Pickings were especially good after a rain, they say. Diamonds once were so common, and their value so little known, that townspeople planted unpolished stones in the mud walls of their thatched huts for decoration. Passing Belgian merchants would buy the gems out of the walls in exchange for soap or salt. Now, to get diamonds, they have to work at it. Even here, decades of government greed and mismanagement have blighted what should be prosperity.
Homes are still of mud and people still decorate the walls but today they use bottle caps.
Kabila ordered foreign diamond merchants out of Mbuji-Mayi in the late 1990s, saying he wanted the business for the Congolese. The war helped keep foreign buyers away. Joseph Kabila, who became president after his father was assassinated in January, has promised to open up the diamond trade again, and Belgian and French buyers appear to be edging quietly back. But prices still are down here, which explains why so many of the diggers at the Kabuebue pit are children. When business was better, grown men crowded the pits, often using their fists to settle rival claims to patches of mud.