Digging for Diamonds, Wielding New Words: A Linguistic Perspective on Zimbabwe’s ‘Blood Diamonds’

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.