Tuna
Tuesday 15 14 August 2023
We saw a hole, a big hole, but not as big a super pit hole. We are in Kimberley the home and the start of diamond mining in South Africa. This is where it all started for Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Ernest Oppenheimer and the creation of the De Beers Consortium. The Big Hole is the site of the first claims of small plots of land to be hand-mined for diamonds. Each claim is just 31 square feet, which is tiny. It was of course horrific, so it wasn’t the claim holders doing the dirty work but the local population. The mine was active from 1871 to 1914 and yielded just over 2,700 kg of diamonds. The hole was all hand-mined and ended up being about 215m deep and 436m wide. That’s a lot of work by hand.
Next stop was the McGregor Museum which was built in 1897 and was originally the Kimberley Sanatorium, then the Hotel Belgrave, Kimberly Convent School and then final became the McGregor Museum. This is a natural history museum, detailing the history of South Africa from first hominids through European Settlement to Apartheid and present day. A great deal on the history of the town, but we had really covered that at the museum at The Big Hole.
It was conveniently placed beside the restaurant we had decided to have lunch at.
After lunch we headed to the Duggan-Cronin Gallery which houses the photographic collection of Mr Duggan-Cronin from 1937-1954. This too was conveniently placed within 350m from our restaurant, but sadly it wasn’t open (due to the large chain around the gate), despite the sign beside it saying it was open.
We chose to head home our apartment via the butcher to pick up some local wildlife (Springbok and Gembok) for dinner.