Du Toit's Pan, now usually Dutoitspan, is one of the earliest

diamond Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon at room temperature and pressure, b ...

mining Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the econom ...

camps at what is now Kimberley,

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring coun ...

. It was renamed

Beaconsfield Beaconsfield ( ) is a market town and civil parish within the unitary authority of Buckinghamshire, England, west-northwest of central London and south-southeast of Aylesbury. Three other towns are within : Gerrards Cross, Amersham and High W ...

, which existed as a separate borough from Kimberley itself until Kimberley and Beaconsfield were amalgamated as the City of Kimberley in 1912. An early map drawn by George Paton on the eve of the discovery of diamonds mentions 'Teuzpan' which, when pronounced in the German way, sounds the way local Dutch/

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gr ...

-speaking farmers would have pronounced (Du) Toit's Pan.Hand-drawn map by George Paton, Africana Library, Kimberley The name refers also to one of the major mines in Kimberley, the Dutoitspan mine. It also applies to the main road extending southwards from the central business district of Kimberley, i.e. towards Beaconsfield.

References

Diamond mines in South Africa Kimberley, Northern Cape {{SouthAfrica-hist-stub