An unpolished government: Sierra Leone’s unmanageable diamond Mines.
Throughout the past few decades, conflict, civil war, unstable governments and meaningless atrocities can be found in Sierra Leone and other areas of Africa that were once controlled and colonized by Europeans. Although the majority of Sierra Leone’s conflict’s were a result of weak government infrastructure and their response to civil problems, the exact source of conflict in this ineffective bureaucracy, and the reason why Sierra Leone’s government was ineffective and powerless to stop a brutal civil war throughout the nineteen ninety’s, can be traced back to European colonial rule and the lingering effects of unmanageable diamond mines.
The beginning of the colonial era in Sierra Leone was marked by the establishment of Freetown (later to become the city’s capital) as a British post and a settlement for slaves granted freedom for siding with the British in the American Revolutionary War. Sierra Leone was made home to it’s largest wave of freed slaves after the British Navy rescued them from slave ships in the Atlantic after the Anti-Slavery Act of 1807 was passed. In 1808, Freetown was declared a crown colony; a British oversea territory (Hirsch 22). The Krios, who are descendents from slaves that settled in Freetown, began entering the British colonial service, and developed a Christian community of schools and businesses. Freetown’s earliest reputation is knows as the “Athens of West Africa” because of the communities fast development (Hirsch 23). Because British ruling was only prominent in and around Freetown, a “protectorate” was declared in 1896 on other areas of Sierra Leone by establishing treaties with the two most dominant ethnic groups; the Temne tribe in the north, and the Mende tribe in the south (Hirsch 24). The tribes were to protect the British trade routes from the French colonialist in neighboring guinea. The British imposed a taxation for use of the trade...