Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  Thirty kilometers south and nearly forty years prior, in April 1947, the much smaller 285-ton Border ran aground onto an Elandsklip farm, having been blinded by fog. Her cargo of explosives was salvaged and carried ashore and over the dunes by a team of donkeys, their hides wet up to their withers. Nine donkeys perished in the effort. The explosives were later used in the Namaqualand mines, one of which killed a diamond digger and maimed four others. No record exists as to whether or not they successfully unearthed diamonds that day.

  Down the shore, plants named half-man and Medusa’s head spoon with the wreck of the SS Piratiny, the 5,000-ton Brazilian steamship bound for Cape Town that fell victim to a Diamond Coast storm in 1943 (or, as a conflicting local legend has it, was torpedoed by a U-boat), with its benign cargo of shoes, scrolls of clothing fabric, and tinned sardines. The wind broke the ship in two against the rocks, and the crew, broken-boned but alive, was searched by the vigilant diamond police who had been patrolling the coastline and who suspected that even such a violent accident may have been subterfuge, a ploy to come ashore and pluck diamonds from the restricted beach. The diamond police shook the crew’s arms and legs into further breakage before arranging transport to a doctor in Hondeklip Bay.

  Six weeks later, another storm—as predicted by the anxiety of the jackal buzzards—atomized the remains of the Piratiny, and the weeks following saw a windfall of shoes and fabric and sardines washing up onto the shore, a godsend to the poor communities of Namaqualand. Still today, beachcombers braving the dwarf adders can find the wayward leather shoe, sun-bleached and orphaned among the seaweed and mussel shells, and the local children—all hauntingly dressed in the same white fabric—still play in these hand-me-down clothes sewn from the Piratiny’s cargo. The tinned sardines were so plentiful that some of them still rest beneath the cobwebs of the local cellars, waiting to one day be unlidded.

  Wrecks beget wrecks: wrecks named Volo and Sagittarius, Phoenix and Shalom, Aloe and Athena, Pigeon and Diamond—grounded, grounded, sank, lost, fire, failure, blown out to sea; terror attack, explosion, sank in a gale, sunk by the Germans, sunk by the British, struck a mine and sank . . .

  There’s still so much here that’s buried, lurking on the other side of the wavy dark. Off the coast, between Port Nolloth and Kleinzee, ship parts litter the seabed, parts that once belonged to the vessels chartered by the East India Company that bore cargoes of gold ducats, silver bars, and copper duits destined for various European soldiers of fortune. These ships once traveled along the South African coast toward the island of Mauritius, on their way to India; docked at the Harbor of the Tortoises, where enslaved locals cut down nearly all of the heartwood and ebony trees, the wood slated for export. The Dutch forced the locals to cut even faster when the enslaved began to flee into the thick forests, effectively eradicating their hiding places. The landscape of the island was thinned for trade, and to make a more effective prison.

  (This deforestation of Mauritius, along with the infestation of feral pigs, rats, monkeys, and insects that hitched rides on the trade ships, as well as the Dutch appetite for the “exotic,” eventually resulted in the extinction of the indigenous dodo bird, cousin to the pigeon. Scientists speculate that a flock of migratory African pigeons got lost and tired and landed in desperation on Mauritius, where, over the years, they adapted to the habitat and, in what Alan Cooper, zoologist at Oxford University, calls “extreme evolution,” became dodos. Had the dodo not been decimated by the Dutch, ornithologists wonder, how many different species of pigeon would have been spawned into the world?)

  Also off the Diamond Coast: wrecks of East India Company trade ships that once carried the tea that led to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution; that carried to North America guns and enslaved people, and carried away furs. Many of these East India Company guns were eventually passed down among generations, and so these guns traveled from the Atlantic coast inland to places like the unincorporated community of Sargents in Pike County, Ohio. Sargents was a community founded as a safe zone for the previously enslaved, and was therefore an important station on the Underground Railroad. There, in 1900, one such gun landed in the hands of a fourteen-year-old boy named Press Clay Southworth, who, heart fluttering at the unnerving beauty of the strange bird eating from his family farm’s corn stock, solicited his mother’s permission to shoot the bird so that he could examine it more closely. His mother’s granting of said permission resulted in the single shot that killed the last passenger pigeon—so named for its once mammoth migrations, once the most populous bird on the planet—ever to be spotted in the wild. A Pike County taxidermist sewed black shoe buttons into its eyes. In Ohio, still today, are eight villages named for the passenger pigeon, and eighteen villages known to house passenger pigeon skins and bones.

