The story of illegal diamond mining in Africa, after most countries on that continent had gained full Independence, is fraught with the deaths of over four million people and $3 billion worth of support for various warlords and newly- freed government treasuries.
This particular tale first started when I was working in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist. It was then that the heads of the freedom movements of Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, the Congo — and later Angola — first decided that diamonds were their best friends and could help finance their secret political manoeuvres and shopping exploits for, among other things, arms and ammunition for use against their internal and external tribal and religious enemies.
As a result, they adopted clandestine tactics to attract unemployed African men and their families to secretly search diamond fields and abandoned mines with their bare hands and rudimentary picks for glass-like gemstones which had absolutely no meaning or value to them.
These peasant miners were paid pittances for their finds which eventually made their nefarious way onto the black market and the fashion jewellers of Brussels, London, Paris and Amsterdam to, no doubt, end up on the newly engaged fingers of many of Europe’s young women.
Also unknown to the hard-working African miners, their desperate toiling over a matter of three decades produced billions of dollars of hard cash for their masters.
They were also unaware that this hard cash was immediately converted into arms and ammunition and into secret funds to support the budgets of various newly independent African governments.
I spent quite a bit of my working time researching what later became known as Africa’s Black Diamond Trade, sometimes also referred to as “the business of financing conflicts to a tune played by certain African Independence leaders.”
The State of Sierra Leone was one country to which I turned my attention. In just over a handful of years, more than a million Sierre Leone people were reported to have either died as a result of black diamond money financing political uprisings between different factions or because they were forced to permanently flee from their homes to neighbouring territories.
Even today, in what is an Africa freed from the shackles of colonial control, the United Nations believes that black diamonds are still a vital source of money for certain Independent African governments.
Official statistics also show that at least four million African deaths can so far be attributed to illegal diamond mining throughout the African continent; a business with a “dark history of violence, human rights abuses and considerable environmental harm.”
In an attempt to stop this illegal political money-making trade, the U.N. recently introduced a special diamond certification scheme for genuinely mined diamonds only — but this has so far failed to put an end to what has become known as one of Africa’s biggest blots on its long and varied history.
In fact, before Africa’s overall Independence was achieved, diamonds were also responsible for some major world news events involving highly planned heists and even inter-country diplomatic disputes.
The biggest diamond burglary occurred on the home estate of South Africa’s leading de Beers diamond magnate, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer.
I was in Johannesburg in South Africa on 5 December 1955 while Sir Ernest’s daughter-in-law living on his estate at Little Brenthurst was out for dinner. She had secured her diamond jewellery in a safe but, after she had returned home, had discovered that a king’s ransom worth of diamond jewellery had mysteriously disappeared from the heavily locked safe.
The police were called but not a single clue could be found as to how the burglary had been carried out.
After an insurance claim was lodged, the insurers were unexpectedly contacted by an Australian tourist who claimed he knew the names of two men who he believed were responsible for one of the biggest single diamond thefts ever.
The Australian sought a 75,000-pound sterling payment for his information and for the recovery of the stolen jewels. After some haggling, a figure of 20,000 British pounds was agreed on and the two alleged culprits were enticed to go to a Johannesburg luxury hotel room with well-hidden police and detectives present.
None of Mrs Oppenheimer’s valuable family jewellery was produced but the two suspects were summarily arrested. After a long drawn-out court hearing, the two men were found to be not guilty and were released while the Australian tourist was paid the 20,000 British pounds promised to him but he was ordered to leave South Africa forthwith. As far as I am aware, none of Mrs Oppenheimer’s jewellery was ever recovered, adding considerably to the overall mystery.
Much to everyone ‘s amazement at the time, it was later revealed that the Australian was in London on the day the mysterious heist occurred. He had then immediately flown to Johannesburg. There, he allegedly found two somewhat dubious characters in a bar and devised a plan to personally benefit from the highly published criminal event.
All we do know from further investigations into the plot is that the Australian tourist is believed to have shared his 20,000-pound payout with two unknown men! One police report I saw at the time claimed that the Australian had pulled one of the most clever and brazen confidence tricks known to police history.
No one has yet been found guilty of entering Mrs Oppenheimer’s quarters and stealing her valuable diamond dowry. Whether it, too, ended up on the black market is still a matter for further conjecture.