(via Gem & Jewellery News, Vol.8, No.4, September 1999) Judith Kinnaird writes:
My visit to Somaliland had not started well. I had arrived on an ECHO flight from Nairobi (EC Humanitarian Organization) and had landed in Hargeisa, the capital, along with about eight other people of assorted nationalities bound for a peace conference.
Unfortunately, the normal rota for the plane that day would have been for it to land in Berbera on the Gulf Coast, which was where my visa was waiting but, because of the conference delegates, that day it had come to the capital instead. A four hour delay then occurred at the airport whilst ‘Mr Fixit’, my mentor, was found. This gave me the opportunity to learn about the country from the various officials who felt it important to keep me company during my sojourn in the VIP lounge whilst visa formalities got sorted.
The discovery of gemstones in Somaliland and their subsequent extraction only began in 1990. The widespread distribution and broad range of gemstones available makes it all the more surprising that gemstones have come to light so recently. My visit to Somaliland had been arranged to consider the small scale mining potential in the country as part of an EC programme to investigate the sustainable exploitation of natural resources. The gemological potential may provide an important income generation in a country where many will earn only $10 per month, not necessarily because of their primitive state, but more as a consequence of a bruising civil war.
Difficulties
Visits to various gemstone producing areas proved quite difficult as many of them are only reached by tracks little better than the bed of dried up stream, resulting in bone-shaking journeys which might take five hours to do 50 miles. Also, the Ministry of Water and Minerals did not want me to visit any private sector producers without being accompanied by a person from the Ministry, and groups in the private sector showed considerable reluctance to accept a Ministry representative since most had not paid for a license for mineral working. Eventually, most of the initial problems were solved and I traveled extensively round the country, particularly in the north east from Sheikh to Berbera on the coast where the temperature was in excess of 40°C (and that was in the winter) and Borama in the west, which is the center for emerald production.
Numerous varieties
Once people knew that I was interested in gemstones everywhere I went I was inundated by collectors and traders who wanted to sell me their goods. Among more than forty different mineral species produced, were a variety of gemstones varying from emerald, ruby, sapphire, and aquamarine, to minerals like garnet and amethyst, some of which were of considerable size and excellent color. Other gems like phenakite, alexandrite and heliodor were reported though not seen, and it was unwise to place too reliance on local gem identification. This is not due to unscrupulous behavior on the part of most producers and traders, rather a lack of knowledge as they begin to learn to identify gemstones.
Thus of occurrences reported as tanzanite, one turned out to be of purple fluorite the other purple of vesuvianite. Similarly, one locality believed to produce emerald, whilst right in the middle of rich pegmatite belt, was found to contain bright green quartz colored by secondary copper minerals between the quartz crystals. Green epidote and diopside are frequently thought to be tourmaline or peridot.
One group told me they were working green garnet. Although the rocks were of the right composition for potential finds of green garnet, the mineral they thought was green garnet was largely epidote, although scapolite, green amphibole and orange hessonite garnets also occurred, and we did indeed succeed in finding one tiny green garnet. Despite the disappointment of sometimes having to tell people that the minerals they were mining were worthless, there were some localities with exciting potential. In one area, the mineral believed to be tourmaline was in fact epidote, although it was accompanied by blue zoisite which, if found in sufficiently large pieces could have some value.
In conversation with a very impressive lawyer in Hargeisa, I was told that gemstones are also being produced in the Bossaso area on the coast in the far northeast, which is consistent with the geology shown on the geological map of Somalia. He also maintained that the gemstones which are appearing from Garowe to the east have been robbed from ancient graves dating back as far as the civilizations of Egypt. He also believed that some of the gemstones referred to in the bible had their origin in Somaliland.
Diamonds
Unfortunately there is a widespread belief among the people of Somaliland that there is an abundance of diamonds in the country. This is based on the mis-identification of quartz by a few locals and traders. These men have ‘diamond testers’ which they believe distinguish diamonds from other stones on account of its hardness. The testers being used are the sort that are specifically designed to distinguish diamonds set in jewelry and were made to show a hardness of ten for quartz crystals, whilst some minerals were shown to have a hardness of anything up to 12. The commonly occurring concentrations of small quartz crystals are called ‘sugar diamonds’ by these traders.
On one occasion, following an afternoon studying an extensive outcrop of water clear rock crystal near the Dabail Weina (a locality from which 200 tons of piezo-electric quartz had been extracted from a 5m deep trench during 1977-78), my driver, myself and guide were arrested and taken to prison, because the locals had reported we had stolen their diamonds. Fortunately, a permit from the Ministry of Minerals, which stated that we were on government business was reluctantly accepted.
The miners
Some groups of gem producers gem producers comprise half-a-dozen men, while others are moderately well-organized with more than twenty workers. Typically all the groups are extracting gemstones from hard rock with the minimum of tools. In addition, one group near Heinweina had no camping equipment, yet they stayed on the mountain for four or five nights at a time because their aquamarine mine is 8 km from the village and more than 500 m up in rough mountainous terrain. All groups face the same problems of lack of equipment, lack of access to overseas markets, lack of capital to travel to foreign gem trade fairs, lack of any central display and exhibition center to attract the attention of the many foreign visitors to the country, lack of knowledge on relevant mining equipment and how to use it, and often the most basic problems of difficulty of identification of even the common minerals.
Buying gems
Gems for sale are not readily obtained, and it is necessary to become acquainted with producers on a personal basis to get good material, although the Somalis are currently in the process of setting up a gemological association in the capital Hargeisa. Once this association has been established it will form a focus for the collection and trading of gemstones and mineral specimens. I did visit one authorized dealer of gemstones in Hargeisa who buys stones from producers and says he also owns a gold prospect. He had a variety of minerals on display, most of which were of dubious quality. He also tried to persuade me to buy some mercury which he says is ‘dripping out of rocks’ in an unspecified locality. Later my mentor suggested that it is more likely from Russian missiles which are remnants of the war.
Among the more enterprising businessmen, one young man showed me more than a hundred Somalia gemstones cut in Ethiopia, for which he paid $1500. Among these stones were some extremely handsome dark purple amethysts, a large cabochon of orange opal, numerous small red garnets, some green chrysoberyl, colorless spinel or zircon, deep red ruby and an occasional sapphire, but no emerald. He said he intended to take these as a display collection to the Far East to generate interest in trading of raw uncut gemstones.
Important deposits
Amazingly, despite their long history, I was told that they have only had a written language in Somaliland since 1972. The country has a population of 1.1 million people, half of them nomadic pastoralists, and the main economy of the country is based on the export of around three million head of camels, cattle, sheep and goats from Berbera. The animals come from all over the region, including Ethiopia, making their way for hundreds of miles, grazing as they go. But agriculture cannot sustain the development of the country and if a legalized gemstone production can be established it will go some way to providing much needed foreign income.
If the continental configuration was reconstructed around 500 million years ago (the time when the Pan African pegmatites were formed, the source of many of the gemstones) then Sri Lanka and Madagascar, which at that time were part of African landmass, lie in the same geological belt of rocks that extend from Somaliland to southern Africa—the Mozambique Belt.
The diversity of gemstones that are coming to light suggest that some excellent material could become available and that with development Somaliland could be an important world producer.
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