A Visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo goes wrong

'At the end of this highway was a scene so intensely shocking that I can recall it instantly by closing my eyes. Picture a great, uneven pit, the result of decades of energetic and inconsiderate mining, a gang rape of the earth’s surface perhaps a quarter of a mile across, under a brassy sun. Then notice that in dozens of small excavations, bowed black figures are hacking and dragging and pulling small objects from the earth. It is ominously quiet apart from the crunching, tinkling noise of hard labour. Every couple of minutes, another of these despairing figures emerges from the bottom of the pit with a laden bicycle and plods toward town. It is like something from before the Middle Ages. One of the Brueghels, or perhaps Hieronymus Bosch, might have painted the scene, only they would have shown it in darkness, lit up by a red glow.

'We approached the fat cop, sheltering under a shady awning, who seemed to be in charge. He wasn’t. He was plainly deferring to a dead-eyed boss man, with one badly chewed ear, sitting to the side. We explained that I wished to write about the mine and that we needed to take some photographs. The cop riffled through our many official permissions and said we needed yet more paperwork. I took this to mean that he needed some paper money, but our Congolese fixer refused to consider this possibility. We went back to Likasi to a series of offices. I am not even sure if we got the necessary chit.

'It wouldn’t have mattered. As we bounced and squeaked down the miserable track once more, I noticed that the procession of laden bicycles had inexplicably stopped. Then we passed a small group of miners, including a boy of about 12 who snarled at me with an expression of pure hatred such as I had not seen before that day, would shortly see once more, and which I hope not to see again. My white colleagues, one African-born and the other with years of experience in the more worrying corners of the continent, also noticed strange signs—large stones on the road and men running uphill away from us.

'None of us realized just how much danger we were in... '

 

You can find out what happened next in 'Short Breaks in Mordor', my new e-book, which you don't even need an e-reader to read. As it isn't an ultra-feminist rant, or a biography of a member of the Marx family, or a misery memoir crammed with rude words, it's not going to be published as a three-dimensional book, or reviewed in the respectable media. That's why I'm publicizing it here:

 

You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:

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You can find the book here:  

 

 

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK) 

 

 

 

and 

 

 

 

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