Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  Flight of the

  Diamond

  Smugglers

  A Tale of Pigeons,

  Obsession, and Greed Along

  Coastal South Africa

  Matthew Gavin Frank

  Liveright Publishing Corporation

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  For Fava

  If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.

  —W. G. SEBALD

  Contents

  Map

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  Msizi and His Bird

  CHAPTER 2

  Isaac Newton & Co.

  Bartholomew Variation #1

  CHAPTER 3

  Beyond the Pits of Alexander Bay

  CHAPTER 4

  Port Nolloth and the Halfway Desert

  Bartholomew Variation #2

  CHAPTER 5

  Riding with the Faceless

  CHAPTER 6

  Driving to Kleinzee amid Shipwrecks and Snakes

  Bartholomew Variation #3

  CHAPTER 7

  New Rush and Kimberley: The De Beers Origin Story

  CHAPTER 8

  Beyond the Boom Gate, Touring the Erasure

  Bartholomew Variation #4

  CHAPTER 9

  Pilgrims and the Mountain of Light: A Link Between Myth and Human History

  CHAPTER 10

  Odyssey to Die Houthoop

  CHAPTER 11

  Champagne and Death at Dark: The Origins of a Pigeon Obsession

  Bartholomew Variation #5

  CHAPTER 12

  This Security Thing

  Bartholomew Variation #6

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  MAP

  Prologue

  AFTER OUR SIXTH MISCARRIAGE, MY PARTNER, LOUISA, AND I DECIDED that we could no longer endure another attempt at conceiving a child. In the nights that followed, we slept little, often waking in the middle of the night to sit up together in bed, stretch our hands out in front of us, fingers splayed. We did these exercises according to the ob-gyn’s instructions, to stimulate blood flow, to decrease the chance of Louisa cramping in sleep, decrease her dependency on the pain pills. We would neurotically peruse my nightstand notebook in which we had recorded pages of potential baby names over the last few years. We would comment on how the name ideas had changed, evolved, doubled back on themselves—a sad little record of our personalities in microcosm over that period. Each of these names was a ghost, we told ourselves.

  In the middle of the night, we started reciting—aloud, as if in mantra or lullaby—the names of these ghosts, of each distinctive personality Louisa and I almost had the shot at spending our lives with. Next to me was the rectangle of bare nightstand wood, framed in dust, where my Dad’s Pregnant Too book once rested. The farrago of loneliness was insidious and unevolving—hard, unholdable, unrockable, unfeedable fact. We feared all this love we had inside of us would ever remain stupidly, perfectly unrequited.

  “I need to be around my family . . . soon,” Louisa began repeating. And so, soon after the loss, we traveled to South Africa, Louisa’s home country, in order to seek solace with her family and to conduct a funeral ceremony of sorts at the Big Hole in Kimberley. A gaping open-pit and underground diamond mine that was active from 1871 to 1914, the Big Hole is a man-made Grand Canyon. Nearly fifty years after mining operations ceased, Kimberley’s city council, in an effort to boost the town’s economy, decided to rebrand the Big Hole as a tourist attraction. They built a museum and, in this new context, what had previously been dismissed as old rusty mining junk now became “important historical relics.” It has been drawing curious travelers since the mid-1960s, and some of Louisa’s happiest childhood memories—into which she would often retreat as part of the grieving process—involve her long-ago family vacations there.

  With a thermos of ashes, we squatted at sunset beneath the Big Hole’s red observation deck, and stared into what is often claimed to be the biggest hole excavated by hand in the world. We listened to the vibrations above us as other tourists stepped onto the deck, their bodies suspended to take their panoramic photos.

  We tried not to name this one. I recited the Jewish mourner’s Kaddish there at the threshold—all 42 acres of its surface area, 1,519 feet of its width, all 22,500,000 tons of excavated, missing earth, and Louisa’s contribution was the final “Amen.” Her syllables echoed downward through the shaft, from basalt to melaphyre to quartzite to quartz porphyry, to the Vaal River conglomerate, to deeply impacted and ancient granite gneiss. We watched the burnt bridal veil-ness of the scattering, the arching of this tiny atomized body all 790 feet down to the floor of this abyss that once revealed to us the stories of rocks and the burden of 6,000 pounds of diamonds.

  In order to contextualize my grief—however inadequately, but essentially—I became obsessed with the history of the Big Hole, which was, after all, the actual context and physical space into which we decided to embed the ashes of our final miscarriage, and, in turn, this phase in our lives. I desperately wanted to know what the Big Hole, and all of the other stories it contained, could tell us about the parameters of our own—to find out, in part, what our grief was made of.

  In order to foster this conversation between our lives and this larger history, I began to consider diamonds, and the industry they birthed. Pretty soon, I found pigeons.

  Like many who carry a childish sort of curiosity into adulthood, I am attracted to forbidden places. I trespass. When I heard that a portion of South Africa’s West Coast was owned by the De Beers conglomerate and had been officially closed off to the public for the better part of eighty years (the heyday of diamond exploration and mining in the area), plunging the local communities into a mysterious isolation, I became infatuated with the idea of visiting the place. During this “heyday,” everyone in Die Sperrgebiet (the Forbidden Zone), as it was called, labored for De Beers; no one was allowed to leave the area. De Beers kept the residents distracted with trucked-in luxuries and social programs. Fully furnished and well-stocked houses were provided. Sundries were provided, and regularly replaced. De Beers set up their own school system for the children, and provided various entertainments and recreational clubs. De Beers even had a shadowy agreement with satellite companies to redact images of the Forbidden Zone from their recorded files. It was, officially, an erasure from the earth: terra incognita meets planned community. Heavily armed security forces guarded (and still guard) its borders.

  Beginning in 2007, De Beers deemed portions of this land “overmined,” and as they began to withdraw their interests in the ensuing years, the doors to some of these towns slowly began opening to the public for the first time. Though De Beers still controls the area, and though signs threatening trespassers with imprisonment and/or death still proliferate roadside, restricted public entry is now possible.

  I badly wanted to listen to the stories of those who live there. Eventually, I navigated the hoops necessary for a visit (replete with the sending of various copies of my passport and other identifying documents in advance, and subsequent background checks).

  My journey brought me to the mining towns of Alexander Bay, Port Nolloth, and Kleinzee on South Africa’s notorious Diamond Coast. Once there on the ground, the story that began to haunt me most, and focused my inquiries, was the one told to me one afternoon by a diamond digger and diver (and curator of the ramshackle Port Nolloth Museum). His story was about the various ingenious methods employ
ed by those who participate in the thriving and ancillary “industry” of “illicit” diamond smuggling, of which he admitted he was a part. One such method involved the sneaking of trained carrier pigeons onto the mine property, affixing diamonds to the birds, and sending them into the air to fly from the mine to the workers’ homes. When overeager laborers began affixing too many diamonds to the birds, though, the exhausted and overloaded pigeons began to falter, and landed at random along the beaches of the Diamond Coast.

  De Beers officials caught wind of this and, having infiltrated the local governments, had it declared illegal to raise pigeons in the region. In fact, in 1998, a local lawmaker made it illegal to not shoot a pigeon on sight, should one have the means to do so. Still, many here raise pigeons in secret, and sometimes successfully smuggle diamonds using this method. But those who are caught suffer various consequences—official and unofficial. Sometimes, those suspected of raising pigeons (and subsequently smuggling diamonds) simply disappear.

  I began to wonder what these stories might mean. What these stories might reveal when told in conjunction with other, seemingly dissimilar stories. I wanted to speak to those who still raise pigeons in secret, who still smuggle in spite of the consequences. I wanted to speak to those who are charged with levying said consequences. I wanted to burrow into the hidden alleyways and natures of this big international business, using as a lens its impact on a handful of small, secluded towns on the Diamond Coast—the towns, one can argue, most directly and viscerally affected by this big international conglomerate. I wanted to find out about the industry policies—declared and undeclared, official and unofficial—that made such ingenuity (the likes of the “pigeon-method”) necessary, possible, and still prevalent.

  I found, strangely, that people were willing to open up to me—often eagerly and urgently—about the things they had seen and done, as a mere result of my anomalous presence there (which the local rumor mills rapidly circulated). A conversation with one person invariably led to a related conversation with another person. People, oftentimes wishing to unburden themselves of their stories, tended to find me, and together we whirled down the proverbial rabbit-hole. In order to situate these contemporary stories within a larger context, I soon began to investigate various mythologies across history and cultures, to find out where our stories of pigeons intersect with our stories of diamonds.

  It may sound moony, but I became interested in the notion of carriage itself, and the language we lend to it; the act of loading and sometimes overloading a pigeon with cargo we deem valuable, and the benefits and consequences thereof; the ways in which the labors of the carrier pigeon connect, however lyrically and ephemerally, to problems with the act of carrying, to miscarriage.

  In the aftermath of writing of this book, I try, and often fail, to take comfort in Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez’s admission, in the acknowledgments of his book News of a Kidnapping, with regard to the book’s subjects: “My only frustration is knowing that none of them will find on paper more than a faded reflection of the horror they endured in their real lives . . . I share this sense of inadequacy [and] . . . To all the protagonists and my collaborators, I offer my eternal gratitude for not allowing this gruesome drama to sink into oblivion . . . with the hope that the story it tells will never befall us again.” My sense of inadequacy here, too, remains overwhelming.

  Chapter 1

  Msizi and His Bird

  IN MSIZI’S LUNGS, THE DIAMOND DUST EMBEDS ITSELF INTO THE pink muscle tissue, the sponge and the honeycomb. This is the dust that will, most assuredly, elicit the growth of collagenous nodules, making it difficult—for the rest of his life—for the child to breathe. In his hands, a pigeon named Bartholomew.

  This is the pigeon, he believes, that will provide him reparations for his future medical issues, that will allow him, his mother, and his brother, their deserved riches. This is the pigeon that is not only a pet, but also an agent of smuggling, the pigeon that the mine bosses believe is an accessory to a quiet—but punishable—piracy. Bartholomew doesn’t think of words like weight or capacity, or weighed-down, or over-capacity, but he knows what it’s like to have too many diamonds tied to his feet.

  Msizi is afraid of getting caught. He is afraid, and he is thirteen years old, and he is sitting cross-legged in the red dust and white sand, and Bartholomew coos as Msizi strokes the feathers with his good pinky, and Bartholomew wriggles like a liver when the child tightens his grip involuntarily as he coughs up his blood. When he stops coughing, he tells me, “I probably should not be showing you him,” meaning the pigeon. “I don’t want him to die.”

  “Why are you?” I ask.

  Msizi takes one hand from Bartholomew, extends his index finger, and runs it along the skin of my forearm. “My mother says to,” he answers. “She says you are probably safe.” His voice is thin, but deep—too deep, it seems, for his age and slight frame. He smiles and begins to laugh a little, a laugh that quickly becomes another coughing fit. I confess that I do not know what his answer means, that all of my guesses are uneducated. When I ask him to clarify, he shrugs his shoulders, smiles again, and says nothing.

  It’s Sunday. We are on a beach just on the South African side of the Namibian border, on the outskirts of the restricted mining town of Oranjemund, sitting beneath a sun-bleached sign that reads “No Entry.” Here, we are mere specks in the middle of the Namaqualand region, 444,000 square kilometers of arid desert that encompasses the western coasts of Namibia and South Africa. Sitting concealed against the lee of a dune, we are about a kilometer from where Msizi lives in a small house with his mother and brother. We can hear, but can’t see, the ocean roaring. Msizi and I found each other this morning in the small dirt parking lot of the local multipurpose store, which sells an array of sundries from canned food to electronics. As he was wearing the palatinate blue overalls worn by those who labor in the diamond pits here, Louisa encouraged me to approach him and his mother, to tell them what, in part, I’m doing here. When I finished my spiel, his mother, disarmingly, urged Msizi, “Speak to him.” The infant-sized sack of cornmeal shifted in her arms. We organized to meet here, this evening. It was his mother, he tells me, who told him to bring Bartholomew.

