Empires rose and fell in the desert—secretive, enigmatic, fabulously rich.
IN KING SOLOMON’S MINES, THE Victorian potboiler whose adventurers find treasure in the heart of Africa, a book captured the spirit of an age. It was a publishing sensation. Its author, H. Rider Haggard, became a millionaire. The reading public, captivated by such recent discoveries as Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, snapped up the novel so fast that the publishers had trouble keeping it in print. When Alan Quatermain, the swashbuckling hero, heads up an ancient road to the royal city of Loo, the reader found the exploit believable. Not long before, explorers had discovered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, a stone city whose oldest buildings dated from the eleventh century. Haggard’s book created a new literary genre, inspiring such bestsellers as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The success of these books revealed a whole country’s hunger for adventure.
Today the gold rush is that adventure. It catapults us out of the quotidian into an enticing dream-world of riches and romance. Africa brims with gold. We emerged from Africa. Maybe the idea of gold came with us.
I thought of this one night on the balcony of a hotel in Dakar, when I couldn’t sleep. In the morning I was leaving on a journey across Senegal to a distant goldfield. I would cross the territory of vanished empires as fantastic as any that Haggard had imagined. The gold rush has awakened them. The forests teem with people whose gold mining skills originated in prehistory. The gold empires of Africa had captivated Europeans centuries before Haggard wrote his book. Portuguese ships had gone scraping past Dakar in the 1400s as they probed the coast of Africa for the gold kingdoms. They had not found them.
I gave up on sleep and phoned for coffee. There was no moon. The electricity had failed in the night. The ocean lay a hundred feet away, invisible, wrinkling softly on the beach. The desert deposited a layer of grit on the balcony, grainy underfoot. We left Dakar at 5:00 A.M.
A succession of empires rose and fell in West Africa from about the seventh century, when a ruler called Dingha Cissé established the Wagadu Empire. It was a secretive and enigmatic power, fabulously rich, in the Mauritanian and Mali deserts. The Soninké people domesticated camels and established trade routes to North Africa. They traded salt, slaves, and gold. The location of the mines was a state secret. The monarch could field an army of 200,000, including 40,000 archers and a strong cavalry. A merchant who visited the ruler’s court in the eleventh century gave this account:
He sits in audience or to hear grievances against officials in a domed pavilion around which stand ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials. Behind the king stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the kings of his country wearing splendid garments and their hair plaited with gold. The governor of the city sits on the ground before the king and around him are ministers seated likewise. At the door of the pavilion are dogs of excellent pedigree that hardly ever leave the place where the king is, guarding him. Around their necks they wear collars of gold and silver studded with a number of balls of the same metals.
In the myths of the Soninké, every year a seven-headed snake called Bida replenished the gold in the mines. In exchange for the annual sacrifice of a maiden, Bida caused a rain of gold. This arrangement ended when a young man decided to keep the maiden for himself, and cut off Bida’s heads. The gold rain stopped. The mines ran out. The Soninké lost their empire.
Over the centuries one empire melted into another through decline and conquest. News of these kingdoms reached Europe, and the Portuguese went looking for them. They established a trading port, but failed to find the gold source. In 1698 the Dutch traveler William Bosman described what the adventurers believed about the people who lived inland. “They are possessed of vast treasures of Gold besides what their own Mines supply them with, by plunder or their own commerce.”
The Ashanti state was the last of the African gold empires. In its founding story, a golden stool descended from heaven into the lap of the paramount chief Osei Tutu I. The federation started by this leader in the seventeenth century eventually extended into the Sahara, absorbing parts of the old Wagadu Empire. The Ashanti king, called the Asantehene, ruled a population of about 3 million. Extravagant reports about him circulated. A Danish doctor wrote that “this mighty king has a piece of gold, as a charm, more than four men can carry; and innumerable slaves are constantly at work for him in the mountains, each of whom must collect or produce two ounces of gold per diem.” The Ashanti state had a treasury filled with gold that was cast into standardized weights. They traded gold at outposts on the Atlantic, a trade that gave the country its European name—Gold Coast. Inevitably, the traders wanted to see for themselves where all the gold was coming from. On April 22, 1817, the British consul Sir Thomas Bowdich marched inland to find the Ashanti capital.
They set off in good order. A breeze came off the sea. They entered the green shade of the jungle on a pathway paved with pulverized quartz. Then the jungle sucked the breeze away, then the sunlight. The men advanced into a steamy, twilit furnace of vegetation. The quartz path ended. Then there was no path at all. They struggled forward into mangrove swamps. Their nostrils filled with the stench of rotting vegetation. Sweat poured into their eyes and soaked their clothes. Bowdich wrote:
The ground of our resting place was very damp, and swarmed with reptiles and insects; we had great difficulty in keeping up our fires, which we were the more anxious to do after a visit from a panther. An animal which, the natives say, resembles a small pig, and inhabits the trees, continued a shrill screeching through the night; and occasionally a wild hog bounced by, snorting through the forest, as if closely pursued.
