“Blood Diamond” – An Inside Scoop

I recently watched Blood Diamond, twice in two weeks. That’s rare for me. The first time I watched it I watched with my aunt who mentioned that missionary friends of hers had to leave Sierra Leone because of the conflict portrayed in the movie. So here, in the words of Kenneth Wiebe, is a personal story and some observations about the movie:

Yvonne and I are from Chilliwack, BC. We’ve been missionaries of Christians in Action to Sierra Leone since 1977. We left the country in the middle of the war — in 1995 — on the last scheduled flight to leave the country. Since 1997 we’ve been living in London, England, and I make regular trips to Sierra Leone — two or more a year — to provide encouragement, oversight, training, and logistical support for our African team.

The Christians in Action work in Sierra Leone consists of a dozen established churches, five more developing churches, several village outreaches, and five primary schools.

We have watched Blood Diamond. It was pretty good… surprisingly so.

DiCaprio’s Krio, though used only sparingly, was far better than any of the other African actors’. And, fittingly, as he was portraying a South African, he spoke it with a South African accent. The presence of South Africans, though, seemed incongruous to me. There may be South Africans involved in Sierra Leone’s diamond trade, but I’ve never seen any. I would have expected to see Lebanese diamond dealers instead — there are thousands of them in the country.

There was some pretty grand looking country in the film, too, though Sierra Leone has much less of that. And, interestingly, despite much red soil all over the country, the diamond-rich soils are primarily a light ashy colour. I may be drawing attention primarily to periferal things, but those were the things that caught my attention.
The grander aspects of the story — corruption, brutality, and how those have been exacerbated by Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth — were done without glaring inconsistencies or factual error that I noticed. I have only marginally experienced some aspects of the terror, so I cannot comment adequately there, but my knowledge of the things that happened lead me to believe that the film in no way overplayed that aspect of the story.

Related posts:

1. Liveblogging “The Leadership Summit” – 7 – Harvey Carey Session 4b – Against All Odds (Harvey Carey) Carey is a pastor in Detroit. His story is here: What do you do when the odds...
2. Liveblogging “The Leadership Summit” – 9 – Andrew Rugasira “Trade Not Aid” Day 2, Session 1b – Thinking Forward: Aid vs. Trade (Andrew Rugasira) http://www.goodafrican.com/ No country in the world is developed through handouts. Handouts will not...
3. Michael Frost – “Vision for Transforming Neighbourhoods” (Liveblogging Renov8 #rv8) (All of my posts from Renov8 can be found here) (Whoever planned the music for this session had their head on straight: the singing actually...
4. Hollywood Mennonite I don’t have time today to explain all that this entails, but my heritage is Mennonite. Not Amish, just Mennonite. So, this list modified movie...
5. On Roman Polanski and Celebrity Worship Matt Gurney in today’s National Post: “Our celebrity worship has finally reached its logical conclusion. For years celebrities could beat their partners, go on drug-fueled...