Word: kimberley
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Brewing Storm. Matthews is the son of a Kimberley diamond digger who named him for an Old Testament prophet. He was brought up in Christian mission schools, proved a brilliant student, and won a chance to study at Yale and the London School of Economics. In 1935 he settled down to his career as professor of native law and anthropology at the Negro college at Fort Hare, in the Cape Province. Full of his Christian-mission teachings, Matthews devoted himself to the gradual improvement of the lot of the black man. He spoke as a moderate. While others were making...
...left of known diamond-bearing top soil is probed by individual diggers who average between $15 and $800 a year. Last month the vast De Beers Diamond Co. threw open to prospectors 950 acres of a farm called Nooitgedacht (Never-thought-it-would-come-true), 20 miles from Kimberley, last remaining De Beers diamond grounds. Eighty-one diamond prospectors and their Negro helpers lined up for the rush...
...feather trade was bringing in $5,000,000 a year, second only to Kimberley's diamond mines. Wild speculation broke out in land and feathers. Prices flew up to $500 a lb. in 1913, before the inevitable crash. Many an ostrich tycoon went to bed a millionaire and woke up bankrupt. Some of them trekked southward to raise oranges; the gaudy Victorian mansions they had built slowly fell to pieces in a weird jumble of white gables and green cupolas. Max Rose, who came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1890, was one of the few ex-millionaires...
...look after his London employer's diamond properties. The year was 1902, when Cecil Rhodes, who had formed the De Beers combine out of hundreds of small claims, died murmuring: "So little done, so much to do." Oppenheimer was just the man to do it. He stayed in Kimberley and went into mining...
Shrewd, eager and personable, he was enough of a success by 1912 to be elected Kimberley's mayor at 32 (he was twice reelected, later went to Parliament). In 1917 he teamed up with an American engineer, William Lincoln Honnold, and, with backing from J. P. Morgan and others, formed Anglo American. While everybody else swarmed to the Central Rand, Oppenheimer tried his luck in the Far East Rand and struck it rich, did it again 100 miles away where nobody thought there was any gold...