They marched for two weeks and came to the ruined villages of the Fante, a people crushed by the Ashanti. Ashes and skulls littered the township. The troop set off again and crossed the Pra River into Ashanti country and found clean villages with wide main streets. On May 19, 1817, they halted a mile south of Kumasi and changed into scarlet uniforms and sent messengers ahead to announce their arrival to the Asantehene, who certainly knew of it already. He sent word for them to wait until he finished bathing. When the king was ready, messengers told the British to enter the city. They marched in at two o’clock in the afternoon, passing under a suspended fetish, a dead sheep wrapped in red silk.
Thousands of people packed the road to stare at the first Europeans most of them had seen. Massed Ashanti warriors filled the air with a shattering din—horns, drums, rattles, and gongs. Fusillades of musketry rolled a dense curtain of smoke across the visitors. So thick was the smoke that the British could only see the path immediately in front of them until they reached a clearing in the crowd. In the open space, flag bearers sprang from side to side waving banners, and the captains leapt in to dance.
The Ashanti captains wore fantastic war hats with gilded rams’ horns and plumes of eagle feathers. Their red cloth vests were decorated with fetishes and passages of Arabic script stitched in silver and gold. Leopards’ tails hung down their backs. As they danced and vaulted in the ring, small brass bells fixed to their costumes jingled. They wore red leather boots that came up to their thighs. Quivers of poisoned arrows dangled from their wrists. Each captain gripped a length of iron chain in his teeth.
When the dance ended, the Europeans were squeezed along through narrow lanes in the packed multitude. They saw streets with long vistas jammed with people, and houses with open porches where women and children clustered to watch them pass. When they neared the palace, horns and flutes played “wild melodies,” while huge umbrellas were used to stir the air and refresh the British with a breeze.
As the soldiers waited to be summoned, a troop of guards with caps made of shaggy black skin led a prisoner by on his way to execution. A knife pierced the man’s cheeks and his lips were sewn shut, and his body showed the wounds of other tortures. The escort pulled him along by a cord through his nose. Then the British were summoned forward.
Our observations . . . had not prepared us for the extent and display of the scene which here burst upon us: an area of nearly a mile in circumference was crowded with magnificence and novelty. The king, his tributaries, and captains, were resplendent in the distance, surrounded by attendants of every description, fronted by a mass of warriors which seemed to make our approach impervious. The sun was reflected, with a glare scarcely more supportable than the heat, from the massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction.
More bands burst out—drums, flutes, and bagpipes. Noblemen and members of the royal family lined the way, and high officials of the kingdom—the gold horn blower, the chamberlain, the master of the bands. They wore brilliant clothes and massive jewelry. Gold necklaces drooped to their waists. Gold bands circled their knees, and disks and rings and little casts of animals, all made of gold, jiggled and clinked on ankle chains. The most important men had heavy nuggets hanging from their wrists, “which were so heavily laden as to be supported on the head of one of their handsomest boys.”
Above the court a sea of huge umbrellas rose and fell as the bearers moved them in an undulating wave to churn the air into currents. The cloth of these giant parasols was sewn from pieces of yellow and scarlet silk. The tips blazed with gold ornaments—elephants, pelicans, crescents, and swords. The umbrellas flashed and twinkled as the sunlight played on tiny mirrors sewn in the cloth.
A huge man with a heavy gold hatchet slung across his chest stood near the king. He was the executioner. His attendant held the execution stool, thick with clotted blood. The keeper of the treasury displayed his symbols of office—solid-gold scales and weights, a blow pan and boxes. Under its own umbrella sat the golden stool, the symbol of the nation. The king’s soul washers wore gold disks or golden wings. The soul washers caught any evil directed at the king, deflecting it with their gold insignia. Four linguists stood near the monarch. The Ashanti had no writing. The linguists were their living archive, with an encyclopedic knowledge of tribal lore and proverbs. They acted as spokesmen for the king, and ambassadors, and carried staffs topped by gold finials with finely wrought designs—a spiderweb, an antelope with antlers full of birds.
The king sat in the center of his court, in a chair covered in gold. Attendants waved a veil of elephants’ tails spangled with gold in front of him. Bowdich thought he was about thirty-eight years old. He wore a dark green cloth. A ribbon of glass beads circled his temples. A red silk cord across his shoulder held three fetishes wrapped in gold. Gold rings hid his fingers. A white crown was painted on his forehead. He had gold castanets in one hand, and could bring the court to silence with a click.
After greeting the king, the British were conducted to a tree some distance away. The whole court milled around and put itself in order for the next stage of the proceedings: repaying the visit. Now the sea of umbrellas, springing up and down in a billowing parade, advanced on the guests. Chiefs rode in crimson hammocks. They dismounted thirty yards from the British and approached to welcome them. Regiments marched past the visitors. Bowdich and his officers reckoned there were 30,000 men in military order. It was late in the evening, “a beautiful star light night,” as Bowdich wrote, when the king himself approached. Torchlight glittered on the Asantehene’s regalia. The skulls of enemies decorated the largest drum. The king stopped and asked the British to repeat their names, then said good night and at last retired, followed by a throng of sisters and aunts shimmering with gold.
