In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

‘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 mineshafts 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.’

‘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 honourable 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.

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.

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 Sebastiao 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.’

‘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 merchandise. There were lip-sticks 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 travelling salesman.

‘He goes from mine to mine selling this rubbish. Who needs aftershave in a place like this? Instead of saving their money these foolish people come here, to America!’

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 colour, 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 Paleolithic 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.’

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.

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.

The woman ran from one hole to the next, crying down each tunnel. All the other children had scurried to the surface. They said that Adi had been digging in a separate tunnel, away from the others, when the earth above had collapsed. The mother screamed, her features locked in an ecstasy of pain. Nothing is so agonizing as to see the face of a mother who has lost her child. I couldn’t bear to watch. The miners crowded round, comforting her. I wanted someone to reassure the woman that there was hope, that children have been pulled from rubble days after an earthquake. But like everyone else, she knew that her son was already dead.

Adi’s body was eventually found a few minutes before sunset. The time that it took to dig the boy out was testimony to the depth at which he had been working. The camp’s wild, carefree atmosphere had evaporated. That evening none of the miners joked or boasted, and there was no talk of Tigrayan whores. Instead they banded together like brothers, and for the first time I felt respect for them. One of their own had died. He may have been a child of nine or ten, but he was a miner who’d perished in the line of duty. In silence the corpse was carried at shoulder height down the muddy track into the village. The mother walked beside her son, resting her hand gently on his head. Her eyes were swollen with grief.

The sordid carnival of the previous night was nothing but a memory. No one drank in the bar. The few clients who couldn’t stay away simply sat there staring into space, consoling each other. In the back room, the fire under the still was starved of fuel. The drip, drip, drip of transparent liquid had ceased. The whores sat about plaiting their hair, ready for a night without trade.

Adi’s crushed body was wrapped in a clean white shawl and laid out in his parents’ home. Samson and I stopped there to pay our respects. The hut was already filled with people.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul . . .

Samson’s eyes were closed as he spoke. Perhaps he was remembering past friends and enemies whose lives had ended under the ground. When we left the hut, he looked up to Heaven and rebuked God. Then he held his Bible to his face and wept.

Next morning, long before the mining had begun, the villagers rose and filed from the camp. Most were wrapped against the early chill in their shammas. Their heads were bent towards the ground, their faces long and drawn. Noah led the procession which snaked for a mile or so south of the mine. We walked near him. Behind us Adi’s body was carried at waist height, with his mother and father, and their closest friends following behind.

A grave had been carved out of the brick-red soil in an area away from the gold seam. The body was placed in the hole and, with little ceremony, it was covered over. Then the first light of dawn turned the sky steel blue.

By seven o’clock the mine was burgeoning with activity again. The pans of golden earth were wending their way up from the bottom of the pit, and the dark, cramped network of tunnels was busy with infant workers. A young miner had been lost, but hardly anyone stopped to reflect. Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

In the late afternoon a vehicle could be seen negotiating the jagged track leading to the mining community. We could hear its engine revving for a mile or more before it arrived. The miners didn’t have to look: they knew the car. It was the property of a local government bureaucrat. Somehow he’d heard that there had been a death and he had come to get the details down on paper.

Noah told me to go into his thatched hut as quickly as I could. The only thing the bureaucrat would like more than a dead miner was a foreigner to torment. So I hid in Noah’s shack while Samson hastened back and forth, filling me in on what was happening. The administrator, he said, was questioning Adi’s parents, telling them to go to Shakiso to help with an official report. That was the last thing they intended to do.

‘If the government knows about this and other illegal mines,’ I asked, ‘then why don’t they close them down?’

‘They’re in it for the money,’ he said. ‘They buy most of the gold, and they sell it at a big profit. Unless they send the army down here they’re never going to be able to stop all the mining, and this way at least they get the lion’s share of the profits.’

Despite this, I found that the miners had a pretty accurate idea of international gold prices. For this reason they only sold part of their haul to the officials.

‘If they let on just how much gold’s coming from this seam,’ said Samson, ‘then the government would have no choice but to nationalize the place. Then they might have a rebellion on their hands.’

