Just days after the rush began, officials visited the site and took samples for testing. “Diamonds! Diamonds!” some people yelled. And there was no shortage of merchants looking to cash in on their newly extracted finds, which they insisted were precious stones.
#Diamond rush africa desperation cracked#
Music blasted from cars while some people cracked jokes and sipped beer. Vendors sold biscuits, sweet corn kernels and kota - a South African street food of white bread, fries and bologna. Many diamond seekers wrapped themselves in blankets and slept in the holes they dug. They also help explain the long-shot appeal of KwaHlathi and its purported diamonds.Ī satellite village of sorts sprouted here. Those statistics translate into all manner of odd jobs - and risky ones, like venturing into abandoned mines, that have proved deadly. Among young people, the situation is even more dire: About three of every four South African youths are without a job. Unemployment in South Africa is at 32.6%, the highest level recorded since the government began producing quarterly labor force reports in 2008. “As the man of the house, it makes me feel less than,” he said of the difficulty of providing for his three children. Staples like beef, milk and butter were luxuries he could no longer afford. With his job search hitting dead ends, he has been subsisting on social grants totaling less than 1,100 rand ($77) a month, a quarter of what he had earned at the factory. The government has meanwhile reiterated calls for people to vacate the area, citing coronavirus risks and environmental degradation.He had been without a job since October when the textile factory where he worked as a supervisor burned down. The diamond rush “highlighted the socio-economic challenges confronting people in the area”, the statement said. The country, renowned for its mineral wealth, has struggled with decades of spiralling unemployment worsened by the coronavirus pandemic. The prospect of finding a diamond had sent ripples of hope across one of South Africa’s poorest regions and beyond. It added that quartz crystals were common across a sedimentary basin known as the Karoo Supergroup, which stretches over the site, and particularly abundant along dolerite sills. The report said the site – more than 300km (186 miles) southeast of Johannesburg – sat near a sill of volcanic rock named dolerite “which is not in a zone where diamond occurrences are present”. More than 1,000 fortune seekers flocked to the village of KwaHlathi in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province in search of what they believed to be diamonds after a discovery of unidentified stones in the area /foUHerlD3R “In fact, what has been discovered are quartz crystals,” it said, noting that the yet-to-determined value of the stones would be “very low” compared with diamonds. “The tests conducted conclusively revealed that the stones discovered in the area are not diamonds,” a local government statement said on Sunday in reference to the report. The rush prompted the government to send geoscientists and mining experts to collect samples for testing, the results of which quashed the dreams of diggers hoping to strike it rich. Thousands of people had flocked to a hillside in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province to dig for mysterious stones first unearthed by a cattle herder and believed to be diamonds. Gemstones that sparked a diamond rush to eastern South Africa last week are just quartz after all, according to preliminary findings.