I soon had four friends in Marange. It took some time before they trusted me enough to let me join their syndicate, but after a month of working shoulder to shoulder with them in the mud, as hard as any of the adult diggers, I became part of the gwejana, a secret syndicate within the Banda syndicate. Every day the five of us met at Banda Hill, picked up our tools, staked out our working area, and turned the soil, searching for the elusive girazi. We shared information with one another, debated mining techniques, whispered gossip, and developed our own secret language and means of protection. One day Kamba and Jamu would dig, Chipo would carry, Arves and I would sift and sort. The next day we would change the rotation and so our days took on a familiar pattern we believed superior to the methods used by the adults. We focused on areas that they ignored, and we sifted in pairs, our fingers nimble and quick over the stones. We kept to ourselves and when the call of Yafa Mari! filled the air, we didn’t waste time in admiring the find, but redoubled our efforts. At the end of each day, before I went back to the shed for my night lessons with my father, we would meet at Gwejana Rock, our camp up on the hills overlooking the mine, to share our stories, relax, and plan the following day’s dig. It felt like we were playing the treasure-hunt game that I had so enjoyed as a child. But working here in Banda Hill, there was the real possibility that lying under the surface, waiting for each of us, was a girazi worth a fortune.
Although it was never said, it was understood that even though Jamu was family and Kamba was reliable and Chipo was a girl, Arves was my best and closest friend. He was a skinny stick of a boy who talked so rapidly he would break into a coughing fit because he forgot to breathe between sentences. His eyes always twinkled with some nonsense or crazy idea, and I have never known anyone who was able to grab life by the collar and shake it up and down so vigorously.
Arves had been born HIV-positive and lived with the sickness like it was nothing more than a pesky mosquito hovering over him. His real name was Tendekai Makupe, but everyone called him Arves because every day he had to take his ARVs—the antiretroviral drugs that kept him alive. Both his parents had died from AIDS and he was orphaned, until his uncle moved to the diamond fields, where they lived with his grandmother in one of the rooms at Junction Gate High School. Arves was one of the first miners to find a true girazi in the early months of the diamond rush. When James Banda heard about the discovery, he met with Arves’s uncle to make him an offer in exchange for the stone. The deal was simple: Arves and his uncle could join the Banda syndicate and in exchange for the stone they received a six months’ supply of food.
“Of course, Banda was smart. He knew that someone taking antiretroviral meds needed to eat regularly. Otherwise, the treatment doesn’t work. I was as dumb as a donkey’s arse in those days,” Arves explained to me as we washed and sieved stones together in the muddy water. “I didn’t know then that the girazi I handed over could buy a four-by-four, the latest Nokia, a business-class trip to anywhere in the world, a Harare whore for my uncle for life, and enough change for fried chicken and chips on the side. And neither did my uncle.
“He’s not the brightest bulb in the socket. He was only too pleased to join the Banda syndicate for a while, and so we handed over my girazi as happily as a monkey picking nuts in a cashew tree. We had no idea of its true value. So what if all I got was a bowl of sadza and meat every day? I’m alive, right? And that’s a good thing, I suppose. I eat regularly and the antiretroviral drugs are keeping my T-cell count stable, but where’s the fun in that?”
“And what happened to your uncle?” I asked, pouring wet pebbles into a sorting tray.
“He left to join the gold mines in South Africa. I told you he wasn’t very bright.”
“And the girazi you found? How big was it?”
He lifted his hand out of the water and showed me his blackened thumbnail. “That big. The purest, brightest, loveliest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“I’ve seen your girazi, Arves,” I whispered. “Only now it’s cut and polished. Banda keeps it in a leather pouch around his neck.”
He stopped working, his eyes glazing over at the memory of his precious stone. “Yah, if only I’d known what I was giving away. If only I had more brains than a rabbit, I wouldn’t still be here. But, hey, there’s plenty more where that came from, and if I could find one, then I can find another.”
Arves angrily piled another handful of ore into his basket and dunked it in the water. He sieved with such force, as if he believed he would find another girazi in the very next basket he held in his hands.
