Sand Mining Threatens Coastline as Sierra Leone Rebuilds

Within a few miles of Sierra Leone’s capital, sand mining is having a devastating effect. As beaches slowly disappear, so do the country’s hopes of post-war revival. 

Freetown Beach in Sierra Leone, Erik Cleves Kristensen, CC BY 2.0

Twenty years after Sierra Leone's 11-year civil war, the economic promises of sand mining prove to be costly. The war, which took thousands of lives and led nearly half the country's population into poverty, destroyed most of the country. What followed was a construction boom made possible by an essential ingredient of modern civilization: sand. However, as Sierra Leone’s 300 miles of glorious beaches slowly disappear, so does the revival of tourism and the protection of 55% of the population who live along the country’s coast from the dangers of rising sea levels due to climate change. 

As part of a post-civil war move to help communities benefit from local resources, Sierra Leone’s central government gave regulation of sand mining to local councils. Under the 2004 Local Government Act, local committees operate the trucks and strictly hire local people to mine the sand. After a long day of mining, the sand is dried and sold to developers to pave and extend roads as new homes, hotels and restaurants go up across the country. 

Government officials defend sand mining as an essential source of jobs and a necessary component in rebuilding Sierra Leone. Kasho Cole, chairman of the Western Area Rural District Council, told the Los Angeles Times that his council is “sensitive to environmental concerns, having banned sand mining on certain beaches because of the devastation it has already caused.”

Cole also acknowledged that assessments had not been carried out anywhere in the district to determine sand mining’s environmental impact. Due to large-scale illegal sand mining operations, Cole could not provide a definite amount of sand extracted from the beaches. 

Sand theft, the unauthorized and illegal form of sand mining, has led to a worldwide non-renewable resource depletion issue, causing the permanent loss of sand and significant habitat destruction. Sand mining has already made a significant environmental impact in North Stradbroke Island and Kurnell in Australia; the Indian states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Goa; and the Red River in Yunnan, China. 

In the United States, the sand mining market generates slightly over $1 billion per year. The industry continues to grow annually by nearly 10% because of its use in hydrocarbon extraction. Globally, sand mining is a $70 billion industry, with sand selling for up to $90 per cubic yard. 

In Sierra Leone, sand mining operations are regulated on John Obey Beach, a village 20 miles south of the Western Area (Freetown Peninsula.) According to the Environmental Protection Agency, sand mining should be banned on all beaches apart from John Obey. However, when the police leave the beaches at 5 p.m., the mining continues after dark. 

Efforts to address the issue are hampered by conflicts of interest from those involved: miners who need the work, construction companies who need the supply and investors who are getting rich taxing the sand. Last year, a press statement from the local police force confirmed “certain service personnel appear to be aiding and abetting this illegal act.” 

As dump trucks continue to haul sand away and tides push further inland, John Obey Beach is slowly disappearing—taking trees, businesses, homes and dry land with it as far down the coast as Bureh, a surf town two miles south. While the activity contributes to Sierra Leone's coastal erosion, which is proceeding at up to 6 meters a year, the removal of sand also changes wave patterns that move sand along the coast, altering the quality of surf that Bureh, a renowned surf spot in Africa, is known for. 

Prior to the war, Sierra Leone’s beaches were packed with adventurous travelers from around the world. Kolleh Bangura, the director of Sierra Leone’s Environmental Protection Agency, told The New Humanitarian that “sand-mining is a calamity for the tourism industry… Anywhere in the world, sand is the resource of tourism, but now our beaches are being degraded.”

Lakka, a coastal town located 10 miles from Freetown, was once known for its large beaches and seaside resorts, offering a glimpse of the future if actions are not taken. Sand mining on Lakka Beach is illegal now, but the ban came too late—leaving a thin wedge of sand lined by crumbling buildings, many of which have been left abandoned. 

Even the miners themselves recognize sand mining is not sustainable; however, with a youth unemployment rate of 70%, the pressure falls on the government to provide alternative jobs. “In time, they need to ban it, as we want to bring tourism here,” Abu Bakarr, a sand miner, told The New Humanitarian. “But we need sand-mining to sustain our lives…The government needs to give us jobs. If there are no jobs, the youths will mine the sand.”

Papanie Bai-Sessay, the biodiversity officer at Conservation Society of Sierra Leone, told the Los Angeles Times that “the sand has been a buffer… we are destroying our first line of defense. If we don’t stop, it will be a disaster for millions.”

