Then, in the year 1866, in a dusty scrubland on the outskirts of a remote agricultural village in the Orange Free State, a young boy found a shiny pebble in the dirt on his father’s farm. It turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond that was called, aptly, Eureka. Prospectors descended upon the area. In 1871, an 83.5-carat diamond was found on a hill on a property belonging to the farming De Beers family. One month later, a stampede of two thousand men had descended upon the land, and the hill was turned into an enormous depression, forty-two acres across, known as the Kimberley Mine, or, more colloquially, the Big Hole. Today, tourists gape at it.
Twenty years after the discovery of Eureka, as thousands of men marched into the Big Hole, a British carpenter wandered across a hill range in the Transvaal. He kicked a glistening stone and walked farther, scanning the land, until he happened upon a long reef of rocks, beneath which lay the biggest deposit of gold in the world. Soon, 300,000 miners would be working in this remote hinterland.
Word spread, and immigrants poured into South Africa, including thousands of persecuted Lithuanian Jews, from whom my husband is descended. European businessmen arrived with high hopes. Harbors sprang up along the coasts, as did a shipping industry. In the thirty-some years since Eureka’s unearthing, workers, mostly black laborers, had laid nearly four thousand miles of railway. Johannesburg, a city built around the gold trade, exploded, and within ten years of its founding it was larger than 250-year-old Cape Town. The earth was plundered and more minerals discovered: copper, iron, and coal. By the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa was no longer a backwater colony but a place in which a white man could make a fortune.
With the discovery of gold and diamonds, Britain regretted allowing the Afrikaners to set up shop on such precious land. In 1899, the British and the Afrikaner republics went to war. Initially shocked and humiliated by successful Afrikaner guerrilla tactics, imperial Britain resorted to all-out destruction: burning crops, razing homesteads, and interning the opposition in concentration camps, where 26,000 Afrikaners died, 80 percent of them children and the rest mostly women. In the end, the British lost 22,000 troops but prevailed.
The main result of this clash for the Afrikaners was a long-standing hatred for the British passed down through generations, and the birth of a particularly hard-line form of Afrikaner nationalism mixed with Dutch Reformed Christianity. This heady mix of religion and nationalism bloomed into a widespread belief that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people, under fire from blacks and British alike but destined to emerge as the ruling white tribe of Africa. They sought, then, to dominate the land in order to protect themselves and realize a divine plan. These deep-seated beliefs would one day morph into the formal system of governance known as apartheid.
After the Anglo-Boer War, the British and the Afrikaners negotiated a peace settlement. The British colonies merged into the Union of South Africa, which was self-governing under the dominion of the British government until 1961, when South Africa became a republic. The Afrikaner general Louis Botha won the 1910 elections, voted in almost entirely by the white British and Afrikaans minority. Though Botha encouraged Afrikaner pride, he was pragmatic: in a country with a black majority, the Afrikaner’s best bet was to create a white power base with his British countrymen, consolidating resources and authority in white hands.
The year of Botha’s victory was the year of Melvin Nofemela’s birth, on a distant homestead on an empty bluff in the far-off village of Lady Frere. Lady Frere was named after the wife of Britain’s high commissioner to the Cape Colony, a stately mustachioed Welshman named Sir Henry Bartle Frere. Frere, who had previously acted as governor of colonial Bombay, had plans to defend the Cape from a “general and simultaneous rising of Kaffirdom against white civilization,” as he said, and took to crushing Xhosa rebellions and starting a bloody war with the Zulus, despite their chief’s continued pleas for peace.
The exact day that Melvin came into the world was never recorded; birthdays are of little significance in old Xhosa culture. Melvin’s parents were illiterate subsistence farmers who had been tending to their land for generations, worshipping their ancestors, living in huts, and visiting sangomas, or traditional herbal healers, when they needed healthcare. The Nofemelas had little wealth and no formal education. The only schools in rural areas were isolated missionary programs, run by evangelical European families intent on saving African souls.
Melvin’s parents might have considered pursuing an education for their child, but when he was a year old, the Mines and Works Act was passed, prohibiting black South Africans from holding skilled jobs; menial labor would be their appropriate calling. By 1959, black students could only attend university with special state permission.
In that case, Melvin’s family may have hoped to leave the area and purchase land elsewhere, but when he was three years old, the Natives Land Act of 1913 passed. This act barred black South Africans from buying or leasing land in white areas; instead, they were relegated to “native areas” or “reserves,” undesirable and overpopulated plots. The land that blacks could legally own made up 7 percent of the total landmass of South Africa. In 1936, this was expanded to 13 percent. With the passage of the Land Act, blacks living on white-owned land were evicted. Many of them had been well-off peasant farmers, and now, if they did not make it to the reserves, they were forced to trudge from place to place, their families and downtrodden animals in tow, begging white men for a plot on which to pitch their disassembled homes in exchange for their labor.
Melvin could have headed to the cities to take a job, but by the time he was thirteen, the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 cut short any such dreams and laid the foundations for the first townships, then called “native locations.” This act defined towns and cities as the white man’s turf. If blacks were ministering to white men as laborers or servants, they were permitted to live in segregated areas on the outskirts of the cities. But if a black man ceased to adequately serve the purposes and needs of whites, he could be deported back to the reserves.
Melvin, living on the bluff in Lady Frere, likely knew little of the political forces shifting his early life. But when he met and married teenage Alice, and she had their first baby in 1940 and their second in 1942, he knew he had to make money. Blacks had been surviving off the soil from time immemorial, but once their land had been reorganized and repopulated by the white government—too many people condensed on too little land, with watering holes and streams overrun—it became impossible for most residents to produce enough food on which to survive.
Melvin left his family in search of a job elsewhere, like many able-bodied black men at the time. In addition to supporting his family, he owed the government taxes, despite receiving neither rights nor representation. Along with hundreds of thousands, Melvin headed north and got a job in the expanding mines. His pay was a pittance, especially compared to a white man’s doing the same work: in 1951, the white gold miner earned nearly fifteen times the wage of the black gold miner, and by 1970, white miners earned twenty-one times the wage of black miners. Because of the Mines and Works Act, Melvin could never rise above the lowest rung of the job hierarchy. He was housed in a hostel, a single-sex compound that often pressed ninety men into a single dormitory. When he left to visit his parents, Alice, and his children for three weeks a year, he was strip-searched in case he was smuggling gold.
Though the idea of unionizing was gaining traction, it was still a daunting task. In 1913 at an open-pit diamond mine in the middle of the country, a black worker offended a white foreman, who proceeded to kick him to death. When his black colleagues went on strike, white workers and cops banded together to kill eleven black miners and injure thirty-seven others. Fighting for one’s rights was lethal business.
Melvin desperately missed his family, his hometown, his community. He returned annually to slowly build a small traditional house with a clay floor and straw roof. On one of his short holidays home, he took a second wife, as per Xhosa custom. His longing for his children and his hatred of the sweltering, perilous mines grew. Between 1933 and 1966, nearly twenty thousand men had died in the mines, which did not have adequate safety measures. The vast majority of victims were black. Frightened, both of death and of leaving his family destitute, Melvin searched for another job.
By that time, the Mines and Works Act had been expanded, so that white citizens would get first dibs at employment