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. He bolted over to the Red Zone and put his hands in the glove box, playing with the diamond. Ketshidile Tlhomelang, the Karowe mine’s affable and bespectacled process manager, was informed of the discovery within minutes. “I know that if I just say something it will be on social media and spread,” he added. Although the discovery made Metseyabeng “very, very happy,” he told me, he kept his mouth shut.
Before then, everyone who knows about the find must sign a nondisclosure agreement, promising not to discuss the matter with anyone, including his or her family. In the days after such a discovery, a press release is issued. The discovery of a diamond 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. Lucara, a Canadian company that owns the Karowe mine, is publicly traded.
The news travelled quickly but discreetly. But Metseyabeng asked his boss for a ten-minute break, to compose himself. Normally, sorters who discover a valuable stone continue to work as usual. Then he alerted a colleague, who called out, “ Teemane e tona tona! ”-“Very big diamond!” A supervisor arrived to verify the find. For a moment, Metseyabeng was the only person who knew about the existence of the world’s largest rough diamond. It was impossible to see any of its interior, except through a few translucent spots. The whole thing was covered in a black carbon rind. The diamond was not only enormous 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. In the Setswana language, his first name means “How are you?” As Metseyabeng examined the stone, a shocked smile spread across his face. Metseyabeng is a tall Botswanan man of thirty-seven, with a high, nervous laugh sorters like him typically earn about twelve dollars an hour. on Good Friday, a sorter named Otsogile Metseyabeng was working at his station when a stone bigger than a baseball tumbled onto his conveyor belt. A light inside the glove boxes illuminated their faces like a vanity mirror. At the end of the day, the jar is sucked upward to a vault through a transparent 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 performed their duties.
Similar-sized stones are plucked from a conveyor belt and placed in a jar. 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. Nobody in the Red Zone ever touches a diamond with a naked hand. On leaving the Red Zone, everyone, including chief executives, is strip-searched. 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 nearest camera. In September, when I visited Karowe, I was given special dispensation to carry a notebook and a pen into the Red Zone. Everyone must wear a blue, pocketless smock. To enter, you must walk, alone, through a sequence of thick doors activated by fingerprint scans. It does not store any personal data.At the Karowe diamond mine, in Botswana, the most highly secured section of the compound is known as the Red Zone. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
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