Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  Until 2004, when De Beers agreed to plead guilty to criminal price-fixing and pay a multimillion-dollar fine, the Oppenheimers and their cohorts were, in fact, treated as an organized crime group in the U.S., which legally prevented any more than three De Beers executives from even being on U.S. soil, for any reason, simultaneously. I wonder if Nicky and Jonathan considered this treatment a badge of honor, a testament to what Cecil John Rhodes once called “so much power.” I wonder if they even laughed a little on the inside when they wrote, “You reinforce our brand through the way you think and act every day. As you have heard both of us say many times before, the men and women of De Beers [whom in other memos they dubbed “the magic people” and “the best kind of people on earth”] have a responsibility to live up to diamonds. The diamond’s place in modern—and future—cultures, and the promise it holds for every person who possesses one, acts as an invisible force, pushing us inevitably and irrevocably toward the right side of history.” I wonder which of their secretaries took dictation for this memo. I wonder if she rolled her eyes when they decided to sign it, “Forever.”

  MacDonald and I pass through an area sans windbreaks, and when I finally find my voice again, I ask him why there isn’t any attempted restoration going on here.

  “Look,” he says, “we want to rehabilitate the environment, but not at the expense of the surrounding economic area. This is still to be mined for diamonds once Trans Hex comes in. They’re the managing group—big operations in Angola. There’s still an estimated 4.5 million carats here that they know of. It’s just not economically viable for De Beers to take them out right now.” He tells me the forthcoming miners, like the miners before them, will brace themselves on one level or another in the pits and, as the diamonds collect in gullies, sweep the bedrock of the sixty-some meters of sand atop it. “It looks like an old slave-type setup,” MacDonald says. “They literally sweep the bedrock with brooms and dustpans. The sweepers are known as the Lashing Gang.”

  The oftentimes all-black Lashing Gang (a group of about one thousand, sweeping in teams of twenty) is responsible for clearing out, or “cleaning,” about 130,000 square meters of bedrock every month. In earlier days, each member of the Lashing Gang had in his overalls pouches a stack of brown envelopes preprinted with charts, into which he would pack his diamond pickups, recording the details on the outside. His hands were gloved, as are the diggers’ hands still today, as are those of the sorters. According to security measures, a worker must never directly touch a diamond, and devices are invented to prevent them from doing so.

  Sorters insert their hands into white gloves which are attached to sorting boxes, sealed off with Plexiglas. The ore is funneled into the case through a pipe at its rear, and the sorter pushes the dross through a chute that passes it outside the box, and drops the diamonds into an attached secure container. In this way, neither the sorters’ hands nor their breath reach the stones. The device resembles an old arcade prize dispenser.

  “So,” MacDonald says, “they can’t lift a glove up and scoop [a diamond] into their mouths. Unauthorized contact equals loss.” In the old days, the Lashing Gang had on mine property their own tea room, where they sealed their envelopes with pliers, turned them in to their superiors and received, as a bonus, a small sum and a cup of tea. The meager cash bonus was based on De Beers’s calculated overhead, which they determined to be about four rand (or forty cents U.S.) per meter swept. On average, the Lashing Gang had to sweep sixteen square meters in order to unearth one diamond, so De Beers calculated their expense at about $6.40 U.S. per gem, the mean size of which was 0.9 carats, which, today, has a market value of anywhere from $4,000 to $27,000. The Lashing Gang members received as a bonus less than 1 percent of $6.40 per diamond found—about five cents; less than 0.00019 percent of the market rate.

  This was back in the day (circa the 1940s to the 1960s) when mine security carried sharp assegai spears with which they sometimes maimed or killed those suspected of smuggling. “Mine workers were commonly sacked,” says Glitter and Greed author Janine Farrell-Robert, “whenever ‘on balance of probability’ the mine management decides they might have stolen diamonds.” Management often ruthlessly interrogated workers after they bought new clothes, or hats or boots or a car, intimidating them into resigning, or calling in security and their assegais.

  “The Lashing Gang are still known for using pigeons,” MacDonald says. “They want more than that small bonus. I just bought a bunch of those old envelopes at auction. Out of sentimentality, I guess.”