There was already insurrection in the air. Samson reported that hundreds of miners had left the pit and were massing around the official. I could make out loud voices, then shouting, and finally the rumble of an engine as it sparked to life.

‘How did he find out that someone had died?’ I asked Noah later when he returned from the mine-shaft.

‘There are spies, lots of them,’ he replied. ‘In fact it is strange that they haven’t handed you in.’

Now that he mentioned it, I realized that the miners had been friendly towards me. They had welcomed me as courteously as they knew how, and some had offered to show me the surrounding area at night or to feed me.

‘You’d better watch out,’ said Noah, ‘they’re probably planning to rob you or kill you.’

‘No, the country America,’ he said. ‘They see you as their way out of here and over there.’

Like all Ethiopians, the miners had a grand plan which culminated with their arrival in the United States. No other country was good enough—none had the cachet of America. I hadn’t been in Ethiopia long, but dozens of people had already asked me how to get a visa for America. I’d even heard of agents who, for a steep fee, could prescribe the best route across the Atlantic.

Dawit’s head was round, like a small watermelon, and it appeared to balance on his wide shoulders without any trace of a neck. His palms were as soft as a beauty queen’s cheeks. They’d obviously never been down the mines. Dawit laughed riotously at the slightest opportunity, and I asked him why he was always so cheerful.

Dawit stopped laughing and lowered his head. The only thing he never joked about was business.

‘These days it’s harder to get an asylum visa,’ he said, ‘but there are lots of other ways in. You can go through another country, like Germany, France or Britain. You can say you’re a priest and get a Christian foundation to sponsor you, or pretend to be a Jew and go via Israel. Or, if you can get to Mexico, you can jump across the river . . .’ He paused for a moment, trying to remember its name. ‘The Rio Grande, they call it the Rio Grande, and the water’s very low at the moment. But the best way to get to America,’ he said, flexing his shoulders, ‘is to get yourself a foreigner’s passport.’

I was struck by how much Dawit knew and the more we spoke, the more impressed I became. There were very few questions he could not answer. At last I asked him which was his favourite American city.

Dawit looked blank and then burst out laughing, and Noah and Samson collapsed in hysterics. When eventually they stopped, the three of them stared at me as if I were mad.

After meeting Dawit, I tiptoed around the village, gripped by paranoia. If I disappeared and my passport was taken by a swarthy young Ethiopian, it could be months or years before the crime was discovered. I told Samson of my worry and forbade him to leave my side even when I was asleep—in fact especially when I was asleep. That night my dreams were filled with gangs of miners creeping into the hut, snatching my passport and slitting my throat. Then they fought with each other to see who would win my passport for the journey to America.

The next morning I awoke to find Dawit at the foot of my sleeping-bag. He’d had an idea in the night, he said. I was to give a short informal talk about America to the miners. As someone who’d passed through US Immigration several times I had inside knowledge that I could pass on. It sounded like an easy way to please the community, so I agreed to talk in the open space that evening.

Life at the gold mine was pleasant so long as you didn’t have to do any mining. There was a perpetual sense of risk, balanced by the lure of instant wealth. The place was like a grand casino. Money raised by communal mining was shared out, but anyone who found a large nugget was permitted by the others to keep it. Whether anyone realized it or not, the system encouraged industriousness. The big problem though was that all of them were unable to stop mining, regardless of how much gold they found.

Everyone I spoke to said they would leave if they found a big enough nugget, but I knew that that was a lie. The miners had become addicted to the gambler’s lifestyle. Nothing, except possibly religion, could prize them away. And in any case, anyone cashing in on a big find had debts to pay, and what was left would be blown in an instant.

‘If you look at this place,’ said Samson as we sat together in the late morning sun, ‘you’d think there wouldn’t be much in the way of expense. But you’d be wrong. Miners make good money, much more than any other Ethiopians. But they have to pay back the money they owe to other miners, they have to buy clothes and food, and they have to send money home to their families. Then there are illegitimate children to care for, there’s araki to buy, and Tigrayan girls to employ.’ Samson stared at the baked earth as he remembered the corrosive existence. ‘The most expensive thing of all,’ he added, ‘is treating others to luxuries—women and drink.’

