Like much of the hidden richness of Africa, the diamond mine at Catoca in eastern Angola strikes the rare visitor as a surprising oasis of wealth in the middle of a desert of poverty.
The open-sky mineworks look like a huge upside-down pyramid where the Catoca Mining Company turns out more than three-million carats of rough diamond a year, accounting for 65% of the southern African country’s production.
The company managers are happy to talk of the benefits their business brings to the region and the help they provide for communities, but local politicians are less convinced.
”We could mine the kimberlite [a mineral in which diamonds are found in parts of the continent] down as far as 600m for another 40 years, even a century, if we learn of more reserves,” Jose Manuel Augusto Ganga Jr, the plant’s managing director said.
The fabulous wealth buried in the ground at Catoca has turned the site in Lunda Sul province, 36km from the main local town, Saurimo, into an enclave of comfortable modern villas behind a giant wall of steel netting.
Villages are few and far between, with huts of thatched roofs, and not a bicycle is to be seen, let alone a motor vehicle. A local politician was less keen on the diamonds than their producers, and told a reporter from the French news agency AFP of the environmental damage in the region that had been caused by the mining operation.
The two main shareholders in Catoca Mining, with 32,8% apiece of its stocks, are the Angolan ENDIAMA state diamond firm and the Russian company Alrosa.
However, Justino Saizumbo, a native of the region and national spokesperson for Angola’s second biggest opposition party, the Party for Social Renewal, says so much in the area has been sacrificed for the sake of precious stones that the people live in dire straits.
”What we’ve got here with the diamond companies is a calamity,” Saizumbo said, fearing the further growth of the quarries and the buildings with them.
”All the villages in the area will be destroyed along with their graveyards.”
The mine itself is a pit the size of a small village, which works with a combination of diamond treatment systems, one from Russia and the other South African.
”We have Western parts developed by De Beers and a system which is Russian. With them both, we’ve made a whole which is pretty much our own,” Ganga Jr said.
Catoca Mining officials say that they provide basic infrastructure for the local people, such as meeting halls, primary schools, drinking water pumps and agricultural plantations for communities.
At the Luenda Primary School, a simple building with a corrugated iron roof on the outskirts of Catoca, about 300 children aged under 10 attend class.
They speak Chowkwe, the local language, and some can manage a few words of Portuguese.
Angola has in recent years been emerging from a devastating civil war which began as a struggle for power even before the end of Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 and in which an illicit diamond trade was as important source of revenue for rebels as the country’s offshore oil is for the government.
Along the banks of the Chicapa, vast fields of crops have been planted. ”These are the community fields,” said Armando Zenza, who runs the Cotoca farming programme.
Officially, Angolan provinces which produce oil and diamonds receive 10% of the income from them, but according to Saizumbo, ”not even the governor of Lunda province knows the name of the bank where this 10% is stashed away”. – Sapa-AFP