I spent an afternoon in the British Library looking at maps the first cartographers had made of the Ashanti lands. On top of one I placed a sheet of acetate so I could flatten the paper and examine the exquisitely drawn huts and streams. The prowling lions looked like large and irritated spaniels. The whole top quarter of the map was colored in a pale green wash and annotated in a flowing script. “Rich in gold,” the cartographer had written, “found in nuggets in pits nine feet from the surface. Brought to Kumasi in solid lumps embedded in loam and rock which together weigh fifteen pounds.”
In 1824 Britain began the first of its campaigns to subdue the Ashanti. They sent expeditions against them from the coast, and seized Ashanti gold mines. The final conflict began when the British governor Sir Frederick Hodgson arrived at Kumasi in April 1900 and demanded the most sacred object in the land.
Where is the Gold Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment? I am the representative of the paramount power; why have you relegated me to this chair?
The Ashanti seem to have been dumbfounded by the deadly insult. But that night, in a secret meeting, the queen mother Yaa Asantewaa poured a scalding speech onto the men.
Now I have seen that some of you fear to go forward to fight for our king. If it were in the brave days, the days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye, and Opoku Ware, chiefs would not sit down to see their king taken away without firing a shot. No white man could have dared to speak to a chief of the Ashanti in the way the Governor spoke to you chiefs this morning. Is it true that the bravery of the Ashanti is no more? I can’t believe it. I must say this, if you, the men of Ashanti, will not go forward, then we will. We, the women, will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.
The queen’s words stirred the men into a rage. In the events that followed, sometimes called the Yaa Asantewaa War, a British detachment, unaware of the mounting danger, went hunting in the nearby bush for the golden stool. The hostile Ashanti engulfed them. Only a sudden downpour saved the soldiers, covering their retreat. A six-month war ended in Ashanti defeat. The British exiled the queen to the Seychelles, where she died. The Ashanti lands were merged into the Gold Coast, now Ghana.
I DROVE OUT OF Dakar with Martin Pawlitschek, a forty-three-year-old Australian geologist who lived in the city with his wife and two children. Tall, with pale blue eyes and light brown hair, Pawlitschek has an easy, affable manner. We had a thermos of coffee and a package of almond tarts. I felt the keen pleasure of being up before dawn. We blundered through the dark streets until he found the highway he was looking for. Masses of people crowded the dark edge of the road. Women with baskets on their heads swayed along in ankle-length skirts. Merchants in white galabias took the shutters from their shops, and roadside stalls bloomed like predawn flowers. Riders on Chinese motorcycles shot through the traffic, weaving among the overloaded trucks that tilted as they dodged the potholes.
We were setting out to drive across Senegal to a package of gold targets in the hills along the Mali border. Geologists had known for years that the ground was promising, and when Senegal passed a new mining code in 2003 that protected investors, in came the drills. An Australian company struck gold, developed a mine, then asked a banker in Toronto to find someone to run it. He found Alan Hill.
Hill had been running a Romanian gold mine, but had quit in the face of “frustrations.” Romania had been a gold producer from antiquity, although in 2000 it became better known for producing catastrophe, when the tailings pond of a mine in the ancient gold mining center of Baia Mare ruptured, spilling 3.5 million cubic feet of cyanide into a tributary of the Danube.
When Hill left Romania, his Canadian management team came with him. The Australians hired them all and formed Teranga Gold Corporation. (Teranga means “hospitality” in Senegal’s dominant Wolof dialect.) Teranga was floated in Toronto. It raised $145 million. The main assets were the company’s 130,000-ounce-a-year Sabodala gold mine located on the original discovery, and a glittering package of exploration targets. Hill planned to double the size of the mill, and Pawlitschek’s job was to find the gold to feed it.
BY THE TIME THE SUN came up we were clear of the city. A cloud of flamingos descended on the Saloum salt flats. The chimney of a salt mill belched dark smoke. Solitary baobob trees scratched at the sky with their demented branches. We came to a stretch of highway pocked with craters. A semi had put a wheel into one and lay on its side like a shot rhinoceros. Boxes and packages had broken loose from the trailer and spilled into the shrubbery. Guards crouched beside the fallen cab.
Driving east across Senegal is a journey backward into time. The accidents of modern life peel away. Traffic peters out, leaving the road to the long-range trucks that ply the route to Mali. The plain, dotted with thirsty trees, extends to the horizon. Thin cattle search the brown grass. Horse-drawn carts appear on tracks beside the highway. Cinder block houses give way to the thatch and mud-brick of the villages.