‘Just in case one of them finds a big nugget,’ he said. ‘If you don’t help them when they’re poor, they won’t remember you when they’re rich.’

Life must have been much the same for prospectors working in the Klondike, in California, or in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. The first great gold rush took place near the Sacramento River in northern California in 1848. A carpenter working at a sawmill there found a sizeable gold nugget. Try as he might to keep his find quiet, word soon got out. Within days there were tens of thousands of would-be miners camped out nearby, and within four years more than 250,000 miners had descended on California. Living in the most terrible conditions and blinded by greed, they were risking everything for the sake of gold.

I met an Italian recently whose great-great-grandfather had set out from his native Milan in search of a fortune in California. He saw the prospectors living like dogs, eating rotten supplies and using lousy equipment. The Italian had intended to search for gold like the rest of them. But as soon as he saw the conditions in which they lived, he changed tack. Instead of thinking about gold, he turned his hand to bringing in supplies. Within weeks he’d made a fortune selling saddles and clothes, pans, chemicals, tents and food.

Look at the map and you can see traces of those pioneering days in the names—Bonanza Creek, Gold Hill, Gold Creek, Eureka. But the name which crops up again and again is Ophir. Christian miners were certain that they’d discovered the Old Testament land. In Bedakaysa no one apart from Samson and Noah had ever heard of Ophir. They had no interest in Bible readings. They had been residents of Hell for far too long. Samson called them ‘The Children of the Devil’.

We often discussed the idea of Ophir. Samson felt sure that Solomon’s gold had come from ancient Ethiopian mines. He pointed out that the Israelites had probably acquired the metal from many mines in one region rather than from a single glorious pit. He said that a giant mine only existed in the minds of novelists and Hollywood, and he reminded me that an entire region, or country, can get mined out, especially where the gold veins are close to the surface, as they are in Ethiopia. Modern industrial mining processes can sift through thousands of tonnes of ore each day. But mining was no less thorough before the days of heavy machinery. Hundreds of thousands of prospectors at the Klondike River did the work of the machines, as they do today in mines like Bedakaysa.

In London I had managed to buy a handful of books written at the turn of the last century which told of Great Zimbabwe, the ruins which the Victorians thought were once Ophir. One of the volumes had been published in 1899 and was written by an eccentric German professor called Carl Peters. The book was entitled King Solomon’s Golden Ophir: A Research into the Most Ancient Gold Production in History. Peters tackled the subject with Teutonic thoroughness and came up with an interesting theory. The Old Testament writers were usually very precise in giving details. Why then did they give no indication as to the whereabouts of Ophir? They seemed to assume, says Peters, that everyone knew where it might be found. If Ophir was remote there would have been a need to supply the curious with details. Africa was a land known to the ancients, though they knew little of its interior or overall geography. Might not Africa and Ophir be one and the same? In support of his theory, he looked at the etymology of the word ‘Africa’. The original root of the name, according to him, was Afer, probably meaning ‘Red’ or ‘Red Land’, as in the common colour of the continent’s soil. Afri were its people, and African the adjective which described them.

In the century since Peters’ book was published, it has been proved that the Great Zimbabwe ruins are not connected with the ancient Israelite kingdom, the land of Solomon. Even so, Peters’ theory seems plausible. Ophir might well have been Africa, and Solomon’s gold might well have come from a region of the continent that lay close to his kingdom, the mountainous hinterland of Ethiopia.

In the late afternoon I paddled at the edge of the panning pool. The miners were hard at work, ferrying their pans of earth from the bottom of the crater. Children darted about selling sticks of roasted maize, sugar cubes and knitted hats. From time to time women and children came up from the mine where they had been digging and swapped places with the panners. Panning was backbreaking work but it meant that you could at least wade in the thigh-deep water and keep cool.

