In Congo, desperate men labor in dangerous conditions to satisfy the world market’s recession-driven appetite for gold

Samy Badrio waded exhausted in waterlogged gumboots up from the mine’s dark entrance and raised his hand to shield his eyes against the brightness of the noon-high Equatorial sun.

Photographs by Brendan Bannon. Click here to view a slide show with many more of Brendan's photographs from Congo.

He threw a rough burlap sack from his shoulder to the ground and lit a crumpled cigarette fished from the pocket of his grubby raincoat. Rummaging inside the bag, he pulled out a mango-sized rock, splashed it with water from the stream at his feet, and squinted at it intently.

He is looking for gold: the tiny tell-tale sparkle on the surface of the cream-colored quartz which will tell him that today, at least, is a lucky day.

Badrio, 33, is one of as many as 1.5 million hand-panning gold miners working the abandoned shafts and open riverside pits in the fabulously mineral-rich northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

They should be enjoying a boom driven, perhaps bizarrely, by the global recession and its attendant sudden fear of risk, which is pushing Congo’s miners to gamble even more in their search for the precious metal. Nervous Western investors who have fled free-falling stock markets are increasingly parking their money in “safe-haven” assets like gold, banking on the trust in bullion which first spawned the phrase “as good as gold.” Those few consumers with a little cash to spare are bypassing the electronics store and the auto showroom, opting instead for purchases, like jewelery, with appreciating value.

This has pushed the market price of gold up and up. It has risen nearly 40 percent in the last three years and is still hovering close to the record levels of $1,023 an ounce reached last year.

Surprisingly, that spike has reached even here, with prices in Congo’s nearby de facto gold capital, Mongbwalu, also nudging record highs.

Badrio snorted dismissively at this as he hauled his sack of hope onto his back and trudged off down the palm-covered hillside.

“I bet people buying it at such a high price there in the West don’t know it comes from a place like this, a place where people suffer too much to find such small amounts,” he said over his shoulder.

A place like this is a place like no other, in fact.

At the time Badrio’s father was a child, this mine, Makala, was fitted with electric lights stretching deep underground and giant, diesel-powered pulleys hauling metal hoppers filled with ore back up to the surface.

Miners toiled for a monthly wage, albeit a small one. Schools, hospitals, houses, and soccer teams, all were subsidized by the local mining firm.

But slowly state-sanctioned corruption and eventually war came to shatter this green corner of Congo. The mining companies pulled out, taking with them their engineers, their chemists, their geologists, and their money.

Back at Makala, Luc Likambo peered into the tunnel entrance and, like an archaeologist describing a dig, pointed to the relics of a bygone but technologically more advanced era.

“See, there are the rails for the ore wagons,” he said, his angry words echoing down into the deep darkness. “That is where the electric lights were, this is where the machine was which sucked the water away.

“Now,” he slapped his muscled biceps, “there is nothing but our physical force to make this work successful.”

Likambo, a tall, weary man in mud-spattered overalls, heads the Miners Association for Development, Reconstruction and Peace in Ituri, this gold-rich province close to Congo’s borders with Uganda and Sudan.

He snorts cynically at the suggestion that his 5,000 members are benefitting from a boom driven by the increased price of gold in Western markets.

“We are doing all this work because there are no other jobs to find money. We hear all this talk of high prices, but who is really winning? We don’t find enough money for medicines, for good houses, for school fees.

“We are not profiting, the real money is being made by other people outside this country, the people in India, in Canada, in the US.

“The biggest problem? It’s not the hard work, it’s not the conditions, although they are very bad. It is that it is all down to luck. We don’t know about geology, so we lack precision when we are looking for the gold.”

The majority of global gold demand is driven by the jewelery industry, which soaks up 68 percent of the 2,525 tons, worth $54 billion, produced annually by some 400 operational mines, according to the World Gold Council.

Market investors buying everything from coins to gold-backed securities and complex structured financial products account for a further 19 percent. Industrial and dental demand makes up the remaining 13 percent.

But, according to Cafod, the British Roman Catholic aid agency, which campaigns for greater transparency in the gold industry, there is a problem.

There is currently no operational “fair trade” process dedicated to ensuring that the world’s 10 to 15 million artisanal gold miners are not exploited, unlike for the diamond industry where the Kimberley Process certifies stones as “clean.”

“This opacity in the gold supply chain means it is impossible to know where the gold you buy in the shops comes from,” said Sonya Maldar, extractives policy analyst with Cafod. “There is no way for a consumer or an investor in the West to know whether their money is buying clean gold, where workers earn a fair wage in safe working conditions, or dirty gold, like that from some of the mines in Congo.”

Few organizations are working to improve the lot of artisanal miners. There are some discussions with the Fairtrade Foundation to plot a strategy, but everything is in its early stages.

