Over the years, the diamond industry has had a devastating impact in countries such as Sierra Leone, Angola and the Congo, where profits from the sale of diamonds have been used to fund brutal wars, with disastrous effects on local communities.
The majority of people in Angola were not provided with any kind of schooling and were completely illiterate, very badly paid, and treated almost as slaves.
The official independence celebration was going to be held over four or five days, and a group of journalists from all over the world was allowed to fly in, because Angola was closed otherwise.
I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months.
The trip I made to Angola to study the prehistoric contents of the gravel beds as a means of deciding the age of the deposits and their economic potential was the first time prehistory had ever been used for such a purpose.
Women in Africa, generally a lot needs to be done for women. Women are not being educated, not only in Angola but my trip to Nigeria, one point I would make over and over again was that women need to be educated too.
Nineteen-seventy-nine had been a year of American setbacks around the globe. Before the year began, Cuban troops were already roaming Angola, and a pro-Communist regime ruled Ethiopia.