Abstract:
The history of diamond mining in Africa is long, complex and heterogeneous. In post-colonial
Zimbabwe, before 2006, two diamond mines operated, at River Ranch in Beitbridge and at
Murowa in Zvishavane, which both had Kimberley Process Certification. However, the 2006
discovery of diamonds at Chiadzwa in Marange, near Mutare, brought about a dramatic
change to Zimbabwe’s mining landscape. Propelled by Zimbabwe’s deepening economic
crisis, soon after this discovery of diamonds was made public, the Chiadzwa diamond fields
were invaded by an avalanche of illegal diamond miners from diverse cultural and
socio-economic backgrounds. Chiadzwa became a dynamic site of struggle where new cultural
and social identities, languages and consumption patterns emerged in a remarkably short
space of time. This study delineates and explicates the new linguistic terms and expressions that
rapidly developed among this new, transient community of illegal diamond panners at
Chiadzwa, in order to describe their activities, experiences and interactions. The study focuses
on the period 2006 to 2008 when the Zimbabwean crisis was at its worst, and the diamond rush
was at its peak. Its aim is to analyse the linguistic strategies involved in these illegal miners’
emergent ‘language’, and its socio-economic and political functions in the milieu of Chiadzwa.
The article shows that as the illegal diamond miners at Chiadzwa were ‘digging for diamonds’
they were also, ‘wielding new words’, suggesting these phenomena are explicable through
notions of ‘antilanguages’ and ‘antistructure’. By triangulating a phenomenological approach
with interviews and observations, the study explores how Chiadzwa became a highly contested
but hugely creative space in which a rich new ‘vocabulary’ was forged, that reflected the
vagaries and complexities of life in the midst of a diamond rush, even as Zimbabwe’s economic
and political crisis worsened deeply around it.
