ON MONDAY, June 22, 1896, after five nights in Port Elizabeth, Clemens gave the first of three performances at the Town Hall. During the first, a woman in the audience began to laugh, and she continued to laugh so loudly and so often that she created a nuisance and had to be removed. It turned out that she was blind. Having learned that Clemens was the funniest man in the world, she persisted in thinking that everything he said was funny. According to a local reviewer, her hilarity disturbed the “venerable writer” and sometimes interrupted his points.
Town Hall, now City Hall, dominates Market Square, where farmers once unyoked their oxen. Today Market Square is a handsome, traffic-free plaza, enhanced by decorative brickwork and potted palms, an attractive oasis in a large, grim, industrial city. About twenty years ago a fire destroyed City Hall, which was gutted and rebuilt, its modern interior “all mohair and marble,” in the words of one local who described it for us. But the original stately façade, with its arched windows and central clock tower, was reproduced. Indeed, the façade looks better now than it had for years before the fire, as, bit by bit, decorative elements had broken off or had worn away. Now it looks as grand as it did when Clemens performed there.
After his third At Home and eighth night in Port Elizabeth, Clemens and his party boarded the train for Grahamstown on Thursday, June 25. They reached their destination, about seventy-five miles to the northeast, after a seven-hour ride, during which they saw ostriches in the fields.
Grahamstown, with its broad, straight streets, library, and air of culture, impressed Clemens. The streets are still broad and straight, the library still stands, and the town is still cultured, as can be seen from the University Bookshop on High Street, which currently displays in its shop window Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, Grahamstown is the home of Rhodes University.
Grahamstown would feel like an English country town, with its pubs and churches, and with its high school students wearing blazers, ties, and straw boaters, were it not for the brilliant blue sky overhead and the preponderance of black pedestrians on the sidewalks. The university tower and the cathedral spire face each other down the length of a broad, tree-shaded street, divided by a grass median and lined by one- and two-story structures, many from the last century
The Anglican Cathedral of St. Michael and St. George, parts of which date from 1824, dominates the town. When Alice and I step into the cathedral we are surprised by its lack of security. No church personnel seem to be present, although somebody gently ejects a madman who has shouted himself up the street and into the sacred place. Of the many memorial plaques found inside, one is sacred to the memory of an officer who fell in 1846 against “the Kaffirs.” Another memorializes a man who perished in the same year in an effort to “repel the inroads of a barbarous enemy.”
A notice appears below these markers: “There is a wide variety of memorial tablets and plaques in the Cathedral. Not all of them are written in language which would be used today. Some words are offensive to us all…But the Church has never hidden away its failures and its sins. The Church cannot and should not try to purify its history as if things never happened … So for the moment these plaques remain as part of our common history, and as a visible sign of our need for penitence.”
Near the cathedral is the Albany Drill Hall, where Clemens performed the night after his arrival in Grahamstown. It is a beautiful two-story stone building, near the library that Clemens noted. The Drill Hall is the past and present headquarters of the prestigious First City Regiment, whose members wear kilts when in dress uniform. A plaque above the door to the hall in which Clemens performed marks the campaigns in which the regiment has fought, including Basutoland (1880-81), South Africa (1899-1902), and Cassino (1944). Black-painted silhouettes of tanks decorate the walls. There is no stage. Instead, a small platform, reached by stairs on each side, stands at one end of the room. The hall, used for festive affairs such as weddings, still accommodates audiences. It will be a venue for the ten-day Grahamstown Festival in July.
The lack of a conventional stage did not impair Clemens’s ability to impersonate Mark Twain. A reviewer of his Grahamstown performance noted that “Mark Twain’s method of approaching his audience is unstudied to a degree. It suggests the idea of a retiring man taking a quiet stroll and while most pre-occupied finding himself suddenly confronted by an animated crowd anxious to pay him homage. The assembly may have disturbed his cogitations, but the enthusiasm with which his popular presence is greeted is apparently very gratifying, and his acceptance of it seems to express the fact that he was indeed somewhat lonesome, before he met them a moment ago, but now, he was glad to see them there.” Clemens’s personality, he wrote, was one of “exceptional charm and distinction,” and his manner is “chiefly conspicuous for its extreme simplicity, charm, and naturalness … There is an entire absence of straining after effect.” Whatever effort he makes “is wholly and admirably concealed.”
