Hollywood film threatens to take the shine off Africa's gem trade

[IndianaGreen]

Hollywood film threatens to take the shine off Africa's gem trade

· £8m De Beers campaign to counter DiCaprio film
· Bushmen appeal to star for help against industry

Jeevan Vasagar
Wednesday September 20, 2006
The Guardian

The diamond industry has begun a campaign to safeguard its lucrative Christmas trade from what it fears will be a blitz of negative publicity resulting from a forthcoming Hollywood film about the trade in African "conflict diamonds".

De Beers, the world's biggest diamond company, plans to spend £8m on publicity this autumn, in advance of the release in December of Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which threatens to make diamonds as unfashionable as fur.

In the film DiCaprio plays a South African mercenary who goes on a quest in pursuit of a rare pink diamond through rebel-held territory in Sierra Leone, a west African country whose civil war was fuelled by diamond smuggling, and resulted in 75,000 deaths

In real life, DiCaprio has become the poster boy for those who believe the diamond industry is wrecking lives. The film has inspired a band of Kalahari Bushmen to advertise in the Hollywood magazine Variety, attacking the diamond business.

The Bushmen, who claim they have been expelled from ancestral land in Botswana to make way for diamond mining, appealed for DiCaprio's support.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1876293,00.html

[Drum]

1. Whoa.

Lids are rattling all over. Yikes.

[Richard D]

2. LA Weekly did an article on deBeers years ago . . .

. . . One of the striking images was that de Beers has warehouses stacked floor to ceiling with diamonds and that they keep the prices of diamonds very artificially high by only letting them trickle out. Warehouses.

I heard a new one the other day. Commitment rings. It's what you buy a girlfriend when you're promising not to date others, but you're not ready for an engagement ring. Wonder who invented that one?

"Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend" was funded by de Beers to promote their product. In fact, the whole idea of a large diamond engagement ring was one of their inventions, according to this article. So was the "you should spend six months salary" for the engagement ring. Amazing how all these ideas have become so normal now, all just a marketing ploy.