South Africa, vol. II.

by Anthony Trollope

I was soon sick of looking at diamonds though the idea of holding ten or twenty thousand pounds lightly between my fingers did not quite lose its charm. I was however disgusted at the terms of reproach with which most of the diamonds were described by their owners. Many of them were “off colours,” stones of a yellowish hue and therefore of comparatively little value, or stones with a flaw, stones which would split in the cutting, stones which could not be cut to any advantage. There were very many evil stones to one that was good, so that nature after all did not appear to have been as generous as she might have been. And these dealers when the stones are brought to them for purchase, have no certain standard of value by which to regulate their transactions with their customers. The man behind the counter will take the stones, one by one, examine them, weigh them, and then make his offer for the parcel. Dealing in horses is precarious work,—when there is often little to shew whether an animal be worth £50, or £100, or £150. But with diamonds it must be much more so. A dealer offers £500 when the buyer has perhaps expected £2,000! And yet the dealer is probably nearest to the mark. The diamonds at any rate are bought and sold, and are sent away by post at the rate of about £2,000,000 in the year. In 1876 the registered export of diamonds from Kimberley amounted in value to £1,414,590, and reached 773 pounds avoirdupois in weight. But it is computed that not above three quarters of what are sent from the place are recorded in the accounts that are kept. There is no law to make such record necessary. Any one who has become legally possessed of a diamond may legally take it or send it away as he pleases.

The diamond dealers whom I saw were the honest men, who keep their heads well above water, and live in the odour of diamond sanctity, dealing only with licensed diggers and loving the law. But there are diamond dealers who buy from the Kafirs,—or from intermediate rogues who instigate the Kafirs to steal. These are regarded as the curse of the place, and, as may be understood, their existence is most injurious to the interests of all who traffic honestly in this article. The law is very severe on them, imprisoning them, and subjecting them to lashes if in any case it can be proved that a delinquent has instigated a Kafir to steal. One such dealer I saw in the Kimberley gaol, a good-looking young man who had to pass I think two years in durance among black thieves and white thieves because he had bought dishonestly. I pitied him because he was clean. But I ought to have pitied him the less because having been brought up to be clean he, nevertheless, had become a rogue.

Next to diamond dealing the selling of guns used to be the great trade in Kimberley, the purchasers being Kafirs who thus disposed of their surplus wages. But when I was there the trade seemed to have come to an end, the Kafirs, I trust, having found that they could do better with their money than buy guns,—which they seldom use with much precision when they have them. There was once a whole street devoted to this dealing in guns, but the gun shops had been converted to other purposes when I was there. Great complaint had been made against the Government of Griqualand West for permitting the unreserved sale of guns to the Kafirs, and attempts have been made by the two Republics—of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State—to stop the return of men when so armed. The guns were taken away from those who had not a pass, and such passes were rarely given. Now they may travel through the Transvaal with any number of guns, as the British authorities do not stop them. Why it has come to pass that the purchases are no longer made I do not understand. Whether the trade should or should not have been stopped I am not prepared to say. We have not hesitated to prevent the possession of arms in Ireland when we have thought that the peace of the country might be endangered by them. I do not think that the peace of South Africa has been endangered by the guns which the Kafirs have owned, or that guns in the hands of Kafirs have been very fatal to us in the still existing disturbance. But yet the Kafirs are very numerous and the white men are comparatively but a handful! I would have a Kafir as free to shoot a buck as a white man. And yet I feel that the Kafir must be kept in subjection. The evil, if it be an evil, has now been done, for guns are very numerous among the Kafirs.

There can hardly be a doubt that Kimberley and the diamond fields have been of great service to the black men who obtain work. No doubt they are thieves,—as regards the diamonds,—but their thievery will gradually be got under by the usual processes. To argue against providing work for a Kafir because a Kafir may steal is the same as to say that housemaids should not be taught to write lest they should learn to forge. That argument has been used, but does not now require refutation. And there can be as little doubt that the finding of diamonds has in a commercial point of view been the salvation of South Africa. The Orange Free State, of which “The Fields” at first formed a part, and which is closely adjacent to them, has been so strengthened by the trade thus created as to be now capable of a successful and permanent existence,—a condition of things which I think no observer of South African affairs would have considered to be possible had not Kimberley with its eighteen thousand much-consuming mouths been established on its border. As regards the Cape Colony generally, if quite the same thing need not be said, it must be acknowledged that its present comparative success is due almost entirely to the diamonds,—or rather to the commercial prosperity caused by the consumption in which diamond finders and their satellites have been enabled to indulge. The Custom duties of the Cape Colony in 1869, before the diamond industry existed, were less than £300,000.[10] In 1875 that sum had been very much more than doubled. And it must be remembered that this rapid increase did not come from any great increase of numbers. The diamond-digging brought in a few white men no doubt, but only a few in comparison with the increase in revenue. There are but 8,000 Europeans in the diamond fields altogether. Had they all been new comers this would have been no great increase to a population which now exceeds 700,000 persons. The sudden influx of national wealth has come from the capability for consumption created by the new industry. White men looking for diamonds can drink champagne. Black men looking for diamonds can buy clothes and guns and food. It is not the wealth found which directly enriches the nation, but the trade created by the finding. It was the same with the gold in Australia. Of the national benefit arising from the diamonds there can be no doubt. Whether they have been equally beneficial to those who have searched for them and found them may be a matter of question.