  The mine dumps slough and recede, depend on one another for support. The bedrock beneath them conceals just enough water to hatch the mosquitoes favored by some insectivorous species of pigeons—the ones who eat the curvaceous ectoparasites who have recently fed on our blood—as we train them to shoulder our baggage, convince them that our home is their home. They are accidentally vampiric, and full of sanguine love.

  But even this airspace is as barren as the macadam, which conceals the mass graves of people and pigeons—marked only by our drive to heap more dirt upon them, parabola after parabola, memorializing not the dead, but the diamonds that killed them. MacDonald parks the truck, and we stand windblown and isolated at the vertices, our clothes percussive, our bodies soft beneath sleeves and collars and cuffs, atop so many corpses and the volcanic pipes that support them, and our vantage point is horrifying and privileged and, out here, seemingly ultimate.

  There, on the upslope, the same windscreens that De Beers uses to lord over the wind form a kind of chalk outline around the holy burial site where the remains of a Khoi man were recently found by diggers searching for diamonds. The man’s skull rests among the foreleg bones of jackals, snake vertebrae, fish vertebrae, springbok teeth, lizard mandibles, crayfish swimmerets, the badly burnt carapaces of two angulate tortoises, the wing bones of birds, the petrified stomach contents of the inert and the extinct, the relics and refuse of human consumption, sacramental and throwaway. The remains’ knees are bent to his chest, his arms and hands reaching toward his skull to cover either his ears or eyes. The position is not quite fetal. This skeleton clearly couldn’t bear to look at something.

  Select members of the Kleinzee Museum Committee (who were not allowed on mine property) were consulted from a distance regarding the logistics of the excavation. They named the corpse Alfred. Initial reports on the excavation read, “The first find was the remains of a tortoise skeleton and shell. Not far beneath this, an anklebone was exposed. Clearing the sand with great caution, the complete skeleton was revealed.” Following said revelation, the De Beers–approved excavation team took out their tape measures. The bones were buried among diamonds, 70 centimeters deep, in what the reports dub “typical Khoisan manner lying on its left side in a contracted position, with the head pointing east and facing south.” The man was thirty years old when he died. In his mouth were the adapted “peg teeth”—single-rooted, straight-sided teeth whose function remains an evolutionary riddle to us. One of the excavators tried to smuggle out a rib bone for analysis and dating. A mine security guard confiscated it, and it was likely returned to the burial site. The excavator, without the aid of further analysis, believed the bones to be between two hundred and five hundred years old.

  “So this is like some sacred burial ground?” I ask, and MacDonald stares at me as if I’ve watched too many movies, which I have.

  “There are burial grounds all over the place,” MacDonald says. “If you travel from here to Cape Town, you’ll probably drive over some kind of burial site every twenty meters . . .”

  Something changes in MacDonald’s demeanor after we stop the truck again for a communal pee. “Pick nothing up,” he instructs, and I want to tell him that, yes, I get it. The sleeves of MacDonald’s windbreaker roar. His shoulders drop, and, after issuing this directive, he seems lighter, willing to confide or confess. Maybe it has to do with emptying his bladder.

  “My wife loves pigeons,” he says. “She feeds them all the time.
” He points to the silhouette of a giant line drag—an elephantine crane, both decrepit and a technological marvel—the pickup truck about the size of one of its lug nuts. “That’s to move the overburden,” he says, “which is the word used to refer to any portion of the Earth that lies atop the diamonds”—the crust, the stuff we walk on and build our homes on, and raise pigeons and children on, and eat turkey and salad on, and get sick on and die on. The overburden. “Isn’t it beautiful? That baby can excavate 75 to 125 tons of earth in one scoop. So big and it takes only three guys to operate it—the driver, the oiler, the spotter.”

  “What’s the spotter do?”

  MacDonald looks at me and shakes it off, zips up.

  “Yeah,” he says, “a real gorilla. A real gorilla in the mist.”

  He watches me take my notes on a bunch of torn scrap paper and old receipts and asks, “Why don’t you get a proper notebook?”

