Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  *

  THE WIND RUSHES INTO AND OUT OF THE BIG HOLE. BECAUSE THE pit is so cavernous, the wind makes no sound. One kilometer away, behind the front desk of the Protea Diamond Lodge, Kimberley’s fanciest hotel, the framed sepia photograph of Rhodes and Barnato, stirred by the ceiling fan, rattles lightly against the wall.

  Chapter 8

  Beyond the Boom Gate, Touring the Erasure

  IT’S 7 A.M., AND EVERYTHING WITHIN THE KLEINZEE BOOM GATES officially belongs to the Oppenheimers, which now includes me and the car I’m renting. In 1902, the year of Cecil John Rhodes’s death, the London diamond brokerage firm Dunkelsbuhler and Company sent their hotshot twenty-two-year-old diamond buyer, Ernest Oppenheimer, to South Africa. At first, Oppenheimer worked for the firm as an independent dealer, but soon after his arrival, he settled in Kimberley and began to study De Beers’s business principles. Seducing the locals with his financial prowess and oratorical charisma, Oppenheimer, in 1912—a mere ten years after his arrival in South Africa—was elected mayor of Kimberley. He used his position to further foster powerful political and economic connections, and leveraged them to take control of the De Beers empire as chairman in 1929. He thereafter consolidated the company’s global monopoly of the diamond trade. When Ernest died in 1957, he passed control of De Beers to his son, Harry, who in turn passed control to his son, Nicky, who in turn passed control to his son, Jonathan.

  Driving through this place—occupied essentially by four generations’ worth of white male Oppenheimers—I’m wondering if the penchant for perpetuating atrocity is a heritable trait. I’m wondering if soul-searching is—the sort that kept Darwin awake and nauseous on the Beagle, as he too considered the pigeon. Today, I am to meet with Johann MacDonald, the man who still bears the title of De Beers Mine Manager.

  In 1938, as Kleinzee was being developed, the mine manager declared this of the workers: “They are unsophisticated as regards to organized sport and know very few or no games; they are uneducated so have little desire for intellectual entertainment. Any recreational device . . . should fit in with their natural background as far as possible, that is, to be understandable by them and appeal as a recreational device.” Soon, the workers’ tastes expanded; their desires evolved, and the recreational “devices” with them. Swimming pools and playing fields were measured and fabricated, though drawing boundary lines on the fields “was impractical because of the sand.” De Beers furnished boxing gloves, “but there is no demand for them,” the men preferring to box bare-knuckle.

  Now, these defunct clubs—the yacht club, fishing club, diving club, clubs for enthusiasts of rugby, darts, snooker, and squash, cricket and dancing, ping-pong and cinema, radio and wrestling, hunting and shooting, tenniquoits and jukskei (tossing horseshoes at an ox yoke)—are slowly becoming piles of rubble, rock cairns stacked at their doorless thresholds, mourning heydays.

  The riding club bears no trace of the Appaloosas who once were boarded in the twenty stables. Though I see no cars, there is a gas station, or its leavings, in the middle of the sand, the pumps hooded in black polyester bags that flap thickly when the wind blows. Once, babies were born here. Once, people carried Christmas trees through doorways, and had barbecues in the town center, where residents heaped porcelain plates with steaming portions of oxtail, and drank beer and drank wine, not to drown out, but to celebrate.

  Beginning slowly in 2007, and accelerating in 2009, De Beers downscaled their interests in Kleinzee, sending the residents in a forced exodus into other parts of South Africa, onto the couches of distant family members and friends, and into other possible occupations. De Beers did little to help these residents find housing or alternative work.

  Now, for those who remain, survivalist proposals hang over the town: to turn the pit mines into hazardous waste dumps, to turn the migrant worker dorm into a prison. The three schools—primary, secondary, high—are cavernous and echoing shells, though rumor has it that some of the town’s few remaining children take private swimming lessons from a former diamond diver in the high school’s Olympic-sized pool, which is no longer heated or lighted (when the town was thriving, electricity, water, and housing were provided free to the residents), the water jaundiced with decomposing pinkstink dung moss.

