NYTimes.com Article: A Black Mud From Africa Helps Power the New Economy

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A Black Mud From Africa Helps Power the New Economy

By BLAINE HARDEN



Before you make another call on that cell phone, take a moment,
close your eyes and reflect on all you've done for Mama Doudou,
queen of the rain-forest whores.

 Thanks to dollars that you and millions like you have spent on
cell phones and Sony PlayStations, Mama Doudou had a knockout
spring season in a mining camp called Kuwait, deep in central
Africa. Kuwait -- a name suggesting big money from below ground --
was one of 20 illegal mines hacked in the past year out of the
Okapi Faunal Reserve, a protected area in the Ituri rain forest of
eastern Congo. The reserve is named after a reclusive, big-eared
relative of the giraffe that is found only in Congo. Along with
about 4,000 okapi, the reserve is home to a rich assemblage of
monkeys (13 species), an estimated 10,000 forest elephants and
about the same number of Mbuti people, often called pygmies, who
live by hunting, gathering and trading.

 Mama Doudou, though, didn't mess with wildlife or pygmies. She
sold overpriced bread in the mining camp and negotiated terms of
endearment among 300 miners and 37 prostitutes. For a miner to
secure the affections of a prostitute, he had to bring Mama Doudou
some of the precious ore he was digging up in the reserve: a
gritty, superheavy mud called coltan.

 Coltan is abundant and relatively easy to find in eastern Congo.
All a miner has to do is chop down great swaths of the forest,
gouge S.U.V.-size holes in streambeds with pick and shovel and
spend days up to his crotch in muck while sloshing water around in
a plastic washtub until coltan settles to the bottom. (Coltan is
three times heavier than iron, slightly lighter than gold.) If he
is strong and relentless and the digging is good, a miner can
produce a kilogram a day. Earlier this year, that was worth $80 --
a remarkable bounty in a region where most people live on 20 cents
a day.

 Coltan is the muck-caked counterpoint to the brainier-than-thou,
environmentally friendly image of the high-tech economy. The
wireless world would grind to a halt without it. Coltan, once it is
refined in American and European factories, becomes tantalum, a
metallic element that is a superb conductor of electricity, highly
resistant to heat. Tantalum powder is a vital ingredient in the
manufacture of capacitors, the electronic components that control
the flow of current inside miniature circuit boards. Capacitors
made of tantalum can be found inside almost every laptop, pager,
personal digital assistant and cell phone.

 Mama Doudou, who is 45, is formally known as Doudou Wangonda, but
she is called Mama because in the rain forest she is widely
respected. She told me she doesn't understand what ''rich white
people'' do with coltan. But she's exceptionally well versed in how
much they pay for it. Late last year, exploding demand for tantalum
powder created a temporary worldwide shortage, which contributed to
Sony's difficulties in getting its new PlayStation 2 into American
stores, as well as to a tenfold price increase on the world
tantalum market. Mama Doudou abandoned her position as a
traditional chief and joined thousands of people who walked into
the Ituri forest hoping to get rich quick.

 When the price of coltan was soaring, Mama Doudou made an absolute
killing. First, she sold bread to miners at a scandalous price. She
made as much as $800 worth of coltan for every $50 in cash that she
spent on baking supplies. Then she used what she called her
''natural leadership abilities'' to win election as president of
the camp prostitutes, most of whom were poorly educated, town-bred
women in their late teens. As president, Mama Doudou collected --
and turned over to the owner of the mine -- a variety of fees and
fines related to the mating habits of miners and their women.

 The normal arrangement in the camp was for a miner, after forking
over a kilo of coltan to Mama Doudou, to pair off with one woman
for the duration of their respective stays in the forest. The
miner's ''temporary wife'' would cook his food, haul his water and
share his bed in a shack made of sticks and leaves. In return, he
would give her enough coltan to keep her in cosmetics, clothes and
beer. If a miner decided that he wanted a prettier young woman to
haul his water, he had to pay Mama Doudou another kilo of coltan.

 ''This is called the infringement fee,'' she explained.


