The Saga That Is Diamonds

Talking Musika
RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE | Monday March 5, 2007 00:00

It appears to be a take-off on the South African 'Cry Freedom', directed by the award-winning Richard Attenborough, which also told Donald Wood's equally ignominious story about the demise of Steve Biko at the hands of South Africa's apartheid regime.
The first captures the cruel images of war that made fighting men out of boys and turned women into victims of rape and displacement on account of the appetite of the miners of the precious stone that has only brought misery to the peoples of the West African nation.

Public relations, politics and logistics may be responsible for focusing on the plight of the people of Freetown initially, but the theme of the film and the documentaries is destined to resound as far south as Angola, South Africa and Botswana.
In the first round, southern Africa has managed to evade a frontal investigation of the role of diamonds extending the life of the civil war particularly in Angola, exposing the most vulnerable groups to the violence and exploitation so graphically depicted in 'Cry Freetown'.

Only about a week ago, CNN confessed to doing a public relations programme at the behest of the government in which they deliberately ignored the controversy of the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve and only pointed to the contribution of diamonds to education and the making of modern Botswana.
Botswana would also be shielded under the collective Kimberlite Process that speaks for the most part about preventing diamond smuggling even as it underplays the legacy of De Beers in creating a strong arm monopoly over marketing of the diamonds.
The historical role of De Beers and Anglo American in providing the economic props for the survival of apartheid in South Africa over the years, causing the Black workers to go on strike in 1922 and later around 1946, is relegated to the forgotten past.

No investigation is made into the industrial relations in the De Beers cartel that benefits from the effective denial of workers to the right to strike and to monumental disparities in the earnings of the miners and the managers. Nothing is said about the possible connivance of De Beers and the government of Botswana in seeking relocation of the Basarwa out of the CKGR to facilitate diamond or other mineral exploitation thereby denying the Basarwa the right to jobs and livelihood that they would gain if they stayed.  All that at the price of the loss of their ties to their ancestral land that gave them security, hunting opportunities and medicine.

For that reason the First People of the Kgalagadi have asked for a hearing at the United Nations in order to tell the other side of the story that was told by President Festus Mogae.  I suspect that they would want the same at the African Union where Botswana wants to move that 'there are no indigenous peoples in Africa'.
They say that Botswana's diamonds are not bloody - yet - but they certainly are 'conflict diamonds'.

Needless to say, the temporary respite that De Beers and the governments of southern Africa will gain from collective cover under the Kimberlite Process will dissipate as soon as the real journalists and filmmakers arrive.
I suspect that the outright truth will sell a more durable and less expensive story in the long run.