It was the kind of news item of which dreams are made. South Africa’s national radio led its 8pm bulletin with an announcement that the world’s biggest diamond had been discovered — and it was twice the size of the fabled Cullinan diamond.
An hour later the discovery had fallen to the fifth item on the national news. But if the South African Broadcasting Corporation was losing faith in it, the world was slowly waking up to the news. The phones of mining experts began ringing with calls from the international media demanding to know if the claim could be genuine. Most hedged their bets. ”Unlikely, but … ” was the judgement being offered and it was the ”but” which spun headlines of the ”monster diamond” around the world.
As the week progressed, the story got bigger and so did the diamond. It was finally claimed to be 8 120 carats — an extraordinary 1,64kg — compared with the mere 3 106,75 carats of the Cullinan, found in South Africa in 1905. A photograph began circulating on the web. It looked like a kryptonite stage-prop from a Superman film.
But still nobody was dismissing the claim, least of all Brett Jolly, who said he was its owner. The diamond would be kept in a Johannesburg bank vault for a couple of days ”until we calm down and decide what we are going to do”, he said in a radio interview. All he would otherwise say about the find was that it was made in the North West province, an area extremely rich in minerals, but not particularly noted for its diamonds.
Then Jolly became elusive. His cellphone was turned on to an answering machine and the email address it offered produced no reply.
Information about Jolly was hard to come by. He was, apparently, a property developer involved in a timeshare company where there was a falling out of the directors. When he found the stone, he apparently attacked it with an angle-grinder to see if it was hard enough to be a diamond.
Mining industry yarns are as big as the fish that got away. Afrikaans newspapers quoted a prediction by the famous Afrikaans prophet Siener van Rensburg, who said that such a diamond would be found in the area of Jolly’s discovery. It would be known as the ”skaapkop” diamond because it was shaped like a sheep’s head.
Beeld newspaper quoted a diamond digger who said the prophecy was that two brothers would find the Skaapkop diamond. ”But one wouldn’t make it. Now everyone is afraid to find it.” It is not known whether Jolly has any siblings. Jolly has asked Ernest Blom, the Johannesburg-based president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses — which oversees the diamond industry — to examine the stone and rule on its authenticity.
Blom told the Guardian that he would be seeing Jolly over the weekend and would examine the stone early next week. He had only seen the fuzzy photograph of it. ”It looks like a greenish coloured stone,” he said. ”A diamond that size is rare. But a green diamond, on top of that, makes it doubly, doubly, doubly rare.”
But Blom refused to dismiss Jolly’s stone. ”Everybody is sceptical because of the size. I have a philosophy that nature is an incredibly intricate thing and it gives us these surprises from time to time. Let’s hope this is one of those surprises.” – Guardian Unlimited Â