Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  “If I don’t get diamonds, I don’t get money,” Moyses tells us, dragging half of his cigarette in one pull. He tells us that in 1981, De Beers paid diamond divers the equivalent of a nickel per carat. “But I was shrewd,” he says. “De Beers forced all the divers to carry picture IDs, and I was the only guy in town back then with a camera. I made more money taking ID photos than I did on diamonds.”

  Moyses kicks at the driftwood. His gray hair is long and his gray beard is long and his long yellow linen pants are rolled up to his knees and reggae music blasts from inside his shanty. He rests his arm on a great white shark he carved to scale out of foam rubber. He nuzzles the shoulderblades of a marmalade cat whose patchy fur smells of dead fish and salt. From his pants pocket he pulls a folded-up piece of paper—stashed there as if for my benefit. When unfolded, he shows me a black-and-white photo of six topless young women. Moyses points with his pinky to his own handwritten caption: “The Diver’s Women (1980–82).” “During the early 80s, most of us divers resided in little matchbook houses in Diver’s Row, Port Nolloth. There were jackpots on jackpots. Lots of diamonds and money around. The stukkies [girls] would then come up from Cape Town and entertain the divers.”

  “Fuck if those days aren’t long done,” Moyses laments, staring at his bony toes and refolding the paper. Louisa snorts. Moyses will not make eye contact with her. “The sea is still a treasure trove,” he says, “but we’re not allowed to get it. And they [De Beers] are the shady characters. They [deal with] the CIA, or warlords, [do] a straight exchange of armaments for diamonds . . . And you can’t even trust [De Beers’s] own records and statistical data. They’re 60 percent accurate, at best.”

  “Does the name Mr. Lester mean anything to you?” I ask. Louisa squeezes my forearm, as if to say, Don’t . . .

  “Ha!” Moyses says. “You know more than you let on! Who are you anyway? No, he’s not a man at all, but many men—like a whole secret government organization. The entire agency.”

  “So he’s just, what? A composite character?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Like Jesus,” Moyses says and giggles nervously. “And they keep secrets even from themselves, from one [corporate] subdivision to another.”

  In fact, when the crews of six Port Nolloth diamond-dredging boats were recently suspected of defying the corporation, the boats were surreptitiously attacked in the night, the seawater inlets slashed, which resulted in their sinking. Port Nolloth was already suffering from an unemployment rate of nearly 70 percent, and this attack put another forty crewmen and divers out of work. “Sabotaging boats in this community,” according to an article in the local newspaper, “is a crime akin to murder.” The local rumor mill suspected that members of the police force’s Diamond Squad who were on the corporate payroll carried out the assault. When accused, one detective, snarky with the immunity with which De Beers supplied him, replied, “Don’t look at me. It wasn’t our members. If we had done it, all the boats [not just six] would have been sunk and they never would have raised them.” The crewmen and divers could do nothing but declare bankruptcy, make soft threats about blockading the harbor and the town. “These waters are being raped,” said one. “The diamonds sucked out of our backyard fly over Port Nolloth and end up being sold in Antwerp. Port Nolloth will end up a ghost town. I think [the corporations] want this town to die so they can mine the gravel under our feet.”

  In order to avoid being labeled as smugglers, and to preserve what they dub “a once vibrant and unique diamond diving heritage,” a collective of diamond divers, skippers, and boat crews have organized, calling themselves the Equitable Access Campaign. “[The corporations] just sit back and collect ‘rent’ from the small guys without adding any value,” says Gavin Craythorne, the group’s technical advisor. “There is zero risk for the concession holder. We carry everything. This feudal system could have worked in the past . . . before climate change, when the resource was more abundant. But today, there is no place for [this].” In spite of the Equitable Access Campaign’s lobbying, the group’s chairman, Joseph Klaase, a sweet-faced man with a fatherly mustache, finally had to admit defeat. “Despite our best efforts to engage with De Beers,” he says, “we were unsuccessful and discovered to our dismay, in the press, that [decisions had already] been made,” and the corporation’s PR machine attached such a stigma to the group that they were portrayed as just another consortium of smugglers.

  “Good luck finding out whatever it is you want to find out,” Moyses says as he retreats inside.

