In 1871, when diamonds were first discovered at Colesberg Kopje, two Dutch, De Beers brothers owned the land with a shallow 30-feet hill, partly shaded by umbrella-crowned Kameeldoorn trees.

Over a century later, I came to this place in South Africa’s Northern Cape, where the once barren veldt reached towards the Kalahari Desert. The giant circular chasm dwarfing the surrounding structures like building blocks upon the flat tableland.

Mesmerized, I peer into the gaping hole with sparse sagebrush surrounding the yellowed and grey rock in sheared slabs. Where, wielding only picks, hammers, shovels, and the spilt blood of unrelenting toil, Kimberley’s Big Hole diamond mine became one of the world’s largest hand-dug holes, with a perimeter stretching a mile around, and plunging almost 600-feet to a water-filled shaft below. A monumental task, driven by hope, need and greed, resulting in slave-driving misery, agonizing injury, disease and death.

Diamonds, the sole reason for Kimberley’s existence and subsequent growth. As you wander the surroundings, reminders of its diamond-charged influences from a bygone age proudly reveal the city’s achievements, but also disclose its shameful past. You learn of the sheer perseverance and heart-wrenching struggles and get a sense of the unequivocal pain that thousands of souls endured at this monstrous hole.

Following this diamond discovery, word quickly spread, attracting diggers who camped in loud belly-aching harmony together, their whiskey-laden breath, and laughter piercing the nights’ silence under star-studded skies. The new ‘Rush’ brought more diggers and black workers, crowding the lowly hill to expand its working boundary for thousands to exploit. The intensity more feverish as the hill eventually revealed it was the centre of a vertical volcanic pipe delving deep into the earth.

Then within an unpredictable plan, they kept digging for decades, until eventually, extraction became too deep and difficult to exploit. Although the bounty was far from done, as the mine expanded the search underground with a shaft bored over a half-mile deep with attaching tunnels.

After 43 years the mine ceased operations in 1914, ultimately yielding over fourteen million carats in rough (uncut) diamonds, and the hand-picked removal of twenty-two million tons of earth from both the Big Hole open cast and underground mines.

Today, the Mine Museum portrays in detail, through refurbished buildings, exhibits of mining equipment, photographs, films and the written records of historians, about the miners whose sacrifices, bettered their family lives.

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After the initial discovery of diamonds at Colesberg Kopje, the canvass homes surrounding the hill, a mere 180 yards by 120 yards became undeniably inadequate. What started as a few diggers staking claims quickly transformed to a crowded mass of humanity, subsequently pushed out further when a 42 acres land parcel comprising the hill was split into 1600 plotted claims.

That same year, the ambitious 18-year-old Cecil John Rhodes from England, wrote home to his mother: “From my tent it is like an immense number of piles covered with black ants, thick as can be, represented by human beings.”

Diggers were mostly white males, who demanded black labor subservience, with tribesmen from different clans performing the arduous tasks of actually digging the mine claims with pick and shovel, dumping rocky material into buckets, hand-hauled through a network of crisscrossing ropes supported by beams and dragged through demarcated pathways beyond the hole to storage piles. As the hole deepened, windlasses enabled the lifting of larger loads for the dangerous, injurious, and sometimes fatal work.

White owners and diggers referred to blacks as Kaffirs, often degrading and humiliating their black heritage, but tribesmen kept coming in droves, despite the hostilities towards all native peoples, treating amongst them, Basuto, Maswarzi and Damara miners like slaves. But for those well enough to survive a minimum three-month contract, and scalp the column daily minimum of five-feet, the five-shillings was a life’s dream. Some survived a year or two, enough to buy their own crop fields or perhaps, pay another family for a maiden wife. Some less fortunate souls never left, except on their way to a paupers’ grave.

According to historical records, plots were sold and worked at different stages, diggers with wealthy owners employed more men and bought deeds to adjacent plots, so the square plot excavation progressed faster. Others had only single plots that hadn’t even begun to dig and the site became a mass of scattered columns, rising from the depths of the hole in various sizes, like chessboard columns to a digger’s puzzle.

Fear of heights was long abandoned when every ounce of rock could make or break a digger’s plight. There were many accidents from falling rocks, and those who fell from the tall stone towers above the rampant diggings abound. The risk involved in reaching the monumental columns, like scaling a vertical mountain wall. Dangerous backbreaking work, where blacks were often the target of slow progress with malignant beatings.

Men arrived in Kimberley often starving and exhausted from the journey and couldn’t work for days. Some never worked in the mine, just getting there killed them. Strong young adults grouped as brothers or friends were preferred, as they would tend to support and stimulate team efforts.

By late 1871, 50,000 men had descended and camped in the Kimberley area. The earlier lure of diamond riches brought diggers to the area from discoveries along the banks of the Vaal River. Then, besides the Big Hole’s ‘New Rush’ impetus, other volcanic pipes in the Northern Cape were discovered, and other sites developed near Kimberley, at Dutoitspan, De Beers, Bultfontein and Wesselton mines.