Likewise, if a woman decided, as many did, to dump one miner in
favor of another who happened to be a better producer of coltan,
then she, too, had to pay Mama Doudou a kilo of coltan.

 ''This also is called the infringement fee,'' she said.

 Frequent
swapping of ''temporary wives'' in an equatorial forest where
hygiene was problematic and condoms all but nonexistent led to an
explosion of gonorrhea.

 ''There was too much sofisi,'' Mama Doudou said, using the Swahili
word for the disease. Soon half the people in Kuwait had it.
Antibiotics that could knock down gonorrhea were on sale in the
camp for a tomato tin of coltan (worth about $27). They sold
exceptionally well.

 Mama Doudou's business ventures were part of a squalid encounter
between the global high-tech economy and one of the world's most
thoroughly ruined countries.

 Congo -- always too well endowed with natural resources and too
weakly governed for its own good -- is a nation in name only. The
Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the late stages of a
political malady that students of modern Africa call ''failed state
syndrome.'' Roads, schools and medical clinics barely exist.
Malnutrition and poverty have brought back diseases, like sleeping
sickness, that had been under control. The World Health
Organization recently estimated that the monthly toll of
''avoidable deaths'' in Congo was 72,800.

 The eastern half of the country, with about 20 million residents,
has no real government and no laws except the ever-changing rules
imposed by invading armies from Rwanda and Uganda and roving bands
of well-armed predators.

 A scalding report that was presented this spring to the United
Nations Security Council said that coltan perpetuates Congo's civil
war. The report, based on a six-month investigation by an expert
panel, said the war ''has become mainly about access, control and
trade'' of minerals, the most important being coltan. The one thing
that unites the warring parties, according to the report, is a keen
interest in making money off coltan.

 ''Because of its lucrative nature,'' the report said, the war
''has created a 'win-win' situation for all belligerents.
Adversaries and enemies are at times partners in business, get
weapons from the same dealers and use the same intermediaries.
Business has superseded security concerns.''

 Environmental groups have added emotional fuel to the accusations
in the U.N. report by cataloging the devastation that the coltan
trade has brought to Congo's wildlife. About 10,000 miners and
traders have overrun Kahuzi-Biega National Park, according to a
report released in May by a coalition of environmental groups.
Before the civil war, the park was home to about 8,000 eastern
lowland gorillas. That number may have since been reduced to fewer
than 1,000, the report estimated, because miners and others in the
forest are far from food supplies and must rely on bush meat. Apes
are killed for food or killed in traps set for other animals. If
something is not done to stop mining and poaching, the report said
that the eastern lowland gorilla ''will become the first great ape
to be driven to extinction -- a victim of war, human greed and high
technology.''

 While coltan extraction has taken advantage of Congo's ruin, it
did not cause it. That has taken more than 110 years of misrule,
during which Congo has attracted a string of shady suitors.

 The most malign of the courtships began in the late 19th century,
when agents of King Leopold II of the Belgians started stripping
central Africa of ivory and rubber. To enforce production quotas on
the locals, Leopold's agents chopped off their hands, noses and
ears. Before the king was forced to trade away the hugely
profitable colony in 1908, an estimated five million to eight
million Congolese were killed.

 In the 1960's, the Americans waded in. To fight Communism and
secure access to cobalt and copper, the Central Intelligence Agency
helped bring about the assassination of Congo's first
democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. That was
followed by three decades of White House coddling of his successor,
Mobutu Sese Seku, Africa's most famous billionaire dictator, who
set a poisoned table for the chaos that followed his eventual
overthrow in 1997.

 Since then, Congo has been locked in a sprawling and numbingly
complicated civil war that by some estimates has become the
deadliest conflict in the history of independent Africa. The war
has caused the deaths of 2.5 million people over the past two and a
half years in eastern Congo alone, according to a recent report by
the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid agency,
which described the emergency in Congo as ''perhaps worse than any
to unfold in Africa in recent decades.''

 The Coltan story seemed clear when I flew to Congo early this
summer. Globalization was causing havoc in a desperate country. For
the sake of our electronic toys, guerrillas were getting rich,
gorillas were getting slaughtered and the local people were getting
paid next to nothing to ruin their country's environment. Traveling
inside Congo, however, I found clarity on the question of coltan to
be as scarce as paved roads, functioning schools or sober soldiers.

