It was a top quality blue-white, more than 50 carats," he says. ![]() "I was digging with a pick and saw it shining in the earth. They work the area about 35 miles north-west of Kimberley which has been the preserve of the individual diamond diggers since 1870.Īt Verlorenshoop (Lost Hope) mine, Fani Louw, 63, points to a tree where he found a big diamond 1981. The individual prospectors are a tough, stubborn breed who are determined to make it on their own. The booming market has also encouraged the small-scale diamond diggers and recently their numbers have increased in the Kimberley area to more than 300, according to local experts. The company employs 11,000 workers and last year its Kimberley mines produced more than two million carats of diamonds to take advantage of the pickup in international demand. The international diamond group De Beers still runs three vast mines in Kimberley, and they are claimed to be the world's oldest and deepest functioning diamond mines. ![]() Kimberley, 320 miles (510km) south-west of Johannesburg, produced South Africa's first diamond rush, which made the fortune of Cecil John Rhodes among others, and fuelled the country's industrial expansion. By triangulating a phenomenological approach with interviews and observations, the study explores how Chiadzwa became a highly contested but hugely creative space in which a rich new ‘vocabulary’ was forged, that reflected the vagaries and complexities of life in the midst of a diamond rush, even as Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis worsened deeply around it.Small signs stake out claims with evocative names such as Good Hope, Bad Hope, Losers' Rush and Moonlight Pool. The article shows that as the illegal diamond miners at Chiadzwa were ‘digging for diamonds’ they were also, ‘wielding new words’, suggesting these phenomena are explicable through notions of ‘antilanguages’ and ‘antistructure’. Its aim is to analyse the linguistic strategies involved in these illegal miners' emergent ‘language’, and its socio-economic and political functions in the milieu of Chiadzwa. The study focuses on the period 2006 to 2008 when the Zimbabwean crisis was at its worst, and the diamond rush was at its peak. This study delineates and explicates the new linguistic terms and expressions that rapidly developed among this new, transient community of illegal diamond panners at Chiadzwa, in order to describe their activities, experiences and interactions. Chiadzwa became a dynamic site of struggle where new cultural and social identities, languages and consumption patterns emerged in a remarkably short space of time. Propelled by Zimbabwe's deepening economic crisis, soon after this discovery of diamonds was made public, the Chiadzwa diamond fields were invaded by an avalanche of illegal diamond miners from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. However, the 2006 discovery of diamonds at Chiadzwa in Marange, near Mutare, brought about a dramatic change to Zimbabwe's mining landscape. In post-colonial Zimbabwe, before 2006, two diamond mines operated, at River Ranch in Beitbridge and at Murowa in Zvishavane, which both had Kimberley Process Certification. ![]() ![]() The history of diamond mining in Africa is long, complex and heterogeneous.
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