Gold (23 page)

Among the uses for gold listed on its website, Barrick includes
such devices as medical thermometers capable of detecting the tiniest changes in a patient's temperature. And it's true that gold makes a good thermometer, but not because it measures what is happening to the human body. It's good because it measures what is happening to the human race.

1
. The technology of faking gold is getting better, most of it apparently based on the near-identical densities of gold and tungsten. The counterfeiter drills out plugs of gold from a bullion bar, replaces the gold with an alloy of tungsten, and covers the replacement plug with a thin layer of gold. The
Financial Times
reported a Chinese scam that involved “a complex alloy with similar properties to gold.” The fake contained about 51 percent bullion, and seven other metals: osmium, iridium, ruthenium, copper, nickel, iron, and rhodium. A skilled metallurgist had made it. One of Hong Kong's biggest jewelers, the Luk Fook Group, was fooled by such fake gold.

Empires rose and fell in the desert—secretive, enigmatic, fabulously rich.

I
N
K
ING
S
OLOMON'
S
M
INES,
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.