32 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
THE ROCK
A company set up by a female diamond hunter is finding some of the biggest uncut gems in history.BY ED CAESAR
A
t the Karowe diamond mine,
in Botswana, the most highly
secured section of the com-
pound is known as the Red Zone. This
is where the gems are sorted. To enter,
you must walk, alone, through a se-
quence of thick doors activated by fin-
gerprint scans. Inside, there are strict
rules. You cannot touch another human
being. Everyone must wear a blue, pock-
etless smock. Phones are not allowed.
In September, when I visited Karowe,
I was given special dispensation to carry
a notebook and a pen into the Red
Zone. I was told that if I dropped my
things I should bend down slowly
to retrieve them, then stand up and
show the recovered items to the near-
est camera. On leaving the Red Zone,
everyone, including chief executives, is
strip-searched.
Nobody in the Red Zone ever
touches a diamond with a naked hand.
There are two sorting rooms, in which
workers organize the mine’s produce
by size and shape, using gloves affixed
to sealed and glass-fronted cabinets.
Similar-sized stones are plucked from
a conveyor belt and placed in a jar. At
the end of the day, the jar is sucked
upward to a vault through a transpar-
ent pneumatic tube—a process that
evokes the Augustus Gloop scene from
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
When I visited the sorting rooms,
workers pressed their noses to the glass
and narrowed their eyes as they per-
formed their duties. A light inside the
glove boxes illuminated their faces like
a vanity mirror.
Last year, at around 10 a.m. on Good
Friday, a sorter named Otsogile Met-
seyabeng was working at his station
when a stone bigger than a baseball
tumbled onto his conveyor belt. Met-
seyabeng is a tall Botswanan man of
thirty-seven, with a high, nervous laugh;
sorters like him typically earn about
twelve dollars an hour. In the Setswana
language, his first name means “How
are you?” As Metseyabeng examined
the stone, a shocked smile spread across
his face.
The diamond was not only enor-
mous but unusually shaped: it had both
large, flat planes and jagged sections
where the stone looked as if it had been
smashed by a hammer. The whole thing
was covered in a black carbon rind. It
was impossible to see any of its inte-
rior, except through a few translucent
spots. For a moment, Metseyabeng was
the only person who knew about the
existence of the world’s largest rough
diamond. He was struck dumb. Then
he alerted a colleague, who called out,
“Teemane e tona tona!”—“Very big di-
amond!” A supervisor arrived to verify
the find. Normally, sorters who dis-
cover a valuable stone continue to work
as usual. But Metseyabeng asked his
boss for a ten-minute break, to com-
pose himself.
The news travelled quickly but dis-
creetly. Lucara, a Canadian company
that owns the Karowe mine, is pub-
licly traded. The discovery of a dia-
mond that is exceptionally large or
“fancy-colored”—tinged pink or green
or blue—is deemed a material find,
which can move Lucara’s share price.
In the days after such a discovery, a
press release is issued. Before then, ev-
eryone who knows about the find must
sign a nondisclosure agreement, prom-
ising not to discuss the matter with
anyone, including his or her family. Al-
though the discovery made Metseyabeng
“very, very happy,” he told me, he kept
his mouth shut. “I know that if I just say
something it will be on social media and
spread,” he added.
Ketshidile Tlhomelang, the Karowe
mine’s affable and bespectacled pro-
cess manager, was informed of the dis-
covery within minutes. He bolted over
to the Red Zone and put his hands in
the glove box, playing with the diamond.He had been in the business for twenty-
four years, and had studied minerals
engineering in England, but he had
never seen anything like this. Tlhome-
lang told me that he felt “blessed and
elated.” He talked about the sensual
pleasures of handling the diamond: its
heaviness; the smoothness of its planes;
how it slipped off his glove. But he also
foresaw a problem in describing the
stone. It looked to him somewhat like
a computer mouse or a piece of obsid-
ian. Certainly, it was not a glassy, lim-
pid diamond from a fairy tale. It would
not photograph well. But the raw fact
of the discovery was urgent. It was
seventeen hundred and sixty carats,
unwashed—about twelve and a half
ounces, the weight of a can of soup.
After a cleaning, it weighed seventeen
hundred and fifty-eight carats. No di-
amond that large had been discovered
in more than a century.
While Tlhomelang was consider-
ing how to frame the news to his su-
periors, most of whom were off-site
and unreachable on the Easter week-
end, the mine’s security manager called
Naseem Lahri, the managing director
of Lucara Botswana. Lahri, who is small
and voluble, with a bright, forthright
manner, is a trailblazer: a head-scarf-
wearing Muslim executive in a majority-
Christian country, and the first Botswa-
nan woman ever to manage a diamond
mine. When Lahri heard that a stone
of more than seventeen hundred car-
ats had been found, she assumed that
it was a mistake.
Tlhomelang then phoned her to
confirm the news. Lahri began to
shiver. She was in South Africa, orga-
nizing a conference, and she postponed
her engagements. She asked to see a
picture. Tlhomelang warned her that
the diamond was much more remark-
able to the naked eye than it would
appear in a photograph. Reluctantly,
he sent her an image, then spent several