The Effect
Dusk is gathering on a wild stretch of beach in South Africa, and a lone 13 year-old boy is sitting beside his empty lunchbox. At first glance, you might think this boy was just pausing a moment before making his way home from school. But there is a sign above his head. ‘No Entry’ it reads, its letters stark and bleached by the sun. This boy is not leaving school following a day of lessons. Look closer and you will see it: the thick layer of grime that saturates his clothes; the split callouses littering his hands, the old scabs and fresh bruises that clutter his skin. The boy scratches at his armpits. It is not mosquito bites that irritate him, but the scars caused by rope burns, from the lines tied under his arms before he is lowered into the pit. For this boy is sitting outside a mine, the mine at which he works a day to match his age: thirteen long hours underground, flanked by the wild stretch of beach known as South Africa’s diamond coast.
The so-called ‘diamond coast’ of South Africa is made up of a series of towns overmined by the company DeBeers, the South African/British corporation specialising in the diamond industry. Even if you’ve never heard of this company before, chances are you will have heard their slogan, devised in the 1940s and popular ever since: ‘a diamond is forever.’ In stark contrast is the average life expectancy of the people who labour in the DeBeer diamond mines: just 37 years-old. The boy has another quarter of a century left to live and work, if he is lucky. And, in a way, this boy is one of the lucky ones. Unlike many of his colleagues, for example, he still has all his fingers. He used them only a few hours ago, in fact, to extract a rough, uncut chunk of stone from hundreds of metres below the ground. The boy had turned that stone around in his fingers again and again. And then, and here is the really curious thing: that same stone, a large, uncut diamond, had abruptly disappeared. The boy has no idea whether he will ever set eyes on it again. Where it might have gone is a complete and utter mystery. It has, quite simply, vanished.
And these strange diamond disappearances have been happening for some time. Indeed, millions of dollars worth of diamonds have been vanishing this way for the past few decades. What happens is this: a worker at one of the mines will unearth an uncut stone. Then it will vanish. While many of these diamonds are never seen again, often the very same diamond a worker has pried from the ground will reappear in that same worker’s home. So maybe, you think, this isn’t actually such a mystery. The worker has obviously stolen the diamond, has slipped it into his pocket, or some secret pouch stitched into the lining of his clothing when his employers weren’t looking. But if you did think that, you would be wrong, as miners are regularly subjected to thorough physical examinations both before they start work in the morning and before they leave at night. They are even required to pass through an X-ray machine, again both on their way into the mine and on the way out. No diamonds are found on them whatsoever, nor when they cross the series of heavily-guarded checkpoints between the mines and where they live. Yet, still, a worker can arrive home only to find that the same diamond they extracted earlier that day, or maybe even the day before, is there waiting for them, as though it has appeared as if by magic. As though it has been teleported there.
And, if you are a mine worker, to have a diamond discovered at your home is a very dangerous thing indeed. Even inhabitants of this stretch of coast who innocently stumble upon a diamond as they are paddling along the shore are legally required to immediately hand it over to the companies who control the diamond mines. Just holding a diamond or gazing at one for a mere second is not only illegal, but can see you dismissed from your job, subjected to beatings or held down as your fingers are cropped: quite literally, severed from your hand and tossed into the blue-grey waters of the South Atlantic Ocean. That’s why the boy sitting outside the mine with his lunchbox is still lucky to have his.
So, why would anyone risk redundancy and destitution, or physical mutilation, for such an endeavour?… To somehow magically steal a diamond that is more than likely to fetch no more than a meagre 37 cents or 28 pence in British money? Surely such a prize isn’t worth the danger? Particularly when the owners of the mines, DeBeers, have made it known to the people living on this coastline that if diamonds are sold on the black market, there will be severe repercussions for the community, including restricted access to their lands or DeBeers using their government contacts to see that funding is withdrawn from essential infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals.
