Ghana – Chapter 15
Accra, August 12, 2005
"Sierra Leone II"
I just
got back from another week in Sierra Leone ("Salone" in Creole).
This time I got to fly to Freetown on the UN shuttle that runs three times a
week between Accra (which has the most international flight connections) and
Monrovia and Freetown (where the UN has its biggest peace keeping forces in the
world). Here's the UN flight at Accra airport
As before, I actually flew into Lungi, the airport that serves Freetown, and had
to take a helicopter across the lagoons to Freetown. The UN shuttle was a 727
flown by a South Africa crew. The UN helicopter is provided to the UN by the
Russian military - an Mi8 - and is flown by a Russian crew.
I was there to attend the annual general meeting of the Peace Diamonds Alliance
(PDA) - a project funded by USAID with some private sector support. You can
read more about the PDA at
http://www.peacediamonds.org/home.asp
As you probably recall - or as I just told you in my last message, Salone had a
very bad civil war. During that war, the rebels captured the main diamond
mining area and forced the people to mine diamonds, which the rebels then used
to fund the war. This is where the terms "conflict diamonds" and "blood
diamonds" came from. There were also rumors that foreign terrorist groups
entered the diamond trade during the war to help finance terrorist activities in
other countries.
Under the PDA project, USAID is working with the government to try to get the
diamond trade back into the mainstream "legal" economy. There are a few regular
mining companies mining diamonds in underground mines, but the largest share of
the industry (and the problem) involves thousands of small-scale miners who mine
the alluvial deposits (diamonds in the gravel in the rivers).
Last week I got a short course on the geology of diamonds, so sit back, relax,
get a diet coke, and I'll share it with you. Millions of years ago, diamonds
were formed in the heat and pressure of the volcanic formation of the earth's
crust. These diamonds were created in layers ("pipes"). Over the eons, as
mountains were pushed up and worn down, these diamond pipes were eventually
exposed and began to erode. The diamonds were eroded out of the hard igneous
rock around them and washed down rivers where they settled in the beds. Much of
the diamond mining in the world involves digging into the ground, finding these
pipes, and blasting or digging the diamonds out. But alluvial diamond mining is
like panning for gold in California.
The miners dig up the gravel in the river beds and look for diamonds in it.
Back to my trip...
I landed in Freetown
on Sunday, Aug. 14. I spent Monday in meetings, then drove up to Koidu in
Eastern Salone - about a 6 1/2 hour trip in a USAID Land Cruiser. My companions
were Simon Gilbert, of De Beers (the big diamond guys) and Greg Valerio (who has
a jewelry company in the UK and specializes in "Fair Trade" gold).
We checked in to the "Kono Hotel". There was no night club and the generator
only ran from 7 pm to 7 am, but it was run by a nice Syrian couple and had good
Middle Eastern food.
So here is the diamond mining. This is the river on the edge of the town of Koidu.
People have been digging here for 30 or 40 years and basically it is mined out,
but people are really intoxicated on the idea of finding diamonds and keep at
it.
The miners use a "shaker" - a kind of sieve - to separate the gravel from the
sand and then go though it by hand looking for diamonds. Here are a couple of
miners on their way to the river with the second one carrying a shaker. I
bought an old used one from one of the miners and brought it home as a
souvenir. (NO, I didn't buy any diamonds).
Sometimes the miners dig fairly deep into the river bottom to reach old layers
of gravel. Shovel the gravel out into buckets and pass them up where they can
be washed and sorted. The cooperatives that the PDA worked with this year all
together found about 45-50 carats of diamonds, worth a total of about $3,500.
Not much work for 250 people for a year. About 15% of the diamonds found in
Salone are of gem quality. The rest are industrial diamonds.
We drove around the area to look at several different mining areas. The traffic
in Koidu was pretty "rural".
At one site, a couple of women were panning for gold in the same stream bed that
the diamond miners were working.
After about 15 minutes we asked them what they had found and they showed us
their pans
Yep - the yellow stuff is gold dust! In 15 minutes they had found an estimated
$100 worth of gold. Greg Valerio also thought that he identified platinum in
the pan - the white flecks - as well. (They are usually found together) We
asked around and were told that there was lots of gold in the area, but "that's
women's work". The men only want diamonds.
Another fellow who was with us (an Indian journalist and gemologist) said that
the gravel is full of corundum and they are just throwing it away. Corundum is
ruby or sapphire, depending on whether it is red or blue (due to impurities in
the stone). It’s worth about $1,000 a kilo (5,000 carats). But the miners
apparently don't know anything about the other gems in the gravel they're
washing.
Well, that - in a nutshell - was my week in Sierra Leone.
I'm back in Accra
now for a few days. Next week I'm off to Mali for a while.
G the 49'er
Click here to go back to the Table of Contents
