The Rise and Fall of Diamonds

by Edward Jay Epstein

  I recalled Oppenheimer's confidence about Namibia. Whether or not he had already established contacts with alterative governments there, it was understandable why he would not want to offend gratuitously the leaders of SWAPO by pressing the diamond workers to vote in this election. He might have to deal with them in the foreseeable future for Namibia's diamonds.

  The forbidden zone was a world unto itself. The only means of entering it was the Ernest Oppenheimer Bridge, which spanned the Orange River frontier between South Africa and Namibia. Armed guards manned barricades at both the South African and Namibian ends of the bridge. Before I was permitted to pass into the forbidden zone, I had to be met by an escort from the diamond company and issued a plastic security badge.

  Inside the forbidden zone is the city of Oranjemund, with its own food-producing farms and reservoirs. The vast mining area runs alongside the Atlantic Ocean. To enter into the mining area, one has to insert his plastic security badge into a slot in the wall and wait for a door to slide open automatically. The central computer, which opens and closes these passageways, tracks the comings and goings of everyone in the mining area. De Beers' helicopters constantly patrol overhead, and closely monitor the activities of the fishing craft that pass by in the ocean (even though the enormous waves would make landing a boat on the beach all but impossible). Behind the beach, a pack of Alsatian guard dogs patrol the no-man's-land between the two barbwire fences. And behind the barbwire fences is the Namib Desert, one of the most inhospitable areas on earth. It is made impenetrable by 1,000-foot-high sand dunes and 120 degree temperatures.

  The extraordinary security procedures are considered necessary in Namibia because what is recovered from the 200 mile-long beach is not kimberlite ore but pure gem diamonds, which can be easily pocketed by anyone. In one small crevice in a rock outcropping, some 15,000 carats of sparkling diamonds were found on this beach some years ago.

  The mine, if it can be called a mine, is actually the continental shelf of the Atlantic Ocean. To get at the richest lodes of diamonds, the ocean must be literally pushed back and held back long enough to dig out the diamonds. The mechanism for holding back the pounding surf is a ten-story high mound, which, 600 feet out in the ocean, runs parallel to the beach.

  Standing on this sandy mound, I looked down into the "mine," which was actually the exposed floor of the ocean. It was an incredible sight; a full-scale battle between man and nature.

  "You are looking at the largest construction project in the Southern Hemisphere," observed Clive Cowley. Cowley had been the editor of Namibia's leading newspaper, the Windhoek Advertiser; now he was the chief public affairs officer of De Beers in Namibia. He pointed to the thousands of workers and machines below. Giant bulldozers were belching smoke and scraping the ground with their blades like some kind of prehistoric animal. Powerful pumps were sucking the water out of the mining area through hoses as fast as it sprayed in over the barrier. Ovambo tribesmen, knee-deep in pools of water, were frantically sweeping the gravel off outcrops of rock on the ocean's floor as if they feared that at any moment the barrier might give way, like a sand castle on a beach, and the ocean would come flooding in.

  In the center of all this activity was an enormous piece of machinery, more than a football field in length and two stories high, mounted on caterpillar tracks. A continuous belt of steel buckets traveled around it, like cars on a ferris wheel, scooping up sand at one end and depositing it at the other end. It was the largest machine I had ever seen.

  "That's the bucket wheel excavator," Cowley explained. "It cost $3.5 million to build, and it can move 1,800 tons of sand an hour." The sand must be stripped away before the workers, called lashers, can get at the diamond-rich gravel.

  The Ovambo tribesmen worked with their primitive tools in the shadow of this colossal machine. The contrast between tribal and modern technology was striking. Ironically,, as Cowley pointed out, it was the tribesmen, not the multimillion-dollar machine, who recovered most of the diamonds. These Ovambos had been recruited to work in the ocean mine in the jungles of Ovamba land, a thousand miles to the north. According to Cowley, they usually received eight month contracts from the diamond company. They would board a Hercules cargo plane, leaving their families behind on the kraal, and fly to Oranjemund.

