Gold

by Matthew Hart

  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 bazaa
r, 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.