For a 9-year-old missionary child in West Africa, it was a dazzling sight in the office of a diamond-mine manager. Little did I realize that I was getting a glimpse into a commercial venture that would escalate into a tragic civil war, ably presented in the new movie "Blood Diamond."

	Clarke Thomas, PG senior editor, far right, with sisters Harriet and Evelyn in Sierra Leone, Africa, in the mid-1930s. Click photo for larger image.

Seeing the movie this week brought back memories of going with my parents to visit the head office of a newly opened diamond mining operation 10 miles from our United Brethren in Christ mission. This was in the Kono tribal country in British-governed Sierra Leone -- what six decades later would be the cauldron of the war portrayed in "Blood Diamond."

Five years before, in 1930, a native African digging a latrine had come across a brilliant, shining stone. Soon enough, the British government realized the possibility of a major field of top-quality gem diamonds. The De Beers syndicate of South Africa, which held a worldwide monopoly on diamonds, then formed a subsidiary for Sierra Leone and began major explorations, and then operations.

In those early days, everything was open. In that 1935 visit, I remember the manager showing us a tray of diamonds and then throwing a few in careless fashion into a sieve full of sand and showing how the sieving operation inevitably would bring the heavier diamonds to the center-bottom of the implement. He casually informed my father that the industry was flush with diamonds, with the necessity of maintaining the illusion of scarcity to keep prices high.

We also visited the diamond-digging sites on the rivers, where men waded in the water to scoop up sand and gravel for sieving (similar scenes are shown in the movie). Pay for this chore: 10 pence a day (4 cents American). We watched men rocking the syndicate's primitive "jigs" -- tall wooden structures that were a larger equivalent of the sieving operation.

Relations were such that a soccer match was arranged between our mission school and a miners' sports club. But the miners showed up wearing soccer boots, and my father soon stepped in to stop the match when it became apparent how the boots were cutting up our schoolboys' bare feet.

At the time of my childhood visits, the British engineers said they had no idea of the origin of the diamonds, except that they were alluvial and not from volcanic "pipes," as in the Kimberly fields in South Africa. That is, the Sierra Leone diamonds were found in the skin of the earth, in streams or only a few feet underground, indicating that they had been washed there from somewhere else.

When I returned for a visit in 1962, for the first anniversary of Sierra Leone's independence from Britain, the word was that the source still had not been discovered. But the natives contended that the British knew the diamonds came from an elevation called "Monkey Hill," presumably for a colony of primates there. The Konos had figured that out from the lay of the land of the diamond-bearing streams.

And sure enough, by the time I returned for another visit in 1991, the British had admitted discovering a long horizontal pipe stretching underground for miles from Monkey Hill. But uncovering this trove would take far more huge machinery than that required for retrieving gems from the alluvial washes.

Long before the British discovery, Africans had realized the ease with which diamonds could be found, and a vast illegal network developed of diamond digging and fencing through criminals in neighboring Guinea and Liberia. Along with it came a sociological disaster for Konoland -- all the aspects of a "gold rush" area with the prospects of instant wealth, along with prostitution, broken families and the like. At least there was not the enforced housing of miners and separation from families that had been part of the South African mineral industry.

Eventually, the government threw in the towel and began issuing licenses for natives to dig diamonds on their own, as a way to funnel the gems into the legal market. During my 1991 visit in the major mining town of Koidu, I was shown a beautiful blue mosque, built by a Muslim with the proceeds from one huge diamond he had found. But the illegal operations continued, often conducted by gangs known as "Kabudus."

The unsettled conditions in Kono prompted the United Methodists to found the Kono Musu Women's Center in Koidu, center of the mining district. (In 1968, my parents' denomination had merged with the Methodists.) My 1991 trip was to take a contribution to the center from my Pittsburgh church, the Community of Reconciliation, and to attend an annual conference in Koidu of the Sierra Leone Methodists.

Imagine my horror when, scarcely two months after I was there, war broke out in that region between a group of rebels and the central government. The Musu Women's Center was but one of many institutions overrun in this brutal conflict so vividly portrayed in "Blood Diamond" -- wanton slaughter, rape, mutilation of hands and feet and the kidnapping of children forced to work as soldiers. This was not so much a civil war as a "plunder war," in which the diamond lands were seized by the rebels.

When I was a boy, Sierra Leone was relatively prosperous, able to feed itself, and served as an educational leader for all of English West Africa, dating from its founding in 1827 in the capital of Freetown of Fourah Bay College, the first in the region. It had a railroad and a tolerable system of roads for motor vehicles. And it had rutile ore (used for titanium), and then diamonds.

But Sierra Leone became a prime example of "the curse of resources," outlined in scenes in the movie about how the presence of ivory, rubber, oil and diamonds often has led to waste and corruption in government and society in Africa and the Middle East.

What should have been a blessing turned to a curse. Sierra Leone now is ranked among the poorest nations in the world -- railroad gone, roads abysmal, forced to import food.

A bright note for Pittsburghers has been the formation of the Cotton Tree Association by Sierra Leoneans now living here and other friends of that beleaguered nation. Under the leadership of Ahmed Sheriff, and with the help of such agencies as Catholic Charities and Brother's Brother, Cotton Tree has shipped six container loads of books, clothing and medical supplies to Freetown. Mr. Sheriff is a domestic relations officer with the Allegheny County court system.

The movie showed the importance of the food donations and refugee agencies of the oft-derided United Nations in alleviating suffering and in helping broker a truce that has brought peace and a democratically elected government. And it showed the role of journalists in bringing to light international scandals, such as the witting or unwitting part played by the diamond industry in Sierra Leone's "plunder war."

Finally, I would hope that Pittsburghers attending "Blood Diamond" would not leave with the false perception that the savagery shown in the film is in any way representative of Sierra Leoneans as a whole.

I can only hope and pray that "Blood Diamond" will further an international insistence upon blood-less diamonds to lift the curse that that resource has placed upon that African land.