Blake Lambert

Throughout the 2000s, the issue of blood, or conflict, diamonds gained manifold and unique expressions in western pop culture. In 2005, Kanye West recorded the song “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” which won a Grammy award. The accompanying video attempted to depict the working conditions in Sierra Leone’s diamond fields and ended by urging viewers to “please purchase conflict free diamonds.” The next year experienced the release of the movie Blood Diamond…

In the early fall of 2006, while I was on assignment for CBC Radio in the West African country of Mali, several unfortunate circumstances sandbagged me. As I exited a car surrounded by overzealous teenage vendors, my wallet and $450 disappeared forever; after eating fish in western Mali, I became ill; and I cancelled an interview with a Cabinet minister after being told by an airline the departure time had…

The cult-like insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army is the strangest war in postcolonial Africa. Growing out of Alice Lakwena’s militant Holy Spirit Movement, these northern-based rebels have fought the Ugandan government of President Yoweri Museveni since 1986. But barring Lakwena’s initial uprising, which may have killed 10,000 people, the LRA has never posed a substantial threat to Museveni’s regime and to the bulk of the country’s…