Sierra Leone Selection Trust

The Sierra Leone Selection Trust was the monopoly through which the British government placed Sierra Leone’s diamond resources under corporate control. Although alluvial diamonds could be recovered by panning and thus offered many people a potential route into mining, the colonial arrangement reserved the territory’s diamond business for De Beers and concentrated control over the richest fields. Its later replacement by a state company did not, in the account presented here, mark a straightforward transition to open access: it formed the opening phase of Siaka Stevens’s plan to take over diamond mining.

Monopoly over alluvial diamonds

Diamonds were discovered in Kono, in eastern Sierra Leone, in January 1930. Because the deposits were alluvial rather than deep underground, the primary mining method was panning in rivers. This method could draw many people into mining, leading some social scientists to describe such stones as “democratic diamonds.” The British government nevertheless created a monopoly for the entire protectorate, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, and granted it to De Beers, a major South African diamond company.

The arrangement placed a resource with potentially broad access behind an exclusive corporate concession. Rather than allowing the dispersed character of river panning to shape a more open mining sector, colonial policy concentrated the rights to diamond extraction in a single company. The contrast is significant within the book’s comparison of Sierra Leone with Australia, where authorities allowed anyone who paid an annual license fee to search and dig for alluvial gold.

Enforcement and conflict

In 1936 De Beers received the right to establish the Diamond Protection Force, a private army that would become larger than Sierra Leone’s colonial government force. Yet the sheer availability of alluvial diamonds made the monopoly difficult to police. By the 1950s, thousands of unauthorized miners were operating, and the Diamond Protection Force was overwhelmed. The result was a major source of conflict and disorder rather than effective corporate control.

In 1955 the British government opened some diamond fields to licensed diggers outside the Trust. The concession remained limited: the company retained the richest areas, including Yengema, Koidu, and Tongo Fields. The change therefore widened access in some locations without ending the Trust’s control of the most valuable deposits.

Nationalization and political control

The struggle over ownership continued after independence. In 1970 Siaka Stevens effectively nationalized the Sierra Leone Selection Trust and created the National Diamond Mining Company of Sierra Leone. The government held a 51 percent stake, but the account identifies the government in practice with Stevens himself. The takeover was not presented as the completion of a broad-based alternative to monopoly; it was the opening phase of Stevens’s plan to take over diamond mining.

The Trust’s history thus runs from a colonial concession to a state-controlled successor, while the central question of who controlled diamond extraction remained. Its alluvial deposits made widespread participation materially possible, but monopoly, enforcement, restricted licensing, and political takeover repeatedly shaped who could benefit from the resource.