  The sand at our backs is cooling, but still warm. This is the first stop along my planned route down the Diamond Coast, and I have been urged by the locals, Msizi’s mother included, to be careful while driving here, as many of the roads are private—for diamond industry workers only. The guards patrolling the roads, apparently, are often directed to shoot first and ask no questions whatsoever. I catch myself staring at Msizi’s lame pinky. The wind cakes my molars with dust.

  He tells me of being lowered into pits and shafts by older and bulkier men, a thin rope cinched under his arms. He does not show me the scars at his armpits, but I have seen him scratching. Msizi is wearing his work uniform—the blue jumpsuit—even though it’s his day off. It hangs loose over his body, and is sun-bleached and sand-softened, worn at the elbows and knees, cuffs and collar. It is speckled with faded orange stains that appear to be old blood. Msizi speaks of the digging required to fill burlap sacks with dirt, returning to the surface, rinsing and sifting through the contents for anything that catches the light and refracts it.

  “Some days are good,” he says, “and some days are bad. Some days, no stones. That’s when they think I’m hiding something. I only use Bartholomew if I find a good amount, early in the day. I have to wait for when no one is looking at me.” He smiles, and raises Bartholomew as if assessing his weight. “We are good at being invisible,” he says, more to the bird than to me.

  We don’t speak of how a diamond is an allotrope of carbon, or of the stone’s high refractive index of nearly 2.5. Nothing of how this measurement makes both physicists and brides-to-be salivate. Nothing of rainbows. On these issues, and others, the pigeon also stays quiet, searching for warmth in the hidden pockets of its own breast. Only when the circling vultures make their velociraptor screams does Bartholom
ew turn toward the sky. Msizi scratches at his dry scalp. His knuckles, too, are dry and cracking. His eyes are bloodshot and seem to be permanently so, as if they’ve taken in too much sand.

  “I start at four,” Msizi says, and I’m not sure if he’s referring to his age when he began laboring in the diamond mines, or the morning hour at which he begins his shift. Though recent child labor laws in South Africa prohibit the hire of someone under the age of fifteen, the law is rarely enforced. According to a 2016 report by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, “Gaps in labor law and criminal law enforcement remain. Children in South Africa [continue to] engage in the worst forms of child labor.” According to the same report, the percentages of children between the ages of five and fourteen who work, who attend school, or who combine work and school are all “unavailable.” One recent survey found that 46 percent of diamond miners were between the ages of five and sixteen.

  The sun is down, but the red earth holds its light, makes it seem as if it’s still up. Msizi and I listen out for voices or footsteps or the cocking of a gun, but all I can hear is the ocean and the wind, and the sand blowing against our bodies. I imagine the three of us as glimpsed through a sniper’s scope, the crosshairs bobbing from Bartholomew to Msizi to me.

  Msizi noses deeply into the feathers, knows that a feather stripped of barbs is bone. The code of the body. The positioning system in the synapses, the electric impulses, the capillaries, the heart. Like all of us, the bird knows something, but does not know how it knows it. The bird does not even coo. The bird, in fact, shows no outward signs of pleasure, or affection, at all.

  “They’d probably kill me for talking to you,” Msizi says, smiling.

  “Who?” I ask, and Msizi shrugs. “Then why are you talking to me? Your mom said it was okay.”

  Msizi sniffs at Bartholomew’s head. He laughs weakly; more of a dry heave than a laugh. “Can you run fast?” he asks.