Essay about De Beers and Stephanus Erasmus Jacobs

Submitted By phillipmccray97
Words: 324
Pages: 2

If you were to go into the mines of sierra leone, do you know what you would find? Imagine children and adults working their bones away for what they can’t even harvest, for something that doesn’t even have any value to them, something that they are barley even paid for...blood diamonds. How do you feel? More importantly how did this begin? Well to answer you your question…
Stephanus Erasmus Jacobs discovered the first diamond as walking down the orange river bank in sierra leone. He then showed people and people showed people and eventually people started trading for it. However, even though half of the world saw this as a precious jewel this wasn’t yet a business. As a result of this, the chairman of the De Beers group said let’s make it one. So he decided to limit the amount of diamonds used in the world and take them in his hold and resell them. He couldn’t do this himself so he needed people to work in the mind, to gather them, to stop other from just taking them off a simple whim, the birth of diamond producers. The more his company grew the he had control of the stint of them, and more rare they are the more the demand grew. As the demand grew, it was more difficult on the supply. The extraction grew intense thus birthing blood diamonds.
The more people they got to work in the mines the lower their pay got. It also got extremely hard to work look after thousands of people
Blood diamonds although may be most harsh on the extractors a great deal of other people