In Bling! The diamond was then cut bruted , and in purchased and given to the British royal family. The largest of the resulting diamonds Cullinan I was set into a royal sceptre, paraded out for British subjects about once a year. For the humanized Phatsima, she was pulled from the earth, violently cut and re formed into a pleasing shape, and then kidnapped from her home country and imprisoned in a foreign land where she is made a tourist attraction and a symbol of imperialism.
While this phenomenon of human zoos is perhaps better known in continental Europe, the UK also held a number of such events in precisely the same period as the arrival of the Cullinan diamond in the UK: the Bradford World Fair in had an exhibit containing Somalis which was visited by some 2. Phatsima is at her core a clown character. She walks through the horrors of neoliberalism and imperialism with an innocence or maybe ignorance that is largely fueled by a distinctly funny self-centeredness.
She reads the biography of Nelson Mandela, but only because she is jealous of his fame and feels that she should really be the celebrity she was, after all, imprisoned for even longer and is finally returning and bringing her wealth and beauty with her.
Trapped in a glass case, cleaned only once a year, bravely and boldly, Phatsima stages her grand escape. Knocking the sceptre onto the door of the glass encasement, then β once the door is opened by a hapless security guard β falling to the floor a jumping free of the sceptre to be eaten by a corgi before finally arriving on the palace lawn. Here, she is able to jump into the pocket of Tendeka, the daughter of an ex-resistance fighter turned member of the corrupt government, who is leaving her palace job as jewel cleaner to return to South Africa.
Part of her tragedy is that only too late β while on trial β does she realize that β like so many South Africans β has been lied to. She is actually selling the synthetic diamonds that she so hates rather than real South African diamonds like herself. It is a story of repression, oppression, and the violent legacies of colonial and imperial agendas in South Africa and the racial and social divisions that were perpetuated during Apartheid and continued in the neoliberal present. Phatsima, a timeless diamond who for millennia has heard all of human existence passing above her head before being pulled by prying fingers from her earth mother, is the witness to the intergenerational trauma of South Africa from the first arrival of Europeans to the present.
