Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Driving up the road to the west, through the East African savanna toward the rainforest of the interior, is like a journey in time. Each bend takes you past reminders of the region’s long, unhappy history and of the successive waves of people who have sought wealth here, most recently in more than a dozen years of sporadic, bloody fighting.

  In 1903, two Australian prospectors hired by the colonial authorities examined a riverbed near a village called Krilo and confirmed that it was a potentially rich source of gold. Whites promptly mangled the name into Kilo, and a few years later the first leg of this road was built for bringing in mining equipment by oxcart. The gold diggers put to work here by King Leopold II of Belgium, who then owned the territory, were different from those mining gold at the same time in the Klondike, for they arrived in chains. Leopold’s entire colonial economy was based on forced labor, and the system continued after the king, in 1908, sold his private colony to the Belgian government and it became the Belgian Congo.

  By the following year, there were 1,400 African forced laborers at Kilo; within six years, as nearby mining sites proliferated, the number of people conscripted to dig gold reached 7,500, and it would expand far more. The arrival of miners was an unexpected boon for white ivory traders: they now had a market for the rest of the elephant, selling dried meat to the mines for their workers. The Belgians requisitioned laborers from local chiefs and supplied the chains and metal collars or yokes in which they were taken off to the mines. Chiefs were punished if they failed to provide their quota of men and were required to supply food and building materials from their villages as well. The mining industry was hungry for labor, not just to dig for gold but to be porters carrying supplies, firewood, and equipment to the mine sites. Of the women I see now in long, brightly colored dresses eking out a living selling bananas spread on pieces of cloth at the dusty roadside, how many, I wonder, are the great-granddaughters of those who were marched to the mines in chains? One eyewitness account from 1914 describes mothers nursing babies as they carried loads of up to thirty kilos, or sixty-six pounds.

  Some Kilo miners were compelled to work for a decade or more and released only when they supplied sons to take their places. Repeated uprisings against the forced labor regime were brutally suppressed, and thousands of deserters were recaptured and put to work again. The mines paid bonuses to overseers based on the amount of gold dug by the Africans under their control, whose workday rose to twelve hours during the First World War. Discipline was enforced by armed mine police and by the chicotte, a whip of sun-dried hippopotamus hide with razor-sharp edges, whose blows were meticulously tabulated. Records from one group of northeastern Congo gold camps register 26,579 lashes applied to miners during the first half of 1920 alone. Forced labor remained part of the economy here, as it did almost everywhere in colonial Africa, until the 1940s. The whip lasted even longer.

  Despite having no political rights, the Congolese, ironically, enjoyed their highest standard of living in the decade or so before the colony won independence in 1960. Belgians invested heavily in the gold mines, and although profits continued to flow back to Europe, colonizers came to understand that this industry and others would produce more if workers were well fed, healthy, and literate. Not too literate, mind you: the colony had one of the best elementary education systems on the continent, but virtually no Africans were trained for management positions. Under Belgian rule, schools for whites and blacks were segregated, of course, and no black schools in the gold-mining towns went beyond 8th grade. As we drive farther along the road, past trees with high green bunches of papayas, we can see aging brick health clinics and primary schools built during the late colonial era.

  Other buildings, abandoned, tell the next phase of the story. Sucking his country’s economy dry during his thirty-two years in power, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko spent much of the national treasury on assorted palaces, a huge yacht, an airport near his Congo birthplace, and renting Concordes to pick him up there for trips to Europe. Plum executive positions like those at the Ituri mines Mobutu passed out to members of his clan and to political allies, who knew little about mining, pocketed profits, and let machinery wear out. By the end of Mobutu’s reign, most industrial gold mining had come to a halt. One town we pass, formerly a depot for mining vehicles, is filled with empty workshops, garages, and jumbles of rusted old machinery. We spot the gray concrete bottom of what was once an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The ladder into the pool and the iron framework of two high-dive platforms are still there. Some old men sitting in the shade tell us that this was a club for European skilled workers and company officials. The whites all left soon after independence, they say; the pool closed later.

