Koidu, Sierra Leone – By late morning in Seidu, a remote village in the Koidu area of eastern Sierra Leone, the cracks, scrapes and thuds of metal shovels being plunged into rock-filled earth ring out again and again.
It is the sound of a dozen miners – many wearing worn-down baseball caps and shredded T-shirts covered in holes – desperately ploughing this opencast pit filled with reddish mud in search of a fortune.
“You could get a big stone any time,” said Tamba James, a 40-year-old miner who switched from farming six years ago. “Farming is slow to earn, even if you work hard. But mining is different. I just pray to God that I will catch a big one.”
Hundreds of thousands of artisanal diamond miners like James take their shovels and sieves each morning to the mineral-rich terrain in Sierra Leone’s Wild East region surrounding Koidu, seen as the capital of diamond mining in West Africa
Ever since the so-called “Star of Sierra Leone” – at 969 carats, the fourth-largest diamond to have ever been unearthed – was discovered in a river near Koidu in 1972, the entire region has been enthralled by the precious gemstone.
Since then, four of the world’s 21 largest diamonds have been found in Sierra Leone – behind only South Africa – and the country’s diamond industry is an estimated $250m a year.
At the same time, a fifth of the diamonds sold in Europe come from artisanal mines, believed to often be smuggled via neighbouring Liberia and The Gambia.
But flawed governance and widespread corruption mean that only a tiny fraction of this immense wealth benefits locals, one of the world’s poorest populations
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In a 2019 report, anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International concluded that “hundreds of millions of dollars generated by the extraction of diamonds continue to leave … the country, without benefitting anyone in the community”.
And now, after decades of immense extraction, diamonds are proving harder to come by. “Before you could go behind your house and pick the diamonds,” said Tamba Dkonday-Pessima, a local chief in Koidu. “Now you work and work and see nothing.”