At Tambacounda we stopped for lunch at a roadside hotel. The grounds were thick with neem trees, a species of mahogany imported from India by the French, who planted them in the villages for shade and because they are supposed to keep mosquitoes away. We parked beside another white Land Cruiser. Jean Kaisin, a Belgian geologist living in Dakar and hired by Pawlitschek, was headed for the gold camp with two Senegalese geologists. Also riding with him was an elfin woman from Dakar named Awa Ba, who drove an ore truck at the Sabodala mine. She wore a fuchsia-colored tracksuit with a blaze of silver sequins. She sat quietly while the men talked around her. The waiter brought us steaks as tough as planks. As the men sawed and struggled around her, I watched the cutlery flash in her delicate hands. We were all still hopelessly adrift in the task when she laid her knife and fork neatly on her empty plate.
After lunch we headed off in convoy. The vegetation grew more sparse. Thorn trees dotted the desert. Where villages clustered at the road, women in stalls sold a drink called thé bouye, made from monkey bread, the dry fruit of the baobob tree. When we stopped for gas, boys came to beg for coins. I learned later that they were pupils from a madrassa, an Islamic school, and had been sent out by their teachers, a practice the local people disapproved.
Late in the afternoon we crossed the Gambia River. In the shallow waters below the bridge, people panned for gold. We entered the Mako Hills. We climbed into a rocky forest. A gray pig the size of a Fiat pranced out of the bush and crossed the road without a glance, melting into the trees. The rock was a rusty pink. Pawlitschek said that it had oxidized in the open air. The resulting color suggested the presence of iron carbonate. Such a rock would have come to the surface in a hydrothermal flow of the kind that transports gold. The Mako Hills were part of a geological feature called the Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier. We had driven onto it when we crossed the river.
An inlier is a window of younger rock pushed up into older rock. The Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier was composed of 1.6-billion-year-old rocks. About 40 percent of the inlier lay in Mali and 60 percent in Senegal. In Mali, three large gold mines fattened their balance sheets on the formation. The Senegalese side had remained relatively unexplored. Pawlitschek was eager to show that what had been found in Mali would be found, in the same rocks, in Senegal.
Shadows lengthened on the road. We would not reach the camp in daylight. Twelve hours after setting out we broke our journey at Kédougou town, at a small hotel on a cliff above the Gambia River. I dug out some photocopies of old maps and went to find a place to spread them out.
After the dusty road the hotel was an oasis. Guests stayed in thatched cabins in a palm plantation. A cool breeze rattled the fronds. White parrots shuffled on their perches in an aviary, and four crocodiles dozed in a heap inside a cage. Two American girls at the pool flashed their Ray-Bans at me before returning to the study of their toes. I settled into a chaise and leafed through images of the Mali Empire.
Of the gold kingdoms that rose and fell in the desert, the empire of Mali was the one that haunted the search for gold in Senegal. Its founder was a prince called Sundiata Keita, “hungering lion.” The empire lasted from about 1230 to 1600. The exploration ground that we were headed for had supported gold mines that contributed to the wealth and power of this dominion. The Mali Empire was unknown to Europeans until the appearance of its greatest ruler, Mansa Musa.
Mansa Musa built mosques and palaces in cities such as Timbuktu and Djenné. In the imperial capital Niani he constructed an audience hall with an enormous dome. One tier of windows was framed in silver foil and another in beaten gold. At its height in the twelfth century, the empire comprised hundreds of cities and towns. A large urban population lived along the Niger River. Gold mines produced the kingdom’s wealth. Sometimes called Lord of the Mines, Mansa Musa captivated the European imagination. In the Catalan Atlas of 1380, almost the whole of Africa is blank. In the center of the map, instead of countries and rivers, a black king in gold regalia sits on a golden throne. In one hand he brandishes a fist-sized nugget. When the Portuguese had sailed down Africa looking for a port, it was Mansa Musa’s kingdom they were looking for. And so were we.
I met the geologists for dinner in an open dining room behind an oleander hedge. The sun sank and the river glowed like copper. Far away across the bush rose the purple mass of the Guinea Plateau. Below us a boatman drifted down the current. Conversation turned to the Malinke people, who panned for gold in the river as they had for centuries. They mined gold throughout the region, as they had in Mansa Musa’s time. Jean Kaisin, who spent years in that part of Africa searching for the emperor’s mines, told us the story of Mansa Musa’s great journey.
In 1324 the emperor set out to make his hajj. He had a retinue of 60,000 soldiers and retainers and 12,000 slaves. Heralds in silk livery carried gold staffs and proclaimed the king. He had a treasure train of eighty camels, each with a load of gold dust. It’s probable that so much wealth had never been assembled into one cargo in all of history. The king brought it to give away.
Friday is the Muslim holy day, and every Friday of his journey, no matter where he was, Mansa Musa paid for the construction of a mosque. In Cairo he made so many lavish gifts that he flooded the gold bazaar, and the price collapsed. A single man disrupted the Mediterranean gold market—Europe’s market. An obscure, little known desert kingdom broke into European consciousness as a land of immeasurable wealth. By the time the Mali Empire passed, Europe’s gold obsession was chewing up other kingdoms. The desert mines seemed to disappear from history. Mansa Musa’s fabulous deposits lay largely forgotten until one day in 1989, when an explorer poking on a hill found an abandoned gallery a quarter of a mile long.
