As a fourth-generation diamond professional and a life dedicated to the industry, SBD member Eddy Vleeschdrager is a living chronicle of the Antwerp diamond sector. Eddy Vleeschdrager grew up in a family where diamonds flowed through their veins, so to speak. “My father was a cleaver, passed away in the resistance. My mother had a cutting workshop. I wanted to learn the sawing profession, like so many young people at the time. There were more than 2,000 sawyers in the 1960s, but I didn’t get a contract. According to the rules, you had to be in the same line: from father to son in the same profession. The ADB complied with this, but CDB made an exception. The unions then decided who could become an apprentice. That was a battle that had already started before the war: there were simply too many apprentices in the profession.”

Vleeschdrager persevered. He received his basic sawing training, then went to the CITO vocational school in Meistraat in Antwerp to learn diamond cutting and then opened several sawing factories. “Every morning at six o’clock in the factory, until seven o’clock in the evening. On Thursdays we simply worked through until Friday morning. Then I had to deliver goods and pay the workers. It was very hard work, but I always did it with great passion.” After training in Germany for cutting precious stones (rubies, sapphires, emeralds) and opening three of his own sawing workshops, Vleeschdrager became chairman of the sawyers patrons department of SBD. Until the second vertical integration of De Beers threw a spanner in the works. “They undermined sawing and cleaving. With that we lost our profession, our craft.”

Vleeschdrager’s expertise took him all over the world. “After the closure of my factories I worked for the World Bank. That’s how I ended up in countries like Vietnam, India, Pakistan and the Central African Republic. In Vietnam I saw people polishing rubies on a cut-open axle of a Russian truck. The workers held the stone between their finger nails and the result wasn’t bad actually.”

According to Vleeschdrager, everything changed when De Beers started supplying sawn goods to India. “Before that, they only processed whole stones for industrial purposes. But with access to sawn goods, they took over the cutting and polishing  of smaller diamonds from Antwerp. Because of their low-wage costs, Europe could no longer compete.”

On 8 May, Eddy Vleeschdrager will present his new book Kroniek van het Antwerps steentje: van de onafhankelijkheid van België tot heden. “The idea came about in 1993, when I was allowed to write the final chapter of The Brilliant Story of Antwerp Diamonds, edited by Jan Walgrave, then director of the Diamond Museum,” says Vleeschdrager. “But so much valuable material remained unused. That is why I wanted to make a complete chronicle: not only about the diamond sector, but also about the broader social context.” From the 1960s to the present, he draws not only from archives, but also from his own experiences. “Think of the Kirschen case, the Monstrey file and the witch hunt on the sector by the Antwerp courts.” The book will be published at a launch price of €25 during the opening on 8 May. Afterwards it will be €40. “I will also sign it for anyone who wants it,” he smiles.