I’d rather be a nigger, and
Get 25 per cent.”
To resume, when the company mania set in, the number of individual diggers gradually decreased. Further restrictions were also placed upon those remaining, as well as upon the managers and lessees of companies, by the passing of a new law in 1882, which law is at present in force.
By this act the digger or lessee is compelled to make a monthly return of all his finds, in which any discrepancy is detected at once by comparing it with a return (also required) from the various licensed buyers of their monthly purchases; and an excessive return of diamonds, or a succession of astounding washings up from notoriously poor or insufficiently worked ground, at once serves to arouse suspicion, and has already in several instances led to a conviction, especially as the private and moral character of each digger or lessee is more or less known to the detective department.
Some white men run the risk of buying direct from natives, and to those knowing Zulu, which is the language of which all natives gain a smattering, the conversation becomes highly amusing. The word diamond is never mentioned; for instance, an illicit will accost a native with the question: “Ipi inkonyama?” (where is the calf?) The native replies if he has no diamonds: “Inkonyama yalukile no mina” (the calf has strayed with its mother), or the white man asks: “Tzinyamazana zi kona na?” (are there any bucks?) and the native, having some diamonds secreted about him, replies: “Zi kona” (there are some). In this manner the secret of their being engaged in illicit traffic is kept from all but the initiated.
These various phases of the crime, and others that I shall describe, have been for years brought to the notice of the public by the local press. The Diamond Fields Advertiser, in a leading article once stated: “There is something terribly revolting about the extent of crime arising out of the I. D. B. calling in all its ramifications. Inducing servants to steal, murder, perjury, receiving stolen goods, white women prostituting themselves to Kafirs for payment in diamonds, little boys employed by mining companies taught to steal and supplied with false pockets in which to conceal the gems, bribes attempted on officers of law, and a thousand other crimes are practiced and gloried in by gangs of ruffians, whom the law seldom reaches.”
But it must not be supposed that many white men were or are foolish enough to buy direct from the raw native; unless the illicit buyer has “planted” his own gang of natives, or in other words educated thieves, on some company to bring him all the diamonds they can steal, he is very wary. One very curious case in point came to light in 1876, when the detective officers, searching among the “goods and chattels” of a man convicted for I. D. B., found, from memorandums in his possession, that he had no less than sixty natives “planted” on different claim-holders, whose sole object was to rob and bring the diamonds to their real master, who had engaged them for that purpose.
A diamond passed, in most instances, through four hands before it reached a legal holder.
1st. The raw Kafir—the thief. 2d. The swell native, or tout of 3d. The low white man, generally agent of 4th. A licensed diamond buyer.
On analyzing this series, it will be seen that the raw native, who is generally the worker in the mine or on the depositing floor, has only to evade the attention of the overseer to enable him to swallow or secrete about his person any diamond he may chance to expose. The lynx-eyed observation of his “brothers” is to him of no moment, for they are, as a rule, so true to each other that they never inform—brothers both in color and in crime. His work done, on returning home to his evening meal our subject’s real fun and excitement begin, in other words, the second scene of the illicit play now commences. His swell “brother” arrives, transmutes his ill-gotten diamonds into gold, leaving him to carouse far into the night and then “dream the happy hours away,” until the morning gives him again fresh opportunities for thieving.