44 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
including diamonds, but for decades it
has been criminally mismanaged and
riven by armed conflict. The citizens
of the D.R.C. are some of the poorest
on earth.
Botswana’s story is different. It’s a
small, landlocked country of 2.3 million
people, much of which is covered by
desert. Since the nineteen-seventies,
when diamonds started to be mined in
significant quantities, the Botswanan
government has exacted exorbitant taxes
and royalties from diamond producers.
The government also holds an equity
stake in De Beers’s ventures in the coun-
try, and its deal with the world’s larg-
est diamond conglomerate is so good
that it’s scarcely believable: eighty-four
per cent of the consortium’s profits stay
in Botswana. Lucara’s deal is less ex-
treme, because it owns the Karowe mine
outright, but in 2016, the year it sold
the Constellation, the firm paid the Bo-
tswanan government eighty-five mil-
lion dollars in taxes, and nearly thirty
million in royalties, on profits of about
a hundred and eighty-five million.
Hundreds of thousands of Botswa-
nans have been brought out of poverty
by the government’s diamond wind-
fall. At independence, in 1966, more
than half the population lived below
the poverty line; that figure is now six-
teen per cent. The government uses
diamond royalties to fund infrastruc-
ture, health care, and education, in-
cluding advanced degrees; the most
promising students can even receive
aid to pursue study overseas. Keith
Jefferis, an economist and a former
deputy governor of the Bank of Bo-
tswana, told me that Botswana has its
problems—high unemployment, an
overreliance on the diamond trade—
but that the upward trajectory of the
country’s economy has been vertigi-nous. “The contribution of diamonds
has been immense,” he said. “It’s really
underpinned the transformation of
what was a very poor country to an
upper-middle-income country.”
Lucara’s contribution to Botswana’s
economy should only increase. When
I met John Armstrong, the Lucara ge-
ologist, in Antwerp, he showed me pre-
dictive models on his laptop, which out-
lined the likelihood of finding more
stones at Karowe that exceed a thou-
sand carats. In Armstrong’s calculation,
it was eminently possible for diamonds
weighing more than two thousand car-
ats to be found there. I asked him if his
models predicted that Lucara would
find a stone even bigger than the Culli-
nan. “There’s a low probability,” Arm-
strong said. “But the possibility exists.”F
or six months in 2019, the where-
abouts of the Sewelô diamond were
unknown to all but a select group of
Lucara employees and Oded Mansori,
the Antwerp diamantaire, who kept it
locked in his office. Eira Thomas did
not want to repeat the mistake that the
firm made with the Lesedi La Rona:
burning the stone by showing it to too
many people. None of Lucara’s tradi-
tional customers would have a chance
to see the Sewelô. When I spoke to
Johnny Kneller, the Graff manufacturer,
in October, he asked me, “Have you seen
the stone?”
I had. In September, when I visited
Mansori in his office, I was joined by
Armstrong and Geoffrey Madderson,
of TOMRA, the maker of the XRT scan-
ners. After half an hour of conversa-
tion, Mansori retrieved the Sewelô from
a safe and dramatically placed it on a
mahogany table in front of us.
I was not expecting to be moved by
a rock. The diamond was so large that
I could not wrap my fingers around it.
In most photographs, the color of its
rind appears black, but in person it
looked more silvery. The stone was
cold—at least, until all of us had han-
dled it, after which it felt as warm as a
pebble in sunlight. It sometimes spar-
kled. Its planes were smooth, like mar-
ble. I now understood why Ketshidile
Tlhomelang had spoken to me about
its sensual pleasures. The diamond also
prompted unusual thoughts. Because
of its dark rind, the stone seemed to“No plans set in stone yet, but I’ll probably spend some time getting
on my wife’s last nerve, maybe hyperfocus on the lawn.”