  “I’m not quite sure what that is,” I admit to him.

  “Well, then everything’s an answer,” he says. “That’s kinda like cheating.”

  He pulls his door closed, and we continue on. The dumpster, rusted orange, up the beach is marked with the sign “Asbestos Only,” and the mist lifts and, from above, the birds can once again recognize the illusory trails that lead out of Port Nolloth into the desert. These paths look like snakes, like rivers, and if we followed them, they would lead us into certain loss, the sort of oblivion that both Plato and Euclid so desired to make real and immortal, to make pure, if only geometrically, in the face of the finite. Maybe the animals can navigate these paths—the jackals and the hares. Maybe not. Maybe these are the dead ends that only the birds, and the mathematicians, can recognize.

  *

  LOUISA TELLS ME ABOUT THE ARTICLE SHE READ LAST NIGHT IN BED, unable to sleep. According to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, “Astronomers today believe that a large fraction of the atoms in our bodies were once inside stars that became supernovae, and that they were ‘launched’ into the universe when these stars exploded. Furthermore, we believe the explosions of supernovae have flooded the Galaxy with high-energy radiation that . . . drives the evolution of life on Earth.” We look up, and wonder what we’ve inherited into our bodies from above. We look up, and can’t make a single constellation here gel.

  Somewhere up there are the Voyager Golden Records, that series of blips and sounds, language and song, meant to greet the extraterrestrials with a cross-section of Earth’s best media, at least as we define it. The cooing of pigeons made the final cut, as did the sound of the kiss of a mother and child. Footsteps, heartbeat, laughter, the wind, the rain, the surf, and the mudpots. Diagrams of conception, fertilized ovum, a fetus, birth, a nursing mother, continental drift. Eventually, the Golden Records and the vessels that carry them will be rendered to smithereens and, if we’ve learned anything from the behavior of prior space dusts, said particles will find their way into our bloodstreams in a new sort of informational pregnancy. Bach and Berry, not to mention heartbeat and rain, will be returned to us, inside of our new alien breed.

  Now, we listen to the ocean evict its tentacular seaweed—the rank bullwhip kelp, creephorn, dead man’s bootlaces. Attached to each variety, and responsible for the rankness, are mussels dead or dying. I think about how babies born to people much younger than we have already grown into adolescents, and are here now, mining diamonds, and raising pigeons to smuggle them. I think of Msizi’s hands, and I stare at my own.

  When Louisa returns to the motel room to rest, I make my way to Vespetti’s, the ramshackle Italian joint on Port Nolloth’s Beach Street, for my meeting with Nico Green. The place is kept running by Oom Koos (a.k.a. Oom Polony), a be-aproned old man with an enceinte belly and a lazy eye, who resembles Captain Kangaroo on meth, and who doubles as Port Nolloth’s part-time butcher because “who else is going to cut the meat?” Though lunch requires no pre-planning, it’s the sort of place you must call ahead—by noon—if you want to eat dinner there that night. If Oom Koos is to be cooking, it’s perceived in town as a real event, which they announce all day on the radio. There are no menus, and the waitress can neither read nor write, so I’m asked to write my order on a scrap of the magenta paper placemat for her to take to Oom in the kitchen.

  At the bar, large men fill their amber ashtrays and sip their brandies-and-Coke, checking out their distorted faces in the pyramid
of empty Jägermeister bottles that serves as ersatz sculpture. The bartender, a raspy-voiced woman with a broken tooth and baby blue hoodie, sits on a stool next to an old rotary phone and blows her nose into half a cocktail napkin. The stone fireplace is more shellac than stone and shines like some rheumy eye. Its mantel supports three tarnished prize cups, testaments to the golf contests that were once held here, when there were still things here that could be won.

  Nico Green, the former security guard at the Kleinzee mine, is over forty minutes late for our lunch appointment. I scratch the soggy crumbs of the amber breading that once interred a lovely piece of hake. When he finally arrives, he orders no food, only a brandy-and-Coke, and he does this before even sitting down. He is about six and a half feet tall, and his legs are stretched and babyish. He wears a skintight neoprene rugby shirt, has a flattop haircut, Coke-bottle glasses, blue-striped tube socks pulled all the way up to the demilune of his knee, and little navy shorts. Rooster-chested and scrotal, he struts to my table, snatches up my hand like a kingfisher a guppy, and plops himself onto the chair across from me.

