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12
DIAMOND
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