THE MAN WHO FOUND THE emperor’s mine wasn’t a geologist, or even a miner, but a character whose story seems taken from fiction. He stumbled on a clue and seized it, and uncovered a lost treasure.
Mark Nathanson was the son of a wholesale grocer from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. He married into a wealthy Taiwanese business family. In the 1980s, among other commercial travels, he began to visit Mali. The country was then a Soviet client state, but Nathanson, learning about Mansa Musa, was more interested in Mali’s past than in its present. In his spare time he picked through archives. One clue led to another until, in a library in Spain, he came across a 300-year-old map of the Sahara, and there on the map, in what is now Mali, Nathanson saw a name that would lift the heart of any treasure hunter: Ophir!
Treasure hunters have searched for a fabulous city called Ophir for thousands of years, hoping to find its legendary mines. In antiquity they looked for it in India, Arabia, and Africa. The son of a king of Sheba was said to have “built Ophir with stones of gold, for the stones of its mountains are pure gold.” To the pre-Islamic Copts of Egypt, Ophir was another name for India, a country synonymous with opulence. Ophir is the fictional lost city of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and the name of a kingdom in the Conan the Barbarian series. In a famous lithograph from the California gold rush, a sailing ship arriving in San Francisco has the name Ophir on its stern.
How many quests start this way? The hero finds a map and off he goes. There was no Ophir on contemporary maps. Nathanson traveled through western Mali searching for towns that a cartographer 300 years ago might have labeled with the name of the legendary city. In that part of Mali artisanal miners were still producing small amounts of gold. Itinerant gold buyers regularly visited the area. Nathanson decided that if he were stopped by the authorities and questioned about his travels, he would say that he was scouting for things to buy, including gold.
Nathanson based himself in western Mali’s provincial city, Kayes, a sweltering town of 100,000 surrounded by iron hills and baked at temperatures that often rise above 100°F. From Kayes he headed into the countryside along the Falémé River, the border with Senegal. On trips that lasted months, he visited the scattered villages. He inspected gold digs, hoping to find the remnant of a mine that might have once been rich enough to attract the name Ophir. In village after village he saw miners grubbing for small amounts of gold, with no sign that they had ever produced more.
With no particular expectation, Nathanson came to a village called Sadiola, an unpromising collection of farmers’ huts. Scrawny cattle competed for grazing with scrawny goats. There was no other sign of village wealth. Nathanson explored the vicinity anyway. There was a hill nearby, and he set out to climb it. As he went up the slope he noticed an indentation. He stopped to investigate, and realized that the depression was the mouth of an adit, a horizontal mine tunnel. It was blocked with debris. No other signs of mining disturbed the hill, only the single adit closed by rubble. He returned to Sadiola with his guide, and learned the story of the hill.
There had indeed been gold mining at Sadiola. The villagers’ ancestors had mined it for centuries. But about a hundred years before, the adit had collapsed, killing every man inside and decimating the local population. Mining had ceased from that day, the hill declared forbidden. No local person would dig there. The adit was what Nathanson had been looking for: evidence of large-scale mining, possibly important enough to have suggested the name Ophir to a European who had heard of it. Moreover, the tragedy and subsequent forbidden status of the ground explained why no one worked it now. To a gold seeker, Sadiola cried out for a drill.
But Nathanson kept quiet. With Soviet influence still strong in Mali, he knew that any discovery would end up in Russian hands. He bided his time. When the Soviet Union crumbled, Mali’s government went looking for investors. And so did Nathanson.
“The first I heard of it,” said Larry Phillips, a Toronto lawyer who became part of what its members called the Mali syndicate, “was a phone call out of the blue in late 1989. It was Bill Pugliese, one of my clients, and he was calling from Switzerland. He was on a ski holiday, but he had this deal that he wanted to proceed with. He sketched it out to me. A gold prospect in Mali. He wanted to buy exploration rights in western Mali. The Mali government was asking for a $2.2 million letter of credit from his bank, and Bill wanted me to examine the letter.
“I sort of panicked,” Phillips said. “I thought—I hope he hasn’t written a check! Then I thought, where’s Mali?”
Soon Phillips was battling his way through the challenging due diligence of a deal with a country that had no advanced business infrastructure. Legal drafts flew back and forth across the Atlantic. Mali is a French-speaking country, and Phillips needed the help of French law firms with African expertise. As he learned more about Mali and its past, he got hooked. He read the journals of the eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park and French colonial accounts of the region. He learned about the scale of the early gold mines. In the end, he found the prospect irresistible. “So I joined the syndicate myself,” he said, “and we went to Africa to take a look.”
