Kono, in eastern Sierra Leone, is presented as a place where colonial administration and the control of natural resources converged. The British incorporated it into their protectorate system, and after diamonds were discovered there in 1930, the government gave De Beers a monopoly over diamond mining across the protectorate. The arrangement turned an accessible resource into a source of concentrated commercial power and continuing conflict.

From kingdom to protectorate district

Before British rule extended into the interior, Sierra Leone comprised numerous small African kingdoms. The British expanded their authority through treaties with African rulers, then declared the territory a protectorate on August 31, 1896. In eastern Sierra Leone, in what is now the diamond-mining district of Kono, they encountered Suluku, a powerful warrior king. After he signed a treaty with a British administrator, the British recast his position as Paramount Chief Suluku and established Sandor as an administrative chieftaincy within the protectorate.

The arrangement illustrates the gap between the rulers’ understanding of the treaties and British policy. The kings had not understood their agreements as permission to establish a colony. When the British attempted to levy a hut tax of five shillings per house in January 1898, chiefs rebelled. The Hut Tax Rebellion was defeated, but its scale and duration—especially in Mendeland—warned the British of the difficulty of controlling the hinterland. Kono’s incorporation into the protectorate thus belonged to a wider transformation in which local political authority was reorganized under colonial rule.

Alluvial diamonds and monopoly

Diamonds were discovered in Kono in January 1930. Because they were alluvial rather than deep underground deposits, they could be recovered by panning in rivers. This method offered the possibility of broad participation: many people could try their hand at mining, which is why such deposits have been described as “democratic diamonds.”

The British government chose the opposite institutional course. It established a monopoly across the protectorate, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, and granted it to De Beers, a major South African diamond company. In 1936 De Beers also received the right to create the Diamond Protection Force, a private army that would grow larger than the colonial government’s own force in Sierra Leone. The state therefore concentrated control of a resource that could otherwise have been worked by many individual miners in a company and its security organization.

Mining, conflict, and political control

The alluvial deposits proved difficult to police. By the 1950s, thousands of illegal miners had overwhelmed the Diamond Protection Force, making the diamond fields a major source of conflict and disorder. In 1955 the British government opened some fields to licensed diggers outside the trust, but the company retained the richest areas, including Yengema, Koidu, and Tongo Fields. The concession widened access without ending the monopoly’s hold over the most valuable sites.

After independence, the struggle over control continued in a different form. In 1970 Siaka Stevens effectively nationalized the Sierra Leone Selection Trust and created the National Diamond Mining Company of Sierra Leone, in which the government—effectively Stevens himself—held a 51 percent stake. This was described as the opening phase of Stevens’s plan to take over diamond mining in the country. Kono’s diamonds thus connect colonial monopoly to postcolonial state control, while the contrast with open mining elsewhere shows how institutions shaped who could benefit from an abundant resource.

Significance

Kono’s story is not simply one of mineral discovery. Its river deposits could support dispersed participation, yet colonial policy assigned exclusive rights to a large company and authorized a private force to defend that arrangement. Later, the national government assumed a controlling stake rather than opening the fields to unrestricted access. Across these changes, the central issue remained who held authority over the diamonds and who could share in their value.