Moreover, DeBeers also claims that such strict regulations aren’t oppressive and tyrannical, they are really just a necessity. The diamonds, they say, must be controlled since their numbers are dwindling. And if the diamonds run out, then there would be no more tiaras or earrings, no more of the diamond bearings that make our watches tick, no more skin exfoliators containing ground-up diamonds… and no more diamond-embellished baby rattles to grace the cradles of the finest Knightsbridge townhouses. And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that, to the western world, a diamond has become almost a condition of marriage. The more money spent on an engagement ring and the bigger the rock, the more intense a person’s love is seen to be. The smaller and paltrier the stone, the more embarrassingly unworthy. This narrative has, across the past nearly nine decades of western civilization, seduced us all. A diamond is the ultimate symbol of success and glamour. Who could forget the iconic Krupp diamond, for instance, the 33 carat whopper once bought by Richard Burton for that legend of the silver screen and ultimate embodiment of glamour, Elizabeth Taylor?
But, when all’s said and done, apart from being a westernised symbol of status and civilised love, what is a diamond? This hardest natural material on the planet is actually ancient carbon, usually created by plant matter trapped below the earth’s surface and degraded millions of years ago, plant matter that has been subjected to vast extremes of heat and pressure. Any minerals seeping their way into this trapped carbon can colour it, creating diamonds in a span of shades from pale yellow to black. The clearer and more uncoloured the diamond, the purer it is from contamination.
So just how are these stones - these sought-after pieces of the natural world - vanishing from the mines, only to reappear at the home of the very worker who extricated them from the earth? Just how is that possible? How could they make it past all those checkpoints, the X-ray machines, those guards authorised to inflict such brutal punishments on any potential thieves?
The 13 year-old boy outside the mine picks up his empty lunchbox and gives a hacking cough, the dust from his work rattling in his lungs. He begins his journey along the busy roads and parched tracks from the mine to the town in which he lives. And, it is extraordinary, as when he pushes open the door of his house, an uncut diamond is there. Sitting in the palm of his mother’s hand in all its beautiful, milky opacity. It is the very same diamond the boy excavated earlier that day, with his raw knuckles and his cracking callouses. But, just like every other mine worker, the boy had been searched before he left, and nothing had been found on him. Just like every other mineworker he had been X-rayed. The lunchbox he carried back, as we have heard, was totally empty. And yet the diamond is there, in his house, all the same. But, the question remains… how?
The Method
Dawn is breaking on a wild stretch of beach in South Africa, and a lone 13 year-old boy is sitting beside his lunchbox. At first glance, you might think this boy was just pausing a moment before making his way into school. But he is not. He is sitting outside the diamond mine at which he works. For this is the same boy we met earlier. And it is the morning of the same day, the day he will arrive home to discover the diamond he dug from the mine awaiting him there. But this time we meet him, as well as it being morning rather than evening, there is one other crucial difference. This time, his lunchbox isn’t empty at all.
The box, however, doesn’t hold food or a small container of drinking water as you might expect. The contents of the lunchbox are alive. If you were to pick it up and listen very carefully, in fact, just as the boy does now, you will hear it too: hear the creature within it stir, give a slight adjustment of its plumage, the faintest, softest coo.
The boy we have been following has a name: his name is Msizi. The bird inside the box has a name too: Bartholomew… and bird and boy share a close bond, built up over months of working together on their extremely dangerous enterprise. And such are the perils they face, they have both become experts at making themselves invisible. Carrying the lunchbox carefully, Msizi proceeds towards the entrance of the mine. Before he enters and starts his work for the day, the boy gives one of his hacking coughs. Large spots of lurid red blood fall from his mouth to the bright orange ground.
Msizi will again today risk sacking, beating or bodily amputation in order to smuggle an uncut diamond to his home, with the aid of his faithful companion pigeon. Once through the X-ray machine, Msizi will transfer Bartholomew from his lunchbox to the loose folds of his overalls. He will then work through the sludge, hundreds of feet below ground, quietly secreting every diamond he unearths beneath his tongue. During a quiet moment, he will look around. The diggers next to Msizi will keep working, their heads down, backs bent, pretending not to notice. The boy will then pack the diamond into a bag he has fashioned from sacking, binding it to Bartholomew’s feet. He will take the pigeon to the bottom of a shaft and he will let him go. He will not wait to see his bird fly up into the light, he would not dare. Using the ‘homing’ capabilities pigeons are so well-known for, Bartholomew will fly with the stone all the way back to the boy’s family home. It is a risky process for the bird, too. He could easily be intercepted as he exits the mine, stabbed with a biro pen, or the nearest instrument to hand. He might have his neck wrung, or even have his head bitten off by a guard.
