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Diamond Mine May Not Be Forever, but It�s a Start
November 2, 2003
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
KUBOES, South Africa - As a young man, Willem Hans spent
years clocking in miners as they arrived to dig and sift
for diamonds at the Alexkor mine, a state-owned colossus on
a plot of Atlantic coastline 10 times the size of
Manhattan.
He shared a room during the workweek in a dirty hostel,
returned on weekends to his family in a highland shack, and
considered himself lucky to make the starting salary, in
1969, of $26 a month. In white-ruled South Africa, many
blacks fared worse.
So consider how lucky he must feel today, now that a
landmark court ruling puts him within shouting distance of
becoming part owner of the mine, which is on the most
western part of the nation's coast, near the Namibian
border.
Along with 2,000 other descendants of the nomadic Nama
tribe, as well as mixed-race descendants of European
settlers known as the Basters, Mr. Hans laid claim to the
mine's land and the minerals in it, charging that the
former apartheid government drove his ancestors off it
three-quarters of a century ago.
The legal battle took five years, and in October South
Africa's highest court agreed, giving the community the
chance to recover the land or to obtain compensation.
"I am happy, I am happy, I am happy," exulted Mr. Hans, 51,
in his Kuboes home, a sparsely furnished brick house
crowded with six children. "Before, the white people had
the benefit, and the brown man was in the background. Now
we don't have to stand begging."
The ruling is part of a far broader effort by the South
African government to reverse the gross disparities of land
ownership under the old apartheid system that relegated
blacks to so-called colored reserves and homelands and
barred them from owning property.
Nine years after the nation held its first democratic
elections, blacks and mixed-race people still control just
15 percent of the land, though they are 88 percent of the
population.
Now pressure is mounting on the government to move faster
with the land programs so that inequities do not explode
into unrest.
But South African officials say they are determined to
avoid the fate of Zimbabwe, where state-approved land
seizures have ruined commercial agriculture.
Instead, they are relying on a plodding process dependent
on administrative decisions, court rulings, a limited state
budget and, at times, the willingness of white landowners
to sell. Of 79,000 land restitution claims filed by the
1998 deadline, just over half have been resolved.
Few are as grand as the claim of the Namas and the Basters,
who seek not only recovery of 210,000 acres of state-owned
land, but also compensation for the diamonds removed from
that ground over 75 years.
The potential cost to the state is so great that the
government intervened as the villagers' legal adversary,
arguing that British colonizers, not apartheid rulers, took
the land.
Henk Smith, the villagers' lawyer at the nonprofit Legal
Resources Center, says the government's loss could be South
Africa's gain if the villagers, most of whom are shepherds
and laborers who never studied past the seventh grade, team
up with the right managers and investors to become stewards
of a diamond mine. "The returns for the South African
people and the South African reconciliation process could
be enormous," he said.
A rags-to-riches ending is by no means assured. The case,
which was novel for recognizing unwritten property rights,
now moves to a land-claims court for a decision on how the
villagers should be compensated.
It is not yet clear whether the diamond field has been
mined out, or whether large reserves remain. Of late much
of the mine's income has come from culling diamonds not
from the ground claimed by the Namas and Basters, but from
the Atlantic seabed just offshore.
On hearing of the court's decision, residents of the Baster
village of Ecksteenfontein, about 40 miles on a rutted dirt
road from Kuboes, rushed outside their homes, shouting,
laughing and crying.
A week later, some were still giddy. "Are they the people
with the bags of money?" yelled one woman as two foreigners
passed by her backyard, where she was hanging laundry to
dry.
Underneath the elation is an ironclad consensus that the
community must focus on its long-term future, said Floors
Strauss, secretary of the group's property association.
"People are not driving new Mercedes," he said. "We know
the diamonds there won't last forever."
Officials of the mining company, Alexkor, suggest that
portrayals of the community as heirs-in-waiting are
premature. A company statement said most claimants opted
for financial compensation rather than land and that no
one, apparently, had won compensation for lost income.
White employees say that whatever happens, the mine will
still need their skills.
Mr. Hans, the former time-clock keeper in Kuboes, agrees
with that. "The white man has the skills," he said. "I
don't have the skills."
But he and other villagers scoff at the notion that they
would settle for less than control of the mine, especially
in light of one estimate that valued the company at $56
million. After six years of losses, the mine posted nearly
$10 million in profits over the last two years.
"We want a sustainable future," said Mr. Strauss, the
leader of the community's association.
He and his neighbors say the court victory offers the first
real hope for development for a community that until the
last decade lived without electricity or plumbing and that
still lacks drinkable water.
Britain annexed the territory in 1847, and after diamonds
were discovered in 1925, the white minority South African
government declared the diamond field to be state property.
Step by step, it corralled the Namas and Basters into a
"colored reserve."
For Magdalena Joseph, a 39-year-old single mother of three,
the idea of part ownership in a diamond mine is almost too
much to contemplate. She spends her days slinging bricks,
helping build guest houses for tourists. When that
government job ends in four months, so will her income.
"I've got nothing," she said in her one-room shack of tin
and cardboard, before squatting on the dirt floor to fry
dough over a tiny fire of sticks.
"I would welcome flowing water in my home and some
furniture and a room for each child," Ms. Joseph said.
"Then I would feel like a person with rights."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/international/africa/02AFRI.html?ex=1068911909&ei=1&en=96979eb717020132
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