In 1889 Barnato sold out to Rhodes for £5,338,650. Rhodes and Barnato battled viciously for the remaining stock. In competition, Rhodes sold one of his companies to Barnato's Kimberley Central, but Rhodes retained interests that gave him a 20 percent share in Barnato's company. Rhodes fought intensely against competing mining interests, and by the end of 1889 he had bought off other diamond claims and was in control of the South African diamond industry in Kimberley.Īfter expansion of his holdings, Rhodes went on to form De Beers Consolidated Mines, which established an effective monopoly over the diamond industry in 1889. He made a huge profit and later formed the Barnato Diamond Mining Company, which he merged with the Kimberley Central Mining Company in 1883. In 1876 he bought four claims in the Kimberley mines. As a large number of prospectors staked out claims to various fields, two key players-Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato (1852–1896)-became the most successful.īarnato arrived in South Africa from England in 1873 at the age of twenty. The development of the South African diamond industry was the work of Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), who arrived in South Africa from England in 1870 at the age of seventeen, and founded the De Beers mining company in Kimberley in 1888. The town of Kimberly was filled with settlers, but it was surpassed by Johannesburg when gold mining started in earnest in 1887. The first rush for diamonds was followed by a gold rush to South Africa a few years later. The discovery of diamonds also had a larger global implication when it led to a "diamond rush" that attracted thousands of fortune hunters from Europe, the United States, and Australia. These claims, along with contestations for economic and political control of diamonds and later gold in South Africa, defined the contours of southern African colonial history. The British government, attracted by the prospect of mineral wealth, quickly annexed the diamond fields, repudiating the claims of the Voortrekker republics to the area. But the discovery of diamonds also exacerbated the colonization of the region, increased the rate of African disposition of land, and led to the political domination of black South Africans.
The diamond industry became a chief source of export earnings and the key to the economic transformation of South Africa. South Africa emerged as a major source of gem-quality diamonds and the world's leading producer in the mid-twentieth century. Four pipes of primary diamonds (those in which the diamonds remain inside the original host rock) were discovered at the town of Kimberley. The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1871 showed that South Africa and other parts of Africa would be the source of an enormous quantity of high-quality diamonds. Two years later an 83-carat diamond was found. Placer diamonds (stream-deposited) were found between the Vaal and Orange Rivers later in the year. In 1867 a pretty pebble found near the Orange River in South Africa was confirmed as a 21-carat diamond.
In the Congo, diamond production jumped from 988,000 carats in 1961 to 4.6 million carats in 2003. Botswana is the world's leading producer of gem-quality diamonds, with over 30.4 million carats produced in 2003. By the early twenty-first century, South Africa was producing eight to ten million carats per year. The major deposits are in South Africa and Botswana, with substantial deposits in the Congo Republic (Zaire), Angola, Namibia, Ghana, Central African Republic, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe.Ībout 269,000 carats of diamonds were produced in South Africa in the 1870s, rising to approximately 505 million carats in 1906.
Africa is the richest source of diamonds, accounting for nearly half of the world's production. Diamond-bearing stones are excavated by drilling holes on the side of pipes (vertical columns of rock) formed by volcanic activity in the earth crust. Diamonds are crystallized carbon compounds that are formed under extreme pressure and high temperatures deep in the earth's crust.
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