  Chimes made of bleached fish jawbones hang from the porch eaves of Kleinzee’s abandoned houses—each of which is low and square and painted white. The wind piles the dust against their walls. No one sits on their stoops, and the only people I see are rail-thin and clad in the same brown gumboots, the same palatinate blue overalls X’ed over the backs with yellow reflective tape, walking not into homes, but down the middle of roads that end at further boom gates, and beyond them, incalculable measures of diamondiferous red sand, and dead birds decomposing in the dunes-cum-tumuli. Empty flagstaffs, declaring no specific loyalty, jut from the dust. When the wind comes, the sparse spiral grass—thick, ribbony ringlets whose penchant for strangling out the local flowers belies its own wild beauty—rattles like something poisonous about to strike.

  I am on edge here within the gates, somehow unbound and imprisoned, euphoric and morose. I can hear the blood whirring in my ears, imagine the hearts of Kleinzee’s hidden residents beating in their bodies. So many dry rivers and their expired arms. The silence seems to be ticking, waiting to go off, and because of this, something inside me—also now property of De Beers—leaps with a cold fear each time a bird so much as whistles as it passes over. And each time a bird passes over, there’s a chance that a diamond will slip loose and drop, once again, to earth. I hold my breath and think of Louisa, likely still sleeping, and the words trying again seem less like an incantation and more like a canary’s cry into some dumb bottomless dark.

  *

  THE DIAMONDS HERE REPRESENT THE MOST EXPLOSIVE (AND exploded) of our origins, the seeds of some ruined nostalgia—the compacted carbon, rendered to crystalline shrapnel, that is responsible for all life on Earth, having, like a good, strong cancer, the ability to metastasize. They are the prettiest version of our lifeblood, so much better-looking than coal and graphite and peat, and certainly methane clathrate (which one can’t easily ring around a finger), and in a town like Kleinzee, they impacted themselves after having traveled the great distances we associate with romance—upward and westward. Having formed as the Earth itself formed, nestled, carrot-shaped, in the mantle, the rare volcanic kimberlitic pipes incubated diamonds in deep-origin magma sources and provided their passage to the surface as the volcanoes—as is written into their code—erupted.

  The low ring of ejecta—the things thrown skyward by the volcanic eruptions—twined briefly with other prehistoric flying things that were in the middle of their evolutions—the germinal insects and birds—before falling to the banks of rivers with a westerly flow, rivers such as the Orange and the Vaal. This ejecta, partly comprised of diamonds, meandered downstream toward what became the Diamond Coast—the Atlantic of Kleinzee and Port Nolloth—where the ocean did what it always does: tried its damnedest to reject the land that was forcing its way inside, belch it out in the form of beaches, and even further—back into the rivers that carried the sediment in the first place. There, the diamonds roosted in the mud, and waited for humans to evolve to the point of conceiving the alluvial mine. In the process, the “crud” (what those in the trade call worthless, or non-gem-quality diamonds) was pulverized, leaving only the choice stones.

  And the evolving organisms did what they did—they roved among diamonds and built their nests and lairs and hives, and killed each other over sex and food, and humans gave them names like fruit chafers and whip scorpions, baboon spiders and ticks, beetles named after rhinos, after jewels, after shit. Ostriches occasionally swallowed diamonds, and so laid the deformed eggs which would be collected and displayed on the bottom shelf of the case in the Kleinzee museum, the sort of exhibit that visitors bypass on their way to look at the pictures of the recovered diamonds that ruined the eggs in the first place.

  As kimberlitic
pipes were named after the town of Kimberley, South Africa, and as the town of Kimberley was named for John Wodehouse, Britain’s First Earl of Kimberley, only in 1873, this represents a reversal of naming—the older thing named for the newer thing. Kimberlitic pipes clearly existed before human beings settled the site of Kimberley, and the site of Kimberley was settled by native cultures long before the Brits dispersed them, saddled them with demimonde attributes, before indenturing them, and named the place after one of their lords—before revising the teleology of this place. In a reversal of naming of this sort, barbarity often attends, and giant holes are blasted into land that once supported many homes. The purposes of things become confused, or, somewhat differently, we recast the purposes of things. Landscapes become estranged from the features with which we pock them, and from the concrete rectangles we name foundations, atop which we anchor our various nerve centers, affixed with fluorescent lighting and typewriters, and furniture made of the species of good, strong wood that once allowed the dodos to live and be well.

