Precious Objects by Alicia Oltuski

Author:Alicia Oltuski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Chapter 12

Blood in the Land of Diamonds

The word “diamond” comes from the Greek word adamas, which, before it came to mean diamond itself, used to indicate, in broad terms, the hardest material in the world. There is an Indian legend that diamonds came from a king by the name of Bala. So great a warrior was he that not even the gods could conquer him in battle. To dominate him, they asked him to offer himself as a sacrifice, and he agreed. When they burned his body, his bones turned to diamond seeds instead of ashes. Supernatural forces dwelled within them. Serpents, gods, and spirits grabbed the seeds, but they accidentally let some drop, and the diamonds fell from the sky into the waters, the mountains, the forests.

For a time, people believed that diamonds had the ability to heal madness, counteract poison, and keep demons at bay. They could also bring ill fortune. A stone that included red marks on its interior, they said, would beget death. The diamond’s beauty has always been symbolically tied up with both salvation and toxicity. In the 1990s, this connection manifested itself in the modern diamond trade.

There was almost an inverse relationship between the splendor of an African country’s natural resources and the well-being of its people. Sierra Leone spent most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a British colony. Following the elections of 1967, only six years after it gained its independence, a series of coups threatened the country’s political stability. In 1978, about ten years after the All Peoples Congress came to power, the constitution was amended to ban all other political parties. It was from the tyranny of this government that the rebel group Revolutionary United Front (RUF) allegedly sought to free the people when they entered Sierra Leone from Liberia and launched their offensive in 1991. But early into their insurgency, the RUF captured the country’s profitable Kono district diamond fields, and the focus of the war shifted from politics to precious gems.

The RUF terrorized the people of Sierra Leone for eleven years, funded by diamonds. The rebels put their captives to work in the mines, and diamonds allowed their soldiers to dress themselves in AK-47s. In parts of the country—whose currency was essentially worthless—the gemstones were used as cash. Diamonds were power. They determined who lived and who died; who was to be feared, revered, and obeyed.

To enlarge their army, the RUF kidnapped, drugged, and brainwashed thousands of children, turning them into boy soldiers. By the time the war ended in 2002, it had killed tens of thousands, displaced approximately a third of the country’s populace, and mutilated some three thousand people. In Sierra Leone, people voted with their hands; amputations were a warning to those who dared to vote against the RUF.

The rebel group lined people up and forced each to place an arm on a tree trunk, then hacked off either their hand or entire arm, sometimes two arms. They played cruel games, filling bags with pictures of different body parts and making villagers reach into the bags to choose their fate.

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