Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  There seems to be no way out of Port Nolloth but the way you come in. There is no road south along the coast, and the public road north dead-ends at barricades and security guards who stand up from fold-out chairs, their guns clapping their hips like pterodactyls, prepared to ask confused travelers the nature of their business here. Beyond these guards, the road to Oranjemund, Namibia, is private, closed off to all except those who labor in, or direct, the trade. My heart is disturbed by the knowledge that the Khoi people once called this area “Where the Water Took the Old Man Away.” In one brochure, I learn that by “Old Man,” the Khoi were likely referring to God.

  The Port Nolloth De Beers hub is as haphazard as an Indiana railyard, equipment parts that once belonged inside boats and tractors and trucks scattered willy-nilly and rusting in the sea air. Like many other rural villages on the continent, this place once saw the influx of intrepid diamond evaluators from De Beers’s headquarters, who, having left the comfort of their air-conditioned London offices, jet-lagged and suffering from intestinal duress, navigated remote jungles and coastlines with attachè cases filled with cash. Here, as elsewhere, they were charged with negotiating with intricate rings of smugglers, thieves, and local middlemen, most of whom distrusted any official operating for the so-called legitimate cartel. Many of these De Beers officials disappeared in the process, their bodies unrecovered.

  The corporation launched local campaigns against the smuggling rings, arguing that if more diamonds were “illicitly” smuggled than “duteously” exported by De Beers themselves, this would rob places like Port Nolloth of their due taxes and, as such, infrastructure would suffer—roads, schools, and hospitals would go to hell. De Beers began infiltrating local government offices and building their hubs, outcompeting the smugglers and, eventually, persecuting them. Next to Port Nolloth’s broken jetty, a blue and white diamond boat lies beached, its flank run through with oxidized stalactites. Somewhere inside the ramshackle building—also blue and white—diamonds are being rinsed and sorted and packaged.

  “We don’t want to be part of a legacy of ghost towns,” says Manne Dipico, deputy chairperson of De Beers. To that end, offshore, the De Beers ship Peace in Africa (which cost 1.1 billion South African rand and has a life expectancy of thirty years—only seven years less than that of the average diamond miner), penetrates the seabed with its big drill, sucking up the sediment with a dredge pump into the bowels of the boat, which double as an onboard sorting plant wherein some sixty-odd boys and men sort through the slurry for diamonds. De Beers hopes that the Peace in Africa will reap an average of 240,000 carats per year, until the ship dies.

  On the ship’s deck, a man with an automatic gun scours the sky. If he sees a pigeon, its body will soon plop into the ocean with hardly a splash, and its parts will be churned up by the ship’s drill and pumped back into the sorting plant, where it will be distinguishable from the rest of the slurry only by the very discerning eye. Some of these boys and some of these men will be picking through the atomized viscera of the pigeons they trained to one day make them rich. If pigeons are spotted near the boat, these boys and men will be interrogated at the end of the shift. The less experienced will be fired. The more experienced will be retained, but not before undergoing a more unofficial kind of punishment. Severed human fingers, when tossed overboard, also hardly make a splash.

  *

  THE TOP THREE THINGS TO DO IN PORT NOLLOTH, ACCORDING TO the tourism office?

  1. “Spend time on a solitary beach.”

  2. “How about some stargazing?”

  3. “Do some birdwatching.”

  The Port Nolloth tourism office recognizes the De Beers outpost, which they’ve nicknamed, adorably, “Captain’s Corner.” The painted sign itself, with its white lettering superimposed onto a serpentine blue banner, looks as if it should be fronting some Caribbean shanty peddling five-buck oyster buckets and watery beer.

  “The De Beers Captain’s Corner,” the tourism office advertises, “is behind high security fencing, and the solemn warning that appears on the board” [which reads: “Diamonds Are Not Forever: The Supply Is Expected To Run Out And An Alternative Source Of Income Will Be Needed For This Region”].

  “As you can see,” says Ann Allan, assistant curator of the Port Nolloth Museum, “it’s not really an ideal tourist destination.”

