WORLD> Africa
Kids working in African gold mines
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-11 10:16

Each night before falling asleep, Saliou struggles to remember a verse from the Quran. He doesn't know what the words mean, but he had been told they would protect him.

Six miles from the village, men and teenage boys, some as young as 14, clamber down mine shafts 30 to 50 meters deep. The shafts are as narrow as manholes. Younger teens yank the rocks up with a pulley.

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Saliou's boss buys bags of dirt from these men. The men have already combed it for gold, but usually a few crumbs remain. Boys like Saliou and his friends take turns at different jobs to coax the crumbs out.

They steer wheelbarrows of dirt over rutted paths. They pound the dirt with wooden posts for hours until it is as fine as flour. They wash the dirt in a large sieve-like box. Then they squat next to a plastic tub, pour mercury into their bare hands, and rub it into the mud like a woman scrubbing laundry on rocks.

Mercury attracts gold like a magnet. But it also attacks the brain and can cause tremors, speech impediments, retardation, kidney damage and blindness.

Saliou's tub of dirt yields a silvery ball the size of an M&M. He hands it to his boss, who lifts up his shades to eye it. The man heats the ball over a charcoal fire to make the mercury evaporate, leaving behind a fleck of gold.

Just handling mercury is treacherous; breathing its fumes is worse. The children don't know that. They crowd for a glimpse of the gold as its silvery husk slowly vaporizes.

At mealtime, Saliou rinses his hands in water from a muddy pool where the mercury run-off was dumped. He scoops a mouthful of rice and licks his hand clean.

Evenings, Saliou's boss weaves his way between huts where women boil cabbage and nurse sweaty babies. The speck of gold the boys squeezed from the dirt is in the pocket of his jeans.

A gold merchant waits in a dark shack, his metal scales propped on a wooden table.

The buyers of bush gold are distinguishable from the miners by their tidy clothes and scales. Each one offers the same price for 1 gram of gold - roughly US$19. (There are 31 grams in a troy ounce, the standard weight used to measure gold.)

The buyers lend the miners money to purchase tools and bags of untreated dirt. In return, they get first crack at the gold. Saliou's boss says he is loyal to a merchant named Yacouba Doumbia, who gave him his startup capital.

Doumbia says it takes him more than a month to collect nearly 1 kilogram (about 32 ounces) of gold. He hides it in pockets sewn into his clothes.

The gold leaves at dawn on the back of a motorcycle. It travels four days through the grasslands to Bamako, the capital of Mali. Couriers say the journey is dangerous. Some carry guns. They take back roads, never the highway.

The motorcycles pour into the city from hundreds of bush mines along the crooked spine of the gold reef. There the gold funnels into five squalid offices near a central square.

Bush buyers like Doumbia say they are nearly all loyal to one of five Bamako gold barons: Fantamadi Traore, Fabou Traore, Sadou Diallo, Boubacar Camara and El Haj Moussa Diaby, whose business is now handled by his son, Fode Diaby.

Doumbia gets his buying money and his motorcycle from Fantamadi Traore. They come from the same dusty Malian village, which means they are as good as family.

Traore says he has recruited over 70 buyers, most from his village. They have blanketed Tenkoto.

"All the gold that leaves our village is headed to Mali to this one man," says Bambo Cissokho, the village chief of Tenkoto.

Traore's buyers pull into his muddy alleyway in Bamako and hand over the gold, sealed like spices in Ziploc bags. The weight of the gold and the name of each buyer is marked on a Post-It note. Then gold from various buyers is melted together in an outdoor furnace and poured into a mold to form an uneven bar.