In droves, they crowded the town and mine-sites. Loaded horse-drawn carts transported picks, shovels, buckets, rockers, sieves, tents and blankets. While oxen, goats and work-mules trudged to a fate as sure as the falling darkness. Natives, sweating, scraping with bleeding bare hands for every daylight hour to secure a fractional share. The hums of loquacious chants, driving, urging mules’ progress from grime-dusted throats. Delivering precious earth to the surface for sieving and sorting by managers, over-lookers and diggers who revelled in chance.

For owners with many plotted claims, fenced tented compounds were set up to establish some control, and even though blacks were searched, rough diamonds invariably found their way outside. Thus, an illicit diamond trade forced digger compound collaborations to ensure increased security.

The swarms of humanity necessitated enough provisions availability for food, drink, clothing and working materials, an unruly infrastructure with markets at first. As digging intensified, animal presence increased the need to pull the exhaustive loads, aided by the giant windlasses. Some diggers brought horses, mules and oxen, and the ever-present dog and rooster population grew to alarming proportions.

The stench of spent cattle, horses, mules and dogs’ carcasses overpowering their black unwashed bodies, as well as the open ditches where they squatted their relief in unashamed lines.  Dysentery, more widespread with blacks and diggers alike, and nobody could escape the disease-ridden flies, even when it rained. Some blacks, maimed beyond repair, near death, but they stayed for the money, about ten times more than a plantations’ grind, the reward for being held like prisoners in their tented compounds. A climate unfriendly place, with blistering desert-dusty heat in summer, that offered only scant relief when the intense sun sliced the compound’s evening shadows. And winter’s wind-swept cold chapped hands into swollen fists and marred fingers with bloodied infected cuts.

Many accidents occurred when windlass cables broke, and the loaded rock boxes crushed or maimed miners that could never work again. Falling rocks, ground and wall collapse added to the inherent danger. Animals driven to exhaustion died, their carcasses left to rot where they fell, along with the starving dogs and roosters abound. The incessant buzz of flies adding to the burden of digging and transporting material to piles, scattered for miles around the hole.

In 1872, the Reverend Tyamzashe, a clergyman later wrote the following extract from a newspaper article published in the Christian Express in Alice: “From the missionary point of view, it is not easy to deal with such a mixture of tribes as we have at the Diamond fields. There are san, Khoikhoi, Griquas, Batlhaping, Damaras, Barolong, Barutse, Bapedi, Baganana, Basutu, Maswazi, Matonga, Matabele, Mabaca, Mampondo, Mamfengu, Batembu, Maxosa and more. Many of these people can hardly understand each other, and in many cases, they had to converse through the medium of either Dutch, Sisulu/Sisutu, or Xhosa.”

Julius Charles Wernher, a mining financier, wrote to his parents about the cacophony of sound: “Shouts, clanging metal, the rattle of the siftings, creaking horse whims, braying mules, the chanting sing-song of the black workers. At night, there was no peace; the hideous howling of dogs was followed by the crowing of a thousand roosters!”

Digging deeper next to each other, even with demarcated access routes created problems when pathways collapsed, carts and wagons slid down. After heavy rains, the more progressed claims flooded, and work stopped lower down. The mine, almost impossible to manage at times.

The original hill of Colesberg Kopje and the land around it was a relatively softer yellowy rock that decomposed over a weathered season into easy breakable material, sometimes yielding diamonds. Once the plot works intensified and the hole widened, digger crews followed the massive volcanic funnel-shaped pipe, formed when diamondiferous molten rock and magma had risen to the surface and pushed out around the pipe and the rim of the hole with the softer yellow ground scattered with diamonds and varieties of other gems. Hence, the promise of riches spurred feverish momentum until the yellow ground gave way to solid blue-ground – ‘kimberlite,’ a name born as the town of Kimberley swelled because of, and beyond the ever-deepening hole.

Many diggers realized the harder blue rock was too difficult and costly to break down and abandoned the mine. But the wealthy claim holders in Kimberly and the Northern Cape knew the pipes were the main source of diamonds and invested accordingly by buying up smaller diggers’ claims and improved the process by constructing grinding equipment.

Besides mine’s complete lack of mine safety, the general health of miners working and living together in the crowded quarters brought other severe ailments to bare. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, scurvy and diarrhoea were prevalent. Conditions became so bad, that Kimberley became known as the most disease-ridden place in the world, where the death rate was one-in-ten! In 1883-84 when Kimberley was infected with ‘smallpox’, 600 workers died. Poor sanitation increased the spread of disease. According to an observer at the time; an African black worker was about the same value as a tiresome fly! Yet they came in hopes of riches.

In 1876, diamond magnate Alfred Beit wrote: “Tents giving way to corrugated iron buildings crowding 50,000 (mostly blacks), in what had been veldt 5 years ago. Approaches to Kimberley lined with carcasses of exhausted pack animals, left to rot where they perished (mules, oxen). Latrines were open ditches, infested with flies, scarce water, so washing was a luxury. When it rained the dust transformed to mud. Summer, hot as an oven. Winter bitterly cold, swept by sandstorms. Camp fever (dysentery, diarrhea) swept diggers away. Shortages of food, vegetables and wood for a fire. The land for miles around deluded of trees.”