 What muddied up the story, first of all, was the curiously
egalitarian quality of coltan mining. Just about anyone with a
shovel and a strong back can dig it up. It's easier to find and
more plentiful than diamonds, which have created their own blood
frenzy in Africa. It has injected hundreds of millions of dollars
into an economy that had virtually ceased to function. True, much
of that money has been creamed off by warlords and profiteers, and
very little of it has been redistributed in social services. Some,
though, has filtered down to miners, middlemen and commerçants.

 To discover the importance of coltan's trickle-down effect (and to
meet Mama Doudou), I first had to take a spine-mashing, 13-hour
ride on the back of a Yamaha trail bike over a mud track that used
to be the main east-west highway across northern Congo.

 The road I traveled is all but impassable to motorized vehicles,
excepting a trail bike driven by someone who knows how to negotiate
mammoth mudholes, many of which are deeper and longer than a New
York City garbage truck, as well as when to bribe drunken rogue
soldiers and when to run from them.

 Riding through the reserve, I was menaced by a Congolese soldier,
a member of the Front for the Liberation of Congo, a poorly
disciplined rebel group supported by the Ugandan Army. He demanded
my boots, explaining that he didn't have boots. He demanded money,
explaining that he had none. He pointed his AK-47 at my stomach.
Gunning the Yamaha, my driver sped away before the soldier, who was
stumble-down drunk, could react. This encounter, my driver later
explained, was normal.

 In Epulu, a village that is the administrative center of the Okapi
reserve, I spent an afternoon with a coltan miner named Munako
Bangazuna, a quiet, wary man who stood only 4 feet 6 inches tall.
Early this year, Bangazuna enjoyed what he called ''my richest
period.'' In a mine inside the Okapi reserve, he dug about a kilo
of coltan a day, he said. Working seven days a week, he made more
than $2,000 a month for two months in a row -- a fortune in the
forest.

 He is 26 and married with children. Mining allowed him to provide
his family with food and consumer goods he never dreamed he'd be
able to afford. Besides food, he bought a bicycle, a radio, a foam
mattress, cooking pots, dishes and clothes for himself, his wife
and his kids.

 Bangazuna does not claim to have spent his money wisely. The
mining camp where he lived was called Boma Libala, a phrase that
means ''kill the marriage.'' It was the largest and, by reputation,
nastiest mining camp in the reserve, with 3,000 miners and several
hundred prostitutes.

 ''I lost a lot of my money on prostitution and also on Primus,''
said Bangazuna, referring to a brand of Congolese beer. His wife
cooked for him in Boma Libala, he said, during the time he was
drinking lots of beer and spending most of his money on
prostitutes. ''I was lucky,'' he said. ''She did not divorce me.''

 Bangazuna was hardly alone in his bad behavior. One coltan moment
that particularly nauseates authorities occurred this spring in
Epulu, when a drunken miner and a seminaked prostitute fornicated
in broad daylight on the lawn of the primary school, in front of
village children.

 Like several miners I interviewed in the reserve, a territory
controlled by the Ugandan military and its rebel allies, Bangazuna
was compelled to give up a slice of his coltan diggings to an
extortion racket run by Ugandan soldiers.

 ''In the morning, when you get up, the Ugandans hand you a pack of
cigarettes, and they give you two bottles of beer,'' said
Bangazuna, explaining his daily routine. ''In the evening, when you
finish digging, you have to pay them back with coltan. It was very
expensive. One bottle of beer cost me two spoons of coltan'' --
about $8 -- and cigarettes were one spoon. If you refuse to pay or
if you don't have coltan, they beat you and threaten to shoot
you.''

 When I talked to Bangazuna, he was broke. He had spent all the
money he'd earned digging coltan. He also happened to be under
arrest. Game wardens (whose expenses are paid partly by donations
from several American zoos) had caught him digging coltan in the
reserve after he'd been warned not to do so.

 When the wardens let him go, Bangazuna confided, he planned to dig
more coltan.

