Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. This continent is composed by 61 territories, most of them defined after the European colonization it suffered. We are going to see some of these countries and its characteristics.
When talking about Africa it is essential to make reference to one of its most important countries, South Africa. We can consider South Africa as a country with a huge diversity, with over 47-million people of diverse origins, cultures, languages and belief
s. As a legacy of the British colonization we can find many white people in the country, and also English plays an important role as spoken language. We can find a huge diversity of other languages in the country (mainly native dialects). We can find another important footprint of the colonization by looking at the religious beliefs; two-thirds of South Africans are Christian, mainly Protestant; Islam, Hinduism and Judaism also play a significant role. South Africa has suffered a lot of different processes and has been exploited during it history. The discovery of diamonds and gold has motivated since the XIX century the arrival of outcomers looking for the wealth of the country. We will focus in all the problems that the diamonds as a resource have brought to South Africa and many other countries of the continent. An important player when talking about diamonds is the De Beers company, it was founded by Cecil Rhodes 110 years ago in South Africa, and its Central Selling Organization (CSO), dominate the diamond industry Together, De Beers and the CSO sell about 80% of the diamonds in the world market.Another country that has been victim about the problems brought by the so called “blood diamonds” is Angola. In this country the diamonds have been source of internal wars and rebellions. The rebel leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) funded the war primarily from diamond sales which has given a lot of power to this movement. Sierra Leone’s case is very similar to this one.
Due to all these conflicts it was developed the Kimberly process. It certifies the trade of legal diamonds, assuring that they are “conflict free”. This helps to support the development of the region by legal means. Today 49 participants covering 75 countries are part of this process.
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