Book Review by African Studies Review

by Thomas R. DeGregori, University of Houston

Peter Carstens has written a fascinating book exploring a side of the diamond industry unknown to most of us. His story of a company town, Kleinzee in Namaqualand in the northwest area of what used to be Cape Province, quite literally starts in the beginning with the first discovery of diamonds in the region by small-time prospectors, one of whom was the author's fatherjack Carstens. Given the technological requirements of diamond mining, combination and cartelization rapidly took over in most diamond areas of Southern Africa. This was not entirely the case for Namaqualand, but there was very quickly a need for access to capital if the small miners were to succeed. Carstens's father and other miners turned to financial backers who conducted business by means of oral agreements, claiming that their word was as good as the stuff that they were mining. Agents of the "venture capitalists" (to use the modern term) quickly secured leases and soon the legal rights to the claims, which eventually were acciuired by Anglo American and De Beers. Miners like Jack Carstens became employees instead of prospector/entrepreneurs, and dreams of wealth were transformed into the hope merely of remaining employed.

Peter Carstens lived in Kleinzee as a child and was a "visiting resident" (xi) there from 1940 to 1947 during vacations from boarding school in Cape Town. He did research in the region from the late 1950s to 1965 when he departed for Canada where he became a citizen and a professor of social anthropology at the University of Toronto. He continued his field and archival research on the mining town and the region on into the 1990s, so his work reflects both personal experience and scholarly research.

Carstens has provided us with a comprehensive history of Kleinzee, covering every dimension of work and life: the economics, including differential wage rates; the racial hierarchy on thejob and off and its changing composition through time; the tight security measures and the tribulations of living in a closed (literally and figuratively) community. The postapartheid period will have to wait for another volume. The book is so rich in detail that one could spend an entire review on any one of its many components.

There is another dimension to this fine book that gives it an audience beyond the readers of thisjournal. The closing chapters reach out to larger questions in the sociology and social anthropology of "closed worlds," 11 total institutions," and "incomplete communities." Carstens concludes the narrative with an epilogue on Tumbler Ridge, an isolated coal mining community in British Columbia that was built by the provincial government. The book reads well and should have a large and diverse audience.

African Studies Review