The compounds’ makeshift shacks with corrugated iron rooves were built within a high fenced enclosure, to secure the natives’ capture for their contract duration, and prevent rough diamonds and gemstones from being thrown outside to families and friends. They were increasingly searched, and often strip-searched when leaving the mine, before entering the compound. There was no trust.

Victorian author Anthony Trollope described the working atmosphere in these terms: “From the vast amphitheater scooped in the rock, there rose in the air the clicking of picks, the rasp and clatter of shovels, the thud of buckets falling, the creaking of windlasses, the tramp over planks, the rolling of carts, the lowing of bullocks, the braying of mules, mingled with the calls and chatter and chants of whites and blacks in an indescribable din.”

During Trollop’s 1877 tour, he wrote: “There are places where men are attracted by the desire of gain – so repulsive to endure for the miseries of habitation. The heat, dust and flies. A gust of wind would bring a thick cloud of dust to hide everything, seeing that the solid surface of the earth had risen diluted into the air. Worse in December – February for flies and dust. The meat was bad, butter uneatable, vegetables rare, milk and potatoes a luxury, and too costly. Not a tree within 5 miles/8 kilometers of town, or a blade of grass within 20 miles. Everything brown. Only pretty things were women. Hideous settlements. An ugly world in the barren veldt.”   

With diets compromised by food shortages, many suffered from malnutrition, often collapsing, and falling into the void, some severely maimed, or meeting an early death. Others were considered too sick to return to the compound and moved to the crammed Kimberley hospital, where many died waiting for treatment. If you could not complete a day’s work, you were no good to the diggers, or the owners who greased their palms for driving the exploitation.

As the museum guide told with a wry smile, black wives sometimes came to the compound gates in search of their husband’s wages. They’d give their names and their man’s assigned numbers to the guard, who would collect the money and hand it over outside the compound. He added sincerely, that after a fatal accident, the dead man’s widow would appear with her children at the locked compound gate, some with the bulge of a swollen belly. At such times, a white man would come out and give the money, as if his importance absolved the mine’s responsibility. Such was the discriminatory era of this land.

Besides the inherent dangers of working the mine, the white man’s abuse of blacks was a frequent reality. Once, an overseer accused two Basotho natives of stealing a handful of rough gems, then proceeded to pound them with a pick handle to display his superiority, because they had no gems. Other Basotho were inclined to intervene but did not want to suffer the same fate. The beaten men were dragged before the camp magistrate and sentenced to ten lashes. Maintaining control over the workforce was paramount for white men.

Many black workers were forced to pay higher prices for scarce food, clothing and a portion of their pitiful compound rent, but contracts were cast in stone, as hard as the rock they dug. They learned that being kept in alienating, unescapable slum-riddled compounds was little solace, after the daily risks of surviving the mine’s perpetual grind. Gruelling enough during open-cast mining. Then the underground mine brought more challenges, explosions, fires, roof falls, and mud rushes that left miners like dead sculptured statues as they worked with chisel in hand. But the complete lack of respect for the mortality and the mourning rituals of surviving black members brought anger and retaliation by the natives of all tribes, especially the highly-strung Basotho.

The mine management’s attitude was to maximize profits. Mourning and disposal of the dead was a loss of business without ritual, whereas black Africans believed that death is an inseparable part of the living. This fundamental issue of ideals brought fierce conflicts for the native groups. As with any society, there is a period of grief for the dead, the burial rites, and worship. Yet, African culture makes the distinction between a ‘good death’, by time-honoured causes, such as old age, and a ‘bad death’, as unforeseen, or sudden, like an accident. A difference between good and evil. Black Africans believe in the elevation to another life form, bringing luck when happy, and misfortune when enraged. Hence, their need for essential rituals. 

Many records of the Big Hole deaths were destroyed by fire, although surviving records for the 5-year period 1887 – 1892 reports that 5,000 black paupers were buried in Gladstone Cemetery, and about 611 pauper burials occurred in a 6-month period in 1900. Many of these without coffins, just wrapped in blankets in unmarked graves. These are just a fraction of the known deaths at Kimberley’s Big Hole. Black tribes loathe the way the dead were treated. The stories detailing their shared sorrows leading to the mass pauper’s grave with a single marker and no names, just a reference to all who perished there.

Now a World Heritage Site, the Kimberley Mining Museum and the town’s restored buildings surrounding The Big Hole lay testament to honor all who sacrificed life and limb to improve the quality of life for their families and hope for future generations. Stories that are told in compelling detail about the town’s success and its struggles so blatantly revealing its warts.

The experience of being around the Big Hole gave me a sense of shared understanding and kinship with all who gathered here. The belabored deprivation, travesties and disasters it took to create this hand-dug diamond mine, from a field with a hill in the shade of Kameeldoorn trees will live on with indelible effects.