  "They have to be literally fought off the plane," Cowley said. For just sweeping the gravel from the rocks, they received $200 a month. For driving trucks and other more skilled jobs, they earned up to $450 a month. This salary is completely exempt from taxes. Their own expense for their eight-month stay at the mines is $22 a month for their dormitory room and food. "By the time they return to Ovamba land, they have enough money to buy cattle, land or even a wife," Cowley concluded.

  Suddenly, a tractor the size of a locomotive came racing toward us. As it passed, an Ovambo waved from the cab. He then maneuvered the vehicle precariously on the edge of the mound, which was only about sixty feet wide, and dumped a load of dirt on top of it. Cowley explained that these tractors wage an around-the-clock battle with the Atlantic Ocean. Waves constantly rip away the sand, and these tractors, each of which carries a thirty-five-ton load of sand, constantly fill the breeches in the barrier. If an opening were not immediately filled, the ocean would break through and submerge the entire mine under fifty feet of sea water.

  Every day, more than 100 million pounds of sand and gravel are dug out of the ocean mine. From the massive moving of the earth and holding back of the ocean, about two and a half to three pounds of diamonds are recovered each day. "All this effort, and more, purely for the vanity of women," Cowley added, with an edge of irony in his voice. That irony was only compounded by the fact that De Beers had millions of dollars invested in advertising to take advantage of this vanity.

  When I viewed the day's catch in the sorting house, which was that day about 6,ooo carats, I saw that unlike in Botswana and Lesotho there were no black or discolored diamonds in the tray. These were clearly not industrial-grade diamonds, but white, well-formed gem diamonds.

  "These aren't the same sort of diamonds that come out of a pipe mine," Cowley said. "They have been pounded by ocean waves for millions of years. The inferior diamonds have been smashed to bits eons ago. Only the fittest survive, and these are pure gems."

  Pointing to the container of diamonds that had been recovered from the ocean floor that day, he continued, "There are probably more pure gems in that dish than have been recovered today in all the pipe mines in South Africa combined." Cowley estimated that this single day's production would bring in over $1-5 million when they were sold by De Beers in London.

  The profits on these Namibian diamonds were enormous. It cost no more to mine and separate these gem diamonds than it did for the industrial-grade diamonds that constituted the bulk of the production of most other mines. Yet these gems sold for one hundred times the price of industrial diamonds. From the four-hundred million dollars in revenues it took in the preceding year for these Namibian diamonds, De Beers realized a net profit of more than two hundred million dollars, making Namibia De Beers' money spinner.

  After we left the sorting house, Cowley took me over to see an extraordinary scrap yard. It was enclosed by barbwire ; and filled with enough antique machines to stock a museum. "Once a vehicle or piece of equipment ever enters the mining area, it is never allowed to leave," Cowley said. He explained that this prohibition was necessary in order to prevent anyone from smuggling diamonds out concealed in a piece of equipment. Since it was not practical to attempt to search for an object as small as a diamond, De Beers simply assigned all the vehicles and machines, when they became outmoded, to this graveyard.

  This tangle of relics encapsulated the history of the Namibian diamonds. There was, for example, a train of turn-of-the-century railroad cars with German markings. "Namibia was a German colony when diamonds were first found here at the turn of the century," Cowley said. He explained that the diamond fields were then about 100 miles north of Oranjemund. To mine the diamo
nds, the Germans had built Teutonic towns at Pomona and Kolinanskop, complete with beerhalls and skittle alleys. "The Germans had the blacks sweep the streets every day to keep the sand out of their houses. When they could no longer find ;my diamonds on the beaches they abandoned these towns to the desert. It has become a ghost town; the beerhall is now filled with sand, sand comes halfway tip the walls inside the houses..."

  There was also an ominous looking World War 11 battle tank with a British insignia on it. A huge steel blade had been welded in front of the gun turret. "De Beers converted these tanks to bulldozers after the war," Cowley continued, "because there was no bridge across the Orange River then and it was next to impossible to float heavy equipment across on barges." It took until the mid nineteen-fifties before the bridge was built.

