1/8/2024 0 Comments Diamond rush africa distrustThe hectic digging may have been partly driven by the fear among local diggers that the government might fail to adequately compensate them for their findings. With “a lot of dolerites all over the place there,” there is a possibility that the gems may turn out to be quartz crystals, though he doesn’t want to rule out the claims of diamonds having been found. Let's hope this is one of those surprises.Paper: South African Diamonds: A Photographic Personal Perspective, published in December 2013, in ‘Rocks & Minerals’, author: Bruce Cairncross, University of Johannesburgĭr Gideon Groenewald, a geologist from South Africa, said in an interview that kimberlite looks awefully similar to dolerite and that in the area of KwaZulu-Natal where people started digging, there are “severe intrusions of dolerites”. I have a philosophy that nature is an incredibly intricate thing and it gives us these surprises from time to time. "Everybody is sceptical because of the size. But a green diamond, on top of that, makes it doubly, doubly, doubly rare."īut Mr Blom refused to dismiss Mr Jolly's stone. "It looks like a greenish coloured stone," he said. He had only seen the fuzzy photograph of it. Mr Blom told the Guardian that he would be seeing Mr Jolly over the weekend and would examine the stone early next week. Mr Jolly has asked Ernest Blom, the Johannesburg-based president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses - which oversees the diamond industry - to examine the stone and rule on its authenticity. Now everyone is afraid to find it." It is not known whether Mr Jolly has any siblings. It would be known as the "skaapkop" diamond because it was shaped like a sheep's head.īeeld newspaper quoted a diamond digger who said the prophecy was that two brothers would find the Skaapkop diamond. Afrikaans newspapers quoted a prediction by the famous Afrikaans prophet Siener van Rensburg, who said that such a diamond would be found in the area of Mr Jolly's discovery. Mining industry yarns are as big as the fish that got away. When he found the stone, he apparently attacked it with an angle-grinder to see if it was hard enough to be a diamond. He was, apparently, a property developer involved in a timeshare company where there was a falling out of the directors. Information about Mr Jolly was hard to come by. His mobile phone was turned on to an answering machine and the email address it offered produced no reply. All he would otherwise say about the find was that it was made in the North West province, an area extremely rich in minerals, but not particularly noted for its diamonds. The diamond would be kept in a Johannesburg bank vault for a couple of days "until we calm down and decide what we are going to do", he said in a radio interview. It looked like a kryptonite stage-prop from a Superman film.īut still nobody was dismissing the claim, least of all Brett Jolly, who said he was its owner. A photograph began circulating on the web. It was finally claimed to be 8,120 carats - an extraordinary 1.64 kilos - compared with the mere 3,106.75 carats of the Cullinan, found in South Africa in 1905. As the week progressed, the story got bigger and so did the diamond.
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