What fortunes have been made in this pursuit no one can tell. If they have been great I have not heard of them. There can be no doubt that many have ruined themselves by fruitless labours, and that others who have suddenly enriched themselves have been unable to bear their prosperity with equanimity. The effect of a valuable diamond upon a digger who had been working perhaps a month for nothing was in the early days almost maddening. Now, as with gold in Australia, the pursuit has settled itself down to a fixed industry. Companies have been formed. Individuals are not suddenly enriched by the sudden finding of a stone. Dividends are divided monthly and there is something approaching to a fixed rate of finding from this claim or from that, from this side of the mine or from the other. There is less of excitement and consequently less of evil. Men are no longer prone to the gambler’s condition of mind which induces an individual to think that he,—he specially,—will win in opposition to all established odds and chances, and prompts him to anticipate his winning by lavish expenditure,—to waste it when it does come by such puerile recourses as shoeing a horse with gold or drinking champagne out of a bucket. The searching for gold and diamonds has always had this danger attached to it,—that the money when it has come has too frequently not been endeared to the finder by hard continuous work. It has been “easy come and easy gone.” This to some degree is still the case. There is at Kimberley much more of gambling, much more of champagne, much more of the rowdy exhilaration coming from sudden money, than at older towns of the same or much greater population, or of the same or much greater wealth. But the trade of Kimberley is now a settled industry and as such may be presumed to be beneficent to those who exercise it.

Nevertheless there is a stain sticking to the diamonds,—such a stain as sticks to gold, which tempts one to repeat the poet’s caution:—

Aurum irrepertum, et sio melius situm
Cum terra celat, spernere fortior,
Quam cogere humanos in usus.

It would be untrue to say that he who works to ornament the world is necessarily less noble than the other workman who supplies it with what is simply useful. The designer of a room-paper ranks above the man who hangs it,—and the artist whose picture decorates the wall is much above the designer of the paper. Why therefore should not the man who finds diamonds be above the man who finds bread? And yet I feel sure that he is not. It is not only the thing procured but the manner of procuring it that makes or mars the nobility of the work. If there be an employment in which the labourer has actually to grovel in the earth it is this search for diamonds. There is much of it in gold-seeking, but in the search after diamonds it is all grovelling. Let the man rise as high as he may in the calling, be the head of the biggest firm at Kimberley, still he stands by and sees the grit turned,—still he picks out the diamonds from the other dirt with his own fingers, and carries his produce about with him in his own pocket. If a man be working a coal mine, though he be himself the hardest worked as well as the head workman in the business, he is removed from actual contact with the coal. But here, at Kimberley, sharp prying eyes are wanted, rather than an intelligence fitted for calculations, and patience in manipulating dirt than skill in managing men or figures.

And the feeling engendered,—the constant recollection that a diamond may always be found,—is carried so far that the mind never rests from business. The diamond-seeker cannot get out of his task and take himself calmly to his literature at 4 P.M. or 5 or 6. This feeling runs through even to his wife and children, teaching them that dirt thrice turned may yet be turned a fourth time with some hope of profit. Consequently ladies, and children, do turn dirt instead of making pretty needle-work or wholesome mud pies. When I heard of so much a dozen being given to young bairns for the smallest specks of diamonds, specks which their young eyes might possibly discover, my heart was bitterly grieved. How shall a child shake off a stain which has been so early incurred? And when ladies have told me, as ladies did tell me,—pretty clever well-dressed women,—of hours so passed, of day after day spent in the turning of dust by their own fingers because there might still be diamonds among the dust, I thought that I could almost sooner have seen my own wife or my own girl with a broom at a street crossing.

There is not so much of this now as there was, and as years roll on,—if the diamonds still be to be found,—there will be less and less. If the diamonds still be there in twenty years’ time,—as to which I altogether decline to give my opinion,—a railway will have been carried on to Kimberley, and planks will have been carried up, and perhaps bricks from some more favoured locality, and possibly paving stones, so that the town shall be made to look less rowdy and less abominable. And pipes will be laid on from the Vaal river, and there will be water carts. And with the dust the flies will go into abeyance. And trees will have been planted. And fresh butter will be made. And there will be a library and men will have books. And houses will have become pleasant, so that a merchant may love to sit at home in his own verandah,—which he will then afford to have broad and cool and floored. And as the nice things come the nasty habits will sink. The ladies will live far away from the grit, and small diamonds will have become too common to make it worth the parents’ while to endanger their children’s eyes. Some mode of checking the Kafir thieves will perhaps have been found,—and the industry will have sunk into the usual grooves. Nothing, however, will tend so much to this as the lessening of the value of diamonds. The stone is at present so precious that a man’s mind cannot bear to think that one should escape him.