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🌊 Diamonds, Danger, and Sierra Leone's Secrets
We visited a diamond mine in the jungles of Sierra Leone
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“A diamond is different from any other stone. When you see it among any other stone, you’ll become attracted to it. The color doesn’t even matter: When you see it, it always attracts you.”
–Richard, a Sierra Leonean diamond miner
I’m sitting in a parliamentarian’s compound in Koidu, Sierra Leone, watching English football on a satellite TV. It’s excruciatingly hot but we have fans, a refrigerator, cold water – all paid for by diamonds.
A razor wire fence isolates us from the reality of most Sierra Leoneans, where there is no electricity, few schools, and hardly any paved roads. In that world, families are heading into the jungle, searching for even the smallest stone. If they find one, they’ll bring it into town and sell it to my host or one of the Lebanese or Israeli traders who live here. The miner needs that money to survive; the trader needs it to build a mansion, buy a new TV, or pay a politician.
As we watch Chelsea score a goal, there’s a banging on the door. My host opens it and an emaciated man in ragged clothing appears in the pitch-back night. He starts speaking quickly, pulls out a bag, and pours some small stones into his hand. My host thumbs through them, shakes his head, and shuts the door.
“Not a diamond,” he says.
The term “blood diamonds” was immortalized by a Leonardo DiCaprio movie about Sierra Leone. As that movie documented, a war was fought here over control of its immense diamond wealth. Whoever controlled the diamonds could buy more guns and win the war. People were forced into slavery to work the mines. Those who refused had their hands cut off.
That was a bad time to be poor – and a great time to be rich. As war raged in the 1990s and early 2000s, Koidu – the capital of Sierra Leone’s diamond region – boomed.
“During the war, black investors, white investors – everyone came to Kono [the province] during the war and bought diamonds in exchange for weapons,” one Koidu resident and diamond industry veteran told me.
“You’d find diamonds on the ground here,” he recalled. “Heavy rain would come and wash them down the street and you’d find them in the morning”
In some ways, those days are gone: Large jewelers have stopped buying “blood diamonds,” which has helped bring peace to Sierra Leone and end slavery.
But has the diamond business itself really improved? We went to a mine to find out.
It’s 98º, 99% humidity, and the sun is beating down. The sound of generators echoes through the forest. The machines are ripping up the earth, sending brown mud into a once-pristine river.
Everyone is dripping in sweat: The men as they swing their sledgehammers, breaking up the rock; the women, who are scooping that earth into buckets and carrying it up the hill, depositing into a gas-powered colander; a second group of men, who pours water over that, rinsing away the dirt. Their eyes dart back and forth as their hands pick apart the remaining stones. They are looking for one thing: The glistening of diamonds.
To reach the mines, we set off into the forest, where the homes were made of exposed mud and there was no electricity. Just ahead of the active mining area, we pulled into a village where two plain-clothes men with machine guns – one with an uzi, the other with an AK-47 – stopped us.
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Editor’s Note
Reporting this story was one of the more difficult but rewarding experiences I’ve had as a reporter. It’s now hard to see diamonds the same way. Also, if you missed our prior Sierra Leone reports, read them here: A child soldier’s story, a report from Trash City, with the Secret Societies, and on eating monkey.
And if you missed our regular reporting, find the stories here:
Lots of replies to yesterday’s deep-dive on how money is transforming college sports. We’ve featured some below:
George wrote:
College sports are worse off with NIL and more specific the TRANSFER PORTAL. The NIL, transfer portal and One and Done have diminished ALL college sports to the point I no longer watch during the regular season games or professional sports either.
I grew up in Durham NC, just off the Duke East Campus with three brothers. We idolized Duke football and basketball players because you knew them, Now, you forget them so easily with the transfer portal and one and done.
Jim wrote:
NIL has destroyed college athletics in that there is no longer a true affiliation with the school they attend, but rather an affiliation with who’s paying them. Therefore, they move around schools like ants looking for food. It has basically transformed college sports to the equivalent of the minor leagues in baseball, except minor league players stay with one team longer.
I’m curious how the athlete’s graduation rates have changed since 2021.
Thanks for writing about this.
And Jeff said:
NCAA fumbled this so hard by not attaching any guardrails to NIL, no structure. The arms race and money finally trickling down to players isn't the issue, it's the total lack of oversight. They should have seen this coming with Ed O'Bannon's lawsuit stemming from using his face on a video game in the late 90's, but they did nothing to adapt, change, or do anything positive. They've allowed mega-conferences to exist that has student-athletes traveling more than professional athletes. Rivalries that existed by proximity were uprooted and UCLA students, made famous by Nick Cronin's rant, got to see the Statue of Liberty twice in one week, all while supposedly being students. NIL needs more then one year contracts, transfer portal rules need to be made, and conferences need to be re-aligned. The product is still really good, but I'm not sure if that's going to last.
Thanks for your replies. Enjoy your Sundays, and see you tomorrow.
–Max and Max