  Here, in this compression of landscapes, time also seems to compress, and it’s tough to distinguish between the ancient and the contemporary, old stories and new ones. As it’s the beige monolith looming like a headstone on a bluff at the edge of town, the mine headquarters—the location of Johann MacDonald’s office—is, by comparison, not hard to distinguish.

  The parking lot, littered with shards of sun-dried eggshells, runs uphill to the building and the structure appears askew, bearing the angle of some giant utility knife tip surfacing for air from its plastic holster. The surrounding caldera of mine dumps conceals old land collapses, and, as the wind sweeps over, the primordial bumps-and-grinds with the post-apocalyptic, each indistinguishable from the other. A sign at the parking lot’s border bears two red arrows, each pointing toward exactly nothing, in opposing directions. At least there’s a choice. Old wires no longer carry electricity, sag to the scalped tops of the dead star lilies that once had the strength to crack through this ruined asphalt. Along these wires, not even the ants make passage. The languishing carports reserve spaces for the fired and the dead—“Mining Engineer,” this sign says, “Mine Garage Foreman,” says another, “Dragline Overseer,” “Snr. Perimeter Walker,” “Safety Mngr”—all having been ferried across the river that now flows only in the imagination, or deep beneath the excavated sand.

  Still, in the distance, the ocean asserts itself. Its foam breaks soundlessly and serrated on the coast. The clouds look snotty. From the antennas on the mine office roof, a faint crackling, an upward sending of signals. In panic, I rush up the five steps inside.

  I see MacDonald’s office before I see MacDonald, having been directed down a narrow hallway lit with flickering fluorescents by a secretary sitting behind a dirty thermoplastic window and her arthritic finger. The place has the feel of a temporary satellite headquarters in a trailer, while the real thing is being constructed. But this is the real thing.

  The office, for the time being, is unmanned, but it is fully decorated, littered with accoutrements that seem to argue with one another—the coat tree hung with reflective chartreuse safety vests, the desk cluttered with papers, a stained De Beers coffee mug, a multibuttoned office phone with a red message blinker, toy tractors and dump trucks, a blue and yellow box of Choice Brand condoms, distributed, via Johann MacDonald, by the South Africa Department of Health to the remaining mine workers; a laminated instructional titled Diamond Route Standards (“All communication about the Diamond Route highlights the link between De Beers, Oppenheimers, diamonds and conservation; All proposed research projects are appropriately evaluated using the De Beers Family of Companies Research Guidelines and approved by the Diamond Route Research Committee; All sites promote and market other Diamond Route sites”); the notecards printed “We use lower hazard alternatives to high risk hazardous substances when possible; We manage effluents, wastes, emissions and hazardous substances to prevent pollution wherever possible; We aspire to normal levels of discharges to sea, including sewage.” Tacked to the bulletin board behind MacDonald’s desk are little greeting cards printed with De Beers’s “Statements of Values” (Pull Together, Build Trust, Show We Care, Shape the Future, and Be Passionate, the latter bearing the emblem of a Valentine’s Day heart).

  Johann MacDonald enters his office behind me. He is big and beleaguered, orange-haired, with skin easily given to reddening and rash. His stubble resembles beach sand. Aurally, he is the sound of clothing coming together and apart—the swish of his yellow and turquoise De Beers windbreaker, a voice that sounds like it’s unzipping something heavy, meant for winter.

  When he inhales, there’s a soft, guttural clicking at the back of his throat. He wears generously cut khaki pants. He exhibits the infectious anxiety of an overworked exile. He slams a clipboard on his desk, and a toy crane rolls off the edge. He fumbles for it in a half-hearted way, resigned to let it clatter to the floor.

  In sight and sound alone, I like him almost immediately. He utters the phlegmatic command, “Sit,” without so much as pulling out a desk chair, and I comply, and quickly feel oppressed not so much by the office decorations but by all the beige and pale green paint; the room is reminiscent of a 1970s’ guidance counselor’s office, and I feel about to be pressured to declare what I want to do with my life.