  When I ask her if she’s heard of Mr. Lester, she simply says, curtly and paradoxically, “Yes. Nope.”

  *

  ANIMAL MEANS “HAVING BREATH,” WHICH MEANS THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a dead animal. The carcass is something new. The pigeon bones on the beach look like shards of some hellish toy tea set.

  There’s something foreboding about the sea air here, as if our inevitable demise is out there riding the tide, and, once it breaks onto the shore, all that will remain of us is some hiccupping spark of DNA drowning in the tabula rasa.

  Louisa and I walk the sand. “Ulna,” she says, and at first I think we’re doing this again—playing this game, making this silly list of potential baby names for a potential baby. Then, she says, “Femur.”

  Louisa—once a student of anatomy—knows bones more intimately than I do. She names them. Tour-guiding, she holds my hand with her left, points to the sand with her right, and lists, “hyoid, atlas, ilium, scapula, patella, pubis, phalanges . . .” I want to say something to her about love, about weight, about the things to which we assign value, about flight. I want there to be an easy overlap among all of these things. My throat catches. The sand cuts our feet.

  “Thoracic vertebrae,” Louisa says. We watch the mosquitoes suckle in vain from them.

  In the mythologies of the Blackfoot tribe, the Scottish Highlands, and ancient Egypt, the pigeon is a shape-shifter which communes with the mosquito. At various intervals, each becomes the other, to better fly, or better hunt, or better suck the blood from men and horses. In these stories, the pigeon is cast as an intellectual—sometimes a dangerous one, sometimes one responsible for salvation. Scientists have proven, in fact, that pigeons are among the most intelligent of the birds, and have demonstrated their capacity to recognize all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, to differentiate between two different human beings in a photograph, and to acknowledge their reflection as their own image, in what naturalists refer to as the mirror test. For some reason, in our myths, we have decided to couple intelligence with a thirst for blood. When fed human blood, it stands to mention, pigeons are said to go mad.

  I wonder how long these mosquitoes journeyed to get here, if, like the mythological pigeon, they are body-hoppers, single spirits endlessly reincarnated over time, as the Old Norse and Old German religions believed, as the Druids of old Gaul believed, as did the twitchiest of the Welsh bards; reincarnated over and over again to carry messages between worlds, the land of the living and the land of the dead—the tin-can telephones of our ancestors and our descendants. According to Hindu myth, once the pigeon has carried all of its messages to all who need to receive them, it will die another death, shed its avian form, and be reborn as a rose.

  The average mosquito weighs 2.5 milligrams, or 0.000088 ounces, or 1/137,000 of a pigeon. So, 137,000 mosquitoes, carefully swarming, shaped into a dove by the updrafts, can carry the weight of our messages. A single pigeon, carefully dissected into 137,000 equal-sized pieces, can be a swarm of lazing mosquitoes. Of course, when filled with our blood, the largest species of mosquito can weigh in at ten milligrams. At that moment, before digestion asserts itself, the mosquito is mostly us—our blood-borne secrets and genetic schematics coming undone in its foregut. This is not the same as being carried.

  *

  HERE, ON THE PORT NOLLOTH BEACH, THE AFTERNOON MIST ERASES the ocean from the far side of the world. I can hear the birds sending their distress calls, but I can’t see them. The load-carrying pigeons are panicking in the blinding white, above the obscured homes and still-empty hands of the waiting mine wives and mine husbands who will never refer to themselves as smuggle
rs. Some of the birds land here on the beach, and some press on through the mist, saddled with the task of traveling north along the coast to Alexander Bay, or south to Kleinzee.

  I’m readying myself for my lunchtime meeting with Nico Green, a former head of security at the De Beers Kleinzee mine. From the beach, the entire town of Port Nolloth—including Vespetti’s, the Italian restaurant where we’re supposed to meet—is cloaked by this mist.

  More than one resident has told me that this mist “freezes” the Diamond Coast, that the townspeople are forced to stop what they’re doing until it passes. I imagine so many bodies sleeping in so many cars pulled off to the sides of the mine-restricted roads, giving in to sleep, or massaging the rubber of the steering wheel; bodies of children frozen into the dustfields, clutching rugby balls the size of their entire torsos to their middles; lovemaking couples frozen into position; dogs’ tails confused and hovering—a cold wet Pompeii, the civilized world rendered to an ashen clay moldable only by the sort of weather that shrouds, and the cries of the invisible birds coming undone within it.

