The American Mission (12 page)

J
UNE
25, 2009
B
USU
-M
OULI

M
arie couldn't shake the feeling that all she had done was to buy a little time. Her village was, she feared, doomed.

It was hard, however, to be too gloomy on such a beautiful morning. She sat on the porch of her father's house drinking instant coffee sweetened with condensed milk and watching the village children play soccer with a ball she had brought back from South Africa. It had been only five days since she and the American had negotiated the freedom of the mining company team, but it already felt like something in the distant past.

Her father was awake now. She could hear him puttering in the kitchen area. A few moments later he joined her on the porch, a wooden mug of goat's milk in his hand. He was getting on in years, Marie thought. His hair was now mostly gray and there were new lines in his face that could only be partially ascribed to the burden of leadership. He was wearing a pair of faded canvas pants with a rope belt. The pants reached only as far as his calves. He wore no shoes. Marie thought of
the trim black capri pants she had purchased on her last trip to Johannesburg and smiled softly. Her father was naked from the waist up. At nearly sixty, he was still wiry and strong, but his ribs were more prominent than Marie remembered. He was losing weight. This was worrisome.

Like more than a million other Congolese, Chief Moise Tsiolo was HIV-positive. Unlike most, he had access to medications that had so far kept him alive. His daughter had made sure of it.

“Good morning, Papa,” Marie offered in the Luba language.

“Good morning, daughter. You're up early.” Her father replied in French. He had always insisted on speaking French to her, having observed once that there were no great universities holding their classes in Luba.

“Busy day. I need to bury a big hole.”

Her father laughed.

“Don't be hasty, my sweet girl. You've only just gotten home. And don't make any decisions just yet. There have been some changes while you were away.”

“I'm sure. I hadn't expected that you would all just sit around and wait for me.”

“Some have been waiting. And some things don't change. Jean-Baptiste has been asking for you. He knows you are home.”

Marie frowned slightly at this. She and Jean-Baptiste A Nyembo had been briefly involved nearly a decade ago. Papa liked Jean-Baptiste and had not understood why Marie had broken it off. That Marie herself did not fully understand why had made it difficult to explain.

“And just how did he find that out, Papa?” Marie asked.

“It's a small town, Marie. People talk.”

“Tell me about it.”

After a breakfast of fruit and
liboke
, a whole river fish wrapped in banana leaves and grilled over hot coals, Marie kissed her father on the cheek, grabbed her backpack, and set off across the village. She had
almost forgotten how much she loved this place. The village was perched on a hillside along the Mongala, one of the Congo River's major tributaries. Villagers fished for perch in the Mongala River and raised yams and corn in terraced fields built into the hill.

The village was not wealthy, but Marie had seen an opportunity for Busu-Mouli to build the clinics and schools and fishing fleets that would transform the lives of the freehold farmers who served as the backbone of the community. Copper and rubber were the traditional sources of wealth in the Congo, and Marie had hoped that the chalcopyrite deposit she had found would liberate her people and allow them to achieve their full potential. But it was not turning out as she had planned.

Marie climbed the steep and narrow path that led up to the mine site. She stopped to chat with a number of friends and neighbors along the way. The unhurried pace of village life was one of its greatest appeals. It took her more than an hour to make the trip. By the time she reached the mine, the day's work was well under way. Young men were attacking the cliff face with steel tools and filling wicker baskets with raw ore. Marie recognized many of them. Two of them were her cousins. The men carrying the ore baskets downhill to the smelter balanced the load on their backs and carried the weight with a rope or knotted cloth stretched across their foreheads. Their bulging trapezius muscles testified to the grueling demands of the job. There was a hole in the cliff face approximately three meters across. Marie could hear the dull slap of metal on rock and the curses of tired men coming from inside.

An older man stood to one side watching the younger men toiling in the sun. He saw Marie approaching and a grin spread across his face. He walked over to meet her, wrapped her in a tight hug, and kissed her violently on both cheeks. Thomas Katanga was her mother's brother. He was also her father's right-hand man and now the pit boss for the mine. Marie's mine.

