In the beginning, there were diamonds on a farm owned by the Dutch brothers – Diederik Arnoldus and Johannes Nicolaas De Beers- in the Orange Free State, South Africa.
Then there were the British government’s demands, and in the end, the De Beers sold off the farm to Alfred Johnson Ebden. With time, there was a diamond rush on the farm.
The miners dug so deep that they created what is known today as the Big Hole. They also created two mines on the farm. One of the mines became known as the De Beers mine.
All this happened in the early 1800s before the birth of Ernest Oppenheimer. But the British Cecil John Rhodes was already renting out water pumps to miners.
The Eureka
In 1867, a farm worker, Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs, picked a diamond along the Orange River banks near Hope town. The same Orange River marks the border between Namibia and South Africa.
Jacob’s mother rescued the diamond from the children and gave it to a neighbour, Schalk van Niekerk, a stone collector. Van Niekerk gave the stone to a stone dealer, John O’Reilly, who took it to a Grahamstone geologist called Dr William Atherstone.
The geologist concluded the stone was a 21.25-carat diamond valued at 500 pounds before and 10.73 carats after it was cut. The diamond was named Eureka.
The Cape Colony governor Sir Phillip Wodehouse bought it for 1 500 pounds. Of course, Wodehouse sent the diamond to England for Queen Victoria to see.
Even at that time, Ernest Oppenheimer had not been born yet.
The Star of South Africa
In March 1869, another farm boy, Booi from the De Beers farm, found another stone. This time, an enlightened Van Niekerk took the diamond in exchange for 10 oxen, a horse and 500 sheep. Van Niekerk sent it to a jeweller, who concluded the stone was an 83.5-carat diamond. He sold the diamond for 11 200 pounds. This diamond was named The Star of South Africa. The Earl of Dudley bought it later for 25 000 pounds. The Star of South Africa came to be known also as the Dudley diamond.
The Birth of Kimberley
The news of this latest find attracted diamond hunters to Orange River banks, where they set up camp and searched the area. A settlement took shape to accommodate about 50 000 diamond hunters in the area. A school, a hotel, a bank, a hotel and even a church sprung up. That was around 1872 – eight years before Ernest Oppenheimer was born in Germany.
An enterprising British, Cecil John Rhodes, brought a pump he rented to the miners so that they work safely during the rainy season. Rhodes was 19 at the time. Renting out pumps and diamond claims speculations became a foundation for Rhodes’ diamond business. He also brought together the small mines around the De Beers farm. In 1880, Rhodes founded the De Beers company.
Rhodes had to contend with another British diamond speculator, Barney Baranto, who had bought over Kimberley Mine. In 1889, when Ernest Oppenheimer was nine years, Rhodes bought Barantos’ Kimberley mine for £5,3-million and merged the two into the De Beers Consolidated Mines.
The Cullinan Diamond
In 1897, Ernest Oppenheimer started working for the diamond brokerage company Dunkelsbuhler in London. He was 17. A year later, some people found a few diamonds in southern German South West Africa (now Namibia). In 1902, Dunkelsbuhler sent Ernest Oppenheimer to Kimberley. Ironically, that was the year Cecil John Rhodes died.
On 25 January 1905, a mine manager, Frederick Wells, at the Premier Number 2 Mine owned by Thomas Cullinan, found a 3,106-carat diamond weighing 621.20g. The Cullinan is the biggest diamond ever found in the world.
The Cullinan was taken to London for sale but could not be bought. The government of Transvaal bought the Cullinan in 1907. The diamond was cut and produced a 530.4-carat Cullinan I, named the Great Star of Africa by Edward VII. It weighs 106.8g.
The second 317.4-carat piece – Cullinan II – weighs 63.48g. King Edward named this Second Star of Africa.
The Cullinan I and II are part of the diamonds on the British Royal House’s crown, while seven more pieces make up the collection of the British monarchy.
Look, Mister, moy Klip (beautiful stone)
In 1908, the railway worker Zacharias Lewala picked stones at Grassplatz near Kolmanskop on land owned by the German company, the Deutsche Koloniale Gesselschaft (DKG).
Kolmanskop got its name from a 1905 incident where Johnny Coleman deserted his wagon after a heavy sandstorm. In Afrikaans, Kolmanskop means Coleman’s head.
Lewala gave the stones to his boss August Stauch, who rightly suspected the stones to be diamonds. Stauch ordered the workers to search for more beautiful stones.
Some historical records erroneously claim that Stauch was the one who found the first diamonds in Namibia. However, Stauch teamed up with Soenke Nissen to stake a claim around the area, about 10km from Lüderitz, where Lewala had picked the stones.
The DKG gave small diamond syndicates concessions of up to 50 years until the company agreed with the German government to declare the area a Forbidden Territory.