  “So, pigeons and diamond smuggling?” he says. “I guess you heard, then, about the recent cave-in. That’s what everyone’s heard.” Behind him, on the wall, are a poster of a Great Dane staring down a Chihuahua, and a printout of the Oscar Wilde misquote, “My tastes are simple. I am simply satisfied with the best.” MacDonald’s head is perfectly centered between the two. He speaks of how a ring of smugglers illegally tunneled into a nearby diamond pit excavation, having, in the middle of the night, cut holes into the security fences and dug channels many meters below the surface, just above the pothole, or bottom of the pit. “It’s an open cast mine,” MacDonald says. “Open because there’s no ceiling, and cast because of the leftover sand that’s cast out.” These pits resemble pyramids in reverse, as if excavation sites for upside-down stepped necropoli—the actual structure which once took up positive space having been hauled away, so only its grave remains. “And these tunnels are so narrow, only children can fit, and in there,” MacDonald says, “is a hell you can’t imagine.”

  Due to the lack of air, teams of hired children fill the tiny culvert, forming a constantly rotating Möbius strip; those digging for diamonds at the terminus of the tunnel dig until they can no longer breathe, whereupon they circle back toward the entry point, gulp for air like whales, and then reenter in turn. MacDonald picks up a pamphlet from his desk and hands it to me. It is filled with De Beers marketing prosaicisms, including an image of smiling black children captioned “ABCDEBEERS: We dig deep to support our young gems.”

  “These syndicates are huge,” says MacDonald. “Chinese mafia, Italian mafia, American mafia,” and here he raises his eyebrows and points at my chest with his pinky, as if I’m somehow guilty of the American mafia’s trespasses onto De Beers territory. “The KGB once paid their operatives in diamonds. God’s honest truth. What they’re not getting directly from mine employees who still get in with pigeons in their lunch-bins, they get out with child slave labor—kids of poor families who have no choice. And do these kids get paid? Sometimes they’re given food, clean water, but usually they work for tik [crystal meth], so they become dependent on these syndicates. God, you have to be drugged to endure the hell you find in these tunnels. They can’t be more than 60 centimeters around. I have photographs”—he rises in his chair as if about to produce them, before falling again—“which I can’t show to you. Security reasons.” This particular tunnel collapse killed two of the would-be smugglers. “And this is why De Beers has to prevent this thing. It’s not just that they own the mineral rights. It’s that there’s this. Smuggling is wrong. These diamonds are not responsibly harvested. Right here in Kleinzee, a few years back, there was a collaps
e that killed ten. De Beers claims an environmental responsibility.”

  As part of this “environmental responsibility,” pigeons here, too, he tells me, are seen as suspicious and shot on sight. They’re not part of the corporate ideal of the mine as a closed system—a pure zone, invulnerable to bacteria. In order to maintain this invulnerability, workers are not only subjected to the random administration of concentrated liquid suppositories (reportedly stored in blue bottles labeled “State Secret”), but also X-rayed when they enter and again when they leave. “The X-rays are random,” MacDonald says, fingering the bed of a toy dump truck. “Legally, it’s a human rights violation to overdose someone on radiation, so these X-rays have to be spaced out. Sometimes they’re getting a real X-ray, but more often they’re getting a placebo. They never know which they’re getting. And the diggers risk it sometimes,” MacDonald says, even though, he tells me, that there are thorough pat-downs as well, “and sometimes they make it.” Laborers sometimes modify their clothing with lead-lined pockets and boot soles, train pigeons to fly over the Orange River from South Africa to Namibia and back, between the mines of Alexander Bay and Oranjemund and safe houses lining the border—to the hands of wives and mothers and sons and grandsons.

  Anyone keeping pigeons is monitored by De Beers operatives, oftentimes 24/7, with hidden laser cameras and night-vision binoculars. If someone is caught with a diamond, MacDonald keeps repeating, “it is not only a crime against De Beers, but also a crime against the state,” and they are “punished” by mine security, hauled away within hours. The offender’s spouse and children are evicted from the town, too, thrown out into the gullet of the desert. Photographs at the Kleinzee museum show suspected smugglers and their families being held in barbed wire enclosures by the mine’s perimeter guards. The suspects stare beyond the wire, emaciated and afraid, into the photographer’s lens. The guards’ faces are hidden in the shadows cast by their hat brims, and their hands hover at their sides, ready. The image isn’t unlike those taken of the Second World War concentration camps—the ones my grandparents showed me when I turned thirteen, because, according to tradition, I was now man enough to behold the faces of my dead relatives.