Diamonds to dust: the ghost town of Kolmannskuppe
In April of 1908, Zacharias
Lewala, a worker on the railway line between Luderitz and Aus in what is now
southern Namibia, picked up a shiny stone and showed it to his supervisor,
August Stauch. Recognizing the find, Stauch got himself a prospecting
license
and then presented the stone for verification. State geologist Dr. Range
confirmed it was a diamond, and within
months the diamond rush was on around the site of Kolmanskop, 10 kilometres
inland from the coastal town of Luderitz. Early documents record the amazing
sight of lines of men crawling through the desert on their bellies under the
light of the full moon, sifting the sand for glimmering diamonds.
By
September 1908, the German colonial government had declared a "forbidden
zone", or "Sperrgebiet" from the Orange river in the south (now
the border between South Africa and Namibia), 360 kms north and 100 kms inland
from the coast. The Sperrgebiet 
was designed to give the government control over
the region thought to contain diamonds. To this day, the Sperrgebiet is still a
forbidden area, and harsh penalties are inflicted on those who wander into the
area without a valid permit. During the post-war recession, Sir Ernest
Oppenheimer, chairman of the Anglo-American Company bought up all of the small
diamond companies operating in the Sperrgebiet and combined them to form the
Consolidated Diamond Mines (CDM). CDM / DeBeers controlled diamond mining until 1995 when
it joined with the new government of Namibia to form NAMDEB.
In
the 1920s, Kolmanskop was a booming centre of diamond mining activity and
serviced the needs of expatriate miners and their
families. A hospital, gymnasium and
concert hall, casino, bowling alley, school, butchery, bakery, and power station was
built in the desert village of Kolmanskop. Many of the professionals in
Kolmanskop had lavish homes constructed and the hospital had the first x-ray
machine in southern africa. Almost everything was imported to Kolmanskop,
including fresh water from Cape Town in South Africa. One of the earliest power
plants in the region was built to provide electricity for the residents and the
mining machinery. The extreme wealth of Kolmanskop during the 1920s made it one
of the richest communities in Africa. Despite the wealth of the 300
Germans, 800 Oshiwambo labourers did not share in the riches. Clearly the racist
colonial government, who orchestrated a genocide against the Herero of eastern
Namibia, were not interested in sharing the wealth with the indigenous people of
the region.
Even for
the German miners of Kolmanskop, the
boom didn't last long. By 1928, larger diamond deposits had been found
elsewhere south of the village and prospectors began to leave. The last residents of Kolmanskop left
finally in
1956 and the village has 
been
deserted ever since. When the community left, the
sand moved in and, together with the wind, has begun to swallow up Kolmanskop. Visually, Kolmanskop is fascinating as the movement of the sand dunes both
exposes and conceals evidence of human presence there. Objects emerge or are
buried by the daily winds. Kolmanskop challenges the visitor to think about the
temporality of human presence both in terms of specific place but also in
relation to the immense power of the natural world. As I photographed various
doorways and windows, rippling shadows on the dunes and interior streams of
light, I realized that the rooms of Kolmanskop are far from
"empty". Perhaps this is why it is fittingly referred to as the
Kolmanskop ghost
town!
Kolmanskop
is representative of many mining towns: the boom-bust cycle
merely reflecting market forces. 
In southern Namibia, external demand for
crystal carbon pulled miners to the desert in search of small glimmering stones.
How did the "value" of this rock develop? How did a piece of stone become so valuable that people would build
casinos in inhospitable deserts in the 1920s?
Since 1980, Kolmanskop has been open to visitors as a tourist site near the mining town of Luderitz. A desolate and isolated ghost town is all that now remains of one of the richest communities of the 1920s.
