Gold (24 page)

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
D
akar
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.

B
Y 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.

T
HE 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.