Motapa Diamonds Inc (fka MTP)

[EnergyGuy62]

The meaning and history of the word "Motapa"

I sent an email to Larry Ott, the Prez of Motapa Diamonds, asking him why the company chose the word "Motapa" for the name of the company.

Here is his reply...

I was given a set of antique books 'The Diamond Mines of South Africa' by Williamson, written before 1900, by the late Hugo Dummett, who shares a large responsibility for the discovery of Canada's diamond mines.
I reported to Hugo when I was supervising the feasibility study for what is now the Ekati Diamond mine.

In the first volume of that set, my wife picked up on the story of the legendary city of 'Muenomotapa', purported to be the source of King Solomon's mines and, up to the late 1600's and early 1700's, generally to be the El Dorado of Africa.

From the time that the Dutch East India Company established a presence in what is now Cape Town in the 1600's, they sent excursions north to try and locate Meunomotapa.

Since we were setting up to operate out of Cape Town at the time, we figured that that was a pretty cool name except that:

a) Muenomotapa has too many syllables for most investment bankers and analysts to handle, and,
b) Muenomotapa sounds vaguely like some kind of disease ... not good for a company working in Africa. So we cut off the 'mueno' and stuck with Motapa.

All of the ministry and mines officials of various governments in the countries that we work in love it, so it has turned out to be a good name.

We are not original thinkers on this. In my office, I have a framed share certificate, picked up in an antique shop in Cape Town, for the Motapa Gold Corp. listed on the Johannesburg exchange. The certificate was issued in 1956 and I do not know what happened to the company.

Motapa applied for an exploration prospecting license over the Mothae kimberlite in 2006. After much lobbying, it was issued as PL 001 - the first prospecting license issued under the Lesotho mines and minerals act of
2005.

Regards ... Larry