  I have no doubt that if we were the last two people on Earth—and it appears that we are—I would have been eaten by now. He puts his hands on his hips, surveys this place. “I think I love it out here,” he says. “Sometimes I stay longer than I’m supposed to. You’re a writer. I bring books out here. Out here, I learned Gaelic to cope with the stress. There are only 60,000 people in the world who speak it. I’ve seen so many people come and go because of AIDS . . .” I can tell he’s working something out, repeating things he’s said before in bars and in bed, but trying to pinpoint some larger shadow-story that will help put all of his time living in and on an erasure into context. “Before that, I was eating pills. I was on every medication known to man.” He squats and his knees crack. He scoops up a fistful of sand and tosses it into the wind.

  “Fuck!” he says. “This attempt to replant is a complete failure! The big challenge is to get things to grow. Some of these dumps have been reshaped and replanted for ten years, twenty years, and still nothing grows.” Though De Beers wants to restore this land, the indigenous population wants to devote it to farming, and are busy fighting—likely in vain—MacDonald’s efforts. The De Beers environmental division perpetuates the rhetoric that the land they disturbed has been so thoroughly ravaged that it has reverted to what they call “a pure state, pure Namaqualand territory.” De Beers believes that the desert here has ultimately suffered not from mining, but from the grazing of farm animals. They don’t want anyone else making money off it in the name of “restoration” and company policy back-patting. So, the corporation wants to block the indigenous people from farming here, wants Trans Hex to have their way with a small portion of it, and wants the rest as their private garden, their little spot to play with their bulldozers, compost cocktails, cardboard “grow” circles, shovels, and pails.

  The mist draws lassos over the ruin. It settles over these 32,000 hectares that will never be a private garden; over the larger-than-life line drag left to rot in the middle of the nothing. To what degree is this sort of restoration a disturbance of the disturbance?

  This is another story of self-importance. Restoration is a fallacy here, as is conservation. To what do they want to restore it, and is it theirs to restore, as if there’s no consequence to this marauding? Conservation psychologist Richard Osbaldiston stresses, “One of the strongest predictors of conservation behavior is the situation or context . . . [O]nly a small percentage actually observes conservation behavior; rather, most of them are based on self-report measures . . . [and] people regulate their own behaviors by changes in their cognitions, emotions, or perceptions . . . All of this fuzziness . . . is important to acknowledge.” This land resists both restoration and fertility, at least as we define it, cognitively, emotionally. The extinct passenger pigeon knows: nothing goes back, or stays put as it is—not even our lovely attempts to make such impossible things so, with squat green screens pressed into sand-stripped-of-sand, against the wind.

  “The reasons that the passenger pigeon was unable to recover from the period of overexploitation are not fully known,” says endangered species scholar Craig Kasnoff. Even our best grief evolves in spite of what we know or don’t know, want or don’t want. Strange how hurt diffuses, but maintains its intensity, settles malign, as if some offspring-of-lightning fog. It becomes harder to find the way out of it, and it becomes a part of us, fills us out. Strange how we grow into it like the laughable turtleneck that we’re bemused finally fits. Our inability to recover becomes fuzzier, which is important to acknowledge, perhaps, in this way: I think of Arlo, our fourth miscarriage, his ashes scattered into the mud of the Mississippi River, dead as Barney Barnato, and the sort of sadness that drops over us, another curtain of dust doing the disappearing of the happy people we once were, and the stupidity of restoration, how that desire is simply not up to the task. How the water carries the diamonds and the earth and Arlo, away. How consolation in the face of the barren is ever an insufficient, incomplete tool. We have both the heart, and the theorems, to tell us this.

  “I rehabilitated a flamingo once,” MacDonald says, staring into the negated hectares. “Amputated its injured wing, carried it out to a flock of flamingos, and it was good for a couple days until the jackal got it. I did as much human intervention as I could, and then the jackal came in.”

  Even if this stab at rehabilitation did work, even if Johann MacDonald and his puffy, flamingo-surgeon hands could make of this havoc something verdantly botanical, even if the jackal didn’t call foul, wouldn’t that also be insufficient? Atrocious, even? Wouldn’t it be a case of environmental restoration as a concealment of decades’ worth of gleeful corporate atrocity? Given that atrocity is often birthed of passion, and should De Beers’s senior environmental managers and spokesfolks be successful, the real atrocities perpetuated since the days of the East India Company, Cecil John Rhodes, and Barney Barnato will be redacted by, and overgrown with, scrubby plants that will struggle a little harder than the rest of their species to flower.