“Patson, listen to me.” He dropped the empty basket in the water and gripped my hand. “If you find a girazi, you don’t give it away to anyone. You hear me?”
I glanced around to see if anyone else was listening. “Arves, are you crazy? This is the Banda syndicate, remember? Nobody dares steal from James Banda. And what about sharing what we find with Chipo, Jamu, and Kamba? It would be stealing from the gwejana syndicate too.”
He shook his head. “Yah-yah, we all share our ngodas for the good of both syndicates, but a girazi is different. The girazi finds you, because you have done something good in your life. You deserve the girazi that comes to you. It’s like winning the lottery. You’ve got one chance and everybody here knows that. Look, Patson, a mine is just a hole in the ground with a fool at the bottom and a liar at the top,” he said. “You’re not a fool, Patson, you’re clever. You’ve got more than monkey nuts for brains. I’ve seen you checking out the security, eyeballing the way the stones are collected. You’re watching with one eye, and planning with the other. You can’t fool me.”
He was right. Throughout my first month on the mine I had watched the men on Banda Hill who were not mining. All day they walked up and down the high ground, peering down on us, always watching, searching for any suspicious behavior. Banda had at least twenty pairs of eyes ensuring that no one slipped a diamond into his pocket. I realized I’d have to be even more careful. If Arves could spot me scheming, why couldn’t any one of the eagle-eyed guards see it as well?
It took a whole month of shoveling and sieving alongside my new friends before I learned exactly how the gwejana kept some of the ngodas they found for themselves. It was the end of another long day on the mine and we made our usual trek up to Gwejana Rock, as we did at the end of most days, to discuss the day’s events before we all went our separate ways home. Arves and Jamu took up their usual positions on the flat rock overlooking the mine, while Kamba filled a bowl with water and began washing the mud off his arms and hands. Down below, the miners were packing up and leaving Banda Hill for their own camps.
“All those stones down there were left to us by our ancestors,” proclaimed Chipo, from her usual perch at Gwejana Rock.
Chipo Nyati was born in the town of Mutare and she felt that everyone who came to Marange looking for diamonds was an invader. Her mother had a market stall in town, selling tomatoes and vegetables but never making enough to pay rent or feed Chipo and the other three children. Chipo moonlighted as a diamond miner, and even though her mother hated the thought of her oldest daughter working the fields, she couldn’t argue with the money Chipo brought home. Chipo liked to brag that with no fathers, brothers, or uncles around, she was the man of the household. Nobody disagreed with her except when she started lecturing us on how the diamonds only belonged to the people who had always lived here.
“The land spirits of Marange are our ancestors,” continued Chipo, throwing stones down the hill in disgust. “The people in this area have been suffering too long, and now these foreigners are taking what belongs to us.”
“I come from the Bvumba Mountains, Chipo,” said Kamba, scrubbing his arms. “You can’t call me a foreigner.”
“But you don’t come from here,” she insisted. “And what’s here belongs to us.”
“My father comes from Chiadzwa,” said Jamu. “If you tell him he’s a foreigner, he’ll cut off your balls. Oh, sorry. I forgot. You don’t have any, Chipo.”
“Oh, yes, she does,” chipped in Arves. “She just hasn’t found them yet.”
We all cracked up, except for Chipo, who squinted at us and then coolly strode over to Arves and slapped him across his head.
“How many sacks did you get through today, Arves? You going to be able to eat tonight? Don’t come crawling to me for food when you have to take your pills,” she said. “And you, fat boy? What’s your father going to say when you show him the worthless pebbles you found today?”
Jamu squirmed. We all knew James Banda expected Jamu to work the hardest of all the miners. Then she turned her gaze toward Kamba and me.
“I didn’t say anything, Chipo,” I said, lifting my hands in defeat.
“Me, too, Chipo, not a word,” added Kamba.
“But you two laughed like a hyena whose arse was being tickled by a feather,” she said, dropping a stone into the bowl and splashing Kamba.
“I was laughing at the idea. Not at you,” I defended.
“Yah-yah,” she said, scuffing dirt in my direction. “And one day your brains are going to get you into a lot of trouble, Patson.”
