The Kimberley Diamond Rush: How It Changed South Africa

Before the diamonds, South Africa’s interior was mostly farms. After the first diamond discovery in South Africa, and the gold that followed in 1886, it became one of the world’s great mining economies. The story is remarkable and uncomfortable in equal measure, and any honest account has to hold both. Here is what happened, in order, and what it left behind.

When were diamonds discovered in South Africa?

The first recorded diamond in South Africa was found in 1867: the Eureka, a 21.25 carat stone picked up by a fifteen year old boy near Hopetown. The fire caught with the Star of South Africa in 1869, an 83.5 carat stone that sold for five hundred sheep, ten oxen and a horse. The sale made the news, and the news made the rush. Within months, diggers were working the gravels of the Vaal River, and within two years the river diggings had given way to something far bigger. The full stories of both stones are in famous South African diamonds, and the Eureka’s place in Cape Town’s story is in Cape Town’s diamond legacy.

Colesberg Kopje and the Big Hole

In 1871 diamonds were found on the farm Vooruitzicht, owned by two brothers named De Beer, whose name, as De Beers, now outlasts everything else in the story. The claim that changed history came that July at Colesberg Kopje, a small hill on the same farm that turned out to sit on top of a pipe of diamond bearing rock. The hill was dug away, then the pipe beneath it, and the diggings became the Kimberley Big Hole: about 240 metres deep, 463 metres across, dug almost entirely by hand. By the time work stopped in 1914, it had yielded roughly 2,700 kilograms of diamonds, and the town of Kimberley had grown up around it. In 1882 Kimberley became the first city in the southern hemisphere to have electric street lighting, powered by its own boom.

The Consolidation: One Company, One Market

The rush produced chaos first, and monopoly second. Small individual claims became unworkable as the diggings deepened, and by the late 1880s the claims had been consolidated by a handful of financiers, most famously Cecil Rhodes, whose company joined Barney Barnato’s to form De Beers Consolidated Mines in March 1888. The result was an industry dominated by a single buyer and seller of rough stones, a company that controlled most of the world’s rough diamond distribution until the start of the twenty first century, and the reason the word cartel still follows the industry. The trading system that grew from it is part of the modern price story in diamond prices by carat.

The Human Cost, Told Honestly

No honest history of the rush can skip its human cost. The mines ran on migrant labour, in conditions that were brutal by any standard. From 1885 African mineworkers were housed in closed compounds, walled off from the outside world until their contracts ended, with families left behind. The wealth the mines generated built fortunes, industries and a city; the price of that wealth was paid largely by black labourers whose names are not on the plaques. Any visitor to Kimberley should hear both halves of the story.

What the Rush Built

The diamond fields pulled the railway inland from the Cape, reaching Kimberley in 1885, and fortunes made at Kimberley financed many of the gold companies formed after the Witwatersrand discovery of 1886, concentrating capital in a way that shaped the whole region’s economy. The rush also gave South Africa a diamond trade of its own, the trade Cape Town’s jewellers still work in. The longer economic story is in how diamonds shaped South Africa’s history and economy, and the journey of a stone from mine to modern ring is told in the journey of a diamond.

Seeing the History in Cape Town

You do not need to travel to Kimberley to meet the rush. The Museum of Gems & Jewellery in the cellar of Huguenot House, at 66 Loop Street, holds the southern African story from the Stone Age forward, including a replica of the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, a kingdom that flourished centuries before the rush. Entry is free and visits are by appointment. It is the right place to end the story, because it makes the point the rush obscures: southern Africans were working gold long before the first claim was staked at Colesberg Kopje.

Sources:

• South African History Online: All That Glitters, the diamond fields and the mineral revolution

• De Beers Group: Our History

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Kimberley