One of the most important business practices of a small exploration company is secrecy. Big companies prey on little ones. From its earliest tactics the Mali syndicate showed how thoroughly they understood the need for stealth. To disguise the location of their target, they took a 500-square-mile exploration license—a massive package that a junior company could never explore properly. If pressed about the size of the license they wanted, they would say that they had multiple targets. Protecting their target became even more important when the government launched a program to promote exploration.
When the Russians had left, Mali had taken advantage of European Union development money to conduct a large-scale geophysical survey of the country. They wanted to locate mineral formations that would attract foreign explorers. The survey had identified the Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier, where Sadiola lay, as a gold-prospective zone. Exploration companies arrived to take a look. The syndicate’s large land position concealed its discovery. “We had all that land,” said Phillips, “but really, the main target was always Sadiola, and that’s what we did not want to advertise.”
At Sadiola they found the galleries of a mine that had been worked for 900 years. By 1992 the syndicate had outlined a reserve of 3 million ounces. The mine went into production in 1996, planning for 285,000 ounces a year and an eight-year life of mine. Instead they got 400,000 ounces a year for twice as long, and have since found another 5 million ounces that will extend the mine life by a decade.
The discovery at Sadiola ignited an exploration rush on the Mali side of the inlier. Randgold Resources, a Channel Islands–based gold miner, found the Morila and the Loulo deposits, which together contained 15 million ounces of gold. With the liberalization of Senegal’s mining code in 2003, the search swarmed across the Falémé River into Senegal. Teranga’s Australian owners discovered Sabodala, and Randgold found a deposit at Massawa. As the gold price rose, this search intensified, and a day after leaving Dakar, Pawlitschek and I drove into the bamboo forest and reached Dalato camp.
THE CAMP SAT ON A high bank of the Falémé River. A row of square, white-painted concrete sleeping cottages with thatched roofs stood along one side of a central plaza. Construction workers swarmed around the concrete shell of a new accommodation building. The camp teemed with geologists and exploration crews, and was so overcrowded that drillers were spilling out of the cantonment into tent camps in the bush.
As we parked, the stocky figure of Donald Walker, the chief geologist on site, exploded into view. Walker and Pawlitschek plunged into a discussion of the day’s complexities. Teranga had a 328,000-acre land package that stretched for sixty miles along the Falémé River. It was a largely trackless waste of choppy hills and rock and scattered villages. Lions and leopards patrolled the bamboo thickets. Onto this landscape the explorers were superimposing the logic of a gold search.
In the camp’s main office, charts covered the walls. Cabinets with narrow drawers held maps and diagrams and drill plots. The geologists swept some Styrofoam cups from a counter and Walker spread out a chart that Pawlitschek wanted to examine.
The exploration of a large gold prospect typically begins from the air. A plane tows a pod containing a magnetometer, a device that scans the upper levels of the crust and measures the relative abundance of magnetic materials, such as iron oxide and magnetite. Because different rock types contain different amounts of these minerals, a map of the magnetism shows geologists where different rock types meet. Since the hydrothermal flows that carry gold from the mantle to the surface exploit such weaknesses as these meeting places, the mapping shows geologists where to look.
Another type of airborne survey narrows the search. Radiometrics measures the radioactive emissions from the surface that result from the decay of isotopes. This information helps date the rock. Geologists already know from regional experience the age of the local rock most likely to hold gold. This new data further help target the drills.
Geologists had already identified 10 million ounces of gold in eastern Senegal. Teranga had drilled hundreds of thousands of feet of exploration holes, and sampled and trenched throughout its license. It had twenty-seven priority targets. Late that night we went to see the richest one—the Gora target.
We left camp and drove past the sleeping village and into the bamboo forest. The trees beside the road were covered in dust and in the headlights looked like a forest of white trees. A panicked squirrel shot across the road, trailing a plume of dust, like snow. After a while a distant light came into view, and we made our way toward it, following the twists and turns of the track until we reached the fantastic scene where the drill rig hissed and roared.
Covered in white rock powder, the Ghanaian drillers looked like ghosts. They moved with an alien deliberation, like astronauts on the moon, filling plastic bags with chips of rock that gushed from the drill. They wore bandannas to keep from breathing dust. The drill was white and the men were white and the ground was white, and all around was the thick black night. A Senegal bush baby—a small, nocturnal primate—sprang from the darkness through the light, a pair of astonished eyes.
The Gora target was a gigantic block of buried quartz that poked out at that single point—like the tip of an iceberg. Gold-bearing “pay veins” ran through the quartz. One was thirty feet thick. The quartz went down in to the surrounding rock at a steep angle. The drillers had tracked it for about a mile. They knew where the gold veins pinched and swelled, but not where they ended.
The deeper they drilled, the more they found. On the night I was there the drills had outlined 70,000 ounces. At that night’s gold price, the deposit would be worth $100 million. A few months later they had more than doubled the estimated gold to 156,000 ounces. Now it’s 374,000 ounces—enough for a five-year mine, and, as I write, more than a half a billion dollars worth of gold. In the forest, a rival army was watching to see what Pawlitschek had found, so they could find it too.
