Diamond Industry Better Be(a)ware of Kanye West

You have to give Kanye West some credit for continuing to show how a platinum-selling, MTV-rotation, mainstream artist can still be conscious and utilize hip-hop music to express concerns over moral and social justice.

In his latest musical offering, “Diamonds are Forever”–off the soon-to-released sophomore effort Late Registration–West eloquently, and with unyielding lyrical intensity, challenges everyone from corporate boardrooms to crooked boulevards to congressional boudoirs to take notice of a yet-to-be-fully-resolved tragedy of bloodshed and death that took place in Sierra Leone and, in many ways, continues to be responsible for adorning the ears, fingers, necks and wrists of all those who believe in that dazzling and marketed slogan-“diamonds are a girl’s (and guy’s) best friend.”

West addresses this very fractious and disturbing issue that has had its greatest consequences felt in the lives of Africans in places like Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where war and death have been good for business insuring high and stable global prices for diamonds. Arms merchants, feeding on the diamond trade, bankrolled local armies, such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and made fortunes for the diamond industry.

The RUF began its jewelry heist in 1991, using the support of neighboring Liberia to capture Sierra Leone’s vast wealth of diamond mines. The RUF’s signature tactic was amputation of civilians; over the course of the decade-long war, the rebels had mutilated thousands upon thousands of people, chopping off their arms, legs, lips, and ears with machetes and axes. The RUF’s goal was to terrorize the population and enjoy uncontested dominion over the diamond fields.

As well, while groups like the Revolutionary United Front were terrorizing and looting the countryside–enriching their pockets as well as the pockets of the aristocratic dons of the diamond industry living both large and far removed from the killing fields–thousands of prisoner-laborers, worked to exhaustion, digging up the gems from muddy open-pit mines. Many ended up in shallow graves, executed for suspected theft, for lack of production, or simply for sport. The international diamond industry’s trading centers funded this horror by purchasing up to $125 million worth of diamonds a year from the RUF, according to U.N. estimates.

Few have cared where the gems originated, or calculated the cost in lives lost rather than carats gained, perhaps, until now. Kanye West, determined to bring awareness to the tragedy, has remixed the original track he had written for the song.

Kanye opens up the track with an assault on the warlike casualties that took place over what is known in the industry as “conflict diamonds.” West passionately raps, “good morning, this aint Vietnam/still people loses hands, legs and arms/for real, little was known of Sierra Leone/and how it connects to the diamonds we own.” With disturbingly bitter irony, West reveals in this verse how African brothers and sisters were amputated–sometimes losing fingers and ears over diamonds–so that people throughout the world could wear diamonds on their very fingers and ears while transnational corporations in developed nations and terrorists cells profited.

In addition, West exposes another agonizing paradox. West rhymes at one point in the song, “though its thousands of miles away/Sierra Leone connected to what we go through today/over here it’s a drug trade/we die from drugs/over there, they die from what we buy from drugs.” He later captures the manner in which diamonds have acted as their own sort of socially-placed, double entendre–on the one hand holding a profound and favorable meaning in the minds of some individuals and on the other hand holding a profane and forsaken meaning to others: “the diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charms-es/I thought my Jesus piece was so harmless/til I seen a picture of shorty armless.”

West uses the song not only to make criticisms but to suggests that he was not always aware of the tragedy that existed in Sierra Leone over blood diamonds. For emphasis, on one verse West begs the question, “how could something so wrong make me feel so right?” In an interview with Billboard, West states that he “wanted to do whatever he could to learn more and educate people about the problem,” drawing upon the Heidegger’s extended interpretation of hermeneutics, that is, that the messenger not only brings a message, but also takes part in listening to that message for enlightenment as well.

Sensing that his fellow hip-hop brothers and sisters probably have suffered through the same fate of ignorance to understanding the devastating history of how Africans lost their lives over some of the diamonds that get bought and sold on the open market, West charges that “a part of me say keep shinin’/how?/when I know what a ‘blood diamond’ is.” West even goes after Jacob the Jeweler, the famed jeweler-to-the-hip-hop industry, arraigning him by demanding “my chain, these ain’t conflict diamonds, is they Jacob?”

This should definitely cause Jacob some alarm. But Jacob should not be the only one worried. Companies like DeBeers–who have cheerfully sat back and watched as hip-hop artists have helped them make billions of dollars by giving them free marketing for the products they sell–now must wonder if hip-hop will now be responsible for causing their earnings to dramatically decrease.

Is that possible? Probably not since hip-hoppers are not the only diamond buyers. But it should not hinder Kanye and other hip-hop artists from continuing to do what is ethical, particularly when you consider that hip-hop has had the greatest influence on popular culture over the 30 years. Even more, artists should raise concerns over the ways in which peril has been consistently been ignored in Africa in the name of someone else getting richer, this time, diamond companies in developed nations who have done nothing more than made blood dividends over blood diamonds.

Indeed, there has been a link between diamonds and death, between the conflict in Africa and the role of international players in the illicit diamond trade. Conflict diamonds have fueled wars and led to massive displacement of civilian populations in African nations. Just as the history of Arab States is intimately tied to the discovery of oil in the region, the discovery of diamonds in Africa has not only impacted the continent’s history, but has been one of the leading causes of hostility.

Sadly, even with the enactment of the Kimberly Process–a regulation set up to curtail the flow of blood diamonds by requiring that all cross-border diamond transactions be accompanied by a non-forged paper trail–and bills introduced in Congress such as the Clean Diamond Act, the problem continues to perpetuate itself. First of all, paper trails are hardly foolproof and do not account for the fact that diamonds are small and portable making it unlikely that any regime could ensure that the diamonds originate in conflict-free areas. Secondly, the Bush administration has been reluctant to give the type of support needed to end the trade of conflict diamonds.

Truthfully, the only infallible method to eradicating the trade of conflict diamonds is to eradicate the conflicts were these diamonds are found. Thankfully, Kanye West has registered this controversy inside of our consciousness, providing a glimmer of hope that the amputations, unlike diamonds, won’t last forever.

Stay lifted and keep it righteous!

Tyran Kai Steward is an Atlanta-based writer, scholar, activist and cultural critic. Should you have any questions or comments about this editorial, he can be reached via email, TyranSteward@aol.com