The male miners were proud of their profession and keen for their sons to follow them. Noah told me that mining gold was considered the most macho thing a man could do. Miners scoffed at farmers and laughed uncontrollably if one mentioned people who did office work. They rated the value of a job by the thickness of the callouses it gave their hands.

Noah was an exception. He had two young sons but he shuddered at the thought of them entering the mine.

‘They’re having an education,’ he said. ‘The only way I can pay for it, though, is by mining. I pray that I’ll find a big nugget. Why do you think I spend such long hours in the tunnels risking my life?’

‘Back in Kebra Mengist,’ he replied. ‘I won’t let them even come to the mine. I’m not ashamed of the work, but I don’t want my wife or my two boys to see the savage people I live with.’

Dawit came over and said it was time for my talk. He’d spread the word through his network of contacts and he expected a bumper audience. We made our way to a flat patch of land to the west of the main mine. Young men would sometimes play football there. Others used it for their ablutions, and the place was running with rats and stank of human excrement. Despite the stench, dozens of miners had already arrived. More were turning up every minute. Most of them knew that a foreigner had been staying in the village, but until that moment they had regarded me as of little use. That was about to change. Dawit had billed me as the man who could put an end to all their problems—he had declared somewhat fictitiously that I was the missing link between them and America.

Samson grew nervous when he saw the extent of the crowd. He said there was a danger of the local official closing the event down and arresting us. Having been in big gatherings in India and Africa before, I was more worried by another danger. At a right-wing rally in Nigeria, given by a fanatical Christian preacher from Germany, I’d seen dozens of people trampled to death. The pastor claimed to have the power to heal the sick. He told hundreds of cripples to make a pyre from their crutches and wheelchairs. When they’d done this, the preacher claimed to have healed everyone, and with that he drove off in his stretch Mercedes. Of course no one was cured. Instead, tempers boiled over and the crowd stampeded. The saddest thing was to see all the disabled left lying on the ground without their crutches and wheelchairs, unable to get home.

Dawit assured me that there would be no stampede. Everyone present, he said, had paid one birr entrance fee, or at least had promised to pay later. The children sat at the front, wriggling in the dirt, a little unsure of why they had been coaxed to attend. Their parents and the general population of miners stood behind them. There must have been about five hundred people. The Tigrayan girls had donned their best dresses and vinyl high heels, and were sitting with the children. The entire congregation was united by their interest in the title of my talk, ‘Getting to America’.

When they were quiet, and we were sure that there were no stragglers still to come, Dawit introduced me, speaking in Amharic, while Samson translated.

‘Mr. Tahir has come from faraway America,’ said Dawit, ‘to tell you about his wonderful country and how to get there.’

After a prolonged greeting, I began my talk. Whenever I said the word ‘America’, the gathering drew a deep breath.

‘America is an amazing country,’ I said, waiting for Dawit to finish translating my words. ‘It’s sometimes known as “The Land of the Free” because everyone has rights.’

One of the young men began to heckle me, demanding to know what people in America thought of Ethiopians there.

‘People like Ethiopians in America,’ I said, reassuringly. ‘I’ve met many Ethiopians there who have a good wage, but they were not frightened of starting in a simple job.’

‘Not exactly . . . more like working in a restaurant. But it’s important to study hard and to learn English. If you have a qualification you can earn a lot of money.’

‘It’s a big country,’ I said, ‘with many ports of entry. Some people cross over from Mexico, but that’s getting harder; and others come in by sea. But the best way is to get a friend or a relative to sponsor you, or to have a job waiting for you. You see, if you’re “uniquely qualified”, they can easily bring you from overseas to do the job.’

One of the Tigrayan girls had a question. She rose to her feet, thrust her chest out towards me and asked: ‘Do American men need us?’

I was taken aback by this question, but rather than discourage her, I replied with enthusiasm.

I carried on, padding the talk out with information about life in America, saying it wasn’t all like the movies, and that the streets weren’t paved with gold. Some of my metaphors must have suffered in translation.

Then, winding up, I said jokingly that they could push me down one of the mine-shafts and steal my passport. That would give one of them at least an easy entry into America. The miners looked at me and then at each other. Then they stared at the ground and giggled nervously.