“Welcome home, my dear Marie. I heard that you had come back to
your father's house. This is a blessing. We prayed to so many different gods for your safe return that there seemed a risk of setting them against each other.”

“It's good to be back. I missed you all terribly.” They spoke Luba together, and for Marie, the language was a taste of home.

“So tell me, Uncle Thomas,” Marie continued, “how's my baby?”

“On balance, pretty good. The tunnel is reasonably stable and the roof seems to be holding. We are using timber to shore it up. It's your design and so far it is working well. My carpenters can build it. We are just going to have to trust your math.”

“I've always been good with numbers, Uncle. Don't you worry about that.”

“Do you want to see it?”

“You're damn right I do.”

Thomas Katanga led Marie on a tour of the mine she had conceived and midwifed but had never seen. The path up to the mine entrance was strewn with broken pieces of ore. Marie picked up a stone and held it close. The rock was a dull yellow, but the brassy metallic streaks of pyrite running through the stone caught the sun and glowed. Even in its raw form, it was clear to Marie just how rich a vein this was.

The mine entrance itself was a perfect half circle. Timber supports formed an inverted V inside the tunnel, theoretically minimizing the risk of a cave-in. It was a simple design that Marie had seen in her textbooks but never in stone and wood.

“We've taken most of the easily accessible ore from the face,” Katanga observed. “Now we need to follow the richer veins into the mountain. It was slow going at first and we had a couple of accidents, but the boys are learning a few tricks. Most important, they are learning to be careful. This is never an easy thing to teach young men.”

“What kind of progress have you been able to make?”

“Maybe two and a half meters a day. Our real bottleneck is the smelting. There's no point bringing out the ore faster than we can
process it. Our total daily output is about one hundred kilograms of pure metal. Not bad. But we are hoping some of the equipment your mining friends have will let us quadruple that.”

Marie pretended she hadn't heard the last point. “Let's go inside,” she said, as she pulled two headlamps out of her backpack. She gave one to Thomas and slipped the other over her own head.

The walls and floor of the tunnel were rough and uneven, nothing like the smooth finish of the established mines she had worked at in South Africa and Botswana. The shaft sloped gently downward, and Marie could see that Katanga had done a creditable job of following the richest vein of ore as he built the main tunnel. The tunnel led into the cliff for about three hundred meters. Marie knew that the men wouldn't be able to dig much farther without some kind of ventilation. The air was already thick with carbon dioxide. At the base of the tunnel, miners were hard at work hollowing out a large room. Most just nodded hello. A few called out to Marie by name.

“This is about as far in as the vein goes,” Katanga observed. “We are following two lesser veins that run parallel to the floor, but the richest ore starts to go deep here. We need to start digging down. Until we get some real equipment, it'll be slow going. I estimate our production will peak sometime in the next week and then start dropping off as we start building down. The boys will have to work short shifts as the air gets stale, and hauling the ore up to the top of the hole is going to add another layer of effort to this.”

Marie knew Katanga was looking for reassurance. He wanted to hear that Consolidated Mining was riding to the rescue with a barge full of jackhammers and explosives, ventilators and powered winches. This was not going to happen. Katanga had a right to know that. But she couldn't bring herself to tell him.

“Come, girl, let me show you our smelter.”

Marie followed Katanga out of the mine and down the winding
path to the Mongala River. On the bank of the river, there was a large building with a frame made of palm logs and walls made of a collage of various materials. The roof was corrugated tin, a relatively expensive luxury that spoke to the importance of keeping whatever was inside dry. Black smoke belched from the single chimney that protruded from the middle of the roof. A simple wooden dock stuck out into the river and served as a boat landing.

A hand-lettered sign over the front door read
UNITED LUBA SMELTING
. It was true, she realized. This project was already too big for her village to handle on its own. Her father had made deals and alliances with surrounding Luba villages to loan labor, materials, and seed capital to get the mine and smelting operations going. The mine would inevitably reshape the political as well as the physical landscape of the Mongala Valley.