Upstairs, above the Drill Hall, is the officers’ lounge. It is done up in high colonial style, with trophies, photographs, and memorabilia displayed on shelves and a leopard skin draped over a chair. There is no record of Clemens’s being invited for a drink here, but on the day of his performance he signed the Visitors’ Book at the Grahamstown Club, where he played billiards with Smythe. Seven years later, Dr. Jameson, who had returned to South Africa and entered politics in the Cape Colony, after his trial and brief imprisonment in England, became a member. A member who joined considerably later, a mayor of Grahamstown, wrote an official letter ten years ago to congratulate the club upon the occasion of its centenary Membership in the club, past and present, he wrote, “has always covered the broadest spectrum of our inhabitants.”
The Clemenses and Smythe took the midday train for Kimberley on Sunday, June 28, and after ten hours broke their journey for a day at Cradock, Cape Colony, about one hundred miles northwest of Grahamstown. Their hotel stood “in a side of the vast bare dust-blown square,” as Clemens noted in his journal. “Clouds of dust blowing along the powerful wind, like snow in New England on a raw March morning.” For the first time since he was a boy, he saw a servant start a fire by bringing it on a shovel.
A reporter showed him the last telegram from Salisbury, reporting on the Matabele uprising, which had begun shortly after the failure of Jameson’s raid. The papers in England and South Africa had been covering the “rebellion” and writing dismayed editorials urging that Rhodesia not be allowed to relapse into “barbarism.” The Matabele had revolted once before, in 1893-94, after suffering brutal and large-scale confiscation of their land and cattle by Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. That revolt was put down by Jameson, as the Company’s administrator in the area. Now that Jameson was in jail, the Matabele — half starved as a result of the rinderpest, which was ravaging what was left of their cattle — rose again. Within a week of Jameson’s raid, the Matabele had killed more than one hundred whites. Soon joined by the Shona farther north, they mounted what was probably the most serious resistance to colonialism in southern Africa at that time. The dispatch shown to Clemens reported that 2,000 “natives” met the fire of Maxim guns and that 2,000 black workers had deserted their railroad gangs. Clemens may have also seen a Reuters dispatch that mentioned a hostile force of “two thousand natives.” “Strange,” Clemens told the reporter, “how that number, 2,000 natives, recurs in every telegram. Never more — never less!”
The Clemens party left Cradock on a cold Tuesday evening for Kimberley, 240 miles northwest, with Clemens complaining that he had to wait ten hours before the train stopped at a place where he could relieve himself. They arrived shortly after noon on Tuesday and proceeded to their hotel, which had erected a triumphal arch and flew the American flag in Clemens’s honor. “When the Great Yankee passed up the pathway,” reported a journalist, “a gentle breeze stirred the bunting, and lo! it was a signal of distress — it was upside down.”
Kimberley had begun as a shantytown twenty-five years earlier, when a diamond found by chance on the farm of an Afrikaner, Johannes Nicolaas de Beer, transformed the diamond rush that had begun the year before into a frenzy. Within four months of the discovery on de Beer’s farm, thousands of prospectors had flocked to this remote, sparsely populated place and were digging an enormous hole that looked, according to one commentator, “like a block of gorgonzola with spoonfuls of cheese gouged out of it.” Britain soon snatched the diamond fields from under the resentful noses of the Afrikaner republics, and before long speculators bought up the diggers’ claims. Within a few years a handful of entrepreneurs, Rhodes foremost among them, controlled the diamond industry, and by 1889 Rhodes had bought up the claims and mines of most of his rivals. It was chiefly the diamond millionaires, with their capital and knowledge, who invested in the gold industry after the goldreefs of the Rand were found in 1886.
When news of spectacular diamond finds reached Clemens in 1870, he responded with manic enthusiasm; he would write a book about the diamond rush, a subject, he told his publisher, that was “brimful of fame and fortune for both author and publisher.” Newly married, the father of a sickly newborn, and in his first year as partner in a Buffalo newspaper, Clemens could not go to the diamond fields himself. But he proposed to send a proxy, who would spend three months on the fields and take notes, which Clemens would then transform into another Innocents Abroad. He persuaded a journalist, former gold prospector, and old drinking buddy, John Henry Riley, to take the job. Clemens agreed to pay Riley’s passage to and from South Africa, give him a monthly stipend in South Africa, and a salary and board when he returned to live with Clemens during their collaboration. Riley could keep whatever diamonds he excavated, up to a value of $5,000. Any diamonds unearthed beyond that value, Riley would have to share with Clemens.