  The first thing he does not do: apologize for his lateness. The second thing he does not do: let the tiny pink and white crab spider crawling on the windowsill live. “Nico,” he says by way of introduction as he wipes the spider guts from his thumb with the paper napkin.

  With very little prompting, he begins to tell me how every single public official of Port Nolloth was arrested for diamond smuggling. Following mayor Nick Kotze’s arrest, one sheepish local informer, asking to remain anonymous, told the papers, “Kotze [whose local nickname is J. R. Ewing] behaves like a movie character. He owns half the town. We are not scared of who Kotze is, but of what he can do.” Nico tells me how sometimes the mayors’ parents, wives, children, and siblings were arrested as well, for running their own rackets on the side. “Until they’re caught,” he says, “they live in the lap of luxury. Big pink gangster houses . . . We once found all these diamonds mixed with stolen ammunition in shoeboxes under the mayor’s bed. He had this big syndicate going. Thirty-three people from Port Nolloth alone. The owner of the hotel. The family who ran the [now-shuttered] fish-and-chips restaurant. Several were women! When I was working for De Beers, if I see a pigeon, it’s my sworn duty to execute it. If I don’t, I’m encouraging bad behavior.

  “Still, smugglers find a way,” Nico continues, whether it’s shoving a tobacco bag filled with diamonds and lubed with beeswax up their asses; or slitting open their forearms and stuffing the diamonds inside the wound, whereupon, due to fear of AIDS, the security guard would often rush the bleeding worker to the hospital unsearched, whereupon a doctor or nurse, who was in on the scam, would either retrieve the stones from the gash, or—in some cases—sew them into the arm; or using something called the Human Torpedo, which Nico refuses to expound upon. “Still,” he says, “they use the reliable pigeons.

  “But we learned a few things since previous operations. [A few years back] the Prosecuting Authority sent in an undercover agent who ended up having a steamy affair with a woman diamond smuggler in Port Nolloth. This time, when we sent in undercover guys, we sent in married men [laughs]. Handwriting experts. Nobody but the top commanders knew the whole story. We had our roles. We had to gain their trust, and we did. I worked constantly. You couldn’t make plans to go away for the weekend. We worked during the night. If it’s a positive case, though, there’s nothing better. It’s like a game—to outsmart them. It’s the best. Best of all, illegal diggers know they’re doing wrong, and they know who I am. They know me by name. It’s long hard work. These investigations can go on for months. If people start driving nice cars, they’re investigated. I had to go after good friends. Even if it was a friend, I don’t get emotional, because that’s your downfall. It’s not easy, but I don’t get emotional. We swooped in simultaneously on all the targets in all the areas. Seven hundred uncut diamonds confiscated, plus two luxury BMW 4x4s. It was part of this top-secret affair we called Operation Solitaire. Look, I can only tell you so much,” he says. “Even though I no longer work for De Beers, I signed a confidentiality agreement and take this very seriously . . .”

  He speaks of local businesses used as fronts—auto parts shops, seafood stands. He speaks of diamond deals gone wrong, of bodies found in the desert, shot through the head. I ask him about Mr. Lester’s involvement in all of this. He eyes me as if I know something I should not. He shakes his head. He tells me that Mr. Lester knows everything, that he “pulls the strings,” that he’s responsible for “this James Bond–style security,” that he’s “the executioner who controls all the other executioners,” that he’s sometimes responsible for disciplining the “less effective executioners.” He does not ask me how I’ve heard of Mr. Lester, because he clearly wants to stop talking about him, saying his name aloud. He grows impatient at my follow-up questions. He does not respond when I ask him what he means by “executioner,” and he refuses to tell me if he’s ever seen or met Mr. Lester. He does not tell me a lot of things, actually.