Kolmanskop shaped up like a town to cater for the miners, but in September 1908, declared a Sperrgebiet or prohibited area 72km of Lüderitz and stretched along the Atlantic coast, covering 26 000 km2. Much mining activity was done at Elizabeth Bay, Kolmanskop and Pomona. The area, also called Diamond Area 1, was closed to the public. (In 2004, the Namibian government created the Tsau ǁKhaeb National Park in the area.)
The Deutsche Diamantengesellschaft, or the German Diamond Company, had sole rights to the diamonds in the prohibited area. By 1909, South-West Africa was producing about 500,000 carats.
While the German Diamond Company was busy at Kolmanskop, Ernest Oppenheimer became the Kimberley mayor in 1912.
In 1915, General Jan Smuts’ forces defeated the Germans in South West Africa during World War I and took control of the Sperrgebiet. This was the year when Ernest Oppenheimer’s term as Kimberley mayor ended.
Two years later, Ernest Oppenheimer founded the Anglo-American Corporation.
Ernest Oppenheimer’s small step towards controlling the world diamond market was getting his foot in South West Africa. To do so, he negotiated with the German owners of the diamond fields, with share offers in the Anglo-American Corporation. After negotiating with the Germans, Ernest Oppenheimer formed the Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa in 1920.
South West Africa and the Consolidated Diamond Mines signed the Halbscheid Agreement, which gave Ernest Oppenheimer’s company 50-year sole rights to Diamond Area 1 in 1923
He still had to break De Beer’s monopoly of 90% control of the world’s rough diamond market. Ernest Oppenheimer’s first move was to ask for shares in the De Beers company and a seat on the board in exchange for diamond properties in South West Africa. By 1926, Ernest Oppenheimer was sitting on the De Beers board after buying his way in.
The abandonment of Kolmanskop
The hive of activity at Kolmanskop started to end in 1928 when prospectors from the Anglo-American Corporation stumbled upon a diamond-rich area on the mouth of the Orange River.
First, the miners found 38 diamonds, and later more diamonds, some as big as 246 carats, were dug up. When the economic depression hit the world in 1929, mining activities slowed. By 1936, all diamond mining activities had moved to the mouth of the Orange River.
The settlement that sprung from the diamond mining activities was called Oranjemund (the Mouth of the Orange River in Afrikaans).
Ernest Oppenheimer’s Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa set its headquarters at the town in 1943. Oranjemund was eventually owned by the Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa until 2017.
Suidwes Afrika Prospekteerders
Johann Vivier is the first to explore diamonds from the seabed. He owned Suidwes Afrika Prospekteerders, which had an offshore diamond concession at the Orange River close to De Beers’ onshore operations.
Vivier focused on shallow waters, where he recovered 39 pieces of diamonds (21,4 carats) in 1958.
In 1961, Vivier worked the waters to a depth of 23,7m around Chamais Head, where he found more diamonds.
Vivier met Samuel Collins in 1961. De Beers had brought Collins to work on a pipeline since he knew about submarines. Collins also owned the Marine Diamond Company.
Soon after the two men had met, Collins acquired Vivier’s license and the Suidwes Afrika Prospekteerders. This acquisition enabled Collins to extend his concession to Diaz Point from the Orange River. He also started using barges to recover diamonds from the shallow waters.
Collins’ first recovery was 45 stones weighing nine carats from Wolf Bay near Luderitz.
By December 1962, Collins’ company had produced 12 700 carats. The company received a concession that allowed them to recover diamonds from deep water in 1963. The company’s production reached 240 000 carats by 1965.
Unfortunately, Collins’ company was hit by financial problems when a storm destroyed some barges. Left with no option, Collins approached De Beers to buy shares in the company.
De Beers being De Beers, agreed to purchase shares only if the Collins’ concession had been surveyed and found to contain diamond deposits. De Beers brought in Ocean Science and Engineering from the US to carry out the mapping process. De Beers also opened an office at Oranjemund for marine geologists.
The Ocean Science and Engineering company estimated that there were nine million carats when they completed the mapping in 1965.
Eventually, De Beers agreed, becoming the majority shareholder in Marine Diamond Company in 1965 when diamonds were being recovered from Chamais Head and Bakers Bay.
Even with De Beers on board as a shareholder, Collins’ fortunes dwindled, leaving production down to 132 000 carats in 1967 from 240 000 between 1966 and 1967 because of exhausted reserves and high operating costs.
The companies brought in one barge in July 1967 when they discovered the Hottentots Bay deposit to contain costs. This helped because, by 1970, production peaked at 239 898 carats, but the barge got old, and operations stopped in 1971.
De Beers took over full control of the Marine Diamond Company, renamed it the Consolidated Diamond Mines Marine in the same year and started scoping the marine resources, collecting samples offshore to test for the presence of diamonds in the sea. The sample collection was confined around Chameis Head, where geologists searched 100m below water.
It was until July 1975 that De Beers went back to marine mining after extensive research and planning on the type of vessels to be used.
