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[Michael Alexander]

From the website, http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap4.htm

" The forbidden zone was a world unto itself. The only means of entering it was the Ernest Oppenheimer Bridge, which spanned the Orange River frontier between South Africa and Namibia. Armed guards manned barricades at both the South African and Namibian ends of the bridge. Before I was permitted to pass into the forbidden zone, I had to be met by an escort from the diamond company and issued a plastic security badge.

Inside the forbidden zone is the city of Oranjemund, with its own food-producing farms and reservoirs. The vast mining area runs alongside the Atlantic Ocean. To enter into the mining area, one has to insert his plastic security badge into a slot in the wall and wait for a door to slide open automatically. The central computer, which opens and closes these passageways, tracks the comings and goings of everyone in the mining area. De Beers' helicopters constantly patrol overhead, and closely monitor the activities of the fishing craft that pass by in the ocean (even though the enormous waves would make landing a boat on the beach all but impossible). Behind the beach, a pack of Alsatian guard dogs patrol the no-man's-land between the two barbwire fences. And behind the barbwire fences is the Namib Desert, one of the most inhospitable areas on earth. It is made impenetrable by 1,000-foot-high sand dunes and 120 degree temperatures.

The extraordinary security procedures are considered necessary in Namibia because what is recovered from the 200 mile-long beach is not kimberlite ore but pure gem diamonds, which can be easily pocketed by anyone. In one small crevice in a rock outcropping, some 15,000 carats of sparkling diamonds were found on this beach some years ago.

The mine, if it can be called a mine, is actually the continental shelf of the Atlantic Ocean. To get at the richest lodes of diamonds, the ocean must be literally pushed back and held back long enough to dig out the diamonds. The mechanism for holding back the pounding surf is a ten-story high mound, which, 600 feet out in the ocean, runs parallel to the beach.

Standing on this sandy mound, I looked down into the "mine," which was actually the exposed floor of the ocean. It was an incredible sight; a full-scale battle between man and nature.

"You are looking at the largest construction project in the Southern Hemisphere," observed Clive Cowley. Cowley had been the editor of Namibia's leading newspaper, the Windhoek Advertiser; now he was the chief public affairs officer of De Beers in Namibia. He pointed to the thousands of workers and machines below. Giant bulldozers were belching smoke and scraping the ground with their blades like some kind of prehistoric animal. Powerful pumps were sucking the water out of the mining area through hoses as fast as it sprayed in over the barrier. Ovambo tribesmen, knee-deep in pools of water, were frantically sweeping the gravel off outcrops of rock on the ocean's floor as if they feared that at any moment the barrier might give way, like a sand castle on a beach, and the ocean would come flooding in.

In the center of all this activity was an enormous piece of machinery, more than a football field in length and two stories high, mounted on caterpillar tracks. A continuous belt of steel buckets traveled around it, like cars on a ferris wheel, scooping up sand at one end and depositing it at the other end. It was the largest machine I had ever seen.

"That's the bucket wheel excavator," Cowley explained. "It cost $3.5 million to build, and it can move 1,800 tons of sand an hour." The sand must be stripped away before the workers, called lashers, can get at the diamond-rich gravel.

The Ovambo tribesmen worked with their primitive tools in the shadow of this colossal machine. The contrast between tribal and modern technology was striking. Ironically,, as Cowley pointed out, it was the tribesmen, not the multimillion-dollar machine, who recovered most of the diamonds. These Ovambos had been recruited to work in the ocean mine in the jungles of Ovamba land, a thousand miles to the north. According to Cowley, they usually received eight month contracts from the diamond company. They would board a Hercules cargo plane, leaving their families behind on the kraal, and fly to Oranjemund."