Riley, perpetually broke and dreaming of a fortune to be made first in diamonds and then in lecturing about his experiences, left his work in Washington at the beginning of 1871 and sailed for London and Cape Town, from which he made his way to East London. There he auctioned off his excess possessions, including the copy of The Innocents Abroad that Clemens had given him as an example of the kind of impressions that were needed for the new book, and then embarked, via oxcart, on the long and difficult journey to the diamond fields.
Three months later he left the fields and the thousands of prospectors who were digging there, with nothing to show for his pains but his notes and some mining claims — worthless, as it turned out — to be shared with Clemens. By the time he returned to America in the fall, Clemens had lost interest in the book and kept postponing his collaboration with Riley who, by the following spring, was fighting a losing battle with cancer. He died in September of 1872.
Years later, when Clemens was in East London, he met the man who had bought Riley’s copy of The Innocents Abroad. The day after that journal entry, during his first performance in Kimberley, he told his audience that “I was in Kimberley by proxy 20 years ago. On that occasion my representative bought a diamond mine from a man who did not own it. Before leaving Kimberley, I intend to take a look at it, and if it pleases me, I will buy it again.”
During his next two days in Kimberley, Clemens did visit some diamond mines, including the Kimberley Crater or Big Hole, which, as he wrote in Following the Equator, “is roomy enough to admit the Roman Coliseum.” The hole, one mile in circumference and 780 feet deep, is the largest hand-dug excavation in the world. It no longer yields diamonds, mining having stopped in 1914. Although partially filled with water now, it is still immensely impressive. Birds fly below its rim, dwarfed by the immense space. On one side you see the towers of Kimberley, which seem insignificant in comparison.
Once you have finished gawking, you can visit, on the west side of the hole, an open-air reconstruction of Kimberley in the 1880s. There you can visit a saloon (where you hear drunken, raucous singing), a church, a diamond buyer’s office, a ballroom, etc. As you walk under the huge pepper trees, you do not see the squalor in which the early miners lived and worked nor the conditions of the Africans who replaced them. You can, however, see a machine that deloused the latters’ clothing and blankets.
One of the most impressive displays is that of three small railroad cars, each holding a few bushels of brilliants. This is the volume of all the diamonds ever extracted from the hole, after they were sifted from the 22.5 million tons of earth and rock excavated along with them.
Clemens reported in his journal that the De Beers concern handled 8,000 carloads of excavated earth and rock a day, with each carload weighing 1,600 pounds. After passing these 12,800,000 pounds through successive processes, only three pounds of diamonds; “a big double handful” as he called them, would be extracted. He saw the tanks in which carloads of mud and water were stirred and churned and reduced to slush. He saw the slush reduced to sand. He saw men spread out the sand and seize the diamonds, and he saw young girls sort them. “Every day ducal incomes sift and sparkle through the fingers of those young girls,” he commented in Following the Equator, “yet they go to bed at night as poor as they were when they got up in the morning.”
Today all South African diamonds are sorted and graded at Kimberley’s Oppenheimer House, a skyscraper ringed by a security fence. The building was designed to provide ideal lighting conditions for the delicate work inside. Its north side is bereft of windows, and the windows on its south side are slanted to prevent direct sunlight from entering.
The long two-story building with lacy wrought-iron balconies, in which Clemens saw the diamonds that De Beers had collected in one day, still stands. The uncut gems were worth about £10,000 or £12,000, or between $50,000 and $60,000. (In Following the Equator he increased the take to $70,000, equivalent to the debt that sent him around the world.) He was also shown the compound in which the African miners were confined. “They are a jolly and good-natured lot, and accommodating,” he observed in his travel book. “They performed a war-dance for us, which was the wildest exhibition I have ever seen. They are not allowed outside of the compound during their term of service — three months, I think it is, as a rule.”
On Friday evening, July 3, after two At Homes and three nights in Kimberley, the Clemens party boarded a train to Cape Town, about 560 miles southwest, for a journey of a day and a half. On July 6, a day after his arrival, Clemens told a reporter that in Kimberley he had found a diamond as big as the end of his finger, “but there were so many people watching me that I did not bring it away.”