DeBeers founded by British colonizer Cecil Rhodes

In the 1870s, during the period called the “scramble for Africa,” the brutal Cecil Rhodes was colonizing Southern Africa, setting up the African front of British imperialism.

One of Rhodes’ primary endeavors was the large diamond mine in Kimberley, South Africa. The gems from this mine made Rhodes a multi-millionaire and consolidated his power in the region. The price to African people was mass slaughter of tens of thousands and the seizure of their territories. Whole populations were dispersed when Rhodes dynamited them off their lands. African families were destroyed as African men were rounded up by the thousands in forced labor concentration camps near the diamond mines, a practice that continues today.

The British colonial exploits in Africa and around the world followed on the heels of more than three centuries of the trade in African people themselves. The immeasurable wealth generated by the slave trade catapulted England out of the poverty and ignorance of feudalism and transformed it into a wealthy industrialized nation. It was this process that brought about the birth of the capitalist system itself.

In his book Capital, written in the 1860s, Karl Marx raised the question, how did capitalism actually begin? Where did it get its start up money? He surmised that the capitalist system must have had a first or “primitive” accumulation of wealth or capital coming from outside of Europe—which was barren, impoverished and unproductive.

Marx observed: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

Omali Yeshitela, leader of the Uhuru Movement and Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, pointed out more than a hundred years later, however, that Marx’s statements about primitive accumulation of capital were a “definition of the significance of the enslavement of African people only as it impacted on development inside Europe, a development which necessarily means what has come to be called the underdevelopment of Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

This is true because if Marx really understood his own observation he would have come to the conclusion that the force that could overturn the capitalist system of workers and bosses would not be white workers in Europe, but the Indigenous people entombed in the mines and the Africans whose homeland had become a warren for the hunting of black skins.

“Marx’s world was white,” Yeshitela asserts. “The enslaved Asian, African and ‘Indian’ of North and South America were essentially objects of history, having more or less significance for European development.”

As white people we habitually ignore the unfathomable suffering inflicted on African and other peoples that bring us the resources and standard of living we take for granted. We happily deny the fact that those resources, wrested at a price of hideous suffering to so many, make up the foundation of the prosperity and opportunities of our society.

The DeBeers diamond cartel has always done what the U.S.-backed rebels of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo have done to African people, and even worse. DeBeers simply had the power to hide it from the view of the white world, for whom the fate of African people has never been a concern in any case.

This is the context for the definition of “blood” or “conflict” diamonds. It’s not just a particular atrocity that comes to our attention at any given moment. It’s a centuries-long institutionalized process of ripping the humanity, the beauty, the resources, land and independence out of the soul of Africa for our benefit.

Blood was dripping from diamonds long before the slaughter began in West Africa in the 1990s.

Next page: The lust for resources