Mali gold
There has to be somebody out there who watches Gold Rush on TV. A short summary is as follows: three different crews are mining for alluvial gold in Alaska. In the programme, every tenth sentence contains the G word: “Hey, look! It’s gold!” and “I’m sure we’ll find gold!” You get the idea?
Last year, my consulting practice was asked if it could go and assist with conducting a noise impact assessment for a gold mine in the country of Mali, in West Africa. Very different from Alaska, I found.
Our quote was accepted. So I told the staff that we were going to Mali. What an adventure! But they were extremely less than thrilled. What about, they said, Ebola? There is an outbreak in Mali. I said you know there is meningitis in South Africa and cholera and malaria . . . and we are going to be miles away from the cities. They would not budge, so I had to go by myself.
I flew to Bamako by way of Nairobi and was driven 240 rattling kilometres to the mining camp. I was assigned a driver called Suliman and a Toyota Hilux.
The day after I arrived, off we went. Suliman explained that the villages around the area all had a main village, called, say, Nariwa, and, as part of its existence, another village, called the Bodega, the fishing village. Thus, there were two villages: Nariwa and Niarwa Bodega. The reason for this was that, occasionally, the Niger river would flood and, when the flood retreated, then Bodega had to be re-established, since it was washed away.
The two main activities were farming and mining. And what farming! They grew vegetables, rice, cassava, apples and maize. Apples? I do not see any apple trees, I told Suliman. Pas de arbre pour lespommes. He pointed out that I was standing under one. I looked up into an apple tree the height of a large oak. They did not prune them, ever. How do you get the apples? Oh, said Suliman, you send some boys up and they throw them down to some boys below.
The artisanal gold mining is terrifying. They dig a hole about 1 m across and about 10 m deep. They lower the miner into the hole with a torch strapped to his cap. He goes to the bottom of the hole and sends up buckets of gravel, which they wash on a crude wash plant. When they have enough gold-bearing gravel, they roil it in mercury, which sticks to the gold. Then they heat up the mercury and gold and distil off the mercury. A dangerous process at every turn.
But here is the thing: just about nobody can read or write. All the gold mining is done by groups that belong to a committee. They pool resources and, to some extent, the gold that is mined. They keep track of who mined what and when by means of an official who writes down everything in a book. And all the characters and numbers in the writing are Arabic.
At the Bodega belonging to Suliman’s village, there were a number of boats, made of teak. The planks were held together with ironwood pins and ropes. The boats have been modified to carry inboard engines. I asked Suliman who made them. He said he did not know – the boats came from a very long time back, before his grandfather. It dawned on me that these were very similar to Arab dhows and, for all I knew, had been used to transport slaves down the Niger river.
As I always do when I go to Africa’s remote places, I had taken a lot of medicines with me to give away. Suliman directed me to the local medicine woman and I explained what the medicines were for. She did not think much of them. After all, how could swallowing a small piece of white chalk cure a headache?
The overwhelming lesson I learnt from my visit was that there are parts of Africa that get along just fine without any foreign aid – which have medicines, food and an artisanal industry. Naturally, things will change, but one has to question: Why should they?
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