Some three billion years ago, planetary explosions saw stars fall from the sky into the oceans that flanked Godwanaland, the great land mass of our infant planet. Deep below the waves, the carbon of shattered stars merged with the Earth’s mantle to form hard crystalline diamonds. Over hundreds of millions of years, the earth shifted and tectonic plates collided, shooting diamonds to the surface through volcanic eruptions.
South Africa has produced more of the world’s most exceptional diamonds than anywhere on Earth. The largest diamond ever found, the Cullinan, was discovered in a place now called Dinokeng.
The name Dinokeng means “a place of rivers” and is a 280 000ha stretch of wilderness where the Gauteng government is developing a new tourism destination — and a Big Five game reserve less than an hour from Johannesburg.
The Cullinan diamond was found there when queens were powerful (Victoria reigned in London) and, a two- to three-day horseback journey south of Dinokeng, elders sat around fires and spoke of Man-thatisi, a powerful Sotho woman chief who lived and ruled over all of the Free State and most of Lesotho in the 19th century, a territory as big as the British Isles.
And, perhaps, because its bedrock still contains the gems that signify royalty, Dinokeng’s landscape continues to be populated by many queens — albeit of a type that would have made Victoria faint.
Out, the gay and lesbian organisation, has a vibrant office in Mamelodi, a sprawling urban sub-metropole of Pretoria that spills into Dinokeng. They regularly have beauty pageants for drag queens, transvestites, gay queens and lesbian queens.
In the conservative black communities that many of these queens live in, to be able to strut their stuff on a stage before adoring fans provides a place of belonging, a way to be proud, the capacity to flaunt their beauty before those who can see — instead of those who judge wearing blinkers.
But because it is not always safe to be “out”, outside of these pageants, the most recent queen declines an interview.
A similarly defiant competition for those who want to flaunt convention is the Groot Gat Godin competition (Afrikaans for “Big Bottomed Goddess”) that takes place during the annual Dinokeng Cullinan Diamond Faire held in early summer.
Big-bottomed goddesses are sought among women aged 25 to 85 who wear between sizes 18 to 26. The first winner, Elize Vogel (34), a size 20, is summoned to our interview by her husband, a police officer, who puts his fingers between his lips and whistles.
She wafts in, all affection and vivacity. She is busy helping her husband pack for a four-day hunting trip. “They’re going to a big farm on the Botswana border. I heard them say something about kudu and impala,” she mutters, almost as an aside to herself. “I hope the car isn’t filled with meat again.”
She tells how the concept for the competition was born. “A few of us had a conversation about beauty competitions. Someone said, ‘Whoever said that thin girls are the most beautiful?’ We wanted a chance, we are beautiful too, we have stunning personalities. My friend, Elise Kotze, began organising the event. We chose the name because Cullinan has the widest mining hole in South Africa, Kimberley is the deepest, it was all tongue in cheek.
“And, of course, I entered. I am one of the bigger girls and I know a lot of men who would rather have a conversation with me than a girl who is obsessed with her body and doesn’t want to eat and drink with them,” she beams.
“I loved it, I was very much in the limelight for the year of my reign. I was on TV and in all the papers. I got a lot of attention which I enjoyed very much.
“I tell big women, ‘Honey, you were made that way, you can do something about it but if you have been on diets and injections over and over again, this is God’s decision. This is the way he wants you on Earth. I am very comfortable with my body, I have a beautiful cleavage that I show to the world every day.”
The Groot Gat Godin doesn’t rest on her ample girth either, she runs an after-school centre and a pub and grill. She smiles, “I am this big girl with all this energy.”
Beauty pageants today are less about beauty than about issues. Liesl Krause-Wiid (32), Miss United Nations International, lives in Dinokeng and runs a cosmetics company and day spa. She initially didn’t want to take part in the competition, which was held in South Africa for the first time last year.
But, as a devout Christian and a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, she was swayed by its focus on promoting family values and community involvement.
Perhaps the real story of Krause-Wiid’s participation began when she was a teenager in her penultimate year of school and was in a devastating car accident. “My pelvis was broken in two places and my back was severely injured. I spent three months in hospital. I was angry and in denial, and then I began to bargain with the Lord. I said I would study theology if I could walk normally again — and it happened.
“In that time I read Ezekiel 16 which says: ‘Then I passed by and saw you squirming in your own blood. You were covered with blood, but I wouldn’t let you die. I made you grow like a healthy plant.’ When I fell out of the car I was lying in a pool of blood.
“Later in the text it says: ‘I made you my mine … I gave you … a beautiful crown to wear.’
“I always wondered what the crown would be. When I was in Hollywood and they put a crown on my head it meant a lot for me spiritually. It was like God giving me something that he’d promised me 16 years ago.”
Ironically, for a woman from the place of the world’s most revered diamonds, her crown was of Swarovski crystals, the diamond lookalike.
Krause-Wiid says she got a “lot of media attention because I am a minister and it was funny for the media that I entered. I tried to focus on the core value of the pageant.”
She has since increased the number of hours she works for charities, especially children’s homes, which, as the mother of a toddler, has particular poignancy and meaning for her. “It’s funny how people listen to you more when you have a title.”
Recently, as another example, 83-year-old Martha Mtsweni, a chief for 43 years, was promoted assistant to the main chief, Nyabela Motha, an Ndebele supreme chieftain at Dinokeng near Pretoria. It was the first time a woman had achieved such status in her community at the Komjekejeke Heritage site, an ancient Ndebele ancestral site dating back to 1873.
When the stars that fell to the Earth came back to the surface as diamonds, some of them nestled in the hearts of the people of Dinokeng. Some queens were already just that, before they were crowned.