" It can lift someone from poverty " : Imagined futures in the Sierra Leonean diamond market (original) (raw)
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IRJET- The Challenges of the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Sector in Sierra Leone
IRJET, 2021
Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) received official recognition in 1930, in which Diamonds were first discovered and mined in Kono District, Eastern Sierra Leone. Artisanal mining arose as the primary source of living for inhabitants of rural populations in 1950. The relatively inexpensive, essential nature of artisanal diamond mining combined with its relative success captivated the majority of the youths to the diamond mining fields of Tongo and Kono. The fuming speed into the sedimentary diamond fields caused illegal diamond mining and population increase, which produced social and security worries to the state. The widespread informality of ASM worsens challenges such as illegal mining, unlawful use of machines, smuggling, exploitative contracts between miners and followers, and unhealthy working environments. To overcome these above challenges, the paper provides an overview of the Government of Sierra Leone (GoSL) developed a roadmap for formalizing the sector. Elements of the strategy include a land allocation for ASM, review of existing laws and regulations, organizing the supply chain, and facilitating access to finance. The paper reviews the support interventions, their intended roles, and their effect on the sector and picks out prevailing gaps and possible ways of dealing with the challenges. There is a necessity for research to measure the actual impact of this past and existing interferences on the ASM sector to draw lessons for future growth.
Diamonds and Plural Temporalities: Articulating Encounters in the Mines of Sierra Leone
Along the Sewa, Sierra Leone’s main river, the underwater search for diamonds coexists with the artisanal extraction of building materials and precious metals such as sand, stone, and gold. There are numerous and substantial differences between these various mining activities, but one aspect is shared by all miners: the need to earn money – more specifically, “fast money” - with which to escape poverty, or improve their own status. This paper shows how miners’ ideas about “fast money” are key to understanding temporal perceptions of resources, highlighting a temporal economy based on the articulation of different modes of production. Various kinds of temporalities as well as different rhythms and cycles are at stake in this mining context. This paper explores this multiplicity and endeavours to explain the emergence of accelerated temporalities. By examining and comparing different kinds of extractive activities, this paper argues that artisanal diamond mining can be seen as a transformative practice that seeks to accelerate the encounter between a variety of rhythms and temporalities. To this end, this paper highlights the layers of processes occurring on different time scales: from the long-term geological processes of diamonds (the "deep time of resources") to the mid- and long-term historical and cultural processes that characterise the specific mining sites where I carried out my fieldwork between 2008 and 2016.
Journal of Rural Studies, 2007
Sierra Leone is currently emerging from a brutal civil war that lasted most of the 1990s, and now has the dubious distinction of being ranked among the world's poorest countries. As thousands of displaced people move back to their villages, a large proportion of the predominantly farm-based rural population are growing food crops for the first time in a decade. Alluvial diamond mining makes an important contribution to the national economy, though some would argue that Sierra Leone's diamonds are a 'resource curse'. Drawing upon research undertaken in the 1970s and also in the post-conflict period, the paper provides a longitudinal perspective on the complex links between the farming and mining sectors. Recent field research in Sierra Leone's Eastern Province, indicates that many links between farming and diamond mining have actually been maintained despite severe dislocation. These links could play a key role in rejuvenating market-oriented food production, providing the much-needed impetus for post-war rural development. In charting a future development trajectory, the paper recognizes the urgent need for an effective management scheme for both mining and marketing diamonds, given the potentially destabilizing effect on the country of the uncontrolled exploitation of this valuable resource. In this context, a recent community-based, integrated management initiative adopted by one local NGO, the Peace Diamond Alliance, is examined. If meaningful rural development is to be achieved among desperately poor communities, development strategies must be based on a detailed understanding of the nature of inter-locking livelihoods in the agricultural and mining sectors. r
God’s Gifts: Destiny, Poverty, and Temporality in the Mines of Sierra Leone
Africa Spectrum, 2019
In Sierra Leone, many artisanal miners share the view that every human act and every event is the realisation of an inscrutable divine plan. Even though notions of fate and destiny are part of the vocabulary of Krio, the country’s lingua franca, miners prefer to use expressions that evoke God and stress His immanent presence and influence in their everyday lives. In order to understand the religious vocabulary of contingency and the cosmology underlying the ways in which miners interpret, reproduce, and imaginatively prepare the conditions to change their lives, this article focuses on the ritual practices connected to artisanal diamond mining. It considers these rituals as attempts to resolve the ever-present temporal and moral tensions between actual conditions of suffering and poverty, and the realisation of the well-being that miners associate with their desired futures.
Diamond exploitation in Sierra Leone 1930 to 2010: a resource curse?
