by Tahir Shah
The crater almost was the size of a football pitch and about a hundred and fifty feet deep at its lowest point. It had been carved out of the rocky African dirt, a fragment at a time. A thousand shades of golden brown reflected in the bright sunlight. The miners were covered in mud. I hardly noticed them at first, but as my eyes adjusted, what I saw took my breath away.
Thousands of men, women and children were digging with their hands. A few had basic implements, shovels or iron pikes. All were barefoot, dressed in ragged wet clothes, their skin glistening with sweat, and all were laboring desperately to dig out the earth and haul it to the surface. It was a sight out of the Old Testament, and at that moment the notion of Solomon’s mines fell sharply into focus. For the first time I understood what I was searching for.
In the village I’d been the cause of great interest, but at the mine itself the workers were too busy to look up. Each had a role to play. If one person paused in his work the system would begin to break up, then production would slacken and money would be lost.
At the bottom of the pit were the diggers. Many of them were women and children. They’d chiselled their way further and further down, through layers of clay, rock and earth. You could see the gold seam clearly. It was a honey-yellow strata, which started about thirty feet down. The upper layers of soil had been piled in a bulwark around the edge of the crater, and the precious vein was being chipped away and carried to the panning pools. Moving such an enormous quantity of earth called for brutish manpower. Hundreds of men, perched on fragile ledges, tossed the pans of soil from one to the next in a giant relay. Their biceps were savagely over-developed, enabling them to transfer a forty-pound pan from the bottom of the crater to the surface in thirty seconds flat.
Once at ground level, the gold ore began another relay, to the panning pools. A great deal of water is necessary for panning, which is the usual way to extract specks of gold from an alluvial lode. The river had been dammed, creating a large pond edged with rushes and water hyacinth. A series of sluices had been built to filter out rocks and to allow a constant stream of fresh water into the pool. In fact, the system hasn’t changed much since it was invented by the ancient Egyptians five thousand years ago.
Most of the panning was done by women and children, using round, wooden pans about three feet wide. A gentle sluicing movement removes unwanted dirt and, if you’re lucky, leaves a fine crescent of gold dust at the bottom of the pan.
The ancient Egyptians turned panning into an art form, and it was from them that Solomon’s kingdom learnt the technique. In the late nineteenth century, gold tailings in the Egyptian desert were discovered and processed by archaeologists. They found that almost no gold had been left by the miners working five millennia before. But the cost was high. The Nubian Desert is littered with human bones, no doubt those of slaves who succumbed to the heat and the toil. The main difference between Solomon’s mines and the illegal ones in Ethiopia is slavery, or rather the lack of it. The Ethiopian miners were working for themselves. There was no need for whips and threats of death. Greed was their master, goading them to work from before sunrise to dusk.
Noah led the way from the main crater to another area, where many hundreds more were working in a labyrinth of tunnels. The openings were like well-shafts, dozens of them stretching out over a distance of about three hundred feet. Etching out smaller, individual seams, the lone workers labor in an underworld where cave-ins are a constant threat. Samson said that every year the narrow tunnels entomb many young men. But for the men without fear the rewards are high. If they find a nugget, they swallow it or stuff it up their rectum, for retrieval later. In the mining camps, trust doesn’t exist.
When I asked how much precious metal had been found, I was always greeted with anxious looks. No one would admit to finding any gold at all, even when everyone knew they had. Although the gold was supposed to be shared out equally in a loose co-operative, everyone lied, cheated and stole from their neighbours. The only people who’d boast were the younger men. They did so to impress the whores, whom they hoped would give them a free servicing. But, as the girls knew very well, anyone boasting about what they’d found, hadn’t found anything at all.
FIVE
Children of the Devil
“Where the south declines towards the setting sun lies the country called Ethiopia, the last inhabited land in that direction. There gold is obtained in great plenty.”
Herodotus, The Histories
Dusk falls swiftly in southern Ethiopia, casting a cape of blackness over the gold mines. The air gradually cools and then comes alive with tremendous bats. Noah said they were the spirits of the miners killed in cave-ins. Enraged at being cheated by death, they were desperate to bite their companions who still worked in the mines.
Soon after dusk the strong young men slunk up from the mine-shafts and returned to the village. Even for them it was far too dangerous to stay out after dark. Who knew what a shaft miner had swallowed? Given the right circumstances there were plenty of would-be murderers eager to find out.
“They slit your throat with a razor-blade or a sharpened belt buckle,” Samson explained. “Then they cut open your intestines and sometimes even your bowels.”
“Very messy,” added Noah.
“How does the murderer get away with it if he’s covered in blood?”
“That’s not the problem,” said Noah. “If he’s found gold he’ll buy some araki and everyone will forgive him. The problem is if he doesn’t find anything and he can’t afford a few rounds of drinks.”
There was no church at the encampment, a fact which made Samson increasingly restless. He said he could smell depravity in the air. Noah, also a staunch Christian, had proposed erecting a house of worship, but the other miners had scoffed at the idea.