  Exactly 147 kilometers to the north, the mist deletes the world’s largest desert lichen field—all twenty-six species—and the Alexkor miners on their way to work lose the road, stop their cars, and wander in it like ghosts. They sink into the spongy earth, their world having softened. As in the mines along the bank of the Orange River, the soil of their hearts feels alluvial, rife with stones both precious and feral, the metastable carbon allotropes (now responsible for their livings and their crumbling towns) having eons ago exploded from the center of the earth through kimberlitic pipes and been carried by wind and water all the way here to the South Atlantic coast. Blinded, they collide shoulder to shoulder with the earlier shift, with prospectors, option hunters, diamond divers, and diamond dredgers, some of them carrying lunch pails that conceal butter sandwiches and trained pigeons, and if they say anything to each other, it takes the form of apology.

  Along the shore, children net crabs. Skeletal old conmen in knitted hats work the beach, offering to go get us live lobsters, if only we pay them the money upfront so they can afford the diesel to drive to their source. When I shake my head, the mist eddies, and the men try to seduce us with words like best and still alive.

  Louisa and I walk into the murk. We hear birds and donkeys and sheep, a bleating lamb chasing its mother through the mist in an act repeated throughout time and species. If the mist hadn’t blotted out the landscape, we’d see the hoofprints in the sand, ants crawling among the broken glass, dipping below the earth and coming out elsewhere—rich, flat pans where broken windmills gauge no wind, and dates dangle from the trees.

  These trees—the date palms, also used to make brooms, rope, and medicine—were brought to Africa from Mesopotamia during the Islamic expansion, and their successful cultivation depended on an enslaved workforce responsible for digging, irrigating, and harvesting. Though the Islamic expansion primarily affected North Africa, West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Swahili Coast, a minority but significant population of Muslims found themselves in South Africa. When the Dutch began to colonize South Africa in 1652, establishing in the Cape a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company’s trade ships, they claimed that they were unable to successfully enslave the indigenous Khoisan population and began to “import” Muslim people (many of whom were prominent clerics) from elsewhere in Africa (but also India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and the Indonesian archipelago), saddling them with—among other labors—the task of date farming.

  Though the Dutch claimed they were unable to enslave the Khoisan population, they were able to force them into indentured servitude. According to historian Ashley T. Brenner, the settlers “sharply discriminated between the two forms of labor. While the status of Khoisan indentured servants certainly resembled that of the enslaved . . . Khoisan were nevertheless thought of as separate from the enslaved population in a number of key ways. Contemporaries distinguished between the enslaved and Khoisan indentured servants based on their status under the law, the free or slave status they inherited from their mothers . . . and the levels of violence that could be perpetrated upon them.”

  The enslaved Muslims could legally be mutilated and murdered when the occupiers deemed it necessary, but the Khoisan—due to the strange fact that the Dutch deemed them “free,” which made their lives worth less than the lives of the enslaved—saw an even greater frequency of violence perpetrated upon them. Khoisan men were indiscriminately slaughtered (their livestock subsequently stolen), the women and children captured and forced into indentured servitude on the farms. “This action,” says Brenner, “was taken on the grounds that it would be wrong to murder women and children.”

  Between 1652 and 1807, when the British colonists abolished the transoceanic slave trade, approximately 65,000 enslaved people were “imported” by the Dutch into South Africa. During this time, subsequent generations born into slavery were of mixed parentage, due to liaisons between the white occupiers, the Khoisan, the enslaved Muslims, and the so-called Bantu peoples (a cursory label for about six hundred different ethnic groups, including South Africa’s Zulu population; Bantu simply means humans). After the British imposed legal and racial limitations on the populace, this group of mixed-race offspring became known (and still today is known) as “Coloured.”

