The blood of diamonds

CNN has been showing Sorious Samura's latest documentary The Blood of Diamonds in rotation for the past week or so. It does make you wonder about whether Africa as a continent is improving at all. We see images of still young boys who executed others on suspicion of stealing diamonds in Sierra Leone, crying into the grass over their memories. We see images of lynch mobs in Congo, of desperate men spading mud for decades in the hope of finding one diamond. DCR is in a low-density war situation, with a vague internal enemy called the Suicidals waiting to pick people off at random. We see panoramic landscapes of rust red earth and livid green, dotted with ant like figures in the middle distance, scavenging in the water and the mud for a glimpse of the white gold. In other words, a continent torn apart yet again by extraction, with the Kimberley Process a polite mask for business as usual.

Best of all in the film, Samura followed the supply chain to its delta, the backstreet diamond shops in New York, to show that the lust for stone is not the preserve of a specifically African rapacity. If only more films linked exploitation in developing countries to the consumer fantasmagorias they enable in the West, there might be a desire en masse to utterly change the configuration. Or maybe not. Maybe desire, in all its bloody forms, will always drown out the struggle for justice and a fairer world.