“The census allows me to combine two of my favorite things: flying & managing our environment,” says the 59-year-old third-generation patriarch of the De Beers diamond dynasty and a family fortune estima-ted at $4.4 billion. With his bushy salt-and-pepper beard, Oppenheimer looks more like an explorer just in from the back woods—or perhaps someone more notorious in the minds of his countrymen, who call him “The Cuban”—than one of the world’s most influential billionaires. Last November, the Financial Times ranked him number 7 on its list of the world’s 25 most powerful billionaires.

When Oppenheimer is not busy counting his wild animals, he is retooling the diamond industry for a new era and championing his own proposal to reform South Africa’s postapartheid economy. Few families have managed to maintain hegemony over an industry in the way the Oppenheimers have controlled the diamond trade. De Beers and its reigning family have long lived behind a veil of mystery, but changing times for the industry have tempted Nicky Oppenheimer and Jonathan, his 35-year-old son who will presumably be CEO one day, to emerge from their seclusion.

SIR ERNEST Oppenheimer, Nicky Oppenheimer’s grandfather and a German-born diamond buyer, arrived in South Africa in 1902 and worked his way up the business, eventually becoming chairman of De Beers. He gained a controlling interest in 1930 and began the Oppenheimer legacy.

Two decades ago, the Oppenheimers’ mines were the source of 85%  of the world’s diamonds. The family says that figure has fallen to about 55 percent because of competition from sources including Russia and Canada (where De Beers, after protracted negotiations, will start mining this year). The collective nemesis of all diamond miners—the technology that can create imitation diamonds so perfect as to be nearly indistinguishable from the genuine—will also take its toll as the price of producing fakes comes down.

Market swings notwithstanding, De Beers and the Oppenheimers—by far the richest family in South Africa—remain rock solid. De Beers enjoyed record-breaking sales in 2003 of $5.5 billion, with earnings of $465 million. The Oppenheimers own nearly half of the company and are major shareholders in Anglo American, which owns the other half. When De Beers took the company private in a $3.6 billion leveraged buyout in 2001 (the second largest such deal ever after the RJR Nabisco buyout in the late 1980s) the local investment community all but wept at losing access to one of only two companies (the other is Johann Rupert’s tobacco and luxury goods behemoth Richemont Securities) truly tied to the global consumer cycle. The South African newspaper Business Day called the disappearance of De Beers from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange “just one more step in a destructive process that sees the bourse becoming more of a regional than an international market.”

TOP VIEW The romance seemingly inherent in diamond jewelry can be traced directly to the house of Oppenheimer, the marketing-savvy family behind the De Beers empire. As the latest generation of Oppenheimers encounters new modes of competition, however, its new sovereigns are eyeing life beyond their monopoly, with ventures in Canadian mining, retail and ecotourism.

The Oppenheimers have refused to discuss why they decided to delist the company, but industry analysts say the move seems connected to their concerns about keeping their corporate assets in South Africa at a time when certain factions within the nation want to embark on a program of nationalization. Certainly Nicky Oppenheimer is doing his part to shape the country’s political and economic future. At a now-famous meeting on August 5, 2003, at his Johannesburg estate, Little Brenthurst, Oppenheimer gathered President Thabo Mbeki and approximately 100 other South African power brokers to hear his plan for economic reform, now known as the Brenthurst Initiative. The scheme includes a proviso to have black South Africans own 25 percent of the companies listed on the same Johannesburg Stock Exchange to which his company just bid adieu. The initiative has stimulated debate on economic expansion policies, as well as a foundation that the Oppenheimers plan to launch in April, aimed at finding ways to draw investment into the continent.

The Oppenheimers are acutely aware of how Africa’s politics affect their business. They refuse to mine in the “conflict diamond” countries of Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia and Congo, and some family members worked to end apartheid at home. Although human rights experts may forever see De Beers as the beneficiary of an unjust regime, Nicky’s father, Harry Oppenheimer, was an outspoken supporter of liberal policies and black political representation while he served in parliament.

JONATHAN, HARRY and Nicky Oppenheimer.

The company has now said it intends to comply with the law in all of the jurisdictions in which it operates, a radical move for a colossus once so powerful that it could afford to ignore antitrust investigations on two continents. Last July, De Beers paid a $10 million fine to settle a 60-year-old criminal indictment by the U.S. Justice Department charging it with conspiring to fix the price of industrial diamonds in the United States and elsewhere. Then, in December, the company proposed a drastic reduction in its purchase of diamonds from the Russian state diamond monopoly, Alrosa, in order to resolve a long-running antitrust investigation by the European Commission.

“No company wants to have a criminal indictment outstanding,” Nicky Oppenheimer says. “America is the largest consumer market of jewelry, so it’s important that De Beers can experience it firsthand.” The settlement may give De Beers a better chance of winning three federal antitrust class action suits. Moreover, De Beers executives can now travel to the United States without the risk of arrest.