From fruit exporter to internationally renowned diamond miner

KINGSTON-BORN Isaac Edmestone Barnes, a trained surveyor and fruit exporter, established his own church, the Kingston Christadelphian Assembly, at 26½ Mark Lane. To escape racism in Jamaica he travelled to Britain, and then as a missionary to Liberia, a country established in Africa in 1821 for formerly enslaved black people in America.

But, when Barnes arrived in Liberia about 1890, at age 33, this independent black republic was still highly underdeveloped, lacking critical infrastructure, such as asphalted roads, and other public amenities. He reorganised the Department of Surveys and laid out roads and settlements, such as Barnesville. He was free to do his work, as there was no colonial government in Liberia, from which he went back to Britain in September 1893.

Barnes settled first in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was a scholar, a theologian, writer, educator, and regular contributor to an independent Scottish religious journal. He was an electrifying speaker who pulled great crowds in many cities all over Britian, which he left in October 1893.

Barnes’ second home in Britain was in Norwich, where he met a German Jew named W. A. Fried who was converted to the Christadelphian faith. Fried became Barnes’ missionary assistant, and Barnes married his sister in 1901 and migrated to Germany, where he was to encounter racism, once again. The union produced a son, Ben Edmestone.

He enrolled as the first black student at the world-famous Leipzig University, known for its racism. He studied mineralogy, geography, geology, and crystallography, and minored in theology. He is listed in 1902-1903 as a graduand, but his and the faces of two Japanese were painted out of the graduating class photograph before it was published. Nonetheless, he spent 10 years in Germany working as a surveyor, as well as in Austria-Hungary and Russia.

Isaac’s son himself grew up to become a geologist and mineralogist, and was invited by the government of Brazil to establish a faculty of geology and mineralogy at the much-vaunted Ouro Preto School of Mines. It is said that he made the first discovery of mineral oil in Brazil, and that he first discovered an oilfield that is classified as the second-largest in the world. He predeceased Isaac in 1960, in Rio de Janeiro.

Sixty years before that, Isaac was appointed surveyor and engineer-assessor of a Venezuelan gold mine called Callao, jointly owned by coloured Jamaican millionaire George Stiebel, who owned the original Devon House, and Corsican mining millionaire Antonio Liccioni. He assisted with the survey for the settlement of the Venezuelan border dispute with British Guiana.

Settlement of the border meant that Barnes had to climb to near the summit of Mount Roraima, the highest point on the border, in the company of a certain Harry Perkins, who had previously climbed Mount Roraima, in 1884. They had also worked together at the El Callao in Venezuela. At the time, Barnes was regarded as the first black man to climb Mount Roraima, 9219 feet high, where three survey pillars were mounted near the summit.

One of the pillars was at the tripoint where Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela meet. It is said that, several decades later, in 1985, the United States Department of State said that “the successful placement of the boundary markers indeed was a remarkable achievement”, bearing in mind the adverse conditions that existed in the mountains.

From 1903 to 1909, Isaac Barnes lived in South Africa, where the racism that he had faced in Leipzig, Germany was to return to haunt him. His qualifications from Leipzig were considered bogus by a British Army officer, who could not imagine that a black man from Jamaica could have such academic credentials.

The bigotry did not stop him from founding and being chief executive officer of two London-based international diamond mining syndicates, for which he personally organised the prospecting and the mining operations. He also established New Premier Syndicate Limited, to prospect for and mine diamonds in South Africa at a place called Kroonstad where he lived for six years.

New Premier Syndicate Limited eventually failed because, under pressure from the colonial government. many investors backed out, despite the fact that diamonds were found. Yet, undaunted, Barnes created a public corporation called the Orangia Syndicate, in which the Earl of Elgin, Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies, and former viceroy of India, and Nathan Mayer Rothschild (of the wealthy Rotschild family and Baron of the Austrian empire) were Barnes’ principal investors.

Two of Barnes’ mines made about £1,222,202 in 1907. This was way too much for the British Army officer and the police, who watched him like a hawk. To them, this black Jamaican did not know his place. The British authorities were hell-bent on destroying him, falsely accusing him of all sorts of wrongs, so much so that the Afrikaner Burghers of Kroonstad had to speak out in his defence. Despite their protest, Isaac Barnes was deported from South Africa in 1909 byAbraham Fischer, the first prime minister of Orange Free State, where Kroonstad is located.