underpinning necessary for any great leap forward in human activity was in place. Such an advance also required human resources, capital and also raw materials backed by technology to be available, as they were. The mining industry was also ready and able to build upon the advances it had made in the 17th and 18th centuries, so all the blocks were in place for the greatest advance in human history.
1. Introduction
The 19th century felt the full force of the Industrial Revolution as scientific and technological advances accelerated and developments in a whole range of industries swept round the world. In earlier centuries restless European adventurers had launched expeditions to acquire essential goods, often agricultural commodities, and to chart the unknown or the barely known. In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution led to a more urgent need to find new sources of, particularly, industrial metals such as copper where local supplies were no longer adequate to fulfil the rapidly expanding needs of the newly industrialised powers such as Great Britain.
Once out of the bag, as we know so well today, the demands of technology which drive industrialisation are relentless. So it was in the 19th century, and the rapidly expanding appetite for raw materials led to a revolution in sea and land transport. It also provided the driving impetus for the great powers to colonise countries, which became key suppliers of raw materials, in order to guarantee them unfettered access to these metals and minerals.
2. Diamonds in South Africa
South Africa was the most important source of diamonds for the worldwide diamond jewellery industry for over a century, its lead position only beginning to waver in the 1970s following the huge discoveries in neighbouring Botswana. Before the South African discoveries in the 19th century diamonds were found primarily in India in alluvial settings, until in the 1700s production fell away to be replaced by alluvial production from Brazil, as we learnt earlier.
The first diamond officially discovered in South Africa was the Eureka, a 21-carat stone found near Hopetown in the Cape Colony in 1867. It had been in the possession of Schalk van Niekerk, a farmer with an interest in gem stones, who enlisted the help of John O’Reilly, a trader, to determine whether the stone was a diamond. There was deep scepticism in Hopetown about the stone’s provenance but in due course it was sent to a geologist in Grahamstown, Dr William Atherstone, who agreed with O’Reilly that it was a diamond; it was eventually valued at £500. Two years later another diamond came into the possession of van Niekerk, who bought it from a shepherd in exchange for livestock. This stone, at 83 carats, was much bigger than Eureka, and having been cut and polished was eventually sold for £30,000 in London to the Earl of Dudley. The stone was named The Star of South Africa and its discovery set off a diamond rush to the Cape.
Strangely, despite the original Hopetown discoveries the area failed to live up to its early promise and prospectors moved on to the far more prospective Vaal River to the north. Here the Cape Colony butted up to the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal; the local tribe, the Griquas, also had land claims in the area. The Vaal River diggings had been worked for a number of years and as discoveries were made at Klipdrift on the north side and at Pniel on the south side, potential political conflicts became inevitable.
The work was hard but straightforward – mud and gravel was removed from the river and riverbanks, and then sieved through a mesh placed over a cradle. Water was poured through the mesh to dissolve and wash away the loose mud, leaving only the stones and gravel. The contents were then removed from the cradle and placed on a table for examination and sorting. Initially the diggings were broadly peaceful, with behaviour well above the levels most mining rushes experience.
Early tensions between British and Boers
In due course the diamond discoveries led to land disputes between the two Boer republics, the Griquas and the British, which were finally settled by the annexation of the disputed areas by the British in 1870. Before that, outraged by manoeuvring by the Transvaal over concessions on the north side of the Vaal, the diggers had set up an independent republic, which lasted only until the British sent a magistrate to the Vaal River diggings to protect the rights of British diggers. But as so often happens in the mining industry, events were soon to overtake these Klipdrift disputes. Early in 1871 new discoveries were made little more than 20 miles away at the farms of Dorstfontein and Bultfontein and then at Vooruitzicht, which was renamed De Beer after the name of the farm’s owner. Finally the discovery that was to ignite South Africa’s diamond industry was made nearby at what was named New Rush. The discovery was in the form of a volcanic pipe, which eventually became known as the Big Hole, and around it grew up the town of Kimberley.
Diamonds come in two basic forms; they are either gem stones or industrial stones. Gem stones used in the making of jewellery are the most valuable, being able to be cut into a variety of shapes and then polished to a lustrous finish before being set in a jewellery piece, often made of gold. Diamonds are amongst the hardest minerals found and cutting them is a highly skilled art. The trick is to find flaws within the diamond that allow a cutter to saw or break the diamond as he shapes the stone. A large diamond may only be able to be cut into a much smaller stone but the diamond residue is valuable as it can usually, itself, be cut into smaller diamonds. A gem diamond has great value due to its rareness but in terms of usefulness, its beauty is its sole asset.
Industrial diamonds, in contrast, have great use as a cutting instrument in their own right and are used in particular in drill bits to cut through rock or as abrasives to cut, grind or polish other materials, including gem diamonds in the shaping and polishing process. Not only are they extremely hard, diamonds also do not heat up during cutting and metal can be cut extremely thin by a diamond cutter. Diamond can also be used to draw very fine wire. Industrial diamonds cannot be used to make jewellery stones as they lack the colour and clarity so important for cut and polished gems. Also, though diamonds are one of the hardest minerals known, the natural flaws and weaknesses in many stones mean that they can fracture and shatter.
For instance, the stones that lie off the coast of Namibia and South Africa are only a fraction in number of the stones from inland kimberlite pipes washed down the Orange River over many millennia. Some stones did not make the open sea but were caught in traps on the river bed and in many cases buried in the mud, many others were too flawed to survive such a journey and had been shattered into worthless shards and un-mineable dust as they bounced down the rocky river course.
The Randlords
The development of the South African mining industry in the 19th century led to the rise of a number of historic figures often referred to as The Randlords. Cecil Rhodes was perhaps the most well known of them but the group also contained huge figures like Barney Barnato, Joseph Robinson, Alfred Beit, Charles Rudd and the Joel brothers (nephews of Barnato). Their interest in diamonds predated their involvement in the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, but it was gold that eventually pitted Rhodes, the most political of the Randlords, against the Boer government in the Transvaal. Having said that, there seems little doubt that Rhodes’s first love was diamonds and it was diamonds that saw him at his sharpest as he eventually battled Barnato for control of the Kimberley fields.
Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902)
Once one of the British Empire’s most revered but also widely hated figures, Cecil John Rhodes enjoyed a burst of popularity after his death when his legacy, the Rhodes Scholar awards to Oriel College, Oxford, in particular marked him as a great philanthropist and visionary. Since then his reputation seems to have been in almost permanent decline as first his admiration for the Anglo Saxon ‘race’ and then his vision of a worldwide British Empire poisoned his public esteem and earned the contempt, particularly, of modern
