OriginSA

Redefining Forever

The qualities of a diamond – its hardness, its durability – have made it symbolic of timelessness. Achieving this status was a direct result of the diamonds that the South Africa industry made available to a wider market.

But South Africa will not be able to produce diamonds forever. Its mines, although they continue to extract a significant portion of the world’s diamonds, have their closures in sight. There will come a time when all of South Africa’s diamonds will have been mined, and the opportunity to possess this piece of provenance will have passed.

This ascribes even more value to an OriginSA diamond – a value beyond currency. Holding one in the palm of your hand situates you in a particular time in history, making you part of both a past legacy and an enduring future. An OriginSA diamond redefines our understanding of forever.

The Quality of Our Diamonds

Almost all of our OriginSA diamonds are certified by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) as triple excellent diamonds. This means that they have scored an excellent rating in terms of polish, symmetry and cut, and are regarded as the pinnacle of quality diamonds.

This excellent rating is further enhanced by the OriginSA stamp, which signifies that your diamond is both of exceptional quality and is also an authentic and verified South African asset.

Your OriginSA diamond will come to you with an official GIA certificate, upon which the diamond’s scoring and OriginSA status will be carefully provided. OriginSA diamonds are available in any size of your choice.

Diamonds In South Africa

The Eureka Moment

Erasmus Jacobs was just a 15-year-old boy when he picked up a small transparent rock on the banks of the Orange River, near Hopetown, in what is today’s South Africa’s Northern Cape. The year was 1867 and South Africa at the time was a land of scattered settlements, occasional farms and endless veld, with a simple and meagre economy. Erasmus’s discovery changed everything.

As the stone passed from the boy to his parents to a neighbouring farmer to the civil commissioner in Colesberg and finally to an amateur geologist in Grahamstown (who received it by ordinary mail), interest in it grew. It was this amateur geologist, W. G. Atherstone, who declared Erasmus’s rock a diamond. Weighing in at 21.25 carats, it was named the Eureka Diamond, and sold to the governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Phillip Wodehouse, for £500.

The discovery of the Eureka quickly sparked a diamond frenzy as prospectors rushed to the region. The town of Kimberley grew out of the dust, and with such urgency that it became the first town in the southern hemisphere (and only the second in the world, after Philadelphia) to install electric streetlights, which it did in 1882.

Within a couple of years of the first discovery of diamonds, alluvial diggings (those conducted in riverbeds) yielded hundreds more. These numbers rose rapidly, and between 1868 and 1888 South Africa’s diamond exports increased from to 200 carats to 3.8 million carats a year. In the 1870s and 1880s, the areas in and around Kimberley were producing 95% of the world’s diamonds.

The Ripple Effect

The discovery of diamonds – and the subsequent discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 – forever altered the fate of South Africa.

Where, in the mid-nineteenth century, the country seemed destined to live out its years as an agricultural backwater, diamonds, gold and other mineral resources established it as an industrialised economic powerhouse. The mining industry led to the establishment of many other industries necessary to support it, including construction, engineering, finance, health, telecommunications and transport. It started to employ hundreds, and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people. Today, the South African mining industry directly employs more 450,000 people, and more than 10 times this number indirectly.

South Africa remains one of the world’s most resource-rich countries today and, despite more than 150 years of diamond mining, continues to rank as one of the top diamond-producing nations globally. But the Kimberley diamond rush not only transformed South Africa, it fundamentally changed the diamond industry worldwide.

Although diamonds had been mined in India for millennia, and were discovered in Brazil in 1795, the world had never before seen the sheer quantities that were found in South Africa. This meant that, where once diamonds had been so rare and so expensive as to only be available to royalty and the aristocracy, the influx of South African diamonds into the market brought the price down considerably. For the first time, this precious gemstone was accessible to the middle class and, in time, became a symbol of eternity.