put the pebble in my pocket. I did not feel at all excited at finding such a beautiful stone. . . . After reaching home I handed the [pretty pebble] to my youngest sister, who simply placed it among her playthings."

Sometime later, a neighbor, Schalk van Niekerk, came to visit and saw the stone, which Jacobs's mother generously gave him after seeing how unaccountably excited van Niekerk had become over the "white stone." Van Niekirk later sold it to an itinerant trader, and eventually it found its way to a minerologist, W.Guybon Atherstone, who pronounced it the real thing, a home-grown South African diamond weighing more than 21 carats. Before long, other diamonds started popping out of the ground.

Since then, it has been discovered that South Africa, along with China, Arkansas, Brazil and India, has just the right geological conditions for diamonds. Created by underground volcanic activity 10 million years ago, the diamonds were formed when pure carbon, liquid rock and volcanic gases came together and were forced toward the surface, crystallizing along the way. The surrounding liquid formed large tubes, shaped like twisters, which open to the surface. That's why diamond mining is so capricious. The mother lode, contained in the tube, lies immediately adjacent to worthless soil. Of two people digging neighboring tracts, one might end up a millionaire and the other would never find a thing.

The great diamond rush that followed Atherstone's pronouncement made the California gold rush seem modest by comparison. Adventurers, mountebanks, earnest young men, traders and bankers of every description soon flocked there from all over the world. From very modest beginnings, the country was built and colonized in a matter of a few decades.

And, of course, nothing could have been done without black labor. Queen Victoria had freed the South African slaves by decree in 1833 over the objections of the Boers, but the black Africans who worked the mines were hardly free men and were certainly not treated as such. The Zulus, the Xhosas and Bechuanas were enticed from their lands by high wages. Tribal wars and failed crops had left them vulnerable to the lure of the mines, and their working conditions were appalling.

Inside the huge, open Kimberley mine, men moved like ants. At each claim, ropes running from the bottom of the hole to the surface made the mine sound and look like a great harp. Inspections of the black laborers after work were painstaking and humiliating, with every orifice searched.

The Kimberley mine - named for the British secretary of state for the colonies who thought that New Rush was not an appropriate name for a town on British territory - was the center of this activity. It attracted ambitious young merchants - among them Barney Barnato from London, Alfred Beit from Germany, and Cecil Rhodes, a South African clergyman's son and certifiable megalo-maniac whose dream was to conquer Africa from Cairo to the cape and present it to Queen Victoria, a jewel to rival India in her crown.