 This spring, the price of coltan crashed, falling from $80 a kilo
in March to $8 in June. As cell phone sales slumped and the Nasdaq
shrank, demand for coltan from companies like Nokia, Ericsson and
Motorola fell precipitously. Suddenly, a Congolese coltan miner had
to dig coltan all day simply to afford to eat in a mining camp, and
he had to dig for three or four days to find enough coltan to pay
for the drugs that would clear up a case of sofisi.

 At the Kuwait mine, everything came unglued. The prostitutes, then
the merchants, then the miners and, finally, Mama Doudou herself
abandoned the mine and walked out of the rain forest.

 A few days before game wardens burned it to the ground, I visited
another mine in the Okapi reserve. It was more accessible than
Kuwait and, unlike the infamous but shut-down Boma Libala camp,
where Bangazuna had squandered so much of his money, it still had a
few working miners.

 To get to Tuko-Tu camp, I walked for about two hours on a
well-trod trail beneath a high canopy of trees. They shrouded the
rain forest in permanent shadow. It rained hard as I walked, and
the dark, soggy forest was threaded with filigrees of mist.

 For all its gloom, the forest was about as primeval as a rest stop
on the New Jersey Turnpike. Every half hour or so, two or three
giggly women, seemingly dressed for a party in glistening lipstick
and gaudy dresses, smelling of strong perfume, would materialize
out of the dank greenery. Their bare feet were caked with mud; they
carried their shoes. They were prostitutes from Tuko-Tu, and they
were walking out to buy bread and beer in a village on the main
road.

 On both sides of the footpath, a towering mainstay of the forest
was dying for the sake of coltan. The eko, one of three giant trees
that form the rain forest's canopy, has a durable, waterproof bark.
Miners strip off a long girdle of the bark to make a trough into
which they shovel coltan-bearing mud, which is then flushed with
water. Stripping bark has killed thousands of eko trees in the
reserve, which greatly upsets the local pygmies. They rely on the
tree, whose flowers attract bees, as depots for gathering honey.

 The mining camp squatted in a clearing hacked out of the forest.
It was a jumble of stick huts with roofs made from forest leaves.
Most of the huts were empty. The camp was down to 57 residents,
from a high of 320 when coltan was at $80 a kilo. Out in front of
the huts, a few toddlers stood stoically in the mud as bored young
mothers picked lice from their hair. Ugandan soldiers used to come
here, I was told, to force miners to buy beer and cigarettes. But
they had stopped coming in May, when the price of coltan began to
fizzle. There were still miners, of course, but they were out
digging, deeper in the forest.

 So I walked on, following a streambed. After about an hour and a
half of walking, the streambed suddenly disappeared. A bombing
range took its place -- or what looked like a bombing range.
Craters, hundreds of them, many 10 feet deep, all of them partly
filled with muck, marched on for miles through the forest -- until
they ended in a cluster of about 25 miners. With shovels, picks and
plastic wash tubs, they were creating more craters in the
streambed.

 Jean Pierre Asikima, 43, was among them. He gave up digging gold
two months earlier, he said, to come into the forest in search of
coltan. But the digging was poor, the price was low and he said he
was losing weight in the forest.

 ''I have come too late, and soon I will quit,'' he said, standing
in a crater he had dug, waist-deep in muddy water that was the
color of chicken gravy.

 Still, Asikima worked with a fury. With mud and gravel from his
crater, he built a seven-foot-high mound. Then he shoveled and
scraped the mud into an eko-bark trough, while another miner, a
16-year-old who said his name was Dragon went to work with a blue
plastic washtub, pouring several hundred tubs full of water through
the makeshift sluice.

 After about an hour, a glittering black stain had gathered at the
foot of the trough. It was an ounce or so of coltan, the fruit of
five hours of digging and washing. Asikima said it was not enough
to buy a tin of rice for dinner. As he began to dig another crater,
I asked him about his life in the forest. He said he despised it.

 ''If I had another job,'' he said, ''I would not come here. But
there are no other jobs. When this mine closes, I will go and find
another one.''

