Home
DiamondSouth Africa Diamonds
South Africa Diamonds
In 1867 discovery of diamonds in the Cape Colony, now a province in South Africa radically modified not only the world's supply of diamonds but also its conception of them. As annual world diamond production improved more than tenfold in the following 10 years, a once extremely rare material became more accessible to Western society with its growing wealth, science learned that diamonds came from volcanoes, and everyone learned of Cecil John Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Kimberley, and De Beers. Today South Africa maintains its place as a major diamond producer.
The tale of diamonds in South Africa begins between December 1866 and February 1867, when 15-year-old Erasmus Jacobs found a transparent stone on his father's farm, on the south bank of the Orange River. Over the next 15 years, South Africa yielded additional diamonds than India had in over 2,000 years. This great outpouring of diamonds coincided with reduction of Brazilian deposits and with a great rise in wealth, particularly in the United States, that ensured diamond prices did not fall as they did when Brazil out produced diamond demand in the 1730s.
The initial diamond discoveries in South Africa were alluvial. By 1869, diamonds were found far from any stream or river, first in yellow earth and below in hard rock called blueground, later on called kimberlite, after the mining town of Kimberley.
In the 1870s and 1880s Kimberley, surrounding the mines that produced 95% of the world's diamonds, was home to great wealth and fierce rivalries, most notably that between Rhodes and Barnato, English immigrants who consolidated early 31-foot-square prospects into ever larger holdings and mining companies. In 1888, Rhodes prevailed and merged the holdings of both men into De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., a company that is still identical with diamonds. Today South Africa is third in production in terms of value and is likely to stay that way for the near future.