Mahenge, After the Rush

In 2007 a pit near Mahenge produced spinel crystals the size of fists, pink running to a red the trade had no vocabulary for. Prices multiplied twenty times inside five years. Everyone who was in Arusha that decade has a story, and most of the stories are about the parcels they passed on.

The rush is over. The giant crystals stopped, the buyers thinned out, and Mahenge went back to being a market town with patient brokers and one good guesthouse. That is exactly why I still go.

Material still surfaces. Small, clean, saturated, two to five carats, sold by families who watched the boom and learned its lessons. The prices are firm now. Knowledge travelled faster than the roads did.

What the first wave got wrong was grading the pink against ruby, as if spinel were an understudy. Mahenge spinel is its own color. It fluoresces without bleeding brown and holds its neon at three metres, which ruby at ten times the price will not always do. Judged as itself, the best of it is still undervalued. I do the judging in daylight, on the tray, one folded paper at a time.