Lupita Nyong’o’s Collab with Infamous Diamond Company De Beers is Giving Chaos
How does one star in a movie franchise about defending a fictional resource-rich African nation only to end up the face of a company with a tense relationship with real resource-rich African nations?
A few weeks ago, it was announced that Kenyan-Mexican Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o was named the first global ambassador of De Beers.
Now, we love to see it whenever a Black queen secures her bag, especially a bag as phat as a De Beers bag. But if you know a bit about De Beers and the company’s complicated history with the African continent and its people, you’d start to wonder.
The story of De Beers begins with the earliest discovery of diamond in southern Africa in the mid-1860s on a De Beers farm in the South African city of Kimberly. Two decades later, English entrepreneur and apartheid funder Cecil Rhodes purchased a claim to the De Beers mine as well as most of the diamond mines in southern Africa.
As the years went by, Rhodes, via De Beers, amassed a somewhat monopoly of global diamond distribution. He went on to establish the Diamond Syndicate, which controlled most of the world diamond trade at the time. As the Great Depression came around in the 1930s, the demand for diamonds declined and De Beers had to shut down some of its mines just to survive that period. At the turn of the mid-century, the then-giant found itself barely scraping any profits. 🤭
To prevent a complete failure of the business, De Beers hired the advertising agency N. W. Ayer, which designed marketing campaigns to promote De Beers by associating its diamonds with society’s image of success and romance. Their campaigns were a resounding success!
We can safely say that the desirability that diamonds command today due to their aesthetic value and symbolism is largely a result of De Beers and its advertising campaigns that rewrote global culture and resurrected the demand for diamond in the late 1940s.
Now, you’re probably thinking: “Wow! What a great company!” And, if you are, you’d be 💯 right.
De Beers is a great company by all accounts. It is one of the relatively few African companies that continue to rival, and even lead, its global peers. As a leader in the diamond industry, it continues to adopt new practices and principles to position itself as an ethical diamond mining company.
However, De Beer’s alleged malpractices and misdeeds stand firmly alongside the company’s meritorious achievements.
In addition to a flurry of criminal charges, De Beers has also been scrutinised for its alleged dealings in blood diamonds. If you’re new to the term, blood diamonds are essentially diamonds mined in areas controlled by opposition forces to the legitimate government as such diamond trades have been found to fund violent wars and conflicts against the government that bring harm to civilians.
De Beers’ has been mired in controversies ranging from enabling genocide to actively working to displace indigenous African people from their homes and communities that are sometimes built atop diamond-rich reserves. Somehow, this is still not the full range of controversies De Beers has found itself involved in. Yet, the reputation of De Beers did nothing to dissuade Nyong’o, a Kenyan-Mexican whose family fled from violence that was funded by colonialists and colonial empathisers like the founders of De Beers.
Nyongo’s announcement as De Beers ambassador is particularly interesting because it came quickly on the heels of her very public explanation of why she turned down a role in the movie The Woman King, a movie that told a screen-adapted story of the Agojie, an all-woman warrior group that protected the Dahomey kingdom, what’s currently the Republic of Benin. 🇧🇯
Nyong’o turns down a platform to tell the story of a legendary African kingdom in The Woman King and, a few months later, becomes the global face of a company known for its tense relationship with Africa and founded by a man with a turbulent connection to South Africa’s apartheid history.
How could anyone reconcile such dissonance? Make that make sense. 🤷🏾♂️
A few days ago, Nyong’o made an appearance in jewellery from said company at the London premiere of Black Panther, a franchise themed around a fictional resource-rich African country. Naturally, Western media gushed about how she ate up the look and left no crumbs—which she did. 😌
Lupita Nyong’o attends the "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" premiere on Nov. 3 in London.
Still, it’d have been great if such red carpet fashion excellence didn’t have to be made possible by a collaboration that, in its way, makes mockery of the Black bodies and communities that have been (and continue to be) exploited by woefully capitalistic organisations such as De Beers. 😒
