PERHAPS it’s time to go back to East Africa. The place seems to need some help, and it’s a very deserving cause.  I saw yesterday, with some alarm, that the tourism trade to Kenya had dropped by more than a third because of election unrest in the country. Things still seem to be tip-top in Tanzania and Zanzibar though, which is quite a relief. And if you have ever considered visiting any of these places, perhaps now is the time to do so. Show some solidarity and all that. Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi are countries that have an unfair portion of romance, adventure and history. It is almost as if the very earth of East Africa caused people to do wonderful things. Here’s just one example of many: I grew up in a small mining town near Lake Victoria called Mwadui. This was the site of the Williamson Diamond Mine. It has one of the most remarkable stories out of a continent that specialises in remarkable stories. Dr John Williamson was a single, dedicated man who defied both the most powerful government in the world and the richest cartel in the world for five years. He thumbed his nose at Big Money, and even though no one knows this about him now, he is beloved by the people who benefited from his work. Williamson was a Canadian geologist who immigrated to South Africa in the 1920s to work for De Beers. At that time Africa was peppered with isolated diamond discoveries but despite the De Beers geologists fossicking about in East Africa, no one had managed to find the source of these stones. Williamson was convinced that they all came from a single pipe – an idea sneered at by other geologists. So in 1932 Williamson resigned from De Beers in Johannesburg and – believe it or not – travelled up to then-Tanganyika on a bicycle. Eleven years he spent on his bicycle, criss-crossing the country, sick with fever, plagued with money problems, lonely and tired, driven only by the certainty that a massive diamond pipe was waiting to be found.  Then, one rainy day, feverish and exhausted, he got off his bicycle to make a fire for tea under a baobab tree. The ground was wet so he scraped it away with his boot to reach dry earth – and uncovered a diamond. Forgetting his sickness and tiredness, he scraped away more earth with his hands – and found that, a few inches under the ground, was a layer of kimberlite. Blue ground. Diamond-bearing rock. Williamson had discovered his mine – the largest single diamond pipe that has ever been found.  The discovery filled De Beers with alarm. The last thing they needed was a renegade prospector flooding the market with diamonds. In 1945 Ernest Oppenheimer offered Williamson ₤2m for the mine. It was a fortune at the time, and Williamson was broke – but he was not, after eleven years of searching, going to give up his mine. With funding from a group of Indian merchants and a team of Italian prisoners of war, he began to excavate the large opencast mine. All the profits went into creating a model village for the workers, named Mwadui after the local chief, and making the mine the most progressive and modern in the world. My dad still has film footage of the huge walking draglines and the city-block-sized lorries.  But as the diamonds poured out of Mwadui, De Beers became increasingly concerned. They could no longer control the global price of diamonds, and they turned nasty. They instructed the diamond cutters of Europe not to buy diamonds from Williamson; otherwise De Beers would cut them off. The British colonial government also threatened that, unless Williamson sold the mine, it would be nationalised. Finally, in 1947, he bowed to the incredible pressure of both the world’s richest cartel and the world’s most powerful government, and agreed to sell his diamonds only through De Beers. But the long battle with the elements of Africa, the fever of the plains and the government of Britain took its toll. Williamson fell ill in 1956 and died in 1958, aged only 51. He had created, all by himself, the largest diamond mine in the world and a prosperous little town, built specifically to improve the lives of the local people. His aim had always been to create something of permanent value to the country in which he had made his home. His memorial is not only the town that he created, but one of the most exciting stories of Africa, as well as the largest pink diamond in the world: the Williamson Pink, a diamond of 23,6 carats which was set in a Cartier brooch and given to Princess Elizabeth as a wedding present in 1947. And the baobab under which he found his first stone has been made the emblem of the town. My father was an engineer at Mwadui in the early 1960s, and I was surprised when I began researching this story just how many people have fond memories of growing up on the Williamson mine. The best part of living there was the access to the wilderness: it was the done thing to pack the family up in the Land Rover and go on safari, for weeks on end, travelling over Lake Victoria by ferry, row boating on Lake Naivasha, buying coconuts in Zanzibar, picking flowers in Rwenzori, getting chased by an elephant in Tsavo Park, meeting pygmies in Burundi and viewing the floating snows of Kilimanjaro. And that will be the story for next week.