The discovery of diamonds on the farms of the Orange River and later at Colesberg Kopje triggered a massive rush. Miners flocked to the area, creating an immense open-pit mine known as 'The Big Hole.' This event catalyzed a period of rapid industrialization in southern Africa, drawing in imperial ambitions and leading to the consolidation of mining under Cecil Rhodes' De Beers company.

The Kimberley diamond rush forms the historical bedrock for poets of southern Africa who grapple with colonial avarice and racial capitalism. While not a poet himself, the conditions at Kimberley directly shaped the political economy that writers like Bessie Head and later South African protest poets would condemn. The imagery of 'diamonds' in colonial poetry is often a veneer of beauty covering a brutal reality of migrant labor and exploitation, which post-colonial poets actively deconstructed.