Informant38

Shorter version of the long post below:
De Beers started the brutally racist laws of apartheid to protect its lucrative diamond trade. It grew rich and powerful, and the men who owned and ran it grew rich and powerful directly through the brutality of apartheid.
Apartheid in Africa has ended, but their heirs get to keep the money, and the power. Just as the heirs of the victims of apartheid get to keep what they inherit.
The linkage of diamonds with engagement and marriage is recent, an artificial tradition instigated and perpetuated by the diamond industry; as is the economic value of diamonds themselves, which are only as valuable as they are rare, and desired.
De Beers implicitly owns the Botswana government and is 50% shareholder in Debswana Diamond with it. Botswana is the largest producer of uncut diamonds in the world.
De Beers, through its surrogates, has forcibly evicted the Kalahari Bushmen from their ancestral homelands, and resettled them in cinderblock "camps" where they are deteriorating spiritually and physically. The latest legal denial of their claims issued by the wholly-owned de Beers subsidiary Botswana government was accompanied by testimony from a government prosecutor that the Bushmen are being moved to "protect them from game".
An ecologist testified in a Botswana court to what every middle-class middle school kid in the US knows - that the Bushmen are good for the game, and the game are good for the Bushmen.
They're being evicted for the same reason apartheid was instituted, to protect the diamond industry.
The Bushmen have lived in the Kalahari for 20,000 years.