Posted on 03/16/2017 10:15:39 AM PDT by Red Badger
An African church minister who supplements his meagre stipend by scrabbling for minerals in the artisanal mines of eastern Sierra Leone has discovered one of the largest diamonds ever found.
The 709-carat stone was extracted this week by Emmanuel Momoh, a pastor in one of the myriad churches that ministers to the mining communities of Kono district, the diamond centre that became the crucible of Sierra Leone’s blood-soaked civil war.
It is believed to be the 13th largest uncut diamond ever to be pulled from the ground, industry analysts said.
The stone is to be auctioned, the Sierra Leonean government announced yesterday, although its value cannot be determined until its quality is assessed. An 813-carat diamond was sold at closed auction in London last month for £51m.
By rights, the stone should have been found by one of the internationally-financed companies operating in the Kono diamond fields. With their huge Caterpillar bulldozers, dredges and industrial water pumps, the big firms certainly had the technological advantage.
That the discovery was instead made by one of the thousands of ordinary men and boys who toil bare-chested under the relentless equatorial sun — a man of the cloth, no less — will be taken by many as an answer to the fervent prayers whispered daily in Kono’s churches.
With the virtuous vicar then handing the stone to the authorities, it may also strike many as an act of propitiation, a moment when Sierra Leone symbolically distanced itself from the diamond-driven bloodlust of its 11-year civil war, which ended in 2002.
Tens of thousands of enslaved Sierra Leoneans spent much of that brutal decade hunched over hand shovels in the mud, forced to dig for diamonds to fund a rebellion mounted by a Liberian-backed warlord, Foday Sankoh.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
So he gave the stone to the Government, wonder if he gets a penny on the dollar of its value.
Wow, God is so watching this one...
Rendering unto Caesar?................
Heck I would too knowing the value of that thing.
He’s a Pastor, what Pastor would want anything to do with something worth so much in this “world”, when by giving it away he’s actually releasing himself and his church of the responsibility of having that thing.
Joel Osteen might want it though ;)
Pretty tall story. I wonder if a worker at one of the big mines bagged it and pawned in off on the pastor?
“Rendering unto Caesar?.”
That’s the beauty of America, here in this country, “You” are Caesar.
Nice looking raw stone. I bet it yields a whopper of a faceted gem.
By giving it to the govt., he may get something out of it, but he will definitely get to live a little longer.
From what I’ve read, “big mines” take loss prevention very seriously, like x-rays before you leave the property seriously. Something this big would be even harder to sneak out.
You got that right.
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