BBCA stark and unsettling duality defines South Africa’s remote west coast. The 800-kilometer journey north from Cape Town begins with vistas of breathtaking natural beauty—rugged mountains, the vast Atlantic, and the famed floral displays of Namaqualand. Yet, as the road stretches toward the Namibian border, this splendor dissolves into a scarred, pockmarked landscape that resembles the surface of the moon. These are not natural formations but the profound physical scars of a century of intensive diamond mining. More disturbing than the environmental degradation, however, is the human cost: the impoverished Nama communities living amid this ruin, who watch the wealth extracted from their ancestral land flow elsewhere, leaving them with little but dust and broken promises.
The Nama people, straddling the border of South Africa and Namibia, are descendants of the Khoi and San peoples, widely recognized as the earliest human inhabitants of Southern Africa. For centuries, they lived as nomadic pastoralists and traders, with an intimate, sustainable relationship with this harsh but beautiful land. Their connection to the region’s mineral wealth is ancient. As community leader Martinus Fredericks recounts, “In our family, they used to teach the children to count with diamonds.” This profound historical context is crucial: the diamonds were not a discovery *for* the Nama, but a known part of their world long before colonial prospectors arrived.
That arrival in the mid-19th century, first by the Cape Colony and later spurred by the diamond rush of the 1920s, systematically dismantled Nama society. They were forcibly cleared from the fertile lands around the Orange River. This dispossession was cemented through the apartheid era and, in a bitter irony for many, persisted after South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994. The new African National Congress government maintained the argument that diamond wealth from areas like Namaqualand was a national resource for the “greater good,” continuing a pattern of extraction that bypassed the original custodians of the land.
The physical evidence of this legacy is visceral. In the coastal border town of Alexander Bay, Andries Josephs stands amid the wrecked shell of a former mine where he once worked. “There’s no work… The people have stagnated and everything has gone backwards,” he says, describing sky-high unemployment and collapsed infrastructure. The scene is a microcosm of the region: a few houses, a dilapidated church, a hospital with damaged windows. The local diamond industry has largely declined, having exhausted the most accessible gems, and departed with the profits, leaving behind a trail of economic and social devastation.
This reality exists in shocking contrast to a landmark legal victory. After a five-year battle that reached South Africa’s highest court, the Constitutional Court ruled in 2003 that the Nama of the Richtersveld area held an inalienable right to their ancestral land *and* the minerals beneath it. This was a pioneering judgment based on the concept of “aboriginal title,” a monumental recognition of historical injustice. Yet, two decades later, the promise of that ruling remains largely unfulfilled for most community members.
The breakdown occurred in the implementation. In 2007, a deal was struck between the state-owned miner Alexkor and the Richtersveld Communal Property Association (CPA), which purported to represent the community. It granted Alexkor 51% of mineral rights, with 49% going to the community via the CPA and a mining company. Martinus Fredericks and others argue this deal was made without proper community consent and that the CPA has been dysfunctional. While Alexkor states it has paid over 240 million rand (approx. $14 million) in reparations and grants to community structures, lawmakers have revealed in parliamentary hearings that over 300 million rand has been paid with little reaching the people on the ground. The chairperson of Alexkor’s new board acknowledged “maladministration and malfeasance” within the company, which was implicated in the broader “state capture” corruption scandal.
Beyond the financial failure lies an ecological catastrophe. The landscape is littered with abandoned mines showing little to no rehabilitation—gaping holes, vast tailings dumps, and denuded earth. Fredericks draws a sharp contrast: “The Nama people used to mine themselves, but they’ve done it sustainably… Big companies come in, they rip up the land, they take whatever they can, and they just move off.” Mining giants like Trans Hex and De Beers, which have sold their local assets, state they met legal obligations and passed on rehabilitation responsibilities, with De Beers committing a final 50 million rand. However, the visible reality suggests a system where legal compliance does not equate to ecological or social restoration, raising fears that this damaging model will simply creep further south along the coast.
Getty Images/BBCThe Nama’s story is thus a powerful case study in the complex challenges of post-colonial restitution, resource governance, and environmental justice. It highlights the gap between legal victory and tangible change, the perils of funneling community benefits through unaccountable structures, and the enduring legacy of extractive colonialism. Fredericks’s fight continues, now through legal action to challenge the legitimacy of the CPA itself. His words encapsulate the core of the struggle: “A Nama person cannot be separated from Nama land because of the intrinsic link between the person and the land.” For the Nama, true restoration requires more than reparations; it demands the return of agency, the healing of the land, and the honoring of that intrinsic link severed over a century ago. Their plight stands as a critical test of South Africa’s commitment to reconciling its mineral wealth with the rights and dignity of its first peoples.