Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/305

 "No one lives in Kimberley because he likes the town; we only remain here to make money."

Johannesburg people are proud of their town, and they have reason to be, but Kimberley people are always apologetic. The population is thirty thousand, a large number of the inhabitants being negroes and Hindus. The rich mine-owners have race-tracks, clubs and resorts, but cannot be very comfortable, owing to the dust and the heat. The few Americans I have seen here are tanned until they are as brown as Indians, and they do not say much in praise of the town except that it is the greatest diamond camp in existence.

—The De Beers Company represents one of the greatest corporations in the world. You hear of De Beers in every conversation when in Kimberley. De Beers owns private cars for use on the railways; De Beers gives millions to public enterprises, and to the government; De Beers owns parks, hotels, street railways, and eight of the greatest diamond mines in the world De Beers was a Dutch farmer on whose land diamonds were found. He never made much out of the discovery, and has been dead a good many years, but, like our John Brown, his soul goes marching on. Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit were the real geniuses of Kimberley and its diamond fields, and they are represented in monuments here, but De Beers is heard of much more frequently because his name was given to the trust which took over the mines Diamonds were originally dis