said,
too, the weather is terrible; I went there in February-midsummer in
South Africa—and it was sizzling.) But Kim-berley has something of its
own—something, perhaps, of San Francisco's quality, which is hard to
describe without using the word "history." And that sounds a little
overblown, for Kim-berley is only eighty-five years old.
Kimberley
is not a very small city, as such things go in South Africa, but it has
the atmosphere of one. It is a company town, and most of its citizens
are held together by the common history of De Beers Consolidated
Mines, Ltd., the great corporation that was born in Kimberley in 1888
and is now one of the most powerful business empires on earth,
thoroughly dominating the world's diamond industry. Practically
everybody in town works for De Beers or has worked for De Beers or has
an ancestor who worked for De Beers. Many of the old mining families
have dispersed, and quite a lot of the young people of Kimberley have
branched out into work unconnected with diamonds—schoolteaching,
shopkeeping, manufacturing, and so on—but most of the people know each
other, and one hears the same names again and again. When two Kimberley
residents who don't happen to know each other are introduced the
conversation is apt to go something like this:
"Weren't you at school with Viljoen, or was that someone else with your name?"
"No,
that was me. Viljoen and I are first cousins, you know —or, wait, is it
second cousins? That's right, second cousins. We grew up together, but
he started working in the washing plant here in '27, and I went to the
Rand."
One thing that makes Kimberley seem small is the fact that it is pinched in by five vast gaping holes—the deepest open-pit