  “You know what the best thing about a diamond is?” MacDonald says. “You can’t break it. You can’t break a diamond. Gem-quality diamonds are indestructible.”

  I nod. Anything that escapes destruction so completely seems the product of absurdity. Perhaps it’s De Beers’s gender narrative that seduces us into believing that diamonds are not absurd—that to be a man, one must woo a woman with a proper diamond, and to be a woman, one must want to be wooed in such a fashion—but surely there’s more to it than that: a desire to possess something so ancient and so hard, fixed, a portion of the Earth’s history—however cut and polished—in which we did not yet participate. A stage of fire, lava. A claiming of ownership of things that survived a stage which we could not, making them measurable in carats, and wedged motionless into a strong setting; a claiming of ownership of the thing we call our home before we inhabited it, as it lay in wait for us, when the insects were as big as pigeons and the pigeons, crows, and the crows, cows. Such subterranean stories our wedded ring fingers silently keep! So much more than the story we thrust upon it of kimberlitic pipes and rivers, oceans, mines, mine closures, the blood, the collapses, the dumps, the failed restorations, MacDonald, Louisa, and me.

  In a 2012 farewell memo to their employees, after selling most of their shares to a sister company ready to bleed Southern and West Africa—aptly named the Anglo American Group—Nicky and Jonathan Oppenheimer actually wrote, “Moving forward, we will be out of the diamond business, but we will be keeping our eye on you.”

  “The mines are exhausted,” MacDonald says, then tells me that, before he became a mine closer and moved to Kleinzee, he wooed the woman who was to become his wife not with a diamond, but with a pet duck. His wife and two daughters have since separated from him, moved to Cape Town, waiting, month after month, for him to get another job. “I never pursued my dream of becoming an artisanal brewer of beer,” he says.

  “I’m a terrible manager,” he says, and walks uphill, away from the truck. I follow him until I reach a spot on the dump slope soft as quicksand. I sink to my shins. The windb
reaker is taut over his back. He’s looking for something. He bends down, examines the dirt, picks something up, and runs down the hill to me. I like the way his body bounces, slides down the sand as if in slow motion, clumsy running crossbred with clumsy skiing. He shows it to me, holds it to my face. It’s no larger than a pinhead. It’s radioactive blue. “A seed,” he says.

  *

  ON THE WAY OUT OF THE MINE, THE PAT-DOWN IS MORE THOROUGH, the shoe scraping more scrutinized. The guard confiscates my pen, but, at MacDonald’s urging, lets me keep my notes. Once outside, I feel as if I have surfaced from a depth, and take in air in gulps. I watch the wind animate the sparse plants. The shock of life. It’s so good to see bees again. They build their nests in the twisted sculptures of rusted chassis and bumpers, engine parts and tailpipes of all the old cars that entered the mine but were not allowed to leave, as they had so many crevices perfect for smuggling diamonds. The bees make a life for themselves here beneath the sign that reads:

  NO ENTRY

  UNAUTHORISED ENTRY PROHIBITED

  IN ACCORDANCE WITH REGULATION 3–1–1

  OF THE MINERALS ACT 50 OF 1991

  ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN

  There are two more lines of text on the sign, which have been sun-bleached into illegibility.

  Bartholomew Variation #4

  WERE THIS NOT TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SOUTH AFRICA, BUT ancient Rome, the oracular priests known as the Augurs would be craning their necks, watching the sky for bird behavior. To them, the divining of the future depended on whether the pigeons were flocking together or flying alone, uttering their coos or keeping quiet. They would have seen Msizi’s bird, the sky otherwise as vacant as an urn awaiting its ashes, and they would have prophesied of doom.

  But Bartholomew can’t take on the superstitions of others, especially those of the underlings of long-dead emperors. He has enough to carry. Many things are preparing to die in this desert, and he flies over them as if immune, but he is not immune. The air above the desert is still the desert.