Over the past year, Jacques Pauw has documented the extraordinary stories of the many people inextricably linked by Namaqualand’s wealth. In the first of a three-part special investigation, Pauw writes about the bloody battle between the police and the thousands who came from all over Africa to the Northern Cape’s once-prosperous diamond fields, now a derelict wasteland of gaping craters, towering mine dumps, rotten machinery and forsaken recovery plants, to dig for treasure in the ground.
