Their diamond-rich land in South Africa was taken. Now they want it back

There is a disturbing contrast along South Africa’s remote west coast.

The 800km (500 mile) journey north from Cape Town begins with views of outstanding natural beauty which, as the long stretch of road runs, and the northern border approaches, dissolves into a stark lunar landscape.

And the scars left by a lucrative diamond mining industry are not just physical.

The poor local community of Nama living amid environmental degradation in the far north-west of South Africa – also known as Namaqualand – wonder what has happened to the riches their land has provided.

Some of the hundreds of millions they earned went on to build the country, but not many, it seems, stayed in the area.

The Nama, who embrace South Africa and Namibia, are descendants of the nomadic indigenous peoples – the Khoi and the San – considered the original human inhabitants of this part of the world.

Despite winning a legal battle over land and mining rights more than two decades ago in Richtersveld, which is part of Namaqualand, many in the community argue they have yet to see any benefit.

Standing among the collapsed empty shell of former mines in the coastal town of Alexander Bay, Andries Josephs, who worked here twenty years ago before being fired, shook his head.

“There is no work, that is the problem. People have stagnated and everything has gone backwards. Buildings have collapsed. Unemployment is high,” he says.

The diamond industry in this part of the region has declined in recent years, since most of the precious stones on earth are believed to have been found, leaving a trail of economic and social problems.

About a kilometer from this abandoned mine there is a residential area of ​​a few houses, a broken church building and a hospital with some damaged windows, offering basic services.

The local authority’s development plan describes “distressed” water and electricity infrastructure as well as bad roads that affect access to things like healthcare.

A century ago, the discovery by prospectors of precious stones south of the Orange River, which now forms part of South Africa’s border with Namibia, led to a diamond rush that changed the land forever.

But the Nama already knew about the gems.

“In our family, they taught the children to count with diamonds,” says Martinus Fredericks.

In 2012, Nama elders appointed him as their leader in South Africa. The 60-year-old man says they encouraged him to fight for the return of their ancestral lands.

The Nama were once herders and traders until the European “settlers” came and interrupted their way of life”, according to Mr Fredericks.

The area where they lived was annexed in the middle of the 19th Century by the Cape Colony – part of what is now South Africa – and then, after diamonds were found in the 1920s, the Nama was cleared from the land around the Orange River.

Nothing has changed during the years of the racist apartheid system, or after the first democratic elections and the end of white minority rule in 1994.

The new government led by the African National Congress maintained the previous position that the greatest good was served by sharing the diamond wealth generated in these parts with the rest of the country.

The Nama were not happy and that trouble continues to this day.

“You go to an area like the Richtersveld… you see how poor people are,” says Mr Fredericks.

“They are unemployed. They live from hand to mouth, so there are no real prospects.

“I’m not against development, but it should be to the point where the community benefits as partners.”

Things should be different.

After a five-year legal battle with the state and the state-owned mining company, Alexkor, which ended up in the country’s highest court, judges ruled in favor of the Nama community in 2003.

The Constitutional Court said that the Nama had an inalienable right to the land of their ancestors and the rights to the minerals there.

However, four years later, Alexkor secured an agreement with the Richtersveld Common Property Association (CPA), which allegedly represented the Nama, which gave the company 51% of the mineral rights while 49% went to the community and an entity called the Richtersveld Mining Company.

But Mr Fredericks argues that the CPA did not represent Nama and the agreement was made without the consent of the wider community. He alleges that 20 years later they have yet to profit from the agreement, or from any wealth generated over the decades despite the sentence of the Constitutional Court.

Alexkor disputes this, saying in a statement to the BBC that it was not “correct to state that the community did not benefit from the land claim”.

She said Alexkor paid 190m rand ($11m; £8.4m) “as reparation” to the Richtersveld Investment Holding Company (RIHC) over a three-year period, as well as 50m rand ($2.9m) as a development grant.

But the chairperson of Alexkor’s board of directors, Dineo Peta, who took over earlier this year, acknowledged that the company “was oblivious to the fact that the community did not receive the full economic benefit of the operations”. In an interview with the BBC she blamed that on “mismanagement and malfeasance within Alexkor”.

The previous management was subject to an investigation by a special commission on what was known as “state capture”. The 2022 Commission report found that there was corruption – those findings are currently being investigated but have not resulted in any convictions.

The question of what happened to the money given to the CPA was raised in a recent parliamentary session.

One lawmaker, Bino Farmer, said that during a briefing, the Select Committee on Agriculture, Land Reform and Mineral Resources heard from the rural development department that the CPA was “dysfunctional”.

He added that “it also came out that over 300m rand ($17.6m) rand was paid by the department and yet the people of the community did not receive anything”.

The CPA was not present at the hearing but the chairperson of the select committee said that she had “expressed dissatisfaction, stating that the relevant national departments did not adequately support the implementation of the [Constitutional] Court Order”.

The BBC contacted the CPA on several occasions in an effort to understand what had happened to the money but did not receive a reply.

“[We] it should have been in a much better position because we are the original custodians of the land,” says Mr. Fredericks.

Apart from money, the community leader has another concern: the environment.

“Big companies come in, cut up the land, take what they can, and move out without rehabilitating, leaving the receiving community to deal with the after-effects of their mining,” he alleges.

“The Nama people used to support themselves, but they did it in a sustainable way, they knew how to use the resources from the land but also how to fix the land after they used it.”

The damage left behind by commercial mining is hard to miss.

Some mines remain abandoned, and there is little sign of rehabilitation.

Instead, there was clear evidence of extraction, where the earth had been dug up, leaving behind an unsightly landscape.

A mine in Hondeklipbaai, once owned by the mining giant, Trans Hex, appeared abandoned.

This is not part of the Richtersveld area but is still considered Nama land.

In a letter to the BBC, Trans Hex said it had sold the site five years ago, but while “it was the mining right holder it complied with its legal obligations including making full financial provision for the rehabilitation of the mining areas”.

But now that it has sold the site, Trans Hex is no longer responsible for the rehabilitation, she added.

Another mining giant, De Beers, has sold its mining interests on the west coast and says it has passed on responsibility for environmental repair.

But in an email to the BBC she said that “as part of the 2023 sale agreement with Kleinzee Holdings, De Beers Consolidated Mines has committed 50m rand ($3m) to support rehabilitation work in the area”.

Now there is concern that the environmental damage could go further south as the mining companies slowly reduce the coast.

The BBC asked the forestry, fisheries and environment department for a response to allegations that many mining companies were not rehabilitating enough land they mined.

Dion George, who was the minister until last month, said that he was not available to comment and added that communication through the media “was not helpful and does not lead to progress”.

The new minister, Willie Aucamp, it has been a little less than a month, he was not yet in a position to comment.

But Mr Fredericks is clear about what should happen next.

“The government should return what is ours,” he says.

To change things he started legal action against the CPA, the group that was supposed to run things on behalf of his community, saying that it was not properly constituted.

“A Nama people cannot be a Nama people without control of Nama land. A Nama person cannot be separated from Nama land because of the intrinsic connection between the person and the land.”

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