I recently had the good fortune to be able to visit part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in its rather remote northeast corner in Ituri Province, definitely one of those places far from the usual trodden track. So what does such a visit have to do with an environmental column in a local newspaper in a small town like Grahamstown?
I recently had the good fortune to be able to visit part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in its rather remote northeast corner in Ituri Province, definitely one of those places far from the usual trodden track. So what does such a visit have to do with an environmental column in a local newspaper in a small town like Grahamstown?
Well, it’s a story of gold, and man’s destruction of a landscape that has entirely altered a whole region and, in so doing, threatens an entire drainage basin.
To geographically pinpoint the region if one flies from Entebbe in Uganda, due west over Lake Albert and the Rwenzori Mountains, you enter the immense Congo Basin, via a town called Bunia (pronounced Boon-ya).
Bunia is a vast conglomeration of people, several hundred thousand of them, many of them refugees from the inter-tribal conflicts that have wracked Rwanda and eastern Congo over the last 20 years.
The landscape west of Bunia drops from an altitude of 1 400m down into the main basin or the Cuvette Congo as it is referred to in French and Belgian literature through an endless series of rolling green hills and steep valleys.
This is a well-watered region, with 1.6 to 2.0m rainfall per year, and is lush and tropical with early morning mists and late afternoon heavy downpours.
The atmosphere is often almost orange in colour, reminiscent of those old Vietnam War films which seemed to show the murky forests of that country wreathed in orange light.
Probably around 100 years ago these hills were forested, with cool, clear streams forming the countless feeder streams to the 4 400km-long Congo main river.
The forests were refuges for some of the strangest creatures on the planet: the okapi, an animal that resembles a cross between a giraffe and a gazelle; bonobo monkeys and chimpanzees and numerous weird-looking fish with long snouts like aquatic elephants which are capable of creating their own electricity!
Since long before colonial times, it was well-known that the hills of the western African escarpment of the Great Rift Valley held gold.
Artisanal gold mining in this area dates back to the 18th century, and possibly much earlier. