known as “burning the stone.” Eventu-
ally, in 2017, Lamb got a verbal com-
mitment from a potential client to buy
the diamond, for sixty million dollars,
but no contract was signed, and Lu-
cara’s board grew impatient. Meanwhile,
Graff visited Lundin on his yacht, where
he bought the Lesedi La Rona, for fifty-
three million dollars. Lamb described
the sale as “a bargain” for Graff. Its more
significant function was to reëstablish
the power of the old diamond world.
Graff has since polished the stone into
various extraordinary jewels, including
a D-color three-hundred-and-two-carat
emerald-cut diamond. The reservations
about the stone’s color, apparently, have
not been borne out.
“Laurence played the game of chess
perfectly,” Eira Thomas told me. “We
didn’t know we were even playing chess.”
Lucara’s management team decided
to take the botched auction as an oc-
casion to learn something new. Recently,
Thomas launched a digital sales plat-
form, called Clara, which allows rough
diamonds to be sold individually to re-
tailers. (To insure that financial trans-
actions are secure, the platform uses
blockchain technology.) The platform
works on the basis that every diamond
has a unique shape and color, which
means that it is possible to create a dig-
ital signature for each stone, and to de-
tail its provenance. If successful, Clara
will pose a threat to the old diamond
world, because suppliers can reach buy-
ers without an intermediary. The plat-
form is growing fast, although there are
no signs yet that it will supplant the
traditional tendering process. Cather-
ine McLeod-Seltzer, the co-founder of
Lucara, told me that you can draw a
line directly from the Sotheby’s disap-
pointment to the creation of Clara.
“Somewhere in the subconscious of
Eira, that was the seed,” McLeod-
Seltzer said.
L
ast April, when the Sewelô dia-
mond was discovered, Eira Thomas
was driving her daughters through rural
British Columbia to see a gold-min-
ing project run by her brother, Gareth.
Thomas’s life is peripatetic and, by her
own admission, sometimes chaotic. She
recently divorced her husband, a Ca-
nadian artist whom she married in
2007, and their two girls, who are eleven
and nine, currently live with her. Not
long ago, she moved from Vancouver
to London, where she knows almost
nobody, to cut down on travel, and to
improve her work-life balance. She in-
spires enough loyalty at Lucara that
several members of her senior team
uprooted their lives to follow her to
England. Thomas told me that she
often brings her daughters with her on
work trips—to the Yukon, or to Bo-
tswana—just as her father took her ex-
ploring as a child. She says that the
girls are becoming as independent and
adaptable as she is.
“I’m never going to win Mother of
the Year,” Thomas told me recently, over
a long, convivial lunch. She flashed a
pity-free smile. “But they get experi-
ences other children won’t get, and
they’re starting to appreciate that.”
Thomas had no cell-phone reception
when Naseem Lahri, Lucara Botswa-
na’s managing director, tried to share
the news of the Sewelô find. Hours
later, Thomas and the girls got hungry,
and they stopped at the Little Creek
Grill, in the small town of Princeton,
for lunch. The restaurant had reception,
and Thomas’s phone was suddenly inun-
dated with images of the diamond. She
was initially unimpressed. “The stone
looked like an avocado,” Thomas told me.
Eventually, she became more ex-
cited, and it is now her favorite stone.
“It’s an enigma,” Thomas told me.
“It’s not as pretty as the Lesedi or the
Constellation. But, to me, it’s more
valuable.”
The diamond would not fare well at
a traditional tender, Thomas explained,
because it was impossible to see exactly
what might be inside the stone until
“windows”—polished panes—had been
cut into it. (Black diamond is usually
much less valuable than white diamond.)
She estimated that the sales value of
the Sewelô at tender might have been
anything from two to twenty-five mil-
lion dollars, but she was not interested
in selling the diamond that way. She
wanted to use the sale and the manu-
facture of the Sewelô to draw attention
to wider issues, not least the relation-
ship of the diamond industry to the na-
tion of Botswana.
M
any African countries suffer from
what is known as the “resource
curse,” in which natural riches do not
benefit the population, because of cor-
ruption and malfeasance. The Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo is perhaps
the most egregious example of this
phenomenon. The country is bounti-
fully endowed with precious minerals,
“Oh, the #humanity!”
