The people who live on the diamonds — farmers of Sierra Leone's eastern highlands whose district produced some of the largest stones ever found, and who have almost nothing to show for a century of extraction.
Population: Around 500,000 in eastern Sierra Leone
Location: Kono district, centred on Koidu, with communities across the Guinean border
Language: Kono, a Mande language closely related to Vai and Kuranko
Language family: Niger-Congo → Mande
Traditional governance: Paramount chiefs over chiefdoms, with the Poro society exercising parallel authority; Sierra Leonean district administration today.
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Koidu-area communities
The district town and the mining heartland.
Farming chiefdoms
Communities of the surrounding hills growing rice, coffee and cocoa.
Guinean Kono
Related communities across the border, part of the same Mande world.
Clothing: Country cloth woven in narrow strips; gowns for chiefs and elders; society regalia restricted to initiates.
Food: Rice as the staple and as the definition of a meal, with cassava leaf, palm oil and pepper soup; coffee and cocoa as cash crops.
Ceremonies: Poro initiation for men and Sande for women; masked appearances at funerals and at the societies' sessions; harvest rites; chief installation.
Marriage customs: Bridewealth in cloth, livestock and cash; Sande completion traditionally required for women; polygyny historically common.
Initiation rites: Poro and Sande bush schools with seclusion, instruction and scarification; the societies remain active though attendance has declined.
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Sierra Leone and Guinea, at national rather than community level — 16 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
8 dishes
Fermented cassava fufu with a leaf sauce, the everyday meal across Sierra Leone. The fufu is sourer than the Ghanaian version and comes wrapped rather than pounded to order.
Serves 6 · 1 hour, plus 3 days fermenting
also Beans stew, Bean sauce
Black-eyed beans stewed with palm oil, onion and smoked fish, eaten with rice or bread for breakfast across Sierra Leone.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus soaking
Finely pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly with palm oil, meat and fish into a thick dark green stew over rice. Sierra Leone's national dish by common consent.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Black-eyed pea fritters sold in bread with pepper sauce at Freetown's morning stalls, eaten on the way to work with a cup of sweet tea.
Serves Makes 20 · 40 minutes, plus 4 hours soaking
Rice cooked in a tomato and pepper base with beef and chicken, made for weddings and Christmas. Sierra Leoneans add a spoon of palm oil that neither Ghana nor Nigeria would allow.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Chicken or beef in a groundnut sauce made with roasted peanuts ground fresh, thickened and eaten over rice. Every household claims a slightly different balance of tomato to nut.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
also Fish pepper soup
A thin, ferociously peppery broth of fish or goat with country spices, drunk as much as eaten and prescribed for colds, hangovers and childbirth.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes
also Palm wine
Palm sap tapped at dawn and drunk the same day, sweet in the morning and increasingly sharp and alcoholic as the hours pass. Drunk in poyo bars from a shared calabash.
Serves Varies · Tapped daily; drunk within hours
8 dishes
Fonio steamed to a light, fine grain and served with sauce. Fonio is one of the oldest cultivated cereals in West Africa and grows on the Fouta Djallon where little else will.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes
Rice with a dark sauce of pounded cassava leaves, palm oil and smoked fish. The most-eaten dish in Guinea, cooked in every household in Conakry and the Fouta alike.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes
also Okra and palm oil sauce
Okra cooked into red palm oil with smoked fish and meat until thick and glossy, poured over rice. The Guinean and Casamance sauce, deliberately viscous.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Chicken marinated in lemon and mustard, grilled and finished in a mass of slow-cooked onions. Casamance in origin and eaten from Dakar to Conakry, served over rice.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Smoked catfish stewed in a tomato and palm oil sauce, the celebration fish of coastal Guinea. The smoking is done over green wood for a full day before the cooking starts.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Rice noodles or fine pasta with groundnut sauce, from the Fouta Djallon. A Fula dish adapted to whatever grain or pasta is available, and eaten at Friday gatherings.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
also Fonio with chicken
Fonio, the tiny fast-growing Sahelian grain, steamed and served with chicken and onion sauce. The Fouta Djallon's grain and now a global health-food export.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Raw ginger blended, steeped and strained into a fierce cold drink, sweetened and sold in frozen sachets. Guinean ginger is strong enough to make a first-timer cough.
Serves 8 · 30 minutes, plus 4 hours steeping
The Star of Sierra LeoneHistorical account
In 1972 an alluvial digger in Kono found a 969-carat diamond, the largest alluvial diamond ever recorded. It was cut into seventeen stones. Kono district has yielded extraordinary wealth for a century; Koidu has had unreliable electricity, poor roads and periodic water shortages throughout. The gap between what the ground produces and what the district receives is the region's defining fact.
The War Over StonesHistorical account
Sierra Leone's civil war from 1991 to 2002 was financed substantially through diamonds from Kono and Kenema, and the district changed hands repeatedly with terrible violence against civilians. The war produced the term blood diamonds and, eventually, the Kimberley Process certification scheme. Kono was left with destroyed towns and pitted farmland.
“The stone leaves; the hole stays.”
Extraction without benefit.
“Rice not eaten is not a meal.”
The Sierra Leonean insistence, shared across the country.
“What the bush school teaches, the town cannot say.”
Poro and Sande as the real curriculum.
Creation: A high creator withdrawn from daily affairs; ancestors and bush spirits handling ordinary life, with the societies mediating between village and forest.
Beliefs: Poro and Sande as religious as well as legal institutions; ancestor veneration; masked spirits; Christianity and Islam both widespread and generally held alongside society membership.
Ancestors: Ancestors consulted through elders and diviners; lineage graves anchor land claims in a district where land has extraordinary value.
The creator (Yataa)
The high god, distant from daily affairs
Poro spirits
Powers embodied in the men's society's masks and rites
Sowei
Spirit of the women's society, embodied in the helmet mask danced by women
Traditional settlements: Villages of round and rectangular houses with thatch or zinc, palaver hut at the centre; Koidu's mining town growth; pitted and flooded ground where alluvial digging has passed.
Building techniques: Wattle and daub with palm thatch; the open-sided palaver hut; raised rice barns; artisanal mining pits worked by hand.
Village layout: Town around the palaver hut and chief's compound, farms beyond; mining pits interrupting the farmland in every direction.
Country cloth
Textile
Narrow-strip woven cloth used for dress, bedding and payment.
Sowei helmet mask
Performance
Mask of the Sande society, among the few African masks danced by women.
Artisanal mining tools
Livelihood
Shovels, sieves and washing pans of the alluvial diggings.
Palaver hut
Architecture
Open-sided structure where disputes are heard in public.
Pre-1900
Kono communities farm the eastern highlands; Poro and Sande organise social life.
1930
Diamonds are discovered in Kono; large-scale and illicit mining both follow.
1972
The 969-carat Star of Sierra Leone is found by an alluvial digger.
1991–2002
Civil war financed substantially by Kono's diamonds; the district is devastated.
2003–present
Kimberley Process certification; industrial and artisanal mining continue with limited local benefit.
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources