Diamonds in Sierra Leone

The New York Times has a front page story today by Lydia Polgreen about the status of Sierra Leone’s diamond trade several years after the end of that country’s vicious civil war which was basically funded by—and largely about—diamonds.  New systems were put into place after the war to help better regulate the diamond industry in Sierra Leone, prevent conflict diamonds, and allow more of the revenue from these diamonds to end up in the hands of the thousands of impoverished diggers who search for these precious stones in very difficult conditions every day.  Also, new laws now require that the diamond mines be locally controlled and not run by international owners or organizations.  These would seem to be positive developments for the mine workers, right?  Apparently they’re not.

Conditions at the mines are no better now than they were before the war.  But I was particularly struck by the statements of a man named Paul Saquee, a former truck driver who had been living in the United States for twenty years before returning to Sierra Leone after the war.  Mr. Saquee now controls a handful of mines in Sierra Leone and he scoffs at the idea of selling his diamonds—extracted by extremely low-paid workers—to only one exporter.  Mr. Saquee calls such a system “indirect slavery.”  How ironic, because it seems that Mr. Saquee has no difficulty at all demanding that his workers hand over their diamonds to him without question.  He claims that the miners are different, that they depend on him because they don’t know the value of the diamonds that they find.  Funny, that sounds a lot like paternalism to me.  That sounds like the same sort of justification slave owners made in Virginia or South Carolina before the Civil War.

We often hear about neo-colonial attitudes coming from the United States or Europe but what about from Africa itself?  It’s certainly nothing new but this alarming elitist behavior will do nothing to advance African economies and, more importantly, improve the lives of the impoverished people who struggle to get by every day.

Thanks Lydia Polgreen for pointing out yet another example of how far Africa still needs to go and how complex these situations really area.  Sometimes just having a decade-long war end isn’t enough.  Much more work still needs to be done in Sierra Leone.  Hopefully soon the long-suffering people of that country will see some real improvements.