  As we continue driving up the road, buildings scarred or demolished by artillery or mortar shells are signs of the long period of civil war that followed the end of Mobutu’s rule. Here in the Ituri district alone, at least sixty thousand people were killed outright, and many more died as refugees. Most of the combat in this region has been between two shifting coalitions of militias, each of them intermittently supported by neighboring Rwanda or Uganda. Both countries have eagerly eyed Congo’s gold—and its wealth of other metals, including tin ore, coltan, and tungsten, necessary to make everything from computers to cell phones.

  Today, with some help from UN peacekeepers, the Ituri goldfields are back under the Congolese national government’s control, but the evidence of fighting is everywhere you look. We pass the town of Bambu, once the administrative center for the network of Belgian mines in the region. A guidebook from some sixty years ago recommends the company-run hotel—now long defunct—to the white visitor. Palm trees shade the dirt streets; the firs that line one were obviously imported from Europe. A spacious white plaster and brick villa on a hilltop above town was once the home of the mines’ Belgian manager. When rival warlords and their Ugandan and Rwandan backers battled for control of the area, each side occupied it in succession. “They always liked these buildings high on a hill, especially if the Belgians once had them,” my traveling companion, Anneke Van Woudenberg, explains. In her work for Human Rights Watch she has written a report on exploitation by the mining industry in this region, The Curse of Gold, well known here in its French translation.

  Today, the Congolese army has taken over the villa as its local headquarters, and several dark green military trucks are parked outside. Like the rebel warlords before them, many army officers have profited from gold. Officers seek posts according to which mining areas the position controls. In half a dozen larger Congolese cities, you can find luxurious houses, surrounded by high walls and security guards, owned by generals whose nominal pay is less than $100 a month.

  Along the side of the dirt road walk men in gum boots and sweaty T-shirts, balancing heavy sacks of rocks on their heads. They will put the rocks in a metal bucket and pound them into dust with an iron bar. Then they will combine the dust with water and mercury—which attracts the specks of gold—and, trying not to breathe the toxic fumes, will heat the gold-mercury mix in a pot over an open wood fire to evaporate the mercury.

  We drive up to a checkpoint where two armed sentries wave our car to a stop. “Du thé! Un sucré!” (some tea, something sweet—slang for bribes) they say through the car window, each rubbing thumb and forefinger together. Van Woudenberg, undaunted, gets out to deal with them and with their commanding officer, who wears a brimmed military cap and red braid and emerges sternly from a little guardhouse. Anywhere you travel in Congo, uniformed men demand money; soldiers and police are paid little to begin with, and much of that vanishes into the pockets of higher-ups before it reaches them. But this time a curious thing happens. When the chief of this little extortion post takes Van Woudenberg’s passport, he at first frowns, then looks up and says in French, “You’re the woman who wrote The Curse of Gold! I’ve read it three times!” He sends us on our way with a smile. There is something moving about this: a petty thief applauding someone who has exposed grand theft.

 
• • •

  Half a day up the bumpy road we reach Mongbwalu, which sits next to a gold deposit so coveted that the town changed hands five times in battling between rival ethnic militias in one decade, leaving some two thousand people dead. Warlords wanted the gold to buy weapons—often from the corrupt national army that supposedly was trying to suppress them. The old gold refinery here is now a rusted skeleton, destroyed by fighting in 2002. Some eerie video footage taken here that year provides a microcosm of the entire war. Civilians are seen fleeing, carrying rolled-up mattresses on their heads. Meanwhile, officers in berets, boots, and camouflage fatigues from the militia group Union des Patriotes congolais, which had taken the town a few days before, are carefully examining still-intact refining machinery, a crushing mill, and football-size chunks of gold ore. A Ugandan TV correspondent, doubtless at the request of the militiamen who’ve invited him along, goes on camera to urge “foreign investors” to help get the mines working again. The militia assumed that multinational corporations would have few scruples about dealing with warlords if the stakes were high enough, and they were right.