Claire Redden is a freelance journalist from Chicago, where she received her Bachelor’s of Communications from the University of Illinois. While living and studying in Paris, Claire wrote for the magazine, Toute La Culture. As a freelancer she contributes to travel guides for the up and coming brand, Thalby. She plans to take her skills to London, where she’ll pursue her Master’s of Arts and Lifestyle Journalism at the University of Arts, London College of Communication.

Has the West Forgotten About Ebola?

Although the Ebola crisis has remained ongoing, it has received no tangible attention in Western media since 2015. A compelling explanation for this phenomenon rests in colonial associations of race and disease, and the way in which those associations have become implicitly present today.

Nurses Caring for Children at the Height of the Ebola Epidemic. World Bank Photo Collection. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In 2014-2015, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia experienced 11,300 fatal cases of the Ebola virus. While not comparable to the scope of the incidence rate in Africa, the handful of fatalities in the West sparked panic about the growing global public health crisis of Ebola. Following the first fatality due to Ebola in the United States, the crisis reached national and international news. 

In reality, the outbreak of Ebola, although it has diminished since 2015, is far from being over: nearly 3300 new cases, including 2171 fatalities, have resulted from the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 12 months between October 2018 and October 2019 alone. Although incidence rates remain steady across Central and West Africa, concentrated especially in the DRC, with additional incidences possible in Tanzania, major media coverage in the West has dwindled to nearly nothing following 2015. The hypocrisy in media coverage in the West and especially the U.S. regarding Ebola is nuanced, and stems from a long history of biases that have developed and been reinforced throughout centuries. 

That is to say, race has been implicitly coded over time into the way in which individuals conceive of hygiene, sanitation, and disease. Much of this coding arose from and became reinforced in colonialism: the colonized was marked “dirty, diseased.” In response, the colonizer labeled itself as a “savior.” Moreover, the concept of miasma, the leading Western theory of disease during the colonial era stipulated that disease originated from “foulness,” which—while not entirely incorrect, potentially misplacing correlation as causation— came to be shorthand for the treatment of the indigenous populations under the Western gaze. The concept of “foulness” was coded into the very identity of the colonized by the colonizer, as the status of the imperialist rested on the denigration of the colonized. It is these social relations which, then, are informative of the present social relations. 

Consequently, centuries later, these attitudes have become baked into everyday life, translated over time from explicit positions into implicit biases. Even during the height of the crisis in 2014, attention has been brought to the phenomenon of the implicit white saviorism in the media reporting. The illustration in the West minimized the victims of Ebola in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to numbers. In this way, the narrative implicated a diseased, “backwards” population in need of saving—implicitly posturing a parent-child relationship, rather than one of symmetrical foreign aid between states. This relationship creates an “us-other” distinction, such that when the virus reached the West the line between “us” and the “other” blurred. Once there were no longer instances of the Ebola virus in the West, the virus returned to its status of something belong to the “other,” directly reminiscent of the colonial attitudes regarding miasma and the colonizer’s role among the colonized. 

Important to note, researchers have found that the cases in the most recent wave of Ebola in the Congo have disproportionately affected women. A dearth of medical research has found that the medical conditions of women, especially women of color, are minimized implicitly both in the medical profession and in general thought. This tendency towards minimization of marginalized groups further adds complexity to the issue of the asymmetry in coverage surrounding the Ebola outbreaks. 

Certainly, this is not to say that anxiety over the proximity of the virus in the United States in 2015 is not partly explanatory of the brief surge and decline of Ebola’s salience in the media. However, the racialization in the framing of public health crises is crucial to understand the dynamics of outbreaks such as the one that has been ongoing. Although still a serious public health crisis, the Ebola virus largely disappeared from the media after its incidence in the West fell back to zero. This phenomenon has had concrete consequences: experts estimated that the incidence rate of fatal cases in the 2014-2015 crisis could have been reduced by 80% had response measures been instated two months ahead of when they were initiated. The responsiveness in public health crises is directly related to the salience of those crises: Westerners were simply less likely to label the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency until the virus was discovered in the West. The asymmetries in media coverage do not occur in a vacuum, however, and understanding their roots and implications is critical to their mitigation.

HALLIE GRIFFITHS is an undergraduate at the University of Virginia studying Foreign Affairs and Spanish. After graduation, she hopes to apply her passion for travel and social action toward a career in intelligence and policy analysis. Outside of the classroom, she can be found, quite literally, outside: backpacking, rock climbing, or skiing with her friends.