The Seventeen
6 October 2026
The Seventeen
On Valentine's Day, 1972, men digging the Diminco alluvial mine near Koidu, in Kono, turned up a stone of 968.9 carats. It is still the largest alluvial diamond ever found, and the fourth-largest gem diamond of any kind. The fourteenth of February. They were not digging for a gift. They were digging for a wage.
In October that year, President Siaka Stevens announced that Harry Winston, the New York jeweller, had bought it for under 2.5 million dollars. The cutter was Harry Vos. He shaped the first cut as an emerald, 143.2 carats, then found a flaw inside it, and cut the stone apart to save what the flaw would not let him keep whole.
Out of that one stone came seventeen. Thirteen flawless. The largest is a pear of 53.96 carats. Six of them Winston set into a brooch and gave the brooch the old name, Star of Sierra Leone, which now belongs to a thing that no longer exists, because a stone broken into seventeen stones is not the stone.
It had been a type IIa: colourless, chemically near-perfect, the kind that is less than one percent of all diamonds. The flaw was in it anyway.
The men of Diminco got their wages. The country got minerals for 79 percent of its export earnings, diamonds near half of that, and 4.5 percent of its GDP. The brooch sits in a vault, six pieces arranged to look like something that was never broken.