  He does not tell me that those arrested as part of Operation Solitaire were hooded as if hostages and paraded at gunpoint along Port Nolloth’s beachfront main street as a local newspaper photographer snapped pictures and residents booed and cheered, and threw fruit and cans and wadded paper and seashells and dried starfish at the captives, as armored vehicles idled in the background and police helicopters roared overhead. (One newspaper article stated, “Port Nolloth looked like an opium smoker’s den after the police raid, smothered in fog. Little figures disappearing in the coastal milk, slipping off to the Coloured shanties on the outskirts as an angry rooster crowed.”) Nico intones a quiet treatise on pigeons coffined into lunchboxes, taken into the mine. He speaks of diamond-bearing pigeons landing in cricket fields, disrupting the games. He tells me that there are desperate people who trade their successfully smuggled gems to tourists for alcohol. He lowers his eyes and says nothing when I ask him about the physical punishments exacted on the laborers for such infractions. He sips from his empty glass that once held brandy and Coke, but now holds nothing, not even an ice cube. Still, he sips from it.

  “If you talk to people in Namaqualand,” Nico says, “they say God put the diamonds in the ground, that there’s no such thing as an illicit diamond, and that we’ve taken away their birthright, but it doesn’t work that way. Adam and Eve said you can’t murder people, and that’s that. We say you can’t take uncut diamonds. So that’s the way it works. My wife still works for De Beers, and I told her, if you step over the line, I will take you out,” and I wonder exactly what my face does here (I can’t imagine it smiling) because Nico follows this with, “No. Really.”

  Nico is a white man, and he does not tell me that, even though mine security was considered one of the few racially integrated occupations during South Africa’s apartheid years, the black security officials would have to patrol the mine on foot while the white officials made their rounds in the comfort of white pickup trucks. On the lookout for potential smugglers and their pigeons, the guards scouted the dig sites, the compounds, the married quarters and single quarters, staff quarters and Coloured quarters, the tennis courts, the hospital, the church, the mess halls (wherein the chefs were able to purchase “offal—not cleaned” at half the price of “offal—cleaned”), the tailings heaps, the paint store, workshops and offices, carpenter shop and general store, trenches, reservoirs, conveyors and pulsators, tracks nicknamed “the gravity loop,” “the crescent,” and “the return,” the cocopans full and the cocopans emptied, the rusting windlasses and the aerial tramways, the horse-drawn whims and the decomposing horses, the power station (which, with its ramps, conveyor belts, and scaffolding resembled a waterslide park in hell), the laundry, the septic tanks, the stables, the hay hot with piss beneath the horses.

  In an extension of a tradition started circa 1893 by diamond baron and De Beers founder Cecil John Rhodes, these security officials, regardless of race, were given off-the-books c
ommissions for catching smugglers, which resulted in many a fabricated charge, which itself resulted in the beating or maiming of the falsely accused. Rhodes hired mercenaries to slaughter the Matabele people who lived along the South African–Zimbabwean border, clearing the land for his mining endeavors. Rhodes renamed this land, Rhodesia, after, of course, himself. Each mercenary was given a reward determined by his number of kills, beginning with two claims and nine square miles of personal property. Once the mines were established, some of these mercenaries stayed on as mine security. The bodies and body parts of those suspected of smuggling were often tossed into the bends of the Limpopo River, which runs along the 140-mile-long border. Today, those who attempt to flee Zimbabwe for a chance at a better life in South Africa must cross this crocodile- and hippopotamus-infested river, at which point, should they be lucky enough to make it across alive, they are often met by mercenaries belonging to the Guma-Guma, a xenophobic militia armed with machetes, who rob and rape the refugees before butchering them. The bodies and body parts of the èmigrès are often found tucked into the same river bends. “If I have to die,” said forty-year-old refugee Sipho Mujuru (one of the few who survived crocodile, hippo, and human, losing only one shoe in the process), “I might as well die in South Africa.”

  Nico and I stand to leave. Oom Koos steps bespattered with grease from the kitchen and waves goodbye to us with tongs. His socks are short and yellow. His body moves like a Lawn ‘n’ Leaf bag infiltrated by chipmunks. Outside the restaurant, Nico makes a call on his cell phone, arranges for some of his friends to pick me up and take me on a “shoot” of some of the pigeons that have been rounded up by De Beers’s “unofficial” militias.