 He is not alone. Although the price has crashed, many
coltan-bearing regions of eastern Congo remain thick with miners,
commerçants and prostitutes. In a country with a 20-cents-a-day
living standard, the chance of earning a few dollars from coltan is
still a powerful enough reason to live in the bush and shovel muck,
sell bread and risk sofisi.

 To halt war profiteering and the destruction of wildlife, the
report to the U.N. Security Council called for an embargo on the
export of coltan and other natural resources from Uganda and
Rwanda.

 Although the embargo has yet to be imposed by the Security
Council, European and American companies that profit from the
coltan trade have been scurrying to avoid bad publicity. Pictures
of dead gorillas and of environmental ruin in Congo's national
parks have been particularly effective in triggering alarm among
companies that pride themselves on their environmental images.

 Sabena, the Belgian airline named in the report for hauling
Congolese coltan to Europe, announced in June that it will no
longer carry the ore. Nokia and Motorola are among several major
mobile-phone makers that have publicly demanded that their
suppliers stop using ore mined illegally in Congo. And so it has
gone down the supply chain. The world's largest maker of tantalum
capacitors, Kemet, in Greenville, S.C., has asked its suppliers to
certify that ore does not come from Congo or bordering countries,
including Uganda and Rwanda. Cabot Corporation, a Boston-based
company that is the world's second-largest processor of tantalum
powder, announced this spring that it ''deplores all unlawful and
immoral activities'' connected with coltan mined in Congo and
declared that it will not buy any ore from that part of the world.

 The high moral ground that companies have been quick to stake out
has the added attraction of being profit-neutral, at least for the
moment. The tantalum market is glutted because of declining demand
in the slumping technology sector. As important, there has been a
sharp increase in production by a giant Australian mining company,
called Sons of Gwalia, which now produces half the world's supply.

 In the immediate future, it looks as though less and less of the
world's tantalum will come from Congo's coltan mines. And as the
U.N. sees it, this will be a very good thing. Its report concluded,
''The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese
people.''

 But inside what's left of Congo, a wide array of influential
people (who are not combatants in the war and are not getting rich
from coltan) make a persuasive case that these demands are naive
and could well produce disastrous consequences. They argue that in
a collapsed state where the likelihood of constructive Western
intervention is next to nil, there simply are no easy fixes.

 ''For local people who are trying to make a bit of money out of
coltan, how can an embargo possibly help?'' asked Aloys Tegera, who
directs the Pole Institute, a nongovernmental social-research
institute in Goma, in eastern Congo. Tegera is well aware of
coltan's destructive side: he is the lead author of a study on the
severe social impact of coltan mining, which describes how teachers
have been lured to the mines from the country's few functioning
classrooms and explains why teenage girls have turned to
prostitution.

 ''Coltan fuels the war; nobody can deny that,'' said Tegera.
''That is why we maybe will never get peace. But civilians,
especially those who are organized, also are getting some money
from this.''

 He and many others find it more than slightly insulting that in a
country where millions are hungry and coltan is helping to feed
some of them, a de facto embargo is gathering steam among high-tech
companies apparently worried less about human beings than about the
public-relations downside of dead gorillas. And, like many other
Congolese, he declines to become morally riled up about foreign
domination.

 ''Of course, the Rwandans are pillaging us,'' he said. ''But they
are not the first to do it and they are no worse than the others.
King Leopold did it. The Belgians did it. Mobutu and the Americans
did it. The most sorrowful thing I have to live with is that we are
incapable of coming up with an elite that can run things with
Congolese interests in mind.''

 Terese Hart, an American botanist who helped create the Okapi
Faunal Reserve and has worked there since the early 1980's,
supports neither an embargo on coltan nor a quick pullout of
Ugandan forces from northeast Congo.

 ''The world wants to intervene from a distance and pull the
strings on the puppet,'' said Hart, who works for the Wildlife
Conservation Society. ''The problem is that the strings are not
connected to anything. When outsiders struggle to find solutions
for Congo, they often assume there is some kind of government.
There is no government. There is nothing.''

 As for coltan mining, Hart said it is silly for the outside world
to try to squeeze one of the few ways for poor people to make a bit
of money.