IN THE MORNING I RETURNED to the forest on a mapping trip with a short, grizzled geologist named Michel Brisebois, a Quebecer who had started out in life as a lumberjack. He’d developed a taste for roaming the world, and decided that the profession of geology offered the best way to finance it. We rode up with a camp employee, a South African army veteran who droned on and on, like a radio that could not be turned off. The program that morning was Horrible Things That Different Kinds of Ammunition Can Do to Your Body. He dwelt long and lovingly on the holes made by certain bullets: tidy hole at entry; messy hole at exit. Then the program switched to snakes and scorpions. In that part of Senegal they have the emperor scorpion and the black-necked spitting cobra. “But the worst is the puff adder,” he said cheerfully as Brisebois and I piled out at our starting point. “The toxin of the puff adder is a cytotoxin. It attacks your cells. People do not always die, but they are never the same again.” He gave us a smile like a bandolier loaded with white bullets.
Brisebois shot him a sour look and struck off into the bamboo. “That guy is an asshole,” he said when we were in the thicket, “but I’ll tell you something. Watch an African in the bush. He looks at the ground, because that’s where the danger will come from. And don’t walk too close to me. If I surprise a snake, you are right there on top of him before he has a chance to get away, and it’s you who will get bit.”
Brisebois wore a tan vest that bristled with pens. A compass dangled from his neck. His graph-ruled notebook filled with tidy entries as we picked our way among GPS coordinates. The day was fresh and the forest suffused with a straw-colored light. A faint smell of wood smoke lay on the air from farmers clearing land. As we made our way through the greening thickets, charred branches striped my shirt with ash.
“The burnt area is very efficient because you can walk quickly through it and see the rock,” Brisebois said when we reached a formation. “Other than these outcrops, we are walking on a thick cap of laterite. Beneath that lies the gold host. This ridge marks a shear zone. The sedimentary rock sheared and these quartz ridges popped up through it, giving evidence that more of them must lie below.”
Brisebois loved to handle rock. He picked up a piece and opened it with the barest tap of his pick. “You see these boxlike shapes?” The pale gray rock was speckled with faint, rust-red outlines winking with tiny flakes. “They are an iron sulfide called pyrite—the fool’s gold that many people recognize. In this deposit, the real gold is associated with the fool’s gold.”
On the ridge, the bamboo broke the sunlight into splinters. A drill roared nearby. A backhoe had made a trench in the hill we were exploring, and there we chanced on an outpost of the competition. At the bottom of the trench gaped a deeper hole, about a yard square; but this one had been dug by hand. A well-made buttressing of logs kept it from collapse. The shaft penetrated too far down for me to see the bottom. The local people who had sunk the hole had viewed the backhoe trench as a free head start. They had reasoned that if the geologists thought there might be something there, it was worth a look. Sometimes the reverse happens—explorers sample where the local people have been digging. A cat-and-mouse game had developed in the forest as each of the two bodies of experienced gold searchers, the new and the old, circled each other. That afternoon I drove out of camp with Djibril Sow and Thierno Mamadou Mouctar, Senegalese geologists on Teranga’s staff, to see if we could find where villagers were digging.
We followed a red road that rose and fell through the hilly forest until it climbed to a plateau and brought us to the village of Bondala. Most of the houses were small and round, covered in a stucco of mud and topped by conical roofs of trimmed thatch. Decorative patterns of twine, ornate and beautiful, held the thatch in place. Bamboo fences encircled the village and divided it into compounds. The only exceptions to the mud construction were a pair of concrete structures—the village school, and the house of a villager who had found a one-pound lump of gold. Bondala was a mining town.
A rough track from the village led into a bamboo thicket. The truck plunged and bucked through crater-sized holes, throwing up clouds of powdery dust that billowed across the hood and covered the windshield. The driver put the wipers on to clear the dirt. We rolled up the windows, but soon our clothes were coated with a fine dust. The geologists said it was a kind of silt, evidence of the sedimentary soils that host the gold in some parts of the prospecting area.
Termite mounds ten feet high rose in the thin wood. Baked hard by the sun, the mounds are made of excavated earth carried up from the termites’ tunnels. The deep systems can extend to sixty feet below the surface. Geologists regularly sample termite mounds to see what lies below. Teranga’s field workers had sampled 20,000 mounds. One of the richest mineral discoveries in history, Botswana’s Orapa diamond pipe, was located with the help of mineral clues carried up by termites. Sampling insect hills may be an ancient practice. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus recorded a story about ants “bigger than a fox” that excavated gold-rich sand in the deserts of Afghanistan.
We came to a place where Teranga crews, investigating reports of local gold digs, had come in and trenched with a backhoe. Gravel lay in heaps, and the tattered forest showed where tracked vehicles had blundered through. Finding nothing promising, the crews had left. But trenching prompted the villagers to investigate in turn. They had put up bamboo sunshades to shield the trench, and dug a few holes. They had not found anything worth pursuing either, and all that remained of their activity was a broken calabash and some poles.