  We spend the night under mosquito nets at the town’s Catholic mission, and I’m awakened in the morning by the sound of hymns. The colonial-era guidebook describes Mongbwalu as having “hospitals for Europeans and natives,” but today the surviving relic of those times is a spacious cathedral, built by the Belgians in the 1930s, with arched windows and a dark-stained wood ceiling above which priests hid during the last round of massacres. From the cathedral’s front steps is a lovely view of green hills that are the western edge of the great equatorial rainforest.

  Above the altar hangs a huge, mural-like painting that offers an extraordinary glimpse into the colonial past. Madonna and child float on a golden cloud; on the ground below, offering flowers in adoration, are nine or ten African adults and children, several carrying a flag emblazoned with the name of the old Belgian mining company. In a bottom corner, a frightened-looking witch doctor, with feather headdress and necklace of shells, is fleeing the scene, vanquished by the combination of corporate power and the Virgin Mary.

  Although large-scale mining has reaped billions from Ituri over the decades, during the civil war it was largely on hold. Multinational corporations prefer a government weak enough not to tax and regulate heavily but strong enough to guarantee order. Today the fighting in the goldfields area has subsided, the price of gold is soaring, and the conveniently weak Congolese government is back in control. Industrial mining appears about to begin again.

  Just as Australian prospectors set off the first scramble for Ituri gold a century ago, an Australian is chief prospector in Mongbwalu today. The geologist Adrian Woolford, who is thirty, he says, “and getting older by the minute,” is exploration manager for a subsidiary of South Africa–based AngloGold Ashanti, the world’s third-largest gold mining company. Tall, thin, bearded, in khaki shorts and khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Woolford draws the good pay necessary to lure highly trained specialists to this bleak spot. He gets two weeks off for every six he works. On his last break, he vacationed in Cambodia; on the next, he will go to Brazil. Several hundred yards away people are living in dirt-floored huts lit by candles or kerosene lanterns, but in the mining company’s hilltop compound, we are in a little Western island of modern offices, flush toilets, and working electricity.

  On his computer monitor, Woolford shows us a three-dimensional image, which he can rotate so we can see it from any side or from above or below, of what’s underground at Mongbwalu. Bodies of gold ore in brilliant red and yellow are separated by thin green lines of other rock. The image also shows many of the more than five hundred sampling holes that have been sunk in the ground with diamond-bit drills, some of them extending nearly two thousand feet down. Outside the building we’re in, dozens of cylindrically shaped samples of ore from these holes are piled up, like a collection of large gray plumbing pipes, awaiting testing.

  The drilling has confirmed a treasure trove. Beneath less than a half a square mile of ground, next to the hill we’re on, Woolford says, are more than 2.5 million ounces of gold, worth about $3 billion at current prices. And it is found at the rate of about three grams per ton of rock—an extraordinarily high batting average for a deposit this big—all of it within an easy eight hundred feet of the surface.

  The company has about 250 employees on this site. For now, they mostly work inside the compound, tightly protected by private security guards who include Nepalese Gurkha veterans of the British army. The compound’s gates, floodlights, and high razor-wire fence prompt Joel Bisubu, a Congolese human rights activist traveling with us, to call it “Guantanamo.”

  AngloGold Ashanti recently finalized a series of agreements with the government under which it can begin mining here and at another site not far away. At Mongbwalu, it will have an 86 percent share of the operation; the near-bankrupt former state mining company, now being privatized, will have the remainder. Four other multinationals—based in England, Canada, and South Africa—have concluded other closed-door agreements over mining rights. No one will ever know what Congolese government officials reaped from these deals in the way of quietly promised jobs, favors, or money under the table, in a country where such rewards are routine. Representatives of villages in the area, meanwhile, find it hard to get a seat at the negotiating table. Seldom, in fact, do local communities gain much from such agreements; that is part of the resource curse.

