Educational Media Reviews Online

This film represents one man’s tour of struggling African nations asking, “How can continent so rich in natural resources, such as cobalt, gold, lumber, and diamonds, be so poor and stricken by war? His travels reveal corruption and poverty, illustrating the seemingly endless cycle of illegal smuggling, de facto slavery, and warfare. Several interviews (with ample subtitles to account for various languages and thick accents) reinforce that the warfare is not so much tribal or racial as it is about leveraging illegal markets of minerals and other resources.

The film offers samples of events from the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, learning firsthand the influence of rebel groups have gained by smuggling and sales goods and resources. There is a significant, and somewhat out of place, portion on diamond appraisal.

The strengths of this documentary reside in its start-to-finish exhibition of the trails of money from shoddy mines to gun dealers in Uganda. The film concludes with an impassioned plea for consumers to stop creating a demand for African diamonds, etc. which only prolongs the violent cycle. This film is exceptionally well done and is a real eye-opening and alarming exploration of this crisis. This work comes highly recommended to audiences high school level and up who seek to learn the dismal conditions in Africa and wish to examine the echoing effects of illegal precious commodity sales.