Diamond Boy

Michael Williams was born and raised in South Africa during Apartheid, the period of state-sanctioned racial segregation that ended in the early 1990s. In lectures, Williams has described how growing up as a white person in this environment—one that taught him to hate Black people—influenced his development, and how he’s spent his adult life working to undo what he learned as a child. As an adult, Williams has published several books for young readers featuring Black protagonists. He also writes plays, musicals, and operas in his capacity as the managing director for the Cape Town Opera, and he’s a faculty alum of the Semester at Sea program. Williams lives in Cape Town with his family.

Alluvial diamond deposits were discovered in the Marange region of eastern Zimbabwe in 2006. A diamond rush soon began, promising, as Patson notes in the novel, “diamonds for everyone.” However, the wider context of Zimbabwe’s economic and political situation allowed few people to flourish. Beginning in the mid 1990s, then-President Mugabe implemented policies that caused the country’s economy to collapse. By 2007, Zimbabwe was experiencing hyperinflation—in 2008, one U.S. dollar was worth more than two billion Zimbabwean dollars. This meant that Zimbabwean dollars were effectively useless, though the government continued to print banknotes in increasingly large increments. The Zimbabwean government initially tried to take control of the mines by sending in the police, who committed numerous human rights offenses. Then, in the fall of 2008, President Mugabe began Operation No Return. He sent the military to the Marange diamond fields to take over mining operations; soldiers killed and tortured miners, in addition to forcing children to work. Rather than saving the country economically, however, the military takeover of the mines benefitted high-ranking military commanders almost exclusively.

Diamond Boy is a companion novel to Now is the Time for Running, which follows characters Deo and Innocent as they flee Zimbabwe for South Africa. It’s also part of a growing body of young adult literature that features African characters and is set in Africa. Nnedi Okorafor has written the Akata Witch series, which takes place in Nigeria, while Waste Not Your Tears by Vivienne Ndlovu takes place in Zimbabwe at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo is a fantastical retelling of the fall of Zimbabwe’s longtime president, President Mugabe, with animal characters. For a nonfiction look at Zimbabwe’s history of diamond mining, Facets of Power: Politics, Profits and People in the Making of Zimbabwe’s Blood Diamonds, edited by Richard Saunders and Tinashe Nyamunda, offers a look at the Chiadzwa mining region from 2006 to the mid-2010s. And other novels that explore child labor in various industries, countries, and time periods include Lyddie by Katherine Patterson, The Circuit by Francisco Jiménez, and Boys Without Names by Kashmira Sheth.