And Maldar adds that voluntary initiatives alone “will not be enough to drive lasting changes.”

“Ending the resource curse requires strong national legislation to regulate the mining industry and this must be enforced effectively.”

Until then, for the hand-panning miners of Congo, it is a desperate gamble to try to make a living feeding the West’s avid appetite for gold. Daily, there are several throws of the dice.

For Badrio and his colleagues at Makala, there are the hours spent underground, lighting charcoal fires against the rock-face, which loosen the ore but then also rob the air of its meager oxygen. Cave-ins are common.

Tuberculosis spreads through the dark tunnels into lungs weakened by rock-dust. Trench-foot attacks limbs immersed in water all day.

All for the off-chance that the rocks in his sack at the end of the day bear gold.

For Dieudonne Dela, a 30-year-old with two young sons, who works an 40-foot deep open mine in what was a riverbed until the water was physically diverted by hand, there is the constant threat of a pit-wall collapse.

There are the eight hours a day he spends digging gravel out of the muddy mine floor for his boss, for which he is paid not in money but in sand. At the end of the day, he is allowed one tin bucket from the mine and whatever gold he finds is his. Most days, there is nothing.

For Mateso Gokpa, although he doesn’t know it, there is the risk that he will poison himself and his unborn children with the mercury he uses to find the gold in his tub of tailings. The toxic metal binds to flecks of gold, and is then burnt off, leaving pure gold behind. But it can severely damage the brain, nervous system, reproductive system, and a host of other organs.

For every gram of gold produced, up to five grams of mercury are released into the environment, the United Nations’ Industrial Development Organization calculates.

“If you want to make money in the gold mines, you should agree to suffer,” said Gokpa, wrapping his lump of gold the size of a child’s fingernail in a grubby 100-franc bill. “We are doing this job because there is nothing else. You can suffer for months making no money, but the day you will make money, it will be a lot.”

With a shy grin, he admitted he cannot remember his highest-earning day in seven years of working the mines. “It all went on drinking beer,” he said.

Mongbwalu, set along muddy lanes high in forested hills, home to 40,000 people, is the archetype of a gold boom-town where men like Gokpa go to drink their windfalls.

Traders sit behind school desks in wooden shacks tipping flecks of gold onto hand-held scales weighted with matchsticks and old coins.

“The price is unstable, people complain,” said one, Gregoire Musinga, as handed over a wad of grubby notes to a miner. “What can we do? The price, it comes from outside. We just follow.”

For now, there are few complaints.

Late one Friday night in the dark cavern of the Zone nightclub, a slim waitress named Mariam in a red felt fedora served beers in oversized bottles to a hundred or more men slumped in the pulsating light of pink lasers. These were the town’s miners, spending the little money they had found in the week. Some danced, provocatively, with the handful of excitable prostitutes pirouetting before the mirrors by the dance-floor. There were no other women. “They are at home, this is not their place,” said one wolfish teenager, ordering another round.

Here, these men gamble again, with their health—HIV/AIDS is rampant—and with their families’ futures. It would take someone brave to tell them to stop, however. Many of the men are former child soldiers who fought in the 1998 to 2003 war.

Rebel militia battled Congo’s army in the lush fields ringing the town. Neighbouring Uganda invaded, ostensibly to fight its own rebels based here. In reality, they were here for the gold.

It is this lust for its loot, from within and without, which has brought Congo to its knees and thrown its progress fast into reverse.

In the weak early morning sunshine, on the outskirts of Mongbwalu, another group of miners swarmed over earthworks which, in theory, should produce nothing. On a rise above them stood the steel skeleton of what was this area’s most productive gold refinery, a jumble of buildings which would take in raw ore at one end, crush it, wash it with cyanide, and push up to 20 kilograms of pure ingots out of the other.

The last bar was smelted in 2001, as the war intensified. The company fled.

Today the miners sift through the factory waste dumped in the riverbed below, looking for gold flecks missed by the machines.

“It was only fate which brought us to this place. We know others have come and worked here before, but we had no choice to do anything else,” said one, who gave his name only as Bevins.

“We have been lucky. The work is hard, but we have found good gold.”

With copper, diamonds, gold, and coltan—crucial to the manufacture of mobile phones—Congo’s precious metals hold the potential to make this country very rich indeed. Proven mineral reserves are worth an estimated $300 billion over the next 25 years.

But with a government hamstrung by the hangover of war and decades of corruption, there is little hope that the slide can be arrested and the state bring benefits to lift its citizens from penury.

So it is left to those citizens to do it for themselves. If they are lucky.

Buffalo native Brendan Bannon is a photographer based in Nairobi, Kenya. Mike Planz is Africa correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, among other news outlets.