“I’m looking at a piece right now, and it’s flashing red. It is very exotic,”
London jewelry designer Stephen Webster told Time’s Sarah Larenaudie in 2007. “In top-end jewelry now, the client is way over branded luxury goods. They are looking for limited availability or one of a kind.”
But when it comes to mining Tanzanite, the sapphire-like precious stone that can only be found in a Tanzanian village called Merelani, the gem itself may be one of a kind, but those who mine it are quite dispensable.
While tourists in nearby Arusha are known to spend $5,000 to $20,000 on the stone, many of the area’s 30,000 miners make less than a dollar a day.
Every year thousands of migrants are added to Merelani’s already cheap and abundant labor pool, each with a private hope of getting lucky, braving the more often than not poorly constructed, 300 meter deep shafts for the chance of stumbling upon one of the elusive stones.
IRIN reports that 4,000 children between the ages of 8 and 14 work the mines every day, at the expense of their health and education. Grace Banya, Chief Technical Advisor for the International Labor Office in Nairobi, told IRIN that the problem of child labor in Sub-Saharan Africa grows in tandem with increasing levels of poverty:
The families cannot be able to take care of their own children. The families have to be economically empowered to be able to even deal with those children who would slip off and go back into child labor … If it’s not dealt with, it’s going to affect the future human resource of a nation– of a whole continent– because we are getting a generation of children who are missing out totally on education.
IRIN profiles the plight a young miner named Wilson Peter, a life complete with all of the classic prerequisites of exploitation: needy family, father injured in a mining accident, mother’s earnings from selling vegetables too meager to support family– boy inevitably ends up in the mines.
“We’re not happy that our kids work in the mines,” his mother laments, reminiscent of, well, any mother who must watch her young child perform dangerous and stigmatized work. “But our problems make it necessary.”
Like blood diamonds before, a huge percentage (some have placed it as high as 95 percent) of Tanzanite is exported illegally from Tanzania via the “informal” mining sector, where children are paid as little as $2 a month, and sometimes not at all, according to a 2001 report by WorldNetDaily.
With 70 percent of worldwide Tanzanite purchases being made by Americans (a large amount in the form of Caribbean cruise souvenirs), Dutch journalist Adriana Stuijt asks,
Do the American women adorned with these stunning and unique gems even know that most of these were torn out by African children’s hands, digging and hacking away at the Tanzanian volcanic rock — often forced to live in deep, unsafe mineshafts where many have already drowned horribly?
My guess is not.
But perhaps the bigger question is– when admiring how such ornamental rocks catch the light just so, bring out the striking color of one’s blue eyes, or commemorate the birth of a December baby– do we really care? Do we really care enough?
Of course, it’s the beauty and the symbolism and the one-of-a-kind-ness that gets marketed to us, not the sweat and the blood and the shrugged off tears. And it’s certainly not the first time we’ve been duped with the shininess of symbolic beauty– the Larenaudie report points out a disgusting, though not astonishing, coup of Big Diamond public relations:
Faced with a glut of diamonds in South Africa that risked destroying prices, De Beers in 1890 organized a cartel to control supply, which was further tightened in 1925. Beginning in 1938, the company commissioned a series of clever promotions in the U.S. to convince consumers that diamonds were rare (they were not), that they symbolized romantic love (a copywriter’s concoction) and that they should never be sold, further limiting the number in circulation. The pinnacle of this campaign was the advertising tagline introduced in 1948: ‘A diamond is forever.’ It was used to cement the role of the diamond solitaire as the de rigeur choice for a wedding engagement gift. In 2005, U.S. sales of diamond engagement rings totaled $4.84 billion.
