As diamond fever spread throughout southern Africa and beyond, the rush to the diamond fields of Griqualand turned into a frantic escapade that one Cape Town newspaper likened to ‘a dangerous madness’. In their thousands, shopkeepers, tradesmen, clerks and farmers set out in ox-wagons and mule carts, heading for the desolate patch of sun-baked scrubland in Griqualand where diamonds had been discovered, excited by the prospect of sudden riches; some travelled on foot, walking from as far away as Cape Town, a journey of 600 miles across the great thirstland of the Karoo. They were joined by a horde of foreign adventurers: seasoned diggers from the Australian goldfields; fortyniners from California; Cockney traders from the backstreets of London; Irish dissidents; German speculators; army officers on furlough; ships deserters; rogue lawyers and quack doctors.
The first scramble in 1869 was for alluvial diamonds discovered along the Vaal and Harts rivers. By late 1870, some 5,000 fortune-seekers had flocked there. Then in 1871, prospectors found the main diamond field on three Boer farms twenty miles south of the Vaal River: Du Toit’s Pan; Bultfontein; and Vooruitzigt, owned by Johannes de Beer and his brother. The rush there turned into a stampede. Beneath the farms lay four diamondiferous ‘pipes’, or necks, of long-extinct volcanoes, extending far below the surface and containing unimaginable riches.
In the early days, diggers using picks and shovels were able to scrape up diamonds lying close to the surface. Some made fortunes in a matter of days. Below an upper layer of limestone, they found ‘yellow ground’ – a yellowish, decomposed breccia which proved to contain diamond deposits even richer than those close to the surface. Beneath the yellow ground they came across ‘blue ground’ – a hard, compact blue-coloured ground that at first was believed to contain no diamonds. To many diggers it seemed that ‘the party was over’. But then they discovered that that blue ground was not rock-hard but friable, decomposing rapidly once exposed to weather. Moreover, it contained an even higher density of diamonds than yellow ground.
Within weeks, the main mine sites were transformed into a sprawling mass of tents, wagons, mud heaps and mining debris. The air was thick with fine dust stirred up by the constant digging, sifting and sorting of dirt that went on from morning until night. New arrivals were immediately struck by the stench and squalor of the settlements. The approach roads were lined with the carcasses of exhausted pack animals left to rot where they had fallen. Open trenches served as public latrines, sited at random amid the haphazard jumble of diggers’ tents. Flies swarmed everywhere. An acute shortage of water meant that most diggers were rarely able to wash; the nearest river for bathing was twenty miles away. In summer, the grey, cindery plains of Griqualand were like an oven; in winter, the nights were bitterly cold. When the rains came, ‘camp fever’ – mainly dysentery – took hold, striking down diggers by the score.
Working conditions were hazardous. At Colesberg Kopje, the diamond pipe on the De Beers’ farm that later became known as the ‘Big Hole’ of Kimberley, thousands of white diggers and their black labourers were crammed into a labyrinth of pits, endlessly filling buckets and sacks with broken ground and hauling them up and down ladders or on pulleys to the surface. The roadways above were permanently choked with carts and mules taking ‘stuff’ to sieves and sorting tables on the edge of the mine. Every day, some tumbled down into the pits below. The hazards became increasingly severe as the pits reached eighty feet or more below ground-level without support: roadways linking the pits to the mine edge frequently collapsed, leaving claims beneath buried under tons of soil.
Moreover, for most diggers the rewards were meagre. Some scraped away with picks and shovels for weeks on end finding nothing of value. Hundreds of claims were abandoned every month when diggers ran out of money to pay the required licence fee. Just as every day brought wagonloads of new arrivals brimming with hope and expectation, so in the other direction destitute men in ragged clothes trudged dejectedly away from ‘the Fields’, unable to afford the fare back to their homes. Everything depended on luck.
Nevertheless, the output of diamonds continued to soar. By the end of 1871, a small stretch of Griqualand, covering in all no more than fifty-eight square miles of scrubland, had become one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. It was also the place that marked the beginning of an industrial revolution in Africa.
The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand precipitated a tussle between Britain, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal for control of the territory. Hitherto a backwater of little interest to any of its neighbours, its borders and status had remained ill-defined. In a treaty signed in 1834, the Cape Colony had accorded due recognition to the Griqua kaptyn, Andries Waterboer, as an independent chief of the area. But Boer farmers had subsequently obtained farm leases in Waterboer’s territory, registering their titles with authorities in the Orange Free State. The Free State had then laid claim to a large part of Griqualand. When the diamond rush to the first alluvial diggings in the Vaal River began in 1869, the Free State claimed sovereignty there and then extended their claims to the ‘dry’ diggings to the south, sending a landdrost to the mining settlements around Colesberg Kopje to supervise diggers’ committees and collect a portion of licence fees. Other claims to the area were made by Nicholas Waterboer, the son of Andries Waterboer; by a Tlhaping chief named Mahura; and by the Transvaal government.
