Smash hit

“We are a separate media within ourselves,” says the Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, “and in a lot of cases we can trump traditional forms of media. We can become the investigative reporter, and we can reach a wider readership than they could ever dream of. You can go to Sierra Leone or South Africa, and you’ll hear them playing 50 Cent. They know the words to his songs, so we have an impact. And what if the song they hear next is speaking about their life?” Until now mainstream American rap has had little understanding of Africa or, indeed, the impact of US hip-hop there. Official releases are heavily outnumbered by bootlegs, so the sales figures from the continent barely register, and American rappers are often astonished to discover that they are famous in Africa. Few visit even the more stable and prosperous nations.

Since Wall’s visit, his grills website carries a note on every page promising that he will never knowingly use conflict diamonds and a pledge to help the miners he met. He says that nothing could have prepared him for what he saw in Sierra Leone. “I had a real rough life, had well over my fair share of bad experiences, but in terms of the amount of change that it caused, this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Hip-hop culture has always flaunted the trappings of wealth. That trait might sometimes be more playful than boastful — witness the ridiculous outsize clock worn by Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav — but it runs deep. The term “bling” was supposedly coined in the late 1990s by the New Orleans rapper Lil’ Wayne: it describes the “sound” of light striking the surface of a diamond.

“It’s like branding,” says Chamillionaire, Wall’s former partner who is best known in the UK for his 2006 hit Ridin’, of the diamond-encrusted pendant he wears with his company logo. “Any picture anybody takes is gonna be branding you or your company. You’ve got to get people talkin’. A wood chain with no diamonds ain’t gonna get people talkin’.”

Vanity is only part of it. “Where our (jewellery) shop is, it’s a pretty rough area of town,” Wall says. “The people who come in know there’s stuff goin’ on in the rest of the world, but they have got their own problems to deal with, and buying and wearing jewellery is like a release from the stress. Even myself, there’s been times I can barely keep my electricity on, but I might scrape up just enough money to buy a new necklace.”

Alex Yeardley, of Global Witness, says: “We were always trying to get to the hip-hop crowd on this. There seemed to be this screaming contradiction; you have people who’ve come out of repression, come out of the long history of the civil rights movement, and there they are, sporting bling, bling, bling. They’re very proud of their African roots, and yet they had no concept, no idea of what was going on.”

He adds: “When we first tried to launch the campaign, we went to one paper, and they said, ‘Have you got any celebrities?’ We wrote to several people and we contacted various pop bands that we had connections to. But all we were getting was, ‘It’s all a bit political, it’s all a bit too difficult to grasp.’ ”

While the odd socially aware musician wrote lyrics about blood diamonds, such as the veteran Chicago folk-soul singer Terry Callier and the British rapper Ms Dynamite, the bling crew were slow to get on board. All that changed in summer 2005 when Kanye West performed at Live8. Yeardley, who was watching, recalls his shock. “I was like, ‘Did he just sing a song about Sierra Leone diamonds?’ ” West, one of hip-hop’s biggest stars, had recorded a single based around a sample from Shirley Bassey’s Diamonds are Forever. His lyrics were nothing to do with conflict diamonds, just about the permanency of the friendship between West and his labelmates. But between finishing the song and readying it for release, he was alerted to the conflict diamonds issue by another rapper, the former Tribe Called Quest leader Q-Tip. West chose not to alter the lyrics but he retitled his record Diamonds From Sierra Leone, and shot a video that featured scenes of diamond mining. It ended with a written plea to fans to buy only non-conflict diamonds.

On his album, Late Registration, he went further, writing a new version of the song that directly addressed the issue: “Over here it’s a drug trade: we die from drugs/ over there they die from what we buy from drugs.”

“Kanye brought awareness of conflict diamonds to a culture enamoured with bling,” says Bill Brummel, producer of a forthcoming documentary for the History Channel, Blood Diamonds. “I think Kanye’s song was much more important than the DiCaprio movie. I bet that without that song they would have had a much harder time getting to make the movie.”

West inspired other rappers. His friend and protégé, Lupe Fiasco, recorded the blistering Conflict Diamonds, an emotive history of the diamond business and of the wars it has helped to fuel.

Public anger was already bringing about change. In November 2002, the diamond industry began the Kimberley Process, which requires every rough diamond put up for sale to be accompanied by a certificate of provenance. This should ensure that stones from areas of conflict are not traded. However, a forthcoming documentary by Sorious Samora, an award-winning Sierra Leonean journalist who worked as an adviser to Zwick’s film, shows how easy it is to smuggle a diamond out of Sierra Leone and sell it in a neighbouring country, where it will enter the Kimberley Process as a “clean” stone. Unscrupulous dealers in the West are also revealed as willing to buy rough diamonds without the proper certification.

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