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 This place, in the southern hills of this long and skinny country about the size of Pennsylvania, seems as though it is at the end of the earth, not just at the end of the Great Rift. Malawi is one of the poorest and least developed places in the world. Although this limits employment opportunities for its people, this also means life here has a timeless quality. Most people grow or catch their own food.
Rubies were discovered here decades ago. A Malawi Ministry of Natural Resources Report mentions a deposit of sapphire, which like ruby is the mineral corundum, as far back as 1958, when Malawi was still a British colony.
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But efforts to mine the deposit commercially were unsuccessful and the mine lay abandoned from the 1960s until 1986. Several later ventures failed. Unlike more common water-washed alluvial deposits, which concentrate the gems into channels of river of sea sediment, the corundum deposit here is eluvial: the remains of a collapsed dome of earth on top of this hill, which scattered the heavy minerals in an unpredictable way.
And the location, at the top of a hill in this forgotten world, without roads, water, or electricity, made mechanized mining difficult to imagine. The severe beauty of this place also needed careful protection.
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David and Kathy Hargreaves came here eight years ago from the United Kingdom, founding a Malawian company called Minex in 1994, to try once more to coax gems from this isolated earth. There are no gemstone mines in Malawi but they thought that this deposit might be something special.
At the beginning, it was a struggle. The deposit can only be mined from April to October during the dry season. The area is often steep and it is difficult to use heavy equipment like the Kubota extractor that carefully removes a layer of soil, revealing the layer of corundum below. And because the mineral deposits are sporadic, the only way to prospect is to dig holes, trenches, and pits to look for concentrations of ruby and sapphire and to better map the deposit. In fact, here at Chimwadzulu, Minex has dug 2000 test holes, one every 5 to 10 meters, each one 3 to 4 meters deep.
Initially, Minex was in search of sapphire but after a few years, Minex discovered ruby here ranging from pink to red to orange to the rare pinkish orange known as padparadscha sapphire. And incredibly, unlike almost all ruby and padparadscha sapphire from every other deposit in the world, its color was completely natural, requiring no heat enhancement to make it beautiful. It also did not contain rutile inclusions, which fog the clarity of rubies from other deposits, allowing it to sparkle with brilliance.
It is only the discovery of these rare brilliant and natural rubies, even though they are only one-third of the gems found here, that has made this mine possible.
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» Continued
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