Chapter 2 examines external notions of Africa as a treasure trove of mineral wealth in the pre-Kimberley period, as well as some of the mining endeavors in which Africans were engaged that helped fuel these impressions. For centuries, Europeans understood that the provenance of the gold that appeared on the southern shores of the Mediterranean lay somewhere in the uncharted lands beyond the Sahara. In turn, this speculative knowledge helped prompt the first interactions between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans, as Portuguese sailors steadily made their way south along Africa’s Atlantic shores in the fifteenth century. Following the resultant cross-cultural encounters, Europeans learned a great deal about Africans’ mining endeavors—alternately exciting and disappointing these interlopers depending on the existence and availability of the minerals they coveted. Yet for centuries Africans remained in firm control of their mineral resources, even when interacting with the most aggressive foreigners. This chapter explores the often divergent ways that Africans and outsiders regarded these resources and how, over time, these valuations shaped Africans’ encounters with those Europeans and Asians who reached the continent’s shores.
Chapter 3 considers the explosion of mining in South Africa following the Eureka discovery and the identification of significant diamond concentrations in the late 1860s in and around what became the commercial center of Kimberley. If Europeans had previously imagined Africa as a repository of precious minerals, these finds surpassed even their most optimistic estimations. Virtually overnight, these bountiful deposits precipitated a “rush” that resembled gold prospectors’ assault on California two decades earlier. In spite of this influx of both foreigners and international capital and the enactment of rac(ial)ist laws, African diggers held their own for some time following the discoveries; many even fared better than their white counterparts. Yet, following new legislation that permitted the amalgamation of individual claims, astute (and well-funded) businessmen such as Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes began to consolidate their holdings, ultimately leading to the emergence and eminence of De Beers. Africans were soon pushed to the margins to make way for foreign capital and local white mining interests, eventually limited to manual labor positions at the very bottom of the pecking order.
Chapter 4 explores the means by which De Beers revolutionized the diamond industry and over time became internationally synonymous with these stones. Africans, perhaps ironically, suffered the most in the wake of this development. The increasingly oppressive, racist South African state implemented policies that ensured that De Beers enjoyed a steady flow of indigenous labor to its mines. Once on site, the company monitored workers by requiring that they live in restrictive housing compounds. De Beers was motivated to introduce this form of housing in order to inhibit diamond theft, control allegedly “unruly” Africans, and draw a distinction between white and black miners. In turn, compound inhabitants experienced some of the worst conditions on mines anywhere in Africa, characterized by acute overcrowding and a variety of violent, intracompound antagonisms. Meanwhile, under the decades-long leadership of the Oppenheimer family, De Beers expanded its interests beyond South Africa, gaining exclusive control of output from South West Africa (Namibia), Angola, and the (Belgian) Congo. The company also reorganized itself into a vertical enterprise by introducing “single-channel marketing.” This aggressive arrangement saw an international cartel of producers, including De Beers, funnel all rough stones through its selling arm, the Central Selling Organization. In turn, the company was able to control supply and, eventually, demand—in great part by convincing global consumers that naturally occurring diamonds are rare, when, in fact, De Beers’s practice of limiting and stockpiling rough output is responsible for producing this artificial scarcity. For all of the enterprise’s success, though, its meteoric ascension was not without problems. In fact, acute mismanagement and catastrophic miscalculations in the 1920s saw the famed firm absorbed by the better-managed Anglo American conglomerate. Only because Anglo opted to retain the De Beers name for this portion of its diverse business is it possible to say that “De Beers” dictated the fate of the vast majority of the world’s diamonds from the 1920s to the 1990s.
Chapter 5 traces the establishment of diamond-mining operations across the continent as Africa came under European colonial rule. Unlike the “wild west” of the early Kimberley days or the violent chaos depicted in films such as Blood Diamond, most diamond-mining settings during the colonial period were actually highly organized and reasonably orderly affairs. Yet they also featured a host of disagreeable conditions for the African laborers who toiled on them. These employees’ experiences were further shaped according to whether a mine’s diamonds were located in superficial, alluvial deposits or buried deep in kimberlite pipes. The particular colonial master involved in local recruitment also played a major role in differentiating employees’ experiences. African headmen also influenced matters by compelling young male followers to engage with mining operations, typically in exchange for corporate or governmental compensation. Exceptionally, in the British colony of the Gold Coast, traditional African authorities themselves retained control of diamond deposits, renting out access to foreign mining companies and thereby playing a central role in the regional development of the industry. This chapter explores the diverse diamond-mining environments that colonial states, extractive companies, and African headmen collaboratively created. I examine the series of early twentieth-century discoveries of deposits scattered across the continent and trace the subsequent developments in these settings through the conclusion of the process of African political independence, which extended from the 1950s until the 1990s.