 ''Outside the reserve, I think that coltan mining is the lesser
evil of the types of exploitation that occur when there is no
government,'' Hart said. ''I prefer mining to logging. Cutting
timber in the rain forest is part of an irreversible ecological
process. I don't think coltan mining does as much permanent damage.
The miner will not get much, but at least he will continue to
live.''

 Among the Congolese I spoke to about coltan, the consensus was
that they could not risk the simple solutions that outsiders had
prescribed. Struggling to survive in a failed state, they saw no
straightforward answers, no moral high ground. For them, the only
thing worse than mining coltan is not mining it.

 What progress there is in eastern Congo tends to be slow,
small-scale and subject to sudden reversal.

 The World Health Organization has succeeded in working with rebel
groups to vaccinate most children for polio, but it says 7 of 10
children have not received any other vaccines in the past decade.
Western donors are distributing some medicines, seeds and tools,
but three-quarters of the population still has no access to basic
health care.

 When progress is being made, it often involves the mixed blessing
of coltan. In eastern Congo, two mining entrepreneurs, Edouard
Mwangachuchu, a Congolese Tutsi, and his American partner, Robert
Sussman, a physician from Baltimore, are struggling to build a
legitimate business in an illegitimate state.

 They run a company that even their competitors say treats miners
fairly. It supplies shovels and picks to about a thousand men who
operate as independent contractors in mines located far from
national parks, protected forests and endangered gorillas.

 The land belongs to Mwangachuchu, whose herds were slaughtered in
1995, as the Mobutu era was sputtering to an end. Desperate to
shore up popular support, Mobutu encouraged Congolese in the east
to attack the ethnic Tutsi minority. A mob pulled Mwangachuchu,
then a financial adviser to the provincial government in Goma, out
of his Suzuki jeep on his way to work. They choked him with his
necktie, ripped off his clothes and dumped him at the Rwandan
border. Crowds later stoned and shot at his house.

 Mwangachuchu, his wife and their six children were granted
political asylum in the United States in 1996, and they rented a
house in Laurel, Md. Two years later, homesick and bored with his
job at a Carvel ice-cream plant, Mwangachuchu returned home for a
visit.

 Civil war was raging. His cattle farm had been destroyed, his
herds gone, his buildings burned. But he still owned the land,
which he had long known was rich in coltan. In 1999, a year after
his first trip home, he heard that there was money to be made
mining it. All he needed was a partner, someone with a bit of
money.

 Robert Sussman, 55, sold his medical practice in Baltimore in the
early 1990's. Comfortably well off, he began a second career as a
mining-camp doctor in remote countries, including Myanmar and
Congo. Intrigued by mining, he began thinking of going into the
business himself. He met Mwangachuchu in a Goma hotel in 1998, and
they became partners the following year, as the price of coltan
began to go up.

 Sussman and Mwangachuchu say they are investing in Congo for the
long term. They believe they can operate profitably despite the
recent slump in coltan prices and despite the fact that their mines
are still periodically fought over by roving bands of armed men.
The partners say they have laid the foundation for a solid
business.

 ''We are proud of what we are doing in Congo,'' Sussman told me.
''We want the world to understand that if it's done right, coltan
can be good for this country.''

 Sussman and Mwangachuchu, of course, are also in it for the money.
High coltan prices last year gave them an unexpected windfall.
Sussman said they sold 22 metric tons of coltan, which earned them
about $7.5 million -- before they paid their many bills.

 Since then, they have bought about 25 more tons of coltan from
miners in the field -- ore that they have not been able to sell.

 Last year, Sussman and Mwangachuchu shipped their ore to Europe on
Sabena airlines. That airline now refuses their business, and they
are scrambling to find another shipper. They fear that a corporate
embargo could cripple their business and idle miners who have come
to depend on them.

 ''We don't understand why they are doing this,'' Mwangachuchu told
me. ''The Congolese have a right to make business in their own
country.''

Blaine Harden is a national correspondent for The Times. His last
article for the magazine was about a doctor who died fighting the
ebola virus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/12/magazine/12COLTAN.html?ex=998888435&ei=1&en=73813d3a2d427857

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