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Tribespeople displaced from their land by the zone’s construction were often employed as laborers in diamond mines, forced to live on cramped, barracks-like compounds for months at a time.īut it wasn’t to last.
#FALLEN LEAVES GHOST ON THE SHORE CRACKED#
They cracked down, declaring a vast area of Namibia a Sperrgebiet, or restricted zone, forbidding entry to ordinary people and reserving prospecting rights for a single, Berlin-based company. Kolmanskop’s prospectors were becoming rich overnight simply picking diamonds off the desert floor, but German authorities wanted greater control over the incredible riches. Only four years before the discovery of diamonds at Kolmanskop, the Namibian Herero people rebelled against the German colonizers, who retaliated with genocidal ferocity by killing over 60,000 Herero. One family kept a pet ostrich that terrorized other townspeople and was made to pull a sleigh at Christmas.īut Kolmanskop-part of the struggling colony of German South West Africa-was also built on a legacy of colonial violence. European opera groups even came to perform. There was a butcher, a baker, a post office, and an ice factory fresh water was brought by rail. Wealthy Kolmanskop became a well of luxury in the barren desert. By 1912, a town had sprung up, producing a million carats a year, or 11.7 percent of the world’s total diamond production. Soon, hordes of prospectors descended on the area. Lewala was not paid or rewarded for his find.
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Lewala’s German employer identified them for what they were: diamonds. One evening in 1908, a Namibian railway worker named Zacherias Lewala was shovelling railroad tracks clear of creeping sand dunes when he saw some stones shining in the low light. ( See nine of the world’s best ghost towns.) A strange, painful history Brightly colored wallpaper peeling off the walls, dilapidated houses now inundated in rolling banks of sand … this is Kolmanskop, a ghost town in southern Africa’s Namib Desert, in the middle of a region known as “the forbidden zone.” And the story of how it got here is about as strange as the sight of the town today.