FEELING THE SLUMP

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 398, 6 December 1932, Page 7

FEELING THE SLUMP

GERMAN MINES OLD SOUTH AFRICAN WORKING FACE WITH RUIN. * On the desert coast of South-West Africa lies Luderitzbrucht — a town which has always depended for its wealth on diamonds, and which has now been ruined' by the depression. Luderitzbrucht may have to be abandoned until the diamond trade revives. Even Kimberley has not been, so hard hit. The story of Luderitzbrucht began four years before the World War, when a young German railway man picked up1 a diamond and beoame a millionaire. August Stauch was. his name. His gang of natives was shovelling desert sand away from the newly-laid railway track when, Stauch saw a glitter in the yellow dune. He picked up a fragment which looked like smooth glass. "Diamond, baas," declared a coloured labourer, James Kolman, who had worked on the Kimberley fields. Stauch resigned from the railway service and pegged claims which proved to be marvellously rich. They have not been exbausted yet, those claims i at the place nameu Kolmanskop in honour of the coloured man who knew the difference between a piece of glass and a precious blue-white crystal. | At the time of the discovery Luderi itzbrucht was probably the most de- : solate seaport in Africa. From the ; day that Bartholomew Diaz raised .a : pillar there in 1486 until the great , discovery, the bay had simply been ! the resort of tough sealing crews, : guano schooners, a few traders, and missionaries. The settlement was nothing more than a collection of hot tin sheds. Not a tree, not a patch of grass will grow there to this day. Water costs 3d for a four gallon petrol tin; the whole supply must be I brought by train or condensed from J the sea. The annual rainfall is less i than oue inch. But the news of diamonds drew a hungry horde of fortune-seekers from I every corner of Southern Africa. ; Within a few months a roaring mining j camp had grown up around the parchI ed shores of Luderitz Bay — a second Kimberley in the wilderness of SouthWest Africa. Beer halls, hotels and shops sprang up in the feverish, reckless atmosphere of this new E1 Dorado. Flaxen-haired barmaids arrived. Uver all floated the German eagle. German officials built well, as always in every colony. After the terri-

tory had been mandated to South' Africa, visitors from Cape Town, steaming into the bay, were astonished to soe the bright villas and splendid public buildings standing on the edge of that thirsty desert — an etching of spires against a rose-pink sky. But when they landed they had to trudge through streets of heavy sand. All transport is by trolleys drawn by mules along narrow-gauge lines. The houses have double doors against the standstorm which screams through the town every morning. There is hardly a garden in the place. Some decorate the sand in front of their houses with beer bottles in strange designs. With the temperature often not less than 100 degrees in the shade, the amount | of beer consumed by the thousand white inhabitants is enormous. In 1904 Hereros rose against the Germans putting thosuands of men i into the field Seven years it took the picked troops of the Kaiser to subdue them; seven years during which no quarter was given or taken. I The Germans hanged many of their " prisoners; and hundreds of captives were left on waterless Shark Island in Luderitz Bay to die. These deeds ,] were done to avenge the deaths of « countless German farmers and their i families in outlying places.