The act of merely keeping a pigeon in this part of South Africa is illegal, outlawed as soon as the mining companies discovered what the miners and their pets were up to. Msizi, like many others, keeps his feathered friend shrouded in the strictest secrecy. Be discovered with a pigeon, even if you are not a mine worker, and you are likely to face the consequences – both official and unofficial.
But Msizi is careful, more careful than many of the other workers who are also using pigeons to smuggle out diamonds from the mines. He only sneaks Bartholomew on to mine property once a week, as the mining authorities are well aware that using pigeons to smuggle away diamonds is causing them irritating financial shortfalls. Some miners try to secure their diamonds by taking risks even more perilous than using birds, by digging unsafe tunnels into the mines themselves. It is not unusual for these same tunnels to collapse, trapping and asphyxiating the miners inside them. Other workers turn to ever more creative schemes to smuggle the precious stones from the mines, but as quickly as they find a new method of slipping out the diamonds, the authorities uncover it. When workers started to hollow out the heels of their shoes, DeBeers responded by having the floor of the X-ray machine tilted, so a person’s heels would better show up. If a miner dies at work, there’s a good chance the mining companies will bury the body deep in the belly of the mines, to prevent other miners from using the corpse to smuggle out stones. One woman was caught hiding diamonds in the socket behind her glass eye. For a while, people would get the pilfered stones out of the mines by throwing them over the perimeter fence. Then they used bows and arrows. When the authorities erected a second perimeter fence to counter this, the workers turned to the humble pigeon.
And all this dangerous ingenuity for an uncut diamond to fetch a measly 15 pence per carat on the local black market. Msizi and his colleagues are not risking life and limb to get rich quick. The extra money made from the sale of smuggled diamonds gives workers more of a chance of being able to feed their families, and reclaim some agency over a community exploited by colonialism. It also helps Msizi to afford the vital healthcare he needs to treat his lungs, cut up from the toxic subterranean air.
But just how do homing pigeons manage to make their extraordinarily accurate journeys? New research suggests that, after a few attempts, a bird will lock onto a preferred route between point A and point B, navigating their way along that route via a series of landmarks that it comes to recognise. Like other migratory birds, it is also thought that pigeons will find their way across the skies by using the position of the sun as a compass and, if this isn’t available, hone in on the earth’s magnetic fields instead. The practice of domesticating pigeons goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, the messenger pigeons belonging to the ancient Greeks in 700BC used to convey the results of the earliest Olympic Games. During the First World War they were famously employed to send important messages between the trenches and headquarters of the Western Front. It is the bird’s powerful natural instinct to return to the location of a reliable food source and safe roost that man has harnessed over the centuries. But training pigeons is a labour intensive process that can take many months, so on South Africa’s diamond coast, it’s a big time investment for people already working over twelve hours every day.
But how did the mining authorities initially come to detect the method of such an imaginative feat of smuggling? It happened when some of the more overeager, or downright desperate, mine workers began attaching too many diamonds to the birds. As a result, the overburdened pigeons faltered, the extra weight of the gemstones causing them to land, exhausted, along the beaches. One homing pigeon was found carrying more than £6000 worth of uncut diamonds taped around its breast. If the mining companies discover a pigeon has been found, then the diamonds are retrieved and the pigeon shot. DeBeers have gunmen scope the birds out from a range of locations along the coast, one being the deck of the ship they own, moored just offshore. It dredges the sea bed for diamonds, and it is estimated that in the ship’s thirty-year lifespan, it will yield 240k carats of diamonds. DeBeers’ threats that the diamonds will run out, it seems, have been grossly overestimated, those controlling this exceptionally lucrative industry having a history of perpetuating misinformation in the areas in which they hold sway.
But who is to blame for the issues miring the South African diamond industry? The conglomerates like DeBeers who are exploiting the people and wildlife of the region for their own financial gain? Or the consumer? It’s a complex matter of capitalism versus human rights, centuries old but continuing to unfold within our own. And, in the meantime, the workers will continue to smuggle the stones out of the mines with the help of their feathered friends, causing these diamonds to vanish and reappear in their homes as if they had been teleported there. As if by magic.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