  The enslaved and indentured alike found solace from the brutality in keeping and training pigeons—to which they’d feed the dregs of the date harvest in acts of quiet defiance. This: the desperate passing on of any sweetness in the face of atrocity, dates being the sweetest of all fruits, with a sugar content that can reach 85 percent. In the clandestine eating of the dates, and the clandestine feeding of the pigeons, the laborers were able to increase their levels of serotonin and the levels of serotonin in their pet birds, that essential neurotransmitter called upon when we’re in need of calming and glimpses, however brief, of happiness. The eating of the dates helped to make life more bearable, the pain less acute, sleep easier to find, the psychology of sweetness some thin defense in the face of the psychology of violence.

  The sweetness did all it could to dilute the burdens, to fuel the muscles and bones, as the bodies of the date-farm laborers—like those of the diamond miners—were forced to carry heavy weights, conditioned to bear loads that their bodies initially could not abide; loads that, had they been airborne, would have dragged them to earth.

  Some psychologists say that the literal carrying of weight can have a reciprocal effect on mental stress, and various social issues. Bearing a physical burden can change the way we think and act, about and unto ourselves and others—a notion known as embodied or grounded cognition.

  When bearing weight, when carrying, when subject to the psychology of carriage, our priorities shift, and things that aren’t typically important to us become important: immediate bodily (and thereby mental) relief, the putting down, the releasing, however premature, of the cargo—the confused, at-random landing, the anxious returning to the earth and to a version of our corporeal selves that we can once again deem homeostatic. Sometimes, in order to return home, to gel with our notions of ourselves, we have to put down our diamonds.

  The laborers kept the date palms alive via flood irrigation, furrow and basin irrigation, and micro irrigation, the latter of which was soon abandoned as it was too dependent on wind and temperature, which influenced spray pattern and rate of evaporation. Soon, the micro irrigation method passed from the date trade to the mining industry, which found it perfect for efficiently irrigating mine dumps so that the wind would not carry the tailings away.

  *

  HERE, AMID THE DATE PALMS, LOUISA AND I EAT TWO HOMEMADE marshmallows, rolled in toasted coconut, that we bought from an entirely pink farm stall on the drive out here, just past Ventersdorp, the self-proclaimed “cradle of humankind” and self-proclaimed Prayer City. The mist makes shapes that aren’t really there—fins of great albino fish, petrified. Beyond it, flashes of lightning, or the head
lights of a car, or the reaching beams of an asthmatic diamond trawler. In this dampness, the town rusts, creeps ever closer to immobility.

  Two anxious fishermen in one small boat return with their catch, exactly one eviscerated snoek, which they will salt and try to sell in the parking lot of the Spar supermarket. One of the men has a triangular open facial wound and smells of booze and piss. He’s bleeding into his gray beard. They drag their dilapidated boat onto the sand amid other crushed hulls, cable tethers cured in the salt air, broken bells.

  Up the beach, we come to a peach-painted corrugated iron shanty. Kicking at the driftwood littering the sand is the man who lives there, a forty-year veteran diamond diver named George “One Time” Moyses. One can’t sneeze here without hitting someone who works—or has worked—in the trade, and Moyses, curious about our unfamiliar faces, is eager to strike up conversation.

  “You’re not from here!” he shouts to us as a greeting.

  Diamond divers are often independent contractors for De Beers, but the boats from which they work are themselves separate independent contractors in an intricate system that sees the divers unofficially hopping from boat to boat after they’ve made deals with HR, giving them a cut of their haul. The divers believe that such practices are necessary in order to best navigate a system they deem “feudal,” with all marine diamond rights in the area controlled by the De Beers, Trans Hex, and Alexkor corporations. Though profound mineral wealth exists in the seabed and could be extracted with independent divers’ pneumatic jackhammers, the corporations’ desire to release diamonds ever so slowly onto the world market elicits an economic stranglehold that keeps these coastal communities in poverty. Many local divers believe that if the corporations allow their diamond concessions to be underused or to lie dormant, then it’s the moral imperative of the divers to go in and get them, in order to feed themselves and their families—in order to set a precedent that will allow some of the spoils back into what they now see as their exploited community.