South Africa needs to find ways to build and sustain its alluvial diamond sector in particular, given this country’s “incredible” alluvial sector which hosts “exceptional” diamonds.
Accompanying these comments to Mining Weekly by diamond luminary Dr John Bristow was a picture of a 176 ct white diamond probably carried down the Orange river from Lesotho and recovered by Namdeb in the offshore setting on the Namibian side of the West Coast. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)
The diamond is the largest of its kind discovered at the Southern Coastal Mine in Oranjemund in the past two decades.
However, the chances of South Africans recovering such diamonds on their way through South Africa have diminished significantly as only about 22 alluvial diamond operators are active on our diamond-carrying rivers compared with ten times that number not that long ago.
Bristow emphasised the importance of a natural diamond business comeback and the need to realise that it is a marketing business, amid the diamond business being huge, particularly in synthetics, and continuing to change and to grow.
“Going back to the period that I joined De Beers and worked for De Beers back in the 1980s and 1990s, De Beers‘s marketing was just incredible,” Bristow recalled.
Bristow is credited with developing a unique micro-mineral (perovskite) age-dating technique at the Research School of Earth Sciences (RSES) of the Australian National University in Canberra.
He did this development with Hugh Allsopp of the Bernard Price Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and also Bill Compston of the RSES. This took place in the 1980s, and it was carried out courtesy of De Beers.
“You’re now starting to see marketing becoming much more aggressive, much more in tune with young people, and certainly, in spite of all the doom and gloom, we’re starting to see an uptick in diamond prices, particularly for better quality diamonds,” Bristow pointed out.
“The big stones and quality stones are doing quite well. The diamond business has been out there 2 000 years. It’s not going to go away in a hurry, and it’s seen lots of challenges in the past, from great depressions, the global financial crash, and now this somewhat more severe downturn.
“But it’s adaptable. We’re seeing that already. It’ll come back. I’ll be a different business, but it’ll be a solid business again,” Bristow forecast in a Zoom interview recently.