Britain’s interest in the diamond fields was equally keen. Officials in Cape Town were determined that Britain should gain possession of the territory and prompted Waterboer to appeal to the Cape government for ‘protection’. On a tour of the diamond fields in February 1871, the new British high commissioner and governor of the Cape, Sir Henry Barkly, quickly realised that what was at stake was not just a frontier dispute over land ownership but the whole issue of political leadership in southern Africa. He resolved that Waterboer’s claims to the diamond fields needed to be supported, regardless of their merit, to ensure the supremacy of British interests. The British duly set up an enquiry which ruled in favour of Waterboer’s claims. Waterboer promptly asked Barkly to take over the territory. Without waiting for approval from London, Barkly proclaimed the annexation of Griqualand West on 27 October 1871 in the name of the British Crown. Griqualand’s eastern border with the Orange Free State was realigned to ensure that the whole of the diamond fields fell within its jurisdiction.
Resentment over Britain’s annexation of Griqualand festered for years. In Bloemfontein, President Brand issued a counter-proclamation and continued to protest year after year at the dispossession of territory he considered belonged to the Free State. As a sop to the Free State, the British government eventually agreed in 1876 to make a payment of £90,000.
With the coming of British rule, names were changed. The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, complained that he could neither spell ‘Vooruitzigt’ (‘Foresight’), nor pronounce it. What was needed, said Kimberley, were ‘English-sounding names’. Accordingly, a proclamation was issued, renaming the mining encampments on Vooruitzigt as Kimberley; the diamond-bearing blue ground became known technically as kimberlite.
Kimberley by 1873 was fast growing into the second largest town in southern Africa, boasting a population of some 13,000 whites and 30,000 blacks; two miles away, Dutoitspan added a further 6,000 to the total. At the town centre, amid a chaotic jumble of tents and canvas-covered frame houses, stood Market Square, a vast open space crowded by day with wagons and Cape carts, where diggers, their families, diamond dealers, tradesmen and merchants gathered to peruse piles of goods for sale and exchange gossip and rumours. Each morning, Boer farmers drove wagonloads of their produce to the square. Other wagons piled with mining equipment, building materials, household utensils, provisions and liquor arrived from Cape Town and other coastal ports, having survived the journey of hundreds of miles over rough tracks. Adjoining Market Square was Main Street, a business thoroughfare lined with stores, canteens, bars and the frame tents of diamond ‘koopers’. Scattered around Kimberley was an array of rough hotels, boarding houses, billiard halls and gambling ‘hells’. Drinking, gambling and sex were the town’s main diversions.
The diamond boom attracted a steady flow of black migrants from across southern Africa. Many travelled for weeks on foot to get to the diamond fields, arriving exhausted and emaciated. The largest number came from Pediland in the Transvaal region 500 miles away, encouraged by the Pedi paramount chief, Sekhukhune, to earn money for the purchase of guns. Tsonga migrants (‘Shangaan’) walked from Gaza territory north of the Limpopo nearly 1,000 miles away. Zulus arrived from Natal and ‘Moshoeshoe’s people’ from Basutoland. In all, the mines drew more than 50,000 Africans each year in the early 1870s.
Most stayed for periods of between three and six months, working as labourers for white diggers or finding other work in the camps. They earned usually about 10 shillings a week and a further 10 shillings in the form of food, leaving for home once they had saved enough cash to buy cattle or a plough or a gun. An old muzzle-loading Enfield discarded by the British army could be bought for £3; a breech-loading Snider cost £12. Between April 1873 and June 1874, some 75,000 guns were sold in Kimberley. Gun sales provided a striking spectacle. ‘At knock-off time,’ wrote one pioneer digger, ‘our Kaffirs used to pass down streets of tented shops owned by white traders and presided over by yelling black salesmen whirling guns above their heads. These they discharged in the air crying: “Reka, reka, mona mtskeka” [Buy, buy, a gun] A deafening din. A sight never to be forgotten.’
A small number of blacks and mixed-race Cape ‘Coloureds’ succeeded in establishing themselves as claim-holders or share-workers managing claims in return for a percentage of profits. They congregated mainly at Bultfontein, otherwise known as the ‘poor man’s diggings’. The British authorities insisted that blacks and Coloureds should be given equal opportunities with white diggers as claim-holders and permitted to buy and sell claims for themselves on the same basis.
But white diggers made clear their opposition to such notions and agitated to restrict the activities of blacks on the diamond fields. They claimed that black diggers possessing the right to sell diamonds acted as conduits for the illegal traffic in gems. What white diggers wanted was black labour, not black competition.
