From the Pit to the Market: Politics and the Diamond Economy of Sierra Leone by Diane Frost (review)

This is an earnest and well-meaning book about an important subject. Unfortunately, it suffers from a surfeit of pseudo-economics, industrial-strength omissions, and multiple errors of fact. In the latter category: we learn that Blood Diamonds (sic) is a Steven Spielberg film (xvii) (Blood Diamond was directed by Ed Zwick); that the De Beers advertising slogan "A diamond is forever" was taken from a 1956 Ian Fleming novel (5) (the slogan was created by an American ad firm, N. W. Ayer, in 1948—Fleming took it from De Beers); that diamonds are cut in India and then polished in New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo (5-6) (diamonds are polished where they are cut); that in 1969 Sierra Leone's President, Siaka Stevens, "buckled under pressure" and finally nationalized the diamond industry "so that the government could more tightly control illicit mining" (11) (in fact, Stevens eagerly nationalized the industry so he and his cronies could get their hands on the loot, making themselves rich and impoverishing the country even further). We learn that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was supported in its early days by something called the "Liberian Special Forces" (they were supported by the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor and his rebel NPLF); and that the Kimberley Process to certify rough diamonds was created in 2000 by two industry bodies at the Antwerp World Diamond Congress (16, 78) (it was the product of intensive negotiations over a three-year period by more than forty governments, industry, and civil society and came on stream in 2003). And all this is in the first twenty-one pages of the book.

On the pseudo-economics side, the author is determined to show through the diamond saga that Sierra Leone has been the victim of colonialism, neocolonial corporatism, peripheral capitalism, and neoliberal and pro-market economics, which are all, in the author's view, bad. They may well be, but the discussion yo-yos up and down and all around these subjects without clarity, consistency, or depth, and we are left with conclusions like "creating dependency actually does more harm than good" (21)—as though anybody ever argued the opposite.

The author describes the evolution of the diamond industry in Sierra Leone well, but misses several key facts that might have strengthened her argument about the dark marriage between colonialism and big business. The Sierra Leone Selection Trust was not just a subsidiary of the Consolidated African Selection Trust; it was part of the Selection Trust mining empire, at the time the biggest extractives conglomerate in the world. This is not mentioned (although at one point SLST is incorrectly identified as being a De Beers company [60]). Nor is the fact that SLST sold all of its diamonds to De Beers, or that the Diamond Corporation of Sierra Leone, which bought up what SLST did not produce, was also controlled by De Beers.

The book attempts to situate Sierra Leone's conflict within the broader panoply of African civil wars, but misses the fact that it was, in many ways, very different. It had no ethnic, religious, or Cold War overtones, and although the RUF claimed to be fighting for democracy and justice, it waged war mainly against civilians, cutting off limbs to frighten people away from lootable resources. Few in Sierra Leone refer to the conflict as a civil war—they prefer "rebel war"—because the RUF never had public support and never represented anyone but itself. It is true that poverty, youth alienation, and bad governance set the stage for conflict, but like so much else in Sierra Leone between the 1970s and the 1990s, the war was little more than a criminal enterprise.

The book's commendable effort to give voice to ordinary Sierra Leoneans, including diamond diggers, is weakened by the fact that the fieldwork was done in 2003...