Halfway There!

... For the likes of Cecil Rhodes, I9th century Kimberley was where ‘it all began’. Originally dubbed, The New Rush, from a chance finding came the largest diamond mine in the then, known world. Now seventy years on, I was there; standing where diamond diggers had toiled, cursed and for those less fortunate, been stripped of every penny by that same, lascivious Lady Luck who had earlier welcomed them to Hell with open arms.

Big-eyed and covered in yellow dust, not too far from the exact spot where Rhodes and his partners had gazed with wonderment at that great pit, the wind swirled and caught me unawares; perhaps descendent of those that sullied the clothes of diggers and diamond buyers, blowing outwards from the diggings – mixing in with oven-hot winds from a westward, ancient Kalahari...

‘Jefereee!’ Mother was shouting for me. I was still outside on the platform. The guard was waiting to blow his whistle; a sunburned man with small moustache like Hitler’s. Reminded me of Mrs Sager, back home on William Street. I grinned at the memory of her rushing out from her front door, spitting through her whiskers and lashing at us kids with her broomstick.

‘All aboard!’ he shouted for a second time so I climbed back into the train and watched Kimberley Town dwindle behind to nothing. Now there was only parched bushveld; the click and clack of iron wheels and the acrid stench of new smoke from the engine stack. The driver was laying on steam – Dad said we were more or less halfway up the line to Bulawayo. We were heading for British Bechuanaland and again, the thrill of new discoveries ruffled the back of my neck with goose bumps...

Sons of Africa; an extract:

Catherine Goddard stood within yards of the opencast diggings. She looked down from the unfenced edge of that sombre pit and as she had done a hundred times before, watched a race of tiny insect-like figures risk life and limb for those elusive, precious stones of pure carbon – some no bigger than a single grain of sand, though sometimes for the more fortunate, larger than the egg of the wild Namaqua dove that had once nested there before the trees were felled and the earth laid back to expose the richest diamond mine the world had ever seen. It was more than a mile across and where once the arid ground had risen up as a desolate, thorn-capped hillock above the Boer farm Vooruitzigt, now there gaped a deep and ominous scar in the earth’s crust and already men as far away as England were calling this phenomenon ‘The Big Hole’.

  Below her feet, desperate men swarmed as ants to a broken mound of yellow earth. In their hundreds they climbed and crossed from rickety ladders to narrow causeways, some going even deeper into places Catherine’s eyes were unable to reach. Others rose up for the sunlight and it was on one such ladder that she recognized her son Mathew, coming up hand over hand for the rim on which she was standing. For one indulgent moment, Catherine looked down again into the ominous throat of that great pit, and she remembered that time, more than two years ago when her husband had enlightened her inquisitive mind as to the intricate workings of this vast, all powerful emporium.

 ‘Those are the steam engines that power the pumps and winches…’ He had explained, then together they had looked down through almost two hundred feet of dizzying heights to the chasm’s floor where the endless ropes were anchored to their sheaves and men so black as human chips of wetted coal were filling skips with yellow diamond-bearing earth. ‘The full one is winched to the surface – the empty one replaces it,’ he had told her, and she had been amazed, almost overwhelmed by the complexity of the operation. Now, through lack of funding and shattered expectations, men were abandoning their dreams so that gaps of a hundred yards and more had appeared between the diggings. Rumours of dwindling ore reserves had been spread amongst the claim owners by unscrupulous men, convincing others as to their folly in hanging on to what would soon be seen as worthless pieces of torn earth, for the friable yellow Kimberlite oxides were bottoming out. However, veiled by ignorance and hidden beneath that diminishing soft upper layer of accessible earth were the untouched ores of ‘blue ground’, a mile-wide pipe of living rock which in its molten state had been forced by immeasurable pressure from deep inside the earth’s mantle, now a quiescent guardian of uncountable fortunes, though without explosives and hefty financial backing, harder to break from the depths of that pit than the pillars of hell itself...

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