The Big Hole at Kimberley

Picks, shovels, up to 50,000 miners and 13.6 million carats

In 1871 members of the Red Cap Party from Colesberg found diamonds on a low hill, Colesberg Kopje, on Vooruitzigt farm, which belonged to the De Beers brothers. The scramble for claims that followed gave the camp the name New Rush, and in 1873 it became Kimberley. Within a year the diggers' camp held around 50,000 people. The hill vanished. In its place grew the Big Hole, officially the Kimberley Mine.

From mid-July 1871 to 1914, up to 50,000 miners worked it with picks and shovels. The pit grew to 17 hectares, 463 m across and about 1.6 km around, and was cut 240 m deep. It yielded 2,720 kg of diamonds, about 13.6 million carats, from more than 22 million tons of rock. Debris later filled it to about 215 m, and some 40 m of water has since collected at the bottom, leaving about 175 m of open hole to look down into. When working from the surface became too dangerous and unprofitable, the kimberlite pipe was followed underground to 1,097 m. On 13 March 1888 the separate diggings were merged into De Beers Consolidated Mines, whose life governors included Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato, and mining stopped on 14 August 1914.

The cost in lives was high. The diamond rush drew a huge migrant workforce of Black miners, many of them Basotho, as land dispossession pushed people off rural homesteads, and mine managers housed them in closed compounds meant to limit diamond theft, without water or proper sanitation, a pattern historians link to the later shape of apartheid cities. Rockfalls, explosives, trucks and cages killed men underground, and tuberculosis, pneumonia, scurvy and other diseases killed more; of 5,368 Black patients admitted to Kimberley Hospital from 1897 to 1899, 1,144 died. Surviving records show 5,000 Black burials in the town's paupers' cemetery between 1887 and 1892 alone, many in unmarked graves.

For decades Kimberley sold the Big Hole as the largest hole ever dug by hand. In 2005 the local historian Steve Lunderstedt showed from mining inspectors' reports that the hand-dug workings at Jagersfontein, and possibly Bultfontein, were bigger. A mine museum grew up on the rim from the 1960s, with old buildings and streetscapes, and opened officially for Kimberley's centenary in 1971. Between 2002 and 2005 De Beers spent R50 million turning it into a modern visitor attraction, and there has long been a push to have the Big Hole listed as a World Heritage Site.