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Chapter 10
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Diamond Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Manhood and Growing Up
Family and Friendship
Corruption and Violence in Zimbabwe
Identity and Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
After a month, Patson has four friends, fellow teenagers Kamba, Chipo, Arves, and Jamu. Together, they form the secret gwejana (child miner) syndicate within the Banda syndicate. To Patson, it feels like they’re playing a treasure hunting game, but with real stakes. Arves becomes Patson’s best friend. He’s HIV positive and an orphan who lives with his grandmother, but he’s one of the most vivacious people Patson has ever met. He was one of the first to find a girazi—which Arves’s uncle traded to James Banda in a terribly unfair deal, locking Arves into a life working in the mine in exchange for the food Arves needs for his antiretroviral medication to work. Arves’s girazi is the one Banda wears around his neck. Arves warns Patson to keep any girazi he might find for himself.
On the one hand, Patson is having a great time with his new friends, and life seems as idyllic as possible given the circumstances. But Patson’s immaturity shows through here, particularly as he describes feeling like he’s playing a game as he performs the real, difficult work of mining diamonds. Additionally, he continues to notice clues that suggest not all is actually well, not least the story Arves shares about Arves’s girazi. Uncle James tricked Arves, pointing to Arves’s (and other young miners’) vulnerability. Further, Arves’s warning that Patson should keep a girazi if he finds one undermines the whole point of a syndicate, suggesting that selfishness, not community, rules life here.
Active
Themes
Eventually, Patson discovers how the gwejana manage to keep some ngodas for themselves. One afternoon, as the teens lounge at their special spot, Gwejana Rock, arguing about who has the right to mine diamonds here, Kamba “feel[s] a delivery coming” and rushes behind some rocks with a sieve and bottled water. Arves digs up a tin containing 20 small ngodas as Kamba returns with a “warm, but clean” ngoda. They swallow them to get them out of the mine, hiding the diamonds in chewing gum to throw off the guards. They have several thousand dollars’ worth of ngodas, but Chipo says this is nothing: others are making millions off the mines, and the government will swoop in soon. Kamba mentions the planes; the president built an airfield nearby and is ferrying diamonds out almost every night.
The gwejana syndicate work together, in part, because they’re so young and vulnerable to exploitation. And while they recognize that some people are making millions, they understand they likely won’t, due both to their age and their economic status. Indeed, Kamba’s description of the government’s planes taking diamonds away from the mines every night creates some tension, supporting Jamu’s earlier claim that things can’t continue like they are forever. It seems like only a matter of time before what’s happening becomes public knowledge.
Active
Themes
As the teens watch miners being searched as they leave the mine, Patson asks what happens if Uncle James finds out about the gwejana syndicate and their ngodas. Jamu insists that they turn in the bigger diamonds, but “there’s enough for everyone” and so they’re keeping the little ones.
Active
Themes