“But seriously, Chipo,” said Arves. “Your people were loading girazi in catapults and shooting birds down from the trees, before someone from someplace else told you they were diamonds. It’s a bit late now to claim something someone else discovered.”
“Oh, I feel a delivery coming,” said Kamba, suddenly getting up off the rock and wiping his hands dry on his T-shirt.
“Another one?” asked Chipo.
“Yah, early this morning, and now it’s making its move,” he said, jumping on one leg. He picked up his sieve and a bottle of water and disappeared behind some nearby rocks.
“Can’t you do that a little farther away?” called Chipo.
“Okay, stop complaining,” he shouted back.
“What’s Kamba’s problem?” I asked.
Chipo and Arves glanced at each other and I caught the slightest nod from Arves. Jamu, meanwhile, picked up a stone and tossed it up and down in his hand nervously. Then he stood up, checking the hill behind us and scouring the path leading up to our camp.
“Relax, Jamu. There’s no one watching us up here. We’re cool,” said Arves.
“Hey, guys, what’s going on?” I asked, feeling uneasy at how tense everyone had become.
Kamba groaned behind the rocks.
“We’ve been watching you this last month, Patson, and we think you’re ready,” said Chipo. “Well, Jamu thinks you’re ready and he’s the one who counts. Like you said, you’re a part of his family, so if he trusts you, so do we.”
They watched me closely. “What?” I said, uncomfortable under their gazes.
“Go get them, Arves,” ordered Jamu.
Arves cleared the bushes away from where they had hidden the camp’s supplies. He unpacked the bottles of fresh water, a Nokia cell phone, a box with bandages, acetaminophen, a bottle of Dettol disinfectant, a bag of raisins and nuts, a couple of old blankets, and their very own loupe. He took a hand shovel and dug into the earth. After a moment he returned with a small tin box, which he, almost ceremoniously, placed on the rock before me.
Kamba returned, grinning. “It’s a beauty,” he said, holding a dark green pebble between his fingers.
“You swallowed that!” I gasped at the raw industrial diamond he held in his hand.
“We all do,” said Arves, opening the tin box. “You have to be careful it’s not too big, otherwise it gets stuck. Ask Kamba about the time he had to drink two cups of salt water to get one out.”
“Un-com-fort-aaaa-ble,” he said with a look on his face that said it all.
Inside the box were at least twenty tiny ngodas. They looked exactly like the stones Uncle James had shown me on the black velvet cloth, only a little bit smaller.
“Still warm, but clean,” Kamba said, handing the stone to Arves.
“Time for the Nokia test,” he said, holding the stone between his fingers and taking a photograph. The phone flashed, the stone sparkled.
“You photograph all your diamonds?” I asked.
“Nah.” Chipo laughed. “This boy is so green it hurts.”
“Only Nokia phones work,” said Kamba.
“It’s the flashbulb they use. It gives a blue light, which shows whether a stone is a real gem or a fool’s diamond. And this beauty is definitely a gem. Well done, Kamba,” Arves said, dropping the stone with a clink into the tin.
“You want me to swallow stones?” I asked, looking from face to face.
“Yah, you get used to it after a while,” said Arves. “But don’t ever put your hand near your mouth while you’re working. That’s what Banda’s security is watching for. In Mazezuru’s syndicate they caught a man swallowing a girazi. They got him later that night, cut him open and squeezed the diamond from his intestines.”
“So how do you do it?” I said, trying not to imagine the agony of that mutilated miner.
“Chewing gum,” said Chipo. “Lots of it. Once you’ve chewed it soft, you stick it in your clothes. When you find a small enough ngoda you cover it with the gum and hide it behind your ear, in your hair, wherever you’re most covered in dust. Kids like us are allowed to chew gum, but obviously you’ve got to be casual about it. Make sure they know it’s only gum.”
“So how much is all this worth?” I asked, running my fingers over the ngodas.
“Maybe three thousand Usahs,” said Chipo.
“Nah, I would say maybe two,” said Arves. “If you get a dealer you can trust.”
“That’s a fortune,” I said.