  Bartholomew Variation #3

  THE MOON IS BRIGHT AND FULL EVEN IN ALL OF THIS DAYLIGHT. ON earth, women in colorful headscarves stare at their feet, waiting for rides to or from the mine. They congregate around a sign that reads “Watch Out for Owls,” itself decorated with owl shit. At its base, a beetle and a butterfly make a home of the same empty Old Brown Sherry bottle. The harmony won’t last.

  A pigeon’s tiny shadow passes over an overturned and crushed carriage, still leashed to the skeleton of the donkey that once pulled it. A broken-necked meerkat bleeds out next to a tuft of Eragrostis lovegrass.

  Bartholomew flies hard and heavy for Msizi. Over the rusty and decomposing machine parts no longer employed in the mining industry, having been heaved out into the back alleys of the desert—sieves and pans, cyclone sorters and washing drums. Over a flattened and sun-bleached diamond diving suit, lying face down in the sand, the rubber of it having once withstood the sharp noses of curious basking sharks. Next to the diving suit is an oxidized nozzle, once used to suck diamonds from the ocean floor, but also, secondarily, to ward off a shark attack by jamming the nozzle into the fish’s mouth and vacuuming out its entrails.

  Pigeons fly because they can’t do anything else, shackled to the spasms of genetic code. The experiences of their forebears—Darwin’s pigeons, the heroic Cher Ami, the sad Martha; their memories of ocean voyages, world wars, and pathetic zoos—are impacted within their hollow bones.

  In Bartholomew’s little bags, the rough diamonds shimmy and collide, and the bird can feel these vibrations in his ribcage, his furcula and coracoid. As most pigeons do when loaded with cargo, Bartholomew tries intermittently to scratch at these little bags with his alulas, the little bird-thumbs inherited from the dinosaurs that some vulgar ornithologist nicknamed “bastard wings.”

  The bird flies over old mining atrocities interred in sand. Like the skinny diamond digger who, in 1906, unearthed a 20-carat stone. He held it aloft and cried to his wife—also a digger—“Vrouw, ek het hom!” (Wife, I have it!), before being clubbed over the head by a spade-wielding security guard who wanted the stone for himself. The wife ran away into the desert, her hat falling off. She hid for hours beneath a downturned scotch cart with her child before the heat overtook them.

  Below is the site on which once stood a meager sorters’ camp, where hundreds of fingers once threaded through stockpiles of gravel. One of these sorters had as a pet a tame zebra foal, and one night, drunk on brandy, one of the camp’s residents thought it would be funny to throw a vial of acid (traditionally used to “clean” the diamonds) into the zebra’s eyes. The animal suffered in silence, even as it went blind, and it was the silence that proved so horrific to the drunk men that they rushed to cut the animal’s throat, not so much to quash its misery as their own. Still buried in the sand are bits of the unfortunate foal’s backbone, smoothed shards of the glass jars that once held the sorters’ brandy.

  Bartholomew zigzags in the air.

  Sometimes, Msizi’s lips bleed when he purses them to whistle at Bartholomew. Msizi likes jazz and often listens to the record his father left behind when he abandoned the family before Msizi was born. The Jazz Epistles’ Verse 1 album.
He listens to it before bed, lying on his back on his mattress on the floor, the single yellow lamp bathing the space in a light that Msizi imagines would be right at home in the jazz halls of 1950s’ Johannesburg. Someplace in that city today, it’s rumored, his father lives. Somewhere in that city, his father has no idea that Msizi wasn’t born “a little slow”—as his mother puts it—like his brother was. But Msizi has never seen that city, and its imagined bigness both frightens and exhilarates him. The only picture he has of his father is a blurry one, the man’s face muddied. His brother, knotted into his blankets across the room, always eventually throws a pillow at Msizi, and at the plastic Capri turntable, and yells at him about noise and about sleep. So, Msizi stands up, his body cracking, and he goes out to the coop.

