Kayes Mali

Dang, dang, dang. Chinkety chink, dong. The sound of hammering draws you in. Musical, metallic and magical. Into the dark shadow of the forges. Beneath the low tin roofs and overhanging trees, small boys wind the handles that spin the fans that blow the air that makes the charcoal roar with a white heat. The man pulls a chunk of metal, glowing red, from the fire with tongs. Sitting on an old car seat he manoeuvres the hot metal onto an old engine block, his makeshift anvil. Three young men, one his son and two his brother’s sons, swing sledgehammers consecutively and repeatedly. Like a well synchronised machine. Dang, dang, dang. The blacksmith positions and moves the hot metal under the hammer blows. Sparks fly. With practised ease he flips the glowing iron on its side, then the other side. Lifting one end, the constant strike of the hammers starts to deform the metal. It elongates, it curves, and tapers to a point at either end. Then it is done. He tosses it to the side. It lands glowing and hissing in the mud. Beside it a mound of similar shaped iron objects, ping as they cool. The man pulls another red hot ingot from the fire, and starts again.

A hundred men and boys work here, in a large, dark shaded area, under a patchwork of roofs. There are smiths at the forge, with their boys and youths. Other men are welding in the fabrication section and in the machine shop the new German lathes are whirring efficiently, in stark contrast to the primordial smoke and fire of the forge. All the workers are from one family. The old man, the father, potters around, seeing everything. A friendly greeting or a sharp rebuke handed out as required. The craftsmen are all his sons, or husbands of his daughters. And the young men who do the hard physical work are his grandsons. The boys who wind the fans are perhaps his grandsons, or great grandsons. He is never quite sure who they belong to. But they are all family. When no one has a job for them, the boys have fun taking scraps of metal and play at forging with small hammers, imitating their fathers. At the same time, a dirty, dangerous industrial site and a jolly family gathering.

The first man has completed a large pile of the curved spikes, black and cool now. When they have had handles welded on they will be finished. Two hundred pickaxes to go to the gold mines at Kéniéba or Balamassala. Many young men of the town and the surrounding area don’t have a successful family business to join. Jobs are scarce, the pay is low. Many are lured by the possibility of finding gold, striking it rich, being the lucky one, hitting the jackpot. It is irresistible for the poorly educated boys who see no other successful future. They make the journey, buy their pickaxe, and try their luck.

At the top of the escarpment above the plains of Balamassala, dotted with gold mines, is the village of Djulibane. Accessible only by a steep, treacherous path up the cliff, the village remains untouched. The small round houses are made from woven bamboo and covered in mud. The roofs are thatched with straw. It has always been like this. There are fields of maize protected by woven fences, and patches of ground nuts growing. A small solar panel charging mobile phones and a scooter are the only hint of the 21st century. Water is drawn from a small stream, but when it dries they have to travel 20 km to the next village. The headman of Djulibane is old and gaunt. He comes out of his hut to sit on an ancient carved wooden chair under the tree. In every village there is a tree. The place for meeting, the place for talking, the place to just sit or snooze in the cool shade. His head is hairless apart from a tuft of white whiskers on his chin and when he offers his hand to shake, you see he is missing his thumb. He asks if he can have my mobile phone and breaks into a wide grin when I refuse. He slaps his thigh, and laughs manically, showing off his few teeth, one of which is capped with gold. He tells about life in the village and the shortage of water. He explains to me that half the young men of the village work in the mines, the other half stay to work the fields. Many of the women and girls also go down to the plain to pan for flakes of the precious metal.

The conditions at the mine are harsh. The women work on the open ground. Noisy diesel pumps run all day pumping water down wooden chutes where it is mixed with shovels of the gritty earth. This flows through channels to form endless pools of muddy slurry. The women stand up to their knees in the grey soup, bent over, under the roasting sun. They swill the earth and slurry in half gourds, slowly spilling out the muddy water and lighter gravel, until they are left with a tiny amount of the heavier stones and maybe, just maybe, a practised eye might see the yellow glint of a flake of gold. But no one complains. The children sit on one of the few dry mounds of earth. The girls plait each other’s hair, and the boys play mischievously. The women sing and shout teasingly at each other. They laugh as they work. The work is hard, but it is a happy place. They earn a little money, but always dream of finding a big nugget.

Where the men work is more industrial. Big machines are grinding up the rock and separating the waste from the tiny part that contains gold. Great mounds of stone produce a tiny amount of slurry in the bottom of a bowl. The mining work is at the bottom of holes in the ground no bigger than a manhole. Sheer sided, with footholds cut into the earth, ten metres down. Each hole is run by a gang of lads. One at the bottom breaking the rock with a pickaxe and headtorch, the other hauling up the bucket and loading it onto cargo trikes to be transported for processing. When I arrive to investigate, I receive the same warm smiles and see the same happy camaraderie as I experienced with the women. I have a shouted conversation with the man at the bottom of the pit. You must come down and see, he insists. No, no, I firmly reply, you are brave and need the money. I am scared and I don’t. When they finish laughing at me we take selfies together. They seem so pleased that I have shown an interest in what they do. The money is good, they tell me. Better than any other job we can get. The work looks terrifying to me, dangerous and exhausting. So I’m surprised they are so cheerful and just happy to be earning.

The small bowl of gold-rich slurry that comes from the grinding machine is finally processed by the gold buyer. He isolates the bigger pieces by further panning and uses a magnet to remove any iron. The remaining slurry still contains small grains of gold so he adds a few drops of mercury. He swirls it around and the gold becomes trapped in the mercury. Finally, with a blowtorch, he burns off the mercury leaving a small nugget of gold, and a cloud of toxic vapour. Collecting up the gold, he weighs it and pays the owner, after first deducting the cost of transport and processing.

The conditions are harsh, the mine workings dangerous, and accidents common. The accommodation is overcrowded in little shanty towns of black plastic and the water supplies are contaminated with mercury and cyanide used to separate the gold. On average, once a month, of all the thousands of miners in the area, someone finds a nugget. The last one found was 15 grammes. Worth 1,000,000 CFA (1,500€), that is the prize that drives so many people to the goldmines of Mali and Guinea. That is the motivation for the gruelling work under the relentless African sun.

But the other lottery they enter into when they choose this life is not so rewarding. Some return to their village as rich men, but many return sick, injured or poisoned and without the money to pay for medical treatment. Some don’t return at all.

Twenty tonnes of gold a year are extracted by artisanal mining in Mali. It sounds romantic and profitable. Sure, some people get rich, and some get hurt or sick. But the majority are just happy to have a job where they get decent money for hard work.