Chipo laughed again, shaking her head. “This boy’s got no idea, has he? I thought you said he was bright, Arves? Patson, this is nothing. People are making millions of US dollars on these mines. Soon the army will get here, then the politicians, and then the corporations will squeeze all of us out. Our president has built an airfield only twenty clicks from here. Every night planes are landing and loading up our diamonds. Don’t you read the newspapers? Everyone around the whole world now knows about the diamonds of Marange.”
“Surely you’ve heard the planes?” Kamba asked, then turned to the others. “Let’s go tonight. We haven’t been in a long time. We’ve got to show Patson the planes.”
Kamba’s name meant “water tortoise” and it aptly suited him. He viewed the world cautiously, sticking his neck out only when it was safe to do so. He had lived in one of the small villages high up in the Bvumba Mountains with his older brother, Hondo. The brothers had looked after goats on the slopes of the mountain, living a slow village life until Hondo had heard about the diamond fields. When they arrived at Banda Hill, Kamba was unused to the crowds of people and the noise and pace of diamond mining, and stayed close to his older brother. They worked together until Hondo heard about an airstrip, torn out of the forest and flattened by bulldozers, not far from the mine fields. He became fascinated with the planes that dropped out of the sky at night, clattering down the runway to a corrugated warehouse, guarded by policemen.
From the safety of the forest, Hondo and Kamba watched the small, faraway lights in the sky grow into the gray steel-winged Dakotas that swooped down onto the dusty airstrip with a clattering roar of their engines that turned into a drowning idle. They saw the tail ends of the Dakotas lift up as large crates of what must have been ammunition and weapons were off-loaded, in exchange for much smaller crates of diamonds. And they watched as papers were signed and passed between Chinese men in uniforms.
“Hondo wanted to know everything about these planes,” Kamba said, when I asked him why he wanted to go back to the airfield. “And then, one day, he ran across the strip while the soldiers weren’t looking, sneaked inside the plane, and hid among the crates. I was too scared to move. The doors closed, the plane turned around, and, with Hondo on board, took off down the runway and disappeared into the night sky.”
“Where did it go to?” I asked, amazed at the courage of Hondo.
“China, I guess,” Kamba said sadly. “I think Hondo’s gone to China.”
That night Kamba lost his protective shell and became a member of the gwejana syndicate.
“Kamba, stop telling the story. You know how upset it makes you. We’ll go to the airfield another time. Just not tonight,” said Chipo, and Kamba’s face fell.
“Someday he’ll come back,” Kamba said to no one in particular, pouring out the bowl of dirty water.
In the distance the sun sank slowly over the faraway hills as the day drew to an end. It was cool and quiet up at Gwejana Rock, a good place to unwind after a day of digging and sieving. No one talked for a while as we watched the line of people being searched one by one before they left the mine. James Banda did not allow anyone, including us kids, to leave his mine without a full-body search. I had learned so much about mining in the last month but still hadn’t found any diamonds, not even a tiny ngoda. I wanted to add my own ngodas to the tin box and prove to the gwejana that I was as good a miner as any of them.
“Jamu, what if your father finds out about the gwejana syndicate and how many ngodas we have?” I asked, watching the men being searched below and remembering James Banda’s tweezers, and the sound of bone being slammed against wood.
“He’s never going to know,” said Jamu, his face set tightly in a hard, grim mask. “We hand over all the larger ngodas. He doesn’t need these small stones. Like Chipo says, there’s enough for everyone. Those ngodas in the tin box are ours.”
The first girazi came to me because of anger. It was two months after the Moyo family had come to Marange, and Uncle James was acting as if he had swallowed a snake. He was obviously troubled but no one knew why. He strode up and down the paths of Banda Hill, talking angrily on his phone. Some said a local chief had complained that the graves in the diamond fields were being destroyed. Every Shona knew the importance of the revered ancestors they worshipped, and if a grave had been disturbed it was serious business. Others said it was Banda’s razor wire that he had set up around the mine that had offended the midzimu. No one had the right to fence off land, and everyone knew if the land spirits were angry, there would be no more diamonds. A few of the bolder adults whispered that Banda had become too greedy.
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