  He hums his favorite tunes, highlighting Kippie “Morolong” Moeketsi’s ornate sax solos, songs called “Gafsa” and “Vary-Oo-Vum” and “Dollar’s Moods,” the latter named for the volatile temper of the band’s piano player, Abdullah Ibrahim, a.k.a. Dollar Brand. After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, during which South African police opened fire on black protestors demonstrating against apartheid policies (specifically the pass laws, which required black citizens to carry an internal passport whenever they ventured out of their “homelands” or “designated areas”), killing sixty-nine people, the apartheid government doubled down on its viciousness and ratcheted up repressive edicts in order to discourage future protests. As part of this doubling-down, jazz was banned—the music could no longer be performed either in public or in private, could no longer be broadcast on the radio or sold to fans. The lives of the musicians were threatened, and the Jazz Epistles broke up, many of its members going into exile in Europe or the U.S. Only Moeketsi, Msizi’s favorite, stayed in South Africa, though he was unable to perform, and so succumbed to alcohol abuse and died, young and penniless.

  Msizi often hums to Bartholomew with his eyes closed, his chest sunken, his belly heaving, his ropy arms swinging, his armpits spicy, the moon in his hair. He hums, and blows into his thumb, makes a saxophone of his body, his lame pinky hanging as if some vestigial part of the instrument. Msizi has to get up early, but still, he makes music for his bird until his lungs can no longer take it, and he spits his blood onto the coop floor.

  Before going inside, returning to his mattress and his brother’s low snoring, Msizi will gather up the feathers Bartholomew has shed and scatter them over his pillow. He has been taught to believe that if he sleeps on pigeon feathers, his illness will eventually be cured, and he will never die. This local superstition has many variations. While some believe that the act of lying on pigeon feathers will keep death at bay, others believe that the sick person will remain sick, languishing in ever-escalating pain and torment without end. In an early version of assisted suicide, old merciful nurses used to pull the pigeon-feather pillows out from beneath the heads of the anguished, so they could more easily and peacefully die. But Msizi has not heard these versions of the story.

  He lies on his pillow, and reads a book about whales. In the morning, he will have the imprint of feathers in his cheek. He will run his fingertips over it as he prepares for work and will like the way it feels, like the way it reminds him of a fossil. It will make him feel very old, part of some longer, larger story. If he had his way, Msizi would learn to play an instrument, speak a foreign language. “French,” he would say, though he would be unsure as to exactly why he would make that choice. He would like to dig for something more important than diamonds: fossils, dinosaur bones, mummies, ancient cities. If he had more free time, he would be good at badminton. If he went to school, he would be good at math.

  Chapter 7

  New Rush and Kimberley

  The De Beers Origin Story

  I’VE PLACED NUMEROUS PHONE CALLS TO JOHANN MACDONALD’s secretary, Trinety, who tells me he’s busy, and she never knows when he’s going to be in the office. She keeps telling me to try back at a later time, and soon she stops answering my calls. I decide to drive straight into town to try to track him down myself. Louisa, too, decides to break the rules; she checks into a ramshackle roadside motel alone to find sleep during what’s left of the day. She’s getting tired of this. I realize that I should be a better partner, but I feel somehow chained to the anxiety that compels me onward. When I drop her at the motel, I take care to avoid melodrama. I keep the word reckoning to myself.

  The road into Kleinzee town proper once bore only the commutes of the laborers, the company men, and their families. Barbed wire fences separate the road from the desert, which is lined here with knee-high green windscreens, each of which stretches for over a kilometer—another of De Beers’s feeble attempts at restoration, wars against erosion. The effect is that of a desert swollen with a lattice of infected veins, its system having gone varicose and septic.

  No one walks the road into Kleinzee. This forsaken outpost in the middle of a goliath nowhere belches its diamonds dully, inches ever closer to its status as ghost town. And yet there remains enough for the residual inhabitants to fetishize and protect, an ingrained wariness of outsiders, a dependency on the bizarre sealed-off bubble it has become, since the town’s entrance is blocked by a boom gate and an alarm that flashes red and wails as soon as any vehicle approaches.

  Crows line the barbed wire behind the rotating red beacon and its siren. They don’t move a muscle, accustomed to the wailing. “Drive Safely,” says the yellow diamond-shaped sign depicting a black stencil of a mining truck, “Death Is Permanent.” The guard, in military boots, khaki uniform, khaki hat fronted with a Thorburn Security Solutions patch, and aviator sunglasses, descends the six steps from his tower, wordlessly hands me a clipboard and pen. The machine gun wobbles against his hip, the muzzle tracing dimples in the dust. The clipboard immobilizes exactly one piece of paper printed with columns in which I must record the date, my personal details, passport number, and reason for my visit. For the latter, I write, bird-watching. The last documented entry, the last record of a visitor to Kleinzee, is from sixteen months ago. I pass the clipboard and pen to him and he walks around the car and one-arms the boom gate upward for me to pass.