Chapter 6 continues the examination of colonial-era diamond mines, but adjusts the angle of approach away from states, corporations, and indigenous authorities in order to consider the motivations, strategies, and experiences of African laborers. Irrespective of whether forceful measures or attractive incentives brought Africans to diamond mines, it was on the backs of these workers that mining enterprises generated prodigious profits. Africans engaged with their respective employers in different ways, with some cyclically migrating for work, often according to the agricultural season(s), and others permanently relocating to take advantage of the wage-earning opportunities that increasingly urbanized mining environments offered. In certain settings, family members accompanied adult male laborers, but in most cases these men departed alone. Once on the mines, workers endured long, taxing days before returning to typically modest housing. In response to these challenging conditions, laborers creatively shaped their plights by employing an array of strategies. More aggressive measures included diamond theft, flight, and work slowdowns and stoppages, though most workers opted for less risky undertakings such as sharing tasks, singing songs, and befriending fellow employees. Only with the end of the colonial era in the 1960s and the dissolution of the apartheid regime in South Africa in the early 1990s, would mine workers come to enjoy significantly improved conditions and wages.
Chapter 7 explores the ways that a range of Africans have utilized diamond revenues to prop up oppressive governments, to destabilize others, and, in both of these scenarios, to precipitate widespread displacement and death. Arguably, the most notorious development of this nature was the emergence of “blood” or “conflict diamonds,” which helped fuel civil conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the DRC in the 1990s. In fact, it is now widely understood that even if social and political grievances may have originally precipitated these conflicts, rebel leaders eventually fought these wars (or, in the case of the DRC, fight them) primarily for the profits available rather than for any coherent political purpose(s). In other cases, dictators such as the DRC’s Mobutu Sese Seko, and, more recently, Liberia’s Charles Taylor and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, have used diamond sales to purchase arms in order to brutally perpetuate their regimes and deeply enrich themselves. Although the era of “blood diamonds” is arguably over, the industry is still struggling to contain the violent legacy
of these stones and striving to change consumers’ perceptions about the relationship between Africa and these precious resources.
Chapter 8 offers refreshing counterexamples to those that appeared in the previous chapter via an examination of the ways that the leaders of independent African governments, namely Botswana and Namibia, have used diamond profits to build democratic states characterized by pacific foreign and domestic policies. These stable, transparent nations have distributed the revenues from their prodigious mineral wealth in a reasonably equitable manner and have also generated meaningful local employment opportunities within their mining sectors. Although their diamond industries are not completely problem-free, Botswana and Namibia, the first and sixth largest producers (by value) of stones, respectively, offer hope for African nations still struggling to effectively manage their diamond resources. Today, Botswana is classified by the UN as an “upper-middle-income country”; clearly, diamond profits are reaching the country’s inhabitants, even if inequity issues continue to trouble the nation.
Finally, a concluding chapter reflects upon the material introduced over the preceding chapters in order to consider what the continent’s diamond future might look like. Although there have been a number of promising recent developments in the industry, including the creation of managerial opportunities for women and the emergence of black mining executives, many Africans are still operating on the fringes of the industry, barely eking out a living. In many settings, Africans without high-level connections or significant firepower survive as artisanal miners, and thereby enjoy little in the way of personal or financial security. Traditionally ignored by both mining corporations and local governments alike, these highly vulnerable individuals are only now beginning to receive attention and support. This encouraging development, combined with the successful implementation of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), which has helped stem the flow of “conflict diamonds”; the cessation of civil wars in Angola and Sierra Leone; increased employment opportunities; heightened corporate responsibility, which has included the allocation of diamond profits to fight HIV/AIDS; and the growing demand for good governance across the continent, suggests that diamonds are poised to play a positive role in shaping Africa’s future.
2: Africa’s Mineral Wealth
Material and Mythical
Off their coast . . . lies an island . . . and there is in the island a lake, from which the young maidens of the country draw up gold-dust, by dipping into the mud birds’ feathers smeared with pitch. If this be true, I know not; I but write what is said.
—Herodotus, in his account of the peoples of the west coast of Africa, c. 500 b.c.e.
The men of this land are ruddy in color and of good physique. . . . Their clothes are of very thin linen and cotton, of many colors . . . ; they are rich and embroidered. They all wear toques on their heads with piping of silk worked with gold thread. They are merchants, and they trade with white Moors . . . carrying gold and silver, cloves, pepper and ginger, rings of silver with many pearls. . . . Men of this land wear all these things.
—Vasco da Gama, describing Mozambique Island, 1498
Imagine how enticing the prospect of accessing Africa’s mineral riches might have seemed to you after reading Herodotus’s alluring depiction or Vasco da Gama’s sensational observations as the Portuguese “discovered” Africa, some two millennia later. Although the lapse in time between these two passages is significant, it is clear that Africa’s minerals were long valued by both insiders and outsiders. For their part, Africans had been tapping the continent’s vast mineral wealth well before Erasmus Jacobs discovered the Eureka Diamond in 1867. The metals and alloys that African societies valued included copper, iron, bronze, lead, and tin. Yet it was Africa’s gold that was primarily responsible for thrusting the continent into a series of durable engagements with the global community. Africans widely treasured this metal, using it domestically for both personal and architectural ornamentation, but they also introduced it into regional and long-distance trade networks. For example, African gold figured prominently in Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean commerce, reaching destinations around the globe. In turn, the provenance of this precious metal helped foster external notions of Africa as a treasure trove of mineral riches. Coupled with powerful myths of the continent’s magnificent mineral endowments, foreigners aggressively attempted to locate the suspected sources of this prodigious wealth. European sailors and explorers had myriad motivations to investigate Africa in da Gama’s day, but the most compelling was the desire to access the continent’s legendary gold deposits.
