Blood River Read Free Page A

detained me on suspicion of being a spy.
    Without Yav, I would not have made it through Lubumbashi
airport. I could see by the way he breezed past soldiers guarding
the entrance to the baggage hall that he was a man of standing,
something that I exploited unashamedly as we waited for the
luggage to appear. I edged closer to him, trying to look at ease and
not catch the eye of various officials whom I could see closely
questioning the other white man from my flight. There was a
bullet hole in the glass partition above the door leading into the
baggage hall, and a rusty fan, mounted on the ceiling, hung
motionless. Apart from brightly painted signs advertising mobilephone companies, nothing seemed to have changed from the time
when the airport staged the brutal finale of Lumumba's life. Eventually I pointed to my bag and Yav barked at an official to
take it outside to his waiting car.

    Rather unexpectedly, he began to quiz the baggage handlers
about a set of golf clubs that had been due in on the flight for one
of the senior mine employees. Years earlier I had met some
wealthy Zimbabweans who told me an amazing story about how
the wealthy live in Lubumbashi. The city is only a few kilometres
from the border with Zambia, connected by one of the Congo's
few functioning roads. One of the wealthy white mine owners is
so keen on show-jumping that each winter in Lubumbashi he
hosts his own event, inviting Zambian, Zimbabwean and South
African show-jumpers to drive their horses all the way to the
Congo. Border guards are bribed and special supplies flown into
Lubumbashi. No matter that the Congo is ravaged by war, poverty
and corruption, this man is wealthy and eccentric enough to
convene his own Horse of the Year Show in the Congo. If it is
possible for Lubumbashi to have its own show-jumping competition, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that it
has a golf course.
    For almost a hundred years Katanga's growth had been based
almost completely on copper. For a long time the province was
known as Shaba, the local Swahili word for the metal. But the
problem with copper is that the production process is relatively
complex. Expensive mining equipment is needed, as well as
skilled labour and large amounts of chemicals for processing and
other supplies that have to be imported. This was all possible
during the Belgian colonial era when law and order existed, but
through the chaos of Mobutu's rule during the 1970s and 1980s,
foreign investors saw their copper mines repeatedly flooded,
supplies plundered and attempts to bring in replacement
equipment blocked by corrupt and incompetent local officials.
    By the time I reached Lubumbashi, copper was in decline, but
the town was in the grip of a new boom, one driven by cobalt. Cobalt had suddenly become commercially attractive because the
world price had been driven upwards by a surge in demand from
China's fast-growing economy. The cobalt price had grown by
300 per cent in less than year, from $8 to $24 per pound, a
dramatic change that had had a dramatic effect in Katanga, home
to some of the world's greatest and most accessible cobalt
deposits.

    Cobalt mining in Katanga does not require massive investment
or expensive processing. Here, a man with a shovel can become a
cobalt miner, simply by digging away the topsoil and looking for
the darker, greyish or purplish rock that is rich with cobalt salts.
The rock is then purified in the most primitive way, using a
hammer to chip away the non-cobalt-rich rock, a process that the
Congolese miners call `cobbing', a word imported from Britain
where it was first used by seventeenth-century Cornish tin
miners. The demand from China is so great that middlemen in
Lubumbashi, often Lebanese or Indian, are willing to pay cash for
sacks of the grey rock. The sacks are then collected, packed on
trucks and driven on a long and tortuous journey past grasping
officials on the Congolese border