Tag: Origin – Sierra Leone

followthethings.com
Gifts & Seasonal

“Diamonds From Sierra Leone“
A music video starring Kanye West & Jay-Z, directed by Hype Williams, music by Kanye West, Jon Brion & Devo Springstein, for Roc-A-Fella Records.
Original video and remix audio embedded above.

Kanye West is writing and recording a new song commemorating the rebirth of his label Roc-A-Fella Records, including conflicts within the organisation whose hand-signal is the shape of a diamond. Q-Tip, a former member of A Tribe Called Quest, then alerts him to the ‘blood diamond’ scandal in Sierra Leone. So West changes the title of the track to ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ and makes a powerful black and white music video about the supply chain linking the country’s child diamond miners to wealthy white diamond consumers shopping in high end jewellery stores in the USA. One scene parodies a 1990s De Beers’ engagement ring advert, except for the blood that drips from the engagament ring once it’s slipped onto a woman’s finger. In another, a black child’s hand appears from beneath the counter in a jewellery store and hands a diamond to the dealer to hand to a shopper. Later, West leaps from a convertable James Bond-type just before it crashes through the jewellery store window. The video ends with an on-screen plea: ‘please buy conflict free diamonds’. Some audience members point out how a diamond-encrusted mask that West wears on stage, and the bling culture he brags about, makes this plea a bit hypocritical. Others point out a disconnect between the message in the lyrics (about internal record label conflicts) and in the video (about international supply chains and trade injustice). Some core fans aren’t impressed by the track’s sampling Shirley Bassey’s ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ (or harpsichords). So, although West returns to recording more conventional tracks – like his 2005 Crack Music – that his fans want to hear, audience members do start to question the origins of their diamonds (especially after West issues a remix whose lyrics are more directly about the the topic). The video becomes a global smash which – along with Leonardo Di Caprio’s (2006) film Blood Diamond – makes this exploitative trade so public that the industry has to respond. Is this an example of celebrity-fronted trade justice activism that has succeeded, despite – or maybe because of – its flaws? Is this another Global North charity-style representation of abject, improverished life in the Global South that’s caused by guilty, and only solvable through responsible, Western consumerism? Or do its scenes of the child miners and West working together to disrupt diamond supply chains show the kind of ‘global racial solidarities’ that could be mobilised to address this trade injustice? See what you think by reading the comments below.

Page reference: Hector Neil-Mee, Hannah Willard, James Kemp, Harvey Dunshire, Maddy Morgan & Luke Jarvis (2026) Diamonds From Sierra Leone. followthethings.com/diamonds-from-sierra-leone.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 86 minutes.