For all of the enthusiasm that these maritime merchants displayed, misguided as it may have been, persistence turned out to be their most important attribute. For centuries prior to finally “hitting the jackpot” in South Africa, European commercial missions typically ended in disappointment rather than bonanza. On Africa’s Atlantic shores, for example, European merchants correctly identified the West African sources of gold that featured in the Trans-Saharan trade. And, after initiating commerce with African littoral communities, they were even able to redirect supplies of this commodity southward, to what they named—not surprisingly—the “Gold Coast.” However, local African leaders retained control of the trade between the inland producers and these foreign merchants, effectively denying the Europeans direct access to the gold deposits. Further south, European explorers’ and merchants’ dreams of additional, substantial mineral deposits proved to be illusory. The centuries that these foreigners spent fruitlessly searching along Africa’s south-central and southwestern coasts confirmed that their grandiose notions of significant mineral deposits in these areas were unfounded. Meanwhile, along Africa’s eastern coast, Middle Easterners, Asians, and, eventually, Europeans were unable to penetrate deeply enough, or for any sustained period of time, into the interior to gain access to the gold mines that fed the Indian Ocean trade. Regardless, by the middle of the eighteenth century this desire to access the continent’s gold was eclipsed by the insatiable demand for an even more lucrative African commodity: slaves.
This chapter examines the pre-Kimberley period and considers the ways that Africans engaged with the minerals buried in the continent’s soils and the manner in which outsiders sought to exploit this wealth. Despite foreigners’ relentless efforts to gain direct access to these real and imagined mineral deposits, Africans successfully safeguarded their endowments with relative ease and thereby largely dictated the terms of trade. Africans’ sustained dominance is explained by their superior force; the location of most mineral deposits far into the interior, rendering them hard to access; and outsiders’ acute vulnerability to an array of tropical diseases. But the outsiders never fully abandoned their dreams of deriving financial fortune from Africa’s mineral wealth. Rather, these aspirations merely went dormant for a time.
Domestic Utilization of Africa’s Minerals
It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when Africans began to value and mine the array of minerals with which the continent is endowed. We do know, however, that the ancient Egyptians believed that gold was a divine, indestructible metal associated with the sun and also that the skin of their gods was golden. Moreover, during the earliest periods of dynastic Egypt (beginning c. 3100 b.c.e.), only the pharaohs were permitted to use gold for personal adornment, while the chamber that held a pharaoh’s sarcophagus was known as the “house of gold,” owing to these leaders’ propensity to include large quantities of this metal in and around their tombs. The grave robbers of later years did not, after all, go to all of the trouble that they did just to marvel at the intricacy of a sarcophagus or to catch a glimpse of a mummified body. Yet, for all of the local reverence associated with this prized metal, gold did not possess great importance as either a currency or commodity. Instead, it was used primarily for funerary and ornamental purposes, most likely due to the limited deposits located within the Egyptian kingdom. Although gold may well be the most aesthetically appreciated of the minerals
that Africans have historically mined, others, such as iron, were valued mainly for their functionality. African communities smelted iron ore in order to make weapons and cooking utensils, and even employed it as currency in certain settings in Western and Central Africa. Archaeological evidence suggests that Africans were mining and working iron ore from at least 1500 b.c.e., though scholars are continually revising the dates, exact locations, and patterns of knowledge transmission related to ironworking on the continent. Although Africans did not value iron for its aesthetic qualities in the same way that they did gold and other minerals, they did greatly revere the smiths who oversaw the complex process of producing ironware. It was widely believed that these individuals’ esoteric knowledge meant that they also possessed mystical powers.
If Africans, in the main, valued gold for its aesthetic appeal and iron for its utility, copper was considered both attractive and functional. Copper was utilized on the continent earlier than iron and in much greater quantities than gold. Africans appear to have embraced the metal so strongly due to its durability and malleability, but also for its unique color, luminosity, and even sonorous qualities. As such, Africans employed copper and its alloys (bronze, which is composed of copper and tin, and brass, which is made from copper and zinc) in a variety of ways. Copper was incorporated into various forms of artistic expression; it was also used as a medium of exchange when shaped into rods, as ingots in the form of crosses, and even as basins of varying size and weight. Beginning sometime before 2000 b.c.e., Africans began mining and smithing copper, bestowing on it an importance that far exceeded continental valuations of gold. In fact, when Africans began to trade gold as a commodity to outsiders, they often sought copper in exchange. Consequently, for some time Europeans believed that the continent did not feature significant copper deposits.
Stones of Contention Page 3