Abstract This paper uses the resource curse hypothesis to explore diamond exploitation in Sierra Leone during the period 1930–2010. Focusing on national and local level analysis, it examines whether the net impact of diamond exploitation was a ‘resource curse’ or ‘blessing’ during four time periods: colonial and early post-independence era, the APC era, the civil war period, and post-war era. The paper argues that the net impact of diamond exploitation in Sierra Leone has not been constant; rather it has changed between resource blessing and curse over different major periods of Sierra Leone’s history and at local and national scales since inception of diamond exploitation. This paper illustrates that during the period 1968–1992 patrimonial politics undermined official diamond exploitation and significantly contributed to a pendulum shift in the net effects of diamond exploitation from resource blessing to curse. The study shows that the net effect of diamond exploitation was: a resource blessing (especially at the national level) prior to 1968; more of a resource curse during the APC era; a full blown manifestation of the curse during the civil war period; and that governance of the diamond sector has improved sufficiently in post-civil war Sierra Leone to start the gradual transformation of diamonds to resource blessing, at national and local levels.
Mineralizing Africa and Artisanal Mining's Democratizing Influence
in Bryceson, D.F., E. Fisher, J.B. Jonsson, & R. Mwaipopo (eds). Mining and Social Transformation in Africa: Mineralizing and Democratizing Trends in Artisanal Production , 1-22., 2014
The 21st century has witnessed Sub-Saharan Africa's re-emergence on the world stage of commodity export. A dramatic surge in mining is catalysing fundamental change with the potential to transform or trammel personal and national destinies. Social and cultural dimensions of African artisanal mining are altering the form and content of relations within the household, local community and at the national level. At the centre of this trajectory is the emergence of new occupations and lifestyles within the mining settlements which provide openings for economic and political democratization.
Development Southern Africa, 2008
There have been developments in the twentieth-century and twenty-first-century history of Africa that scholars and observers have commonly referred to as a 'scramble', with no attempt to put them in their proper historical perspective. This paper interrogates the historical concept of a 'scramble' to explain the political economy of Sierra Leone's mineral resources. Although the modern-day 'scramble' phenomenon might look 'new' on the surface, closer examination reveals that it still carries certain genes that were inherited from the nineteenth-century parent organism, making it not so much a 'new' scramble as a mutated version of the old. The paper assesses the relationship between artisanal miners, 'supporters' and exporters, on the one hand, and the government and other key stakeholders, on the other, in the scramble for diamonds in Sierra Leone. It also examines the economic and environmental consequences, including government and stakeholders' response.
Routledge, London, 2014
After more than three decades of economic malaise, many African countries are experiencing an upsurge in their economic fortunes linked to the booming international market for minerals. Spurred by the shrinking viability of peasant agriculture, rural dwellers have been engaged in a massive search for alternative livelihoods, one of the most lucrative being artisanal mining. While a proliferating literature has documented the economic expansion of artisanal mining, this book is the first to probe its societal impact, demonstrating that artisanal mining has the potential to be far more democratic and emancipating than preceding modes. Delineating the paradoxes of artisanal miners working alongside the expansion of large-scale mining in Africa, Mining and Social Transformation in Africa concentrates on the Tanzanian experience. Written by authors with fresh research insights, focus is placed on how artisanal mining is shaped by and indeed shapes local, regional and national mining investments and social class differentiation. The work lives and associated lifestyles of miners are brought to the fore, while posing the question of where this historical interlude is likely to lead them and their communities in the future. The question of value transfers out of the artisanal mining sector, value capture by elites and changing configurations of gender, age and class differentiation, all arise.
Environmental Science & Policy, 2021
In recent years, governments, donors and policy makers across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have increasingly realised the potential of formalizing and supporting artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM)-low tech, labour-intensive mineral processing and extracting. A significant body of evidence suggests that ASM has become the most important rural non-farm activity across SSA, and by making it the centrepiece of new rural development strategies being launched across the continent, it could help governments meet a number of targets linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Focusing on the West African country of Sierra Leone, this paper explores recent reforms to ASM, examining both their potential to support a formalized sector, and to make contributions to the SDGs. In doing so, two broad sets of formalization reforms that have taken place, or are underway, are analysed. First, the paper examines Sierra Leone's legal, policy and regulatory reforms that have shaped the development of a number of laws and policies, including the Mines and Minerals Act of 2009. Second, it analyses institutional reforms resulting from the splitting of policy making and regulatory functions, especially the decentralization of the artisanal mining licencing process. The paper argues that beneath these changes, there exists intractable continuities of informality that make reforms in the sector superficial, unsustainable, and potentially a barrier to attaining the SDGs. Underlining these continuities, the paper suggests, is the role that ASM has traditionally played in a political economy that links powerful local Chieftains with national politicians in mutually beneficial relationships, which invariably render formal state regulators such as the National Minerals Agency and Environment Protection Agency largely uncoordinated, and operationally weak. The paper concludes by arguing that that the persistence of informality in the sector needs to first be dismantled as a rational strategy for those who profit from it, and only then can sustainable mining reforms be linked to broader development initiatives, such as attaining the SDGs.