There was not a soul in sight. Djibril Sow was certain there was mining somewhere near. He pointed to fresh tire tracks that led down a narrow track. “Their water truck,” he said.
A cyclist came wobbling along from the direction of the village. We called out but he pedaled away into the bush, ignoring us. We left our truck and followed him on foot. Soon we saw the water truck, more bicycles, and came to the dig. At first I saw only a few dozen people working around six or seven holes, but as we walked into the site, I saw that it stretched much further, as far as I could see into the thin wood. The whole village was out digging for gold.
Clearly they resented and distrusted me, and would not even look at me until my companions explained that I didn’t work for the company and was not a geologist. It would have been hard to mistake me for one. I wore an old tennis hat. My hands were as red as lobster claws and my snowy outfit, fresh from the hotel laundry in Dakar, was striped with ash from top to bottom. The kids thought I was hilarious. They would dash up and shout at me from a few feet away, and when I looked at them, they would whirl away and race off squealing. I jumped at one, and the whole pack went shrieking into the trees; but I was fair game after that.
I watched one man scuttle down a hole at least twenty feet deep. He had no ladder or rope, but went down by bracing himself against the shaft wall. With a few quick movements he was at the bottom, where he disappeared. A network of deep tunnels ran beneath the wood. A steady feed of ore came up in baskets. The women panned it in their shallow calabashes. They manipulated these with mesmerizing skill, swirling the water and soil around and tipping off the lighter particles until they had a residue of heavy grains, and sometimes, sparkling among them, a globule of gold. “They call it in their tongue nara,” said Djibril Sow. “It means nugget.”
GOLD IS ITS OWN COUNTRY. One morning on the bank of the Falémé River I watched a motorcycle buzz into view from the bush on the Mali side. The rider navigated down the muddy slope, bounced across the shallows and tore off into Senegal, headed for a sprawling artisanal minesite at a place called Soreto. It dwarfed the forest digs at Bondala, and miners from Mali commuted to it every day.
The mine was a fairground of men and women, laborers and vendors, miners, children, dogs. The women and girls blazed with gold earrings. People greeted us with shouts. “Bonjour! Ça va?” A woman sipping from a glass of yellow liquid raised it to us in a toast and scorched us with her smile.
They were mining a strike that ran for half a mile. They had trenched the length and screened it with bamboo shades. From the floor of the trench, shafts went down to the mining galleries. Some of the shafts reached depths of 100 feet. Sometimes they hit water, and the miners clubbed together to rent pumps. On a rough head count, about 300 people were working in the mine. Many more supported it.
Mechanics serviced the pumps and blacksmiths made tools. The smiths pumped their bellows with one foot while hammering at iron implements on their anvils. Vendors sold popsicles and water, cigarettes and candy. A small solar array powered a battery-charging station for cell phones. Masses of bicycles and Chinese motorcycles leaned together under a thorn tree. A man with an air pump between his knees sat in the scanty shade repairing tires.
The whole site, and others like it, belonged to the village of Diabougou on the Falémé River. The chief levied “license fees” on miners who were not native to the village, which was most of them. The hamlet had swelled from a population of 1,000 to about 10,000—a rapid influx of outsiders drawn by the gold boom. Diabougou was a boomtown. In stalls along the widest thoroughfare you could buy shoes and shirts, blankets and mattresses, plastic toys, vegetables, fish, televisions. Two cell phone dealers competed head-to-head across the street. On one side of the town stood the old village of round mud houses with thatched roofs; on the other, dwellings bashed together out of anything at hand: mud, tin, planks, cardboard, vinyl sheets. Scooters buzzed through a labyrinth of lanes and boys toiled up from the river with handcarts loaded with plastic water jugs.
Inexorably, the gold rush was erasing an old way of life. On the way to the town we’d met a large herd of goats filling the road. The goatherd was a young man in outlandish costume. He wore a round black hat with a narrow brim, and a loose, ragged skirt almost to his ankles. Tall and thin, he looked at us with profound astonishment. He emitted a series of short, low whistles, like a sentence of code, and the goats surged off the road. He stopped in the grass and gaped at us in bafflement as we went by. I was told these herders have roamed immemorially through Mali and Senegal, following the grass, and are now disappearing. They mine gold instead.
On the flats beside the river stood a line of sluices fed by water pumps. To recover gold, they directed water down a sluice and shoveled ore in at the top. The water carried the ore over strips of carpet nailed to the bottom of the channel. Light soils flowed away while the heavier, gold-bearing gravels snagged in the carpet. They would use mercury to concentrate the gold, handling the toxic substance with bare hands. According to Moussa Bathily, a Teranga geologist, Friday was the day reserved for this gold recovery. No one would work at the minesite on Friday. I asked him if that had anything to do with Friday being the Muslim holy day. “Oh, no,” he said. “They leave the mine because they say that Friday is the day the devil comes to put back the gold.”