THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 37
formed Lucara with Lukas Lundin, and
began to raise money for an African
diamond play.
Lucara had a bumpy start: it bid un-
successfully on several sites. Then, in
2009, a site called AK6, about an hour’s
flight north of Botswana’s capital, Ga-
borone, became available. AK6 was near
a famously productive diamond mine
called Orapa. De Beers had discovered
AK6 in the seventies but had not de-
veloped it, concluding that it would cost
too much money to extract too few di-
amonds. When Lucara’s team exam-
ined samples that had been extracted
in the seventies, they noticed evidence
that many diamonds had been dam-
aged in the sampling process, and that
De Beers’s statistical models had dis-
counted these larger, broken stones.William Lamb, a lean, energetic
South African, had been appointed the
general manager of Lucara. Lamb and
his team believed that the less sophis-
ticated processing methods of the sev-
enties had crushed any stone larger than
ten millimetres in width. Lucara’s ge-
ologists knew from studying the AK6
samples that larger diamonds existed
in the deposit, and they wonderedAt Karowe, in Botswana, workers find diamonds by examining ore in machines that resemble airport baggage scanners.