  Since De Beers' geologist found that most of the diamond lodes were on the ocean floor, a method had to be devised of holding the ocean back, Cowley explained. Assisted by oceanographers at the University of Capetown, engineers initially experimented with the idea of altering the ocean's current so that it would rip up the beach and redeposit the sand farther from the shoreline. This would create a natural barrier behind which the workers could sweep the diamonds out from the bedrock. To shift the direction of the ocean current, they dug a channel across the beach. Unfortunately, the ocean refused to follow the predicted course, and the engineers gave up on the attempt to harness the sea.

  Next, the engineers attempted to erect an earthen dam in the ocean at low tide and cover it with a gigantic canvas tarpaulin before the tide returned. They postulated that the tarpaulin would prevent the ocean from dissolving the dam. Working in a rising tide, it took nearly two hours to lash down this cover. Less than an hour later, the waves ripped the tarpaulin to shreds.

  The De Beers engineers had to return to their drawing boards. Finally, in the early 1960s, they came up with a system for building a series of dams that would be replenished with sand from the mine as fast as the ocean could strip it away. "After a good deal of trial and error it worked Cowley concluded.

  Leaving the mining area, we had to pass through a long narrow building. Along one wall were large mirrors, which, Cowley explained, were two-way glasses through which security guards observed everyone passing through. At the end of one maze-like corridor, there was a turnstile that led to two closed doors, side by side. We went through the turnstile, waited; then a buzzer sounded, and the door on the right opened. "If the other door had opened, you would have had to undergo both an X-ray and body search," Cowley said. He explained that the selection of who gets searched is completely at random. It would be medically dangerous to subject workers to constant dosages of X-rays, therefore only a small percentage of those who passed out of the mining area each day were actually searched. "Everyone from Harry Oppenheimer to Ovambo workers have to pass through that turnstile, and they never know which door is going to open," Cowley added, as he again inserted our security badges into the slot at the end of the passageway.

  The last door buzzed opened, and a moment later we were walking down a suburban street in Oranjemund. The transition from the moonscape-like mine to the familiarity of the modern city was somewhat unsettling.

  We dined that evening with a group of De Beers executives at the Hexen Kcssel. The decor and cuisine were meant to evoke an "Old World" European spirit, but, like everything else in Oranjemund, the restaurant had been designed and built by De Beers. As far as the De Beers executives were concerned, the Namibian diamond mining operation was a reality that had been created by De Beers. If a revolutionary government ever forced De Beers to relinquish the concession, one executive suggested that mines would be flooded by the ocean in a matter of months, and no more diamonds ever would be recovered. So the forces of nationalism in Namibia would have to come to terms with the diamond cartel.

  [V]

  The Big Hole

  In Kimberley I visited a mine that was completely different from all the others that I had seen in Africa. Instead of an open pit, the mine was entirely below the surface. In the entire world, there were then only six such underground mines. All of them were in South Africa: five hemmed in the mining city of Kimberley, and the sixth located 400 miles northeast in the Transvaal. The Wesselton, located only about a mile from downtown Kimberley, was the deepest of these diamond mines. The mine shaft extended 3,300 feet below the surface, which is deep enough to accommodate both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, stacked one on top of the other.

  Before I was allowed to descend into the Wesselton, I was taken to a spotlessly clean changing room and provided with the necessary mining gear. This included steel boots, a white jumpsuit, a steel helmet with a built-in lantern, and a portable battery, which I strapped around my waist. I then proceeded to the mine shaft where I was met by Edward Robinson, a soft-spoken South African, who had been born and raised in the mining area around Kimberley.

  At the top of the mine shaft, we stepped into a steel cage, the size of a large freight elevator. The door clanged shut. Robinson pressed a button, and with a sudden jerk, we began hurtling down the mine shaft. We were falling at a rate of twenty feet per second, or twelve miles an hour. Even at that speed, it took slightly more than two minutes to reach the mining level, 2,500 feet below the surface.

