Rock Solid: African Laborers on the Diamond Mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang)

My dissertation explores the daily lives and experiences of the African men, women and children who, from 1917 to 1975, traveled to the diamond mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang) in Angola's Lunda region, toiled on and around them, created mining communities and eventually returned home.

Diamang enjoyed exclusive mining and labor procurement rights over a vast concessionary area in the Portuguese colony of Angola and used this monopoly to become the colony's largest commercial operator and also its leading revenue generator.

The wealth was generated on the backs of African laborers, many of whom were forcibly recruited to work on the mines via the aggressive state-company recruitment scheme in place in Lunda (shibalo).

By the 1960s, Diamang was employing annually over 20,000 African men, women and children from throughout the northeastern, central and eastern regions of Angola, as well as others from the neighboring (Belgian) Congo.

Drawing upon extensive archival and oral evidence, the dissertation focuses on the work performed and the gendered organization of labor both on the mines and in company encampments from the commencement of mining operations in 1917 to Angolan independence in 1975.

Although conditions on Diamang's were brutal, there is little evidence that the company's African work force engaged in overt resistance, such as strikes or trade unionism, so commonly pursued by African mineworkers elsewhere across southern Africa.

Instead, informants described in great detail how they and their colleagues engaged in a wide variety of acts, often hidden, to improve their living and working conditions without fear of the violent reprisals that open, collective action would have surely elicited.

In short, their words document graphically how they coped, creatively adapted and, at times, struggled against this oppressive regime.

I argue that the absence of closed compounds, the proximity of the (Belgian) Congolese border and thinly-stretched colonial and company staffs offered African men and women sufficient space in which to pursue gendered strategies and thereby help to shape their own histories.