Finding the Prince of Mines
Lewanika Timothy | Monday November 2, 2026 11:01
The place from which Botswana would draw so much of her wealth had a single borehole when the prospectors arrived. Around Jwana Hill, in the shallow, grass-covered Naledi Valley, a rural community kept its cattle and went about its life. The men searching for diamonds also used the water as they worked to establish what lay beneath the surrounding ground.
There was no Jwaneng mining town then, Norman Lock recalls. Families lived at cattle posts and tilled the land around them. As the search turned into a mining project, some would move from their homes, whilst workers and traders arrived to seek opportunities in the emerging settlement.
A renowned geologist, Lock was part of the drilling team that encountered the deposit in December 1972, working with project geologist Stuart Vercoe and Batswana colleagues whose contribution he insists belongs in the story. Some of the Batswana technicians had gained their experience at Orapa in the 1960s, bringing that knowledge to the new search.
“I was the geologist who drilled the Jwaneng discovery hole in 1972, together with Stuart Vercoe and our team of Batswana,” he says.
Lock had already worked at Orapa in 1967, six months after its discovery, as part of Manfred Marx’s team. By the time of the Jwaneng breakthrough, Botswana was six years into Independence. Orapa had opened in 1971, bringing diamond income into an economy long dependent on cattle. Seretse Khama and his administration were building institutions, extending services and trying to make political independence economically sustainable.
The scale of what followed at Jwaneng gave that work a much stronger foundation. The mine became renowned as the world’s richest by value, its exceptionally valuable production helping finance development across Botswana. Yet its discovery received far less attention than Orapa’s, leaving much of the account with the people who had done the searching.
“Grateful as the country must have been for the new Orapa mine, the big step forward came from the Jwaneng mine. The much higher grade and value ensured the success of consecutive National Development Plans for socioeconomic investment,” Lock writes in his 2019 account of the discovery.
De Beers had begun its modern exploration campaign in Bechuanaland in 1955. Its interest rested on earlier geological arguments and small diamond finds, giving the company reason to believe richer deposits might await discovery. Legendary geologist Gavin Lamont, recruited from the protectorates geological survey, became one of the central figures in keeping that search alive.
The company had already come close to the Jwaneng field in 1962. Lock recalls that prospectors sampled ground containing tiny mineral clues, but their processing methods missed them. The opportunity passed, and the deposit remained undiscovered whilst Bechuanaland continued towards Independence.
That timing has invited speculation, including suggestions that Britain might have withheld Independence had the diamonds been found earlier, according to David Magang’s book, Delusions of Grandeur. Lock however refutes that claim.
According to Lock, Fawcus told a Botswana Society gathering that the route to Independence would have remained the same. Lock’s concern about an earlier discovery centres instead on the regional circumstances, particularly South Africa’s interest in incorporating Bechuanaland.
After Independence, tribal mineral rights were ceded to the State. The discoveries that followed would therefore be a national inheritance. Wealth beneath Ngwaketse ground would build national wealth just as the stones at Orapa could serve people beyond Bangwato territory.
Back in the southern Kalahari, a new search began producing encouraging results in 1969. Mike Whateley’s work helped identify ground worth investigating further. One target acquired the name Whateley’s Wish, preserving the name of a geologist who would leave the company before the deposit beneath it was found.
The search required people to walk the ground, collect soil and look for tiny minerals associated with diamond bearing rock according to Lock. Even termites had played a part, bringing material upwards during their excavations over long periods. These small traces gave the prospectors a way of following a deposit hidden beneath a substantial covering of sand and other sediments.
One early discovery yielded samples that tested negative for diamonds. Initial drilling at Whateley’s Wish failed to reach beneath the covering ground. The equipment lacked the reach needed for the task and the programme was reconsidered. The discovery that would make the area famous still lay beyond the drill.
A renewed effort began in September 1972. Vercoe worked on the soil sampling with Moses Rapoo, whilst Tabona Machinye assisted Lock with the magnetic survey. Their work involved measurements recorded by hand and calculations back at camp in the evenings. Gradually, the results gave the team sufficient confidence to choose where to drill again.
Locke recalls that at 11am on December 16, 1972, the drill encountered suspected kimberlite pipeline, the rock that can contain diamonds. What came up was fine, pink and “clayey”. It bore little resemblance to a glittering treasure, but the minerals it contained gave the team reason to continue. Lock’s drilling record preserved the moment that would enter Botswana’s history.
Further holes followed, and rock samples recovered in early 1973 confirmed the discovery more firmly. Establishing its size took more work, whilst proving that its diamonds could support a mine. This required more years of testing however and even after the breakthrough, the machinery continued to cause trouble.
“The challenge of using this underpowered drill was underlined when, a few holes after the discovery, the whole drill string was lost, at great expense,” Lock records. The equipment had helped locate a deposit whose importance would dwarf the scale of the original operation, but getting the diamonds out would require a very different undertaking.
The decision to build the mine came in 1978. For the people already living in the area, development meant changes reaching well beyond a prospecting camp. Jwaneng’s town profile records the relocation of residents, including families from Gatalamotho who moved to Sese, whilst other farming households were resettled in the Naledi area.
The national story of diamond wealth therefore also contains a local story of people moving to make room for it. A mine and town required land, roads, housing, water and services. Workers and businesses arrived as the settlement expanded. In August 1984, two years after the mine opened, the Jwaneng Township Authority was established. The place that had helped sustain the prospectors with water now required the administration and public services of a growing town.
Jwaneng opened in 1982, during former President Quett Masire’s tenure, with Botswana already holding an equal stake in its mining partnership with De Beers. That ownership had been secured in 1975, whilst the Jwaneng deposit was still being evaluated. The country’s negotiators were working to obtain a greater return from an industry in which their commercial partner possessed far more knowledge.
Lock’s writing describes Masire resisting Cabinet colleagues who wanted a majority stake. He points to Masire’s concern about the responsibilities that came with control and the example of Zambia’s nationalised copper mines. Equal ownership required the partners to agree, sharing responsibility for the undertaking. Jwaneng was being developed within a relationship shaped by those arguments.
Masire’s memoir, Very Brave or Very Foolish, records the debate on why Botswana took so long to develop more employment and industry around its stones. The discovery solved one problem, finding a source of national wealth, whilst leaving successive administrations to negotiate what could be built from it.
For Lock, the names behind the discovery deserve to survive alongside the presidents, company chairmen and agreements. His writings give credit across the team and the years of work that preceded the breakthrough. Whateley’s early search, Lamont’s persistence, Vercoe’s direction and the work of Rapoo, Machinye and others all belong to Jwaneng’s beginnings.
“Fairly apportioning credit among the many geologists, and others who worked on the project, would have been problematic, though the discovery drill-hole marks a point in time,” he writes.