City still has sparkle of heyday
‘PEOPLE may pass Kimberley on the way to somewhere else. However the city is filled with surprises everywhere you look,” is a caption to one of the many photographs that grace this book; in this case a magnificent – and Herbert Baker’s only known – house in the city of diamonds, circa 1903.
Kimberley: the city that literally sprang up overnight in the midst of nowhere; at one time the powerhouse of South Africa, the hub of the British Empire. A city where streets blazed with electric lights when London was dimly lit with gas lamps; the city that had the first stock exchange in Africa.
A place of diamond prospectors and dashing military men, in its heyday it was described as “the place stuffed with money”; at one time the centre of the world’s newest and most abundant diamond fields. Paul Duncan and Alain Proust (Africa Press)
Writer Paul Duncan and photographer Alain Proust evoke the Kimberley of days of yore, of the hustle and bustle of this compelling city more than 150 years ago, but they also conjure up the city where a diverse and indeed magnificent collection of historic buildings have remained, standing, steadfast and as testimony of the power of maintaining the past.
The book presents 24 significant historic buildings, each a piece of the jigsaw that vividly portrays the story of this bustling commercial centre, once the second-most important in the country. As Duncan writes, it’s a city with enough architectural sights to satisfy any amateur historian or receptive visitor – all captured in a visual feast by Proust’s observant eye.
Some of the great, most colourful personalities of the day were to be found in Kimberley, from Cecil John Rhodes to Ernest Oppenheimer and a motley crew of diamond millionaires.
Sol Plaatje, Robert Sobukwe and Frances Baard were also sons and daughters of the city, which was transformed from a mining camp and shanty town into a modern Victorian city.
Extensively researched, Kimberley’s story in its many facets is grippingly and illustriously told; the photos are the magnificent visual backdrop, showing as in so many testimonies of time that while people and societies come and go, it’s the solid buildings, the bricks and mortar, that remain, glimpsing back at the past.