Task 51: Visit 5 museums I've never been to before - 3rd post

The Cape Town Diamond Museum could hardly be more different from the South African Police Service Museum in Muizenberg, except that they are both small and specialised.  It is a non-profit organisation created and run by Shimansky, which sources, cuts, polishes and sells South African diamonds and tanzanite.  Not surprisingly it includes a large showroom where you can buy their jewellery and the museum has a distinctly corporate feel to it.  Despite that there is no pressure at all to buy anything and the tour is free.

Having spent a day some years ago exploring Kimberley, where we stayed at the wildly inappropriately named Savoy Hotel, I was interested to see what this museum might add to that experience.  Being small and well-presented, it had the advantage of focusing on the key facts, with a delightful and well-informed guide just for the two of us.  You need to book in advance, and I wish I had known that the on-site diamond polishers and setters are there on weekdays only, until about 3.30pm, whereas the museum itself is open 7 days a week, 9am-9pm.

Amongst the facts that struck me are that it was the Venetians in the fourteenth century who started the diamond cutting industry (described on the museum’s website as “Venice, Rome a widely recognised trade capital”) and that the first diamond given as an engagement ring was in 1477 by the Archduke Maximillian of Austria, when he proposed to Mary of Burgundy.  Until 1867, when diamonds were discovered in South Africa, the only known sources were India and then Brazil.  Within a decade, 95% of all diamonds were coming from South Africa.  It was as late as 1939 when the Gemological Institute of America established The 4Cs system for the grading of diamonds: cut, colour, clarity and carat weight.  Diamond cutting is now done by laser rather than by hand, which is both far faster and more consistently reliable.  Some diamonds have a natural colour - blue, yellow, pink or black - and tend to be more expensive because of their comparative rarity.  Tanzanite - a beautiful blue/violet colour - is found in only one place in the world, in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.  It is 1,000 times rarer than diamonds and the existing source is estimated to last less than 30 more years.

I enjoyed walking through the mock-up of a mining shaft and looking at the replica displays of some of the most famous diamonds in the world:

The individual work stations in the room used for setting the diamonds once they have been cut and polished were surprisingly small, with few tools required:

Then it was time to browse round the showroom, enjoying the brilliance of the stones and the artistry of some of the settings:

None of the items was priced and I didn’t bother either to try anything on or to ask how much they were.  The pleasure was simply in admiring the finished products and thinking of the extraordinary enterprise and resilience shown by the men who risked their lives in the diamond rush of the 1860s, living and working in appalling conditions.  Cecil Rhodes was one of them and he made his fortune there, with arguably world-changing results.