They said a church was a waste of money, and proposed instead that a team of them should be sent up to the northern state of Tigray to bring back new prostitutes. The ones at the mines were, by all accounts, riddled with venereal disease. Tigrayan women have angelic features and copper skin, and are considered by many people to be the most beautiful women in Africa. A large number of the prostitutes I’d seen at the mining village, not to mention in the bars in Kebra Mengist and Shakiso, were Tigrayan. Samson told me that prostitutes usually work in another region, for fear of bringing shame on their families.
Without a church to pray in, Samson and Noah sat on a bench in the bar and talked about Jesus. They swapped stories of his life and drew morals from his teachings. A pressure lamp lit up the room like daylight, causing the huddle of miners to blink nervously. They preferred the shadows. An empty glass was sitting before every one of them. Bizarrely, the walls of the bar were papered with The Straits Times, the Singapore daily. Beside my head was an interesting feature about black magic rites performed by Dyak headhunters in Malaysia. I pointed it out, but no one was interested. They had only two things on their mind — araki, and how to get some more of it.
Noah said that little gold had been found that day, so I bought a round of drinks. The araki was served warm, straight from the still. Quite often a batch is so strong it turns to a crude form of poison, knocking out everyone who drinks it. Quality control is non-existent.
Samson and Noah shunned the araki and pulled out their Bibles. I respected them for staying faithful to their religion in what were testing circumstances. They were like missionaries in a foreign land. But they knew as well as I that saving souls and spreading God’s Word was a sure-fire way of getting themselves killed. What surprised me most was that Samson had managed to wrench himself from the debauched spiral of life at the mine.
“Gold mining is like a drug,” he said. “The more gold you get, the more you need to excite you. Your closest friends are dying around you, but you don’t give them a second thought. All you can think about is araki, Tigrayan whores and the meaningless knick-knacks you’re going to buy.”
Samson’s father had stressed the value of education to his sons.
> Studying, he’d told Samson as a youngster, was the key which could open the doors to life. I was struck by the clear goals Samson had set himself, now that he had escaped from the world of prospecting. In his spare time, he was learning computer programming, a skill which he had heard would be useful if and when he got to America.
“For years I wasted every moment working at a mine like this,” he said, pressing his Bible to his stomach. “I turned my back on my parents and my true friends, accusing them of jealousy. But worst of all I turned my back on God. If I’d not got away, I’d have been dead long ago. Yes, I may be much poorer — but driving a taxi is more honorable than this!”
He motioned to the pack of thirsty miners who were ready for more free drinks. Then he begged Noah to leave the mines. But his friend said he was wedded to the profession, addicted to the thrill of danger and the financial rewards.
When I had doled out as much charity as I could afford, a string of tall Tigrayan women trooped into the bar, each wearing yellow vinyl shoes and a transparent top. Their hair was braided tightly and their mouths shone with fuchsia-pink lipstick. None of the miners had any money, but the girls took credit. Samson said some of the men, the older ones at least, had wives. But they liked the prostitutes, whom they considered to be sophisticated. One of the women, plumper than the rest, sat down beside me. Her name was Hannah. When I asked what she thought of the miners, she rolled her eyes and blew me a kiss.
“You go America, tomorrow?” she replied.
I didn’t understand.
“No, no, I’ll be staying here at the mine for a few days.”
“Not America... tomorrow?”
“No,” I said.
She sneered at me and turned her attention to a hulking creature with a fresh gash down one cheek. Again, I heard her asking about America. I doubted if the man even had a passport, let alone a visa to the United States. But as he massaged her thighs, he whispered: “America, America.”
The evening dragged on, with Samson and Noah discussing the Psalms, and the miners racking up huge bills on credit with the working women and the bar’s one-eyed owner. As the hours passed, it seemed that everyone was talking about America, and any man who merely uttered the magic word was assured the Tigrayan girls’ attention.
As I settled down to sleep in Noah’s hut that night, I wondered how an entire population could have become so desperate to get to a place of which they knew so little. Samson rarely stopped going on about the life he’d lead in that far-off land. Even as he read the Bible or discussed the lives of the Apostles, I could sense him thinking of America.
To him and others, America was a place full of opportunities where Ethiopians were given prospects and a future. Samson had applied to the US Embassy for a visa but had been refused. He knew the chances of gaining entry were slim, and he was turning his mind to more subversive tactics. Someone had told him that you could go to Mexico and cross the border by swimming the Rio Grande. Another had suggested he find a rich American woman and persuade her to marry him.
The following morning, three more women asked me if I was going to America. Then a gang of children selling maize and roasted barley came over to tell me that it was nearly time for America. They would be going over there to have a look.
“When? When are you going?”
“Oh,” one replied dreamily, “any minute now.”
