The first gemstone discovered in East Africa

Wednesday 6 February 2008

Those who have read Out of Africa or An Ice Cream War, or remember Bogart in The African Queen, will know that "The Great War" was also fought in Africa. But they are unlikely to have heard of the Battle of Merkerstein, a minor skirmish in the northern part of Tanzania, which was then part of German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). It was there and then, at Merkerstein around the turn of the year 1914/1915, that the first deposit of gemstones was found in East Africa. A soldier who presumably had other things on his mind saw a bright red stone, a ruby. Was he British or German? Usually it's said to have been a German but it can depend on who tells the story.

Merkerstein Hill took its name from Moritz Merker (1867-1908), a fine scholar who was also the pre-War German military commander for the Kilimanjaro region. A few crumbling labels in European museums show the name "Merkerstein" even today, but the deposit has long been known as the Longido Ruby Mine, "Longido" being the Masai name of a prominent mountain familiar to those who have driven from Nairobi down to the game parks of northern Tanzania. With time, Merkerstein, Merker, and his never-translated Die Masai (1904) have been generally forgotten, perhaps because Germany was forced to give up its colonies following World War I, but perhaps, too, because of the eerie parallels Merker drew between the ways of the Masai and those of nomadic peoples in the Old Testament.

The war story was became widely known, and rubies at "Merkerstein" were said to have been seen again by employees of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but the change of administrations from German to British, the Great Depression, a gold rush far to the west, near Lake Victoria, and World War II intervened and it was not until sometime around 1949 that the deposit was re-found. According to one account, a Nairobi-based gold prospector named Tom Blevins and an associate discovered a narrow rock outcrop the length of a football field composed of bright green rock with lovely bright-red six-sided crystals standing out from the surface. "Sacksfull" of loose rubies which had weathered out of the hard green host rock were collected and the two gold prospectors returned to Nairobi, thinking of themselves as rich men. Then, by means of what might charitably be called "lapidary experimentation", Blevins reduced most of the stones they had collected to tiny valueless fragments. Returning to the deposit, the two men learned that the rubies which remained were for the most part so firmly encased in their matrix rock that they could not be removed without breaking.

But there is also very different version of the rediscovery in which a professional hunter named Louis "Woody" Woodruff accidentally came across a circle of five or six geometrically constructed stacks of the green host rock sitting on the ground, as though waiting for transport that had never come. The Longido property then passed through a series of owners and managers, including the Polish Prince Eustache Sapieha, a greatly liked figure on "the Nairobi scene", who in later years had a little chapel built on his property with a footpath to it paved with ruby shards splashed with green. Prince Sapieha, universally known as "Stash", had come to Kenya in 1948 after the Communist takeover of his country, joining other members of his family and the sizable Polish-Kenyan community which had coalesced in the years following the Nazis invasion in 1939. Stash, who had seen the stacks of rock, thought that no one but an army would have done things that neatly.

Stash and his wife and three daughters were all under the impression that there was something peculiar or mysterious about the whole business. Had Blevins and Woodruff once been partners? Had a fortune in rubies been destroyed out of ignorance? Had it been destroyed at all? Did Blevins get it? Did Woodruff? At this point we need a script writer. In any case, there is agreement that the proceeds of the sale of the stacked "Tanganyika Artstone" had financed the first real mining operations at Longido, decades after the original find. Each owner of the Longido property has in his turn reluctantly concluded that, with the exception of unspectacular "gem pockets" which are discovered once a decade, or even less frequently, the Longido rubies cannot be profitably removed from their host rock. Too much labor and too much breakage are involved. In time, the Longido has ceased to be a gemstone mine, though it continues to produce the decorative red-and-green artstone prized for making ashtrays and carvings.

Both the bright red of the ruby and the bright green color of the encasing grains of the mineral zoisite are produced by trace amounts of the element chromium in the host rock. Anyolite (from anyoli, Masai for "green") is the proper geological name for the Tanganyika Artstone but in Tanzania even the Masai say "ruby-in-zoisite".

Although "ruby-in-zoisite" is in no way incorrect, the name became a source of confusion in the late 1960s when tanzanite (which is a variety of zoisite colored by traces of vanadium, not chromium) was discovered, for people in Tanzania and Kenya had come to believe that "zoisite" had to be green.

John Saul