Will we get ours?

A while back I read an article prizing the largest diamond heist from South Africa yet; a 7,000 carat, green-tinted stone unearthed in a northwest region little known for producing diamonds. Initially when I read this article, and I will admit I was aware of the brutality of the diamond trade before seeing “Blood Diamond”, I wondered who was really going to prosper from that discovery. The movie showed the slave labor utilized in the process, probably somewhat similar in real life. Seeing it dramatized before you does more justice to the issue though. Whether we recognize it or not, or compulsive mass consumption does impact other less “developed” regions of the world, especially in Africa.

For a continent with so many natural resources, most are inaccessible without the investment of heavy machinery and excavation techniques. Oil and minerals have plentiful reserves on the continent, but the native people had no way of unearthing them. After centuries of development, the Europeans descended upon Africa in the 19th century with a fury, taking over land, enslaving people, destroying culture and imposing European “ways” on Africans. Of course, the average African was able to taste these refinements, without a doubt. Even though the European countries found the African landscape basically fruitless with no easy profits to show for it, their private companies got into the mix, settled in, and made a killing; literally. (In the end, many immigrants have flooded into the European nation escaping hunger, famine and war and this exodus has placed a burden on those nations. I guess you always get what you deserve.)

For something as obvious as the diamond trade causing such misery in these countries, it is a shame that “civilized” society still has a relentless demand for them. When I hear the local jeweler commercials on the radio and see them on the television, I wonder how our society in the future will survive when things change for the worst and we need to rely on each other and others to get by. For a regard so small for the rest of humanity, is there really a doubt whether other people will come to our aid? Maybe in the end, when we stood by and watched the purging of Darfur, and when we bled Africa dry for want of oil and diamonds etc., we will get what we deserve.