Reef, or Rand, of Johannesburg gets its name because it is a ridge, for rand in Afrikaans means "ridge"; but rand, or
"reef," is also the word used for the rock surrounding dia-mondiferous
ground—the stony wall around a diamond pit. In the late 1870s the reef
around the Kimberley Mine was falling into the pit in great slabs, and
before long there was no stopping it. The harder the harassed diggers
worked to haul the rubble out of the way, the more landslides there
were. It was like trying to dig a hole in a sandbank beyond the depth
that the laws of gravity permit. Digging had become not only pointless
but perilous, and by 1882 the diggers were again moving off and it
again looked as if South African diamond mining was doomed.
Once
more the Kimberley Mine's obituary was premature. This time,
engineering and big business came to the rescue. Once and for all, the
new men—the capitalists and the engineers—threw out the concept of
diamond mines as surface phenomena. The pipes obviously went down a
long way, and they obviously had to be worked as any other deep mines
were— underground. This meant sinking shafts and digging tunnels.
Capital was required—a lot of it. Claims were amalgamated. Companies
were formed. Companies ate each other up. The great consolidation that
was to be known all over the world simply as De Beers came into being.
But that is another story. The story of the rush ends with the birth of
De Beers, though the people of Kimberley haven't forgotten it. How
could they, with those great pits gaping at the sky?
Today,
the Kimberley Mine is surrounded by a high wire fence. The fence has
been there ever since late in the last century, when a man committed
suicide by throwing himself into