  This pattern is all the stronger in a place where the national government has as fragmentary a hold as it does here. A failed state fails its people in many ways, and one of them, in a world of powerful corporate players, is that a weak and corrupt government has no bargaining power. For industrial mining that could create new skilled jobs, Congo desperately needs the expertise and investment capital that, for better or worse, only a multinational can offer. But a company like AngloGold Ashanti, with more than sixty thousand employees at work on four continents, can easily invest elsewhere if the terms in Congo are not to its liking.

  The company would not score high in any social responsibility ratings. During the war years, lucrative mining concessions changed hands many times between corporations eager for future profits and warlords happy to sign contracts. Despite a United Nations embargo on dealings with rebel groups, when a rebel warlord controlled Mongbwalu some time back, AngloGold Ashanti made payments to him, also providing him and his entourage with rides in company planes and vehicles and a house on its concession. While spending millions of dollars prospecting, it has made only small contributions to a local hospital, schools, a soccer tournament, and the like, keeping at arm’s length a coalition of local groups and churches lobbying for this desperately poor community.

  “Of everything we’ve put in our list of demands and grievances,” says Richard Magabusini, an elected chief and member of the coalition, “nothing has been done. They keep saying, ‘We’re just prospecting. We’ll look at all this later.’” AngloGold Ashanti prefers to deal instead with a collection of more pliable community representatives it has assembled, rather like a company union.

  Another point of tension with people here is whether the company will dig a large open-pit mine or sink shafts to tunnel underground. For gold deposits nearer the surface, it almost certainly will do the former, which is far cheaper; people who live here want it to do the latter, for open-pit mining strips away fertile topsoil, leaves a huge gouge in the landscape, and can pollute rivers and streams. Here, it would also require moving an entire village. “We have our ancestral secrets in our communities that must not be disturbed,” says Chief Magabusini. “We are categorically demanding that they not move people.” But he has no power to prevent this from happening.

  As the company takes its slice of Africa’s riches, only a tiny percentage of the proceeds from those 2.5 million ounces of gold is likely to stay in Congo—and even then, much of what does will leak into high officials’ private bank accounts. AngloGold Ashanti mined more
than $1.5 billion worth of gold in neighboring Tanzania between 2000 and 2007, but only 9 percent of that money remained in the country as taxes or royalties. Where do the profits go instead? A good chunk comes to the United States; the company’s largest single shareholder, the hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, lives on New York’s Upper East Side and summers in the Hamptons.

  • • •

  The big money in gold comes to those who can afford to dig massive mines and build refineries to process the ore. But those who cannot, an estimated seventy to one hundred thousand people in Congo’s northeast—including some ten thousand children—dig for gold literally by hand, much the way men did in California’s Gold Rush of 1849.

  Even at 8:30 on a Sunday night, the streets of Mongbwalu, bordered by open sewage ditches with small plank bridges across them, are filled with rubber-booted miners and lined with people and businesses wanting a share of whatever pittance they have earned: gaudily dressed prostitutes, cafés, a bar with a picture of Jesus on the wall, and dozens of shops that buy gold and sell miners what they need. A raindrop-sized silvery globule of mercury in a plastic baggie goes for the equivalent of 75 cents.

  We enter one shop, La Grâce à Dieu—Chez Johnny. A big man in his late thirties chewing a toothpick, Johnny sits behind the dimly lit counter. On a handheld scale, he weighs gold flakes, the occasional tiny nugget, and amalgame, the gold dust separated by mercury from crushed rocks, which is 80 to 90 percent pure. From here the gold will quietly find its way across Congo’s porous border with Uganda, on to refining in Dubai, and then into the voracious world market. An estimated 97 percent of Congo’s gold leaves the country without ever being taxed.