  From all the films I had seen about coal mining, I expected to step out into a dark tunnel where men were hacking away at the rock with picks and shovels. Instead, I found myself standing in an enormous well-lighted and air-conditioned chamber. The ceiling was at least fifteen feet high, and there was a road in it wide enough for a two-ton truck.

  "We call this the block cave-in method," Robinson said. "It works on the same principle as punching a hole in the bottom of a bottle to drain the liquid out." He explained that rather than scooping out the kimberlite ore from above, as is done in open-pit mining, a shaft is drilled in the bedrock that encases the volcanic pipe. Once underneath the main body of ore in the pipe, or "the bottom of the bottle," as Robinson put it, a series of tunnels that run parallel to the surface are dug under the pipe. This is the "mining level." The kimberlite above, loosened by dynamite, then simply pours into the tunnels.

  Robinson's attention focused on something happening at the end of the tunnel we were entering. He held up his hand. Suddenly, everyone around us froze.

  A voice counted in Afrikaner "... schwi ... di ... ein." Then there was a loud explosion, followed in rapid succession by four other blasts. I could feel the reverberations of the concussion and smell burnt sulphur in the air.

  "They're dynamiting ahead," Robinson calmly said. The dynamite came, he explained, from De Beers' own explosive factory, which was the largest in Africa.

  Robinson motioned to follow him into the tunnel. At one end, kimberlite ore was flooding in. A black worker operated a powerful winch. It manipulated a bulldozer blade about thirty yards away. The blade scraped kimberlite ore through a hole in the floor of the tunnel.

  The ore poured into a train of hopper cars on the level below. It was fully automated. The train arrives under the opening just before the scraper forces the ore through it. When full, it then shuttles over to the mine shaft where it dumps its ore. A belt of continuous buckets then bring the ore to the surface and deposit it on the conveyor belt. In all, this highly mechanized form of mining required about 165 men, including supervisors, below ground. Most of the workers were black, and the supervisors were white.

  Robinson said that it was the white labor unions that insisted that the whites be given supervisory positions, rather than the blacks. He explained that some 40 percent of the black workers were tribesmen from Lesotho on seasonal contracts (while in South Africa, they lived in De Beers-- owned dormitories, called "hostels," and received about $40 a week in salary).

  Before Robinson became manager of the Wesselton mine he had worked at one of the Anglo-owned gold mines. The mining level there was more than one mile below the surface of the earth, and the temperature of the walls in the cramped
tunnels reached 12o degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike kimberlite, which when loosened flows by gravity into the mining tunnels, gold ore must be chiseled out of bedrock with picks and drills. "The seam at times was no wider than a pencil line, and there were literally thousands of men chipping away at it," he said. "There are more workers in a single gold mine than in all the De Beers diamond mines in South Africa."

  When we returned to the surface, I was momentarily blinded by the glare of the sun. It was also at least thirty degrees warmer above ground than below. We then took another elevator to the top of the tower of the mine shaft, which was about ten stories high. From this vantage point, the entire history of the mine could be clearly seen.

  Robinson pointed to a yawning pit, almost 500 feet deep, across the parched earth. It was the original mine. Like all pipe mines, the Wesselton had begun as an open-pit mine. At some point it became too deep to haul out the kimberlite ore profitably. "The only way it could be mined," Robinson said, was "to get the ore out from below."

  The half-mile-deep mine I had just visited was below that pit. The continuous belt of buckets dumped the ore from the shaft onto the conveyor belt. At Wesselton, according to Robinson, more than 6,ooo tons of kimberlite ore is brought up the mine shaft every day by this automated equipment. Yet there are only some 1,400 carats of diamonds recovered from this mass of ore. Of these, only about 150 carats are of gem quality. "More diamonds are recovered per ton from the waste dumps than from the mines", he said, pointing to the mountains of kimberlite ore that had been spewed out of the separation plants over the years.

  Some of this waste was more than a hundred years old. Diamonds smaller than a tenth of a carat were difficult to sell then , and De Beers had not invested until recently in sophisticated technology for recovering a high proportion of the minute diamonds. Now, however, with factories in India polishing diamonds as small as 1/25th of a carat, there was a ready market for these "small goods."