By the time the first rays of sunlight spilled over into the mine, two thousand workers were busy digging the ground or lugging ore up to the panning pools. As the sun rose it baked the ground, making the business of digging far harder. The miners toiled away like convicts.
A few years before, I’d seen Sebastião Salgado’s extraordinary black-and-white photographs of the enormous Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil. I remembered images of mud-drenched men, tens of thousands of them, climbing rickety ladders up the sides of the pit. They carried sacks on their backs, filled with soil to pan. The mine near Shakiso didn’t have ladders. Rather, the workers would take their positions and stay in them. In some ways their system was more efficient. Hurling pans of earth up in a giant relay was much speedier and far less tiring.
The miners were working together because they had to, but I never got the feeling that they did so willingly Given half a chance, they would happily have killed the man or woman next to them for the smallest nugget of gold. Noah pointed out three or four characters to keep away from.
“That’s Josiah,” he said, pointing to an elderly miner with a limp. “He killed his own wife after suspecting she’d stolen a pouch of gold from him. He’s already asking why you have come here.”
Noah tapped one finger on his nose meaningfully.
“And that’s Yohannes over there. He’s got Aids, but he still rapes the Tigrayan girls.”
Later that morning I left the mine and walked back through the village. Samson had been complaining that his shoes were being ruined by the ankle-deep mud and I’d offered to buy him a pair of rubber boots. We headed for the market area and had a good look through the heaps of old clothes on offer. The only boots were parrot green and four sizes too big. He took them anyway.
There was a commotion at the far end of the market. In the distance I made out a throng of Tigrayan girls mobbing a stall. They were admiring its stock of impressive merchandize. There were lipsticks and handbags, blankets and bed-sheets, leather footballs and French aftershave, silk shirts, Swatch watches and cartons of 555 cigarettes. Some of the girls sidled up to me and implored me to buy them luxuries.
Samson said it was all contraband, brought from Djibouti once a week by a traveling salesman.
“He goes from mine to mine selling this garbage. Who needs aftershave in a place like this? Instead of saving their money these foolish people come here, to America!”
“America?” I exclaimed.
Samson pointed to a crude, hand-drawn board hanging above the stall. On it, in Amharic, was the word America.
As we wandered back towards the crater I found myself questioning man’s obsession with gold. How could a simple, relatively useless yellow metal have been so important for so long? Was it the color, the weight, or the warmth of it in one’s hand? Or was it the fact that gold stays brilliant and clear of rust in even the wettest climate?
Whatever the reason, gold has been hoarded and worked since the days of the ancient Egyptians, though man discovered the metal long before Pharaonic times. Fragments of natural gold have been found in Spanish caves, apparently put there forty thousand years ago by Palaeolithic man. And the lure of gold has been responsible for some truly terrible episodes in history, not least the Spanish conquest of the Americas that brought the Aztec and the Incan empires to a brutal end.
With the sun beating down on our heads, we clambered down the slalom of trails leading towards the floor of the crater. The first thing I noticed as I descended was a sharp rise in temperature. Fifty feet down and I was gasping for breath, asphyxiated by the press of hot air. Another fifty feet and my pores began to run with sweat. The miners tossed up their weighty pans higher and higher in their well-rehearsed relay. They too were sweating, but I never saw one of them pause for water. When they needed to pee, they did it where they stood.
We squatted in the deep glutinous mud at the bottom of the crater, catching our breath and wishing we’d brought a supply of drinking water. Around us were dozens of women and children, all shovelling earth on to the round wooden pans. Up above, the children had been thrilled at the spectacle of a foreigner and eager to cluster around and get a good look. But on the floor of the pit there was no such interest. The children worked like slaves. Indeed, they were slaves, for I doubt they got any share of the money they earned. Working alongside them, their mothers were brawny and well built, with strong backs and muscular hands. Several of them were obviously pregnant.
One of the boys, aged about ten, slipped me an affecting smile. Samson told me that the children start young.
“They work down here in the pit,” he
said, “but they’re more useful to bore the tunnels which run along the actual gold seams. You can send a child down a hole just a few inches wide.”
“Don’t they ever get stuck?”
Samson nodded.
“Yes. Then they suffocate. Or else they’re killed in cave-ins.”
Our timing couldn’t have been worse. As Samson finished his sentence, we heard shouts from beyond the pit. The area echoed with sound at the best of times, but these yells rose above the usual noise. Many of the miners dropped their pans and scrambled to the surface. Others were running round the periphery of the crater.
“Cave-in,” said Samson coldly. “Someone’s trapped, probably a child.”
We left the women and children and hurried up the steep banks and over to the maze of tunnels. A crowd of miners were digging furiously with pikes and spades, and one man was shouting out, calling a single name: “Adi! Adi! Adi!” But there was no response.
A woman came running, tearing barefoot down the track from the village. She was weeping hysterically. I found out later that no one had called her, she had simply known that her son, her eldest boy, was trapped. We listened, all quiet, desperate for a sound. But there was silence, a terrible, haunting silence.