  Inside the gates, what was once a De Beers stronghold seems to be sinking into the earth. Desperate hangers-on here are buying up the old diggers’ quarters on the cheap, taking down the barbed wire, trying to convert them into tourist cottages; some are taking jobs as cashiers and stockers in the remaining convenience store, peddling Grandpa’s Headache Powders and tinned viennas in brine to the other hangers-on; the only available uncanned food being sacks of squashed white bread, freezer-burned chicken necks, and rotten halves of iceberg lettuce in cellophane.

  Kleinzee is still wheezing along, in spite of the initiative supported by Rob Blake, De Beers’s project manager for town proclamation and local economic development, that “when mining ceases, all remaining structures, including houses, are classified as mining disturbances. By law, mining towns should be bulldozed, buried and planted over.” One may wonder as to the accuracy of his title, the slippery, audience-dependent natures of proclaiming and developing. One may wonder how rumor dovetails with tragedy.

  The De Beers name, printed on everything from old water tanks to the defunct hospital wall, to the rusted delivery gate of the defunct supermarket, is frayed and peeling, being stripped away. The complicated legacy of De Beers founder Cecil John Rhodes and his co-magnate, and sometimes rival, sometimes lover, Barney Barnato, is being sandblasted here until it shines.

  Rhodes, seventeen years old, anemic and otherwise sickly, came to South Africa from England with his brother to farm cotton using slave labor in KwaZulu–Natal in 1870. When the cotton venture failed, he traveled, one year later, to the diamond fields of Kimberley, where, with the financial backing of a British multinational investment banking company (with whom he had familial connections), he soon succeeded in buying up all of the smaller diamond mining operations. With the backing of the bank, Rhodes was alone in being able to afford steam pumps to
eradicate the water from flooded claims, which—given that they were presumed ruined—he had bought for a song. By this point, he was only eighteen. In public, he often wore white cricket flannels.

  Young Rhodes organized what had been a ragtag jumble of tent communities and nomad diggers who had bought a site called New Rush from local farmers Johannes and Diedrich De Beer. Before selling their land, the De Beer brothers had been raising karakul sheep, the still-fetal lambs of which—prized for their downy pelts—were routinely forced from their mothers. (In years to come this practice would spawn a series of attendant articles with titles such as “Hamid Karzai’s Famous Hat Made from Aborted Lamb Fetuses,” and “The Secret They Don’t Want You to Know.”)

  Rhodes soon exchanged his cricket flannels for suits of at least three pieces, and began carrying a diamond-studded watch on a length of gold chain, which stood out against the dusty overalls, drooped hats, and broken lutes of those who inhabited the diggers’ camps. Rhodes, nurturing his greed aboveground, did not have to memorize their code of signals—a series of intricate and subterranean knocks, rope tugs, and bell rings with meanings ranging from explosives may be loaded to accident to persons, stop all hoists (colloquially known as “cages”) immediately, to help me, need more air.

  Greed, while bearing etymologies that range from “voracious hunger” (Middle English), to “death by starvation” (Albanian), to “passionate gladness” (Dutch), also derives from the ancient Greek word for “never fading.” In the face of it, as always, the people toiling in the diamond industry told themselves stories. Many of the early laborers in New Rush, in fact, under the spell of a South African legend, endured these harsh conditions in silence, as they believed that they were doing divine work. In that legend, once upon a time, long ago, a great sorrow settled like a mist over South Africa. As that sorrow crescendoed, a kindly bird-spirit—its pity aroused—descended from the heavens, a fat basket of diamonds draped over one blue-gray wing. The spirit scattered diamonds into the Vaal River, flying from Delport’s Hope to Barkly West, Forlorn Hope to Gong Gong, scattering and scattering. Once the spirit arrived at the place now called Kimberley, it was flying so fast that it impaled itself on a barb of a great camel thorn tree, and became entangled in the branches. Legend dictates that the great camel thorn is struck by lightning more than any other tree. In panic, the bird-spirit thrashed itself to pieces while trying to escape. Its basket was upset, and the remaining diamonds fell to the earth, arousing us with their glittering. The great camel thorn still stands, its seeds roasted and ground as a substitute for coffee beans, and its succulent leaves remain a favorite food of giraffes, who, in a mutation that especially excited Darwin, bear specially adapted tongues in order to cope with the thorns.