Katanga was visibly proud as he gave her a tour of the “factory.” At one end of the single large room, a group of women was sorting and washing the ore to remove dirt and other impurities. Nearby, three men were trying to fix a complex but clearly makeshift machine that seemed designed to function as a rock crusher. Marie saw that it was powered by two truck engines linked together with a single driveshaft. The gears of the crusher were heavy-duty propellers, probably stripped from the fishing boats and ferries that plied the Congo River.

Marie's background was in mine engineering rather than mineral processing. She had put together the schematics for the smelter operations, but her diagram had said simply “put rock crusher here.” She was in awe of what the villagers had accomplished.

“This is absolutely amazing, Uncle Thomas. You've done so much.”

“It hasn't been easy,” Katanga replied. “There have been setbacks. Look at the crusher. One of the engines has burned out again. It happens fairly frequently, but we've been able to keep it running most of the time. The propellers were your father's idea.”

“Papa always had a gift for making do. Remember when you and he reconfigured the motors in the fishing boats to run on palm oil when there was a diesel shortage? The fleet smelled like fried plantains.”

A clay kiln sat in the middle of the building, radiating heat from the charcoal fire burning beneath it. This was Marie's design, based on kilns that Luba tribes had been using long before the Europeans came to central Africa. Two men worked a large bellows to stoke the fire and create the heat necessary to melt the crushed chalcopyrite into copper metal. As Marie watched, one of the men abandoned the bellows and opened the door to the kiln. He used a metal rod with a hook on one end to extract a large steel pot. Using both arms, he shifted the pot to a hook hanging from the ceiling and used the pole to pull down on an edge of the lid. A shimmering orange liquid spilled out of the pot and into a series of rectangular molds on the floor. Metallic brown bricks from earlier castings were piled next to the molds. This was matte, a crude mixture of molten sulfides. The matte would need to be converted into “blister” copper and then refined by heat and electrolysis before it could be sold on the open market.

This was a low-tech operation. They were skipping a couple of key steps that would have drastically improved the purity of the copper matte. Each step of the smelting process added value to the finished product. The equipment to do this was pretty basic for an operation like Consolidated Mining, but difficult to jury-rig out of boat parts and truck engines. The more sophisticated and expensive equipment was well beyond anything an operation like this could aspire to. The bosses at Consolidated had promised to provide a converter for making blister copper, along with the other specialized machinery that made modern mining the voracious mountain-eating beast it had become.

“I'm blown away by this. I never dreamed you'd move this fast.”

“You underestimate us, Marie. You have been away a long time. You have forgotten just what we are capable of. What your father is capable of.”

“You're right. I do sometimes forget.” Marie swallowed hard at what she had to say next. “Uncle Thomas,” she said, after a moment's pause. “They aren't going to help us. The mining company, I mean. What you have accomplished is extraordinary, but we made our plans based on the idea that Consolidated Mining was going to back us with money, equipment, and technical support. I found out just before the last trip . . . the one that ended badly . . . that they aren't going to do that.”

Although she had promised herself that she wasn't going to cry, Marie felt her eyes fill, and Katanga's face shimmered slightly as she looked at him through her tears.

He reached out and took hold of both of her arms, clasping her biceps firmly and urgently. “We know that, child. In truth, your father and I, we never expected that they would. We are prepared; we do not need your mining friends.”

“It's worse than that,” Marie continued. “It isn't that they are going to leave us alone. When the big bosses in New York saw the test results on the ore samples I brought them, they got greedy. Then the Chinese started snapping up every ton of copper and steel and manganese and you-name-it that came on the market. This is a rich find, maybe the richest in the Congo. They want it for themselves. It was one thing to offer us help when it looked like there was little at stake. The ore samples changed that picture for them. The company is negotiating its own deal with the Ministry for Mines and Metals in Kinshasa. Consolidated will buy the usual army of politicians and bureaucrats, and through them, they'll get exclusive mineral rights to the valley. They are going to chop the top off the mountain, fill in the river, and leach the tailings with acid to extract every last damn molecule of copper. And it's my fault, Uncle. I'm sorry.”