Facing white protests, the British authorities compromised, issuing a new set of rules for labour contracts that required ‘servants’ or employees to carry a pass signed by their ‘masters’ or employers at all times. Anyone found without a pass was liable to a fine, or imprisonment or flogging. In theory, the law was colour-blind, applying equally to all servants or employees. In practice, it applied only to blacks. Blacks who were their own masters, holding claims or cart licences, or engaged as independent traders, were granted ‘protection passes’ to prove their exemption from pass laws – a pass to avoid a pass. The new regime for labour contracts linking them to a system of pass laws became the main device for controlling black labour throughout southern Africa for decades to come.
As the excavations at Kimberley mine deepened, mining operations became increasingly complex. To overcome the problem of collapsing roadways, diggers constructed an elaborate system of cable transport held in place by a series of massive timber stagings erected around the margin of the mine. Hauling ropes attached to windlasses were used to lift buckets up from the claims. By 1874, there were 1,000 windlasses on the stagings. But no sooner had the cable system been devised than more severe problems occurred. As the digging went deeper, the outside walls of the mine, consisting predominantly of black shale or ‘reef’ extending downwards for 300 feet or more, began to disintegrate. Summer storms regularly set off avalanches. Flooding added to the diggers’ woes.
The scale of the problem spelled the end of the age of individual claim-holders. Hitherto, the number of claims that claim-holders could possess had been restricted to protect the interests of individual diggers and prevent mining companies from gaining control. But in 1876 mining authorities concluded that the future of mining belonged to capitalists and companies able to operate sophisticated steam machinery and other modern equipment, and lifted the restrictions.
A new breed of mining entrepreneur emerged. Some came from the ranks of the more successful diggers; some were Kimberley traders who had made their fortunes importing equipment and supplies; the most active group in purchasing claims were diamond merchants. All relied heavily on international connections. Among them were a number of youthful immigrants from Europe who struggled to the top of the pile and amassed great fortunes.
The most colourful of the new entrepreneurs was Barney Barnato, a Jewish diamond trader, born in 1852 in the East End of London, known in Kimberley more for his performance as a music-hall entertainer than for his talent for business. He arrived in the diamond fields in 1873 carrying a box of poor-quality cigars in the hope of starting a business career there and began at the bottom end of the diamond trade working as a ‘kopje-walloper’, itinerant diamond buyers who scoured the mines each day in search of diggers selling small, cheap diamonds they could purchase on the spot. Facing hard times, he moved into a back room in a sleazy hotel, a notorious rendezvous for illicit diamond dealers, that was owned by his brother Harry. Together they managed to accumulate enough money to buy four claims in Kimberley in 1876, risking their entire capital. From such precarious beginnings, the mining interests of the Barnato Brothers began to prosper, albeit under a cloud of suspicion about the origin of their wealth. By 1878, their claims were bringing in an estimated £1,800 a week. By 1880, they had become major players in the diamond trade, with offices in London.
Another central figure was Alfred Beit, the son of a Hamburg merchant who was sent to Kimberley in 1875 at the age of twenty-two as the representative of a German diamond firm. A small, shy and unprepossessing man, he made his first fortune from property deals but became one of Kimberley’s leading experts on diamonds and a financial mastermind. Beit forged a lasting business partnership with Julius Wernher, a young German aristocrat who had arrived in Kimberley in 1873 as the agent for a Paris-based diamond merchant.
A young Englishman, Cecil Rhodes, also gained a foothold in the Griqualand mines. The son of a country parson, Rhodes had been sent from England to Natal in 1870 to work with his brother in a cotton-farming venture but had joined the rush to Griqualand a year later at the age of eighteen. Along with an English partner, Charles Rudd, he built up a stake in a part of De Beer’s mine where claims could be purchased more cheaply than in Kimberley mine. By the age of twenty-two, he was already wealthy, worth about £40,000. Together with a group of other claim-holders, Rhodes then set his sights on gaining control of the entire De Beers mine, launching a joint-stock company in 1880, naming it De Beers Mining Company.
As mining profits soared, Kimberley took on a more staid character. Under British supervision, the grog shops and black prostitutes that had made Saturday nights in Kimberley the stuff of legend were banished. The town boasted churches, chapels, a synagogue, schools, temperance societies and a public library. Streets were regularly watered to keep down the dust. On Main Street, the Craven Club, with its reading-room, card room and billiard room, provided a convenient rendezvous for well-to-do diggers. Nearby, the Varieties Theatre offered entertainment in elegant surroundings. A new residential suburb named Belgravia was laid out in 1875, attracting ‘leading merchants and men of leisure’ who built brick houses with all the trappings and comfort expected of a Victorian bourgeois lifestyle. A telegraph office opened in 1876, providing a direct link to Cape Town.
But Kimberley nevertheless still had the feel of a frontier town. Paying a visit to Kimberley in 1877, the English novelist and travel writer Anthony Trollope was impressed by the riches it produced but complained of the heat, the dust, the flies, the food, the living conditions, the high prices and the barren landscape. ‘There are places to which men are attracted by the desire of gain which seem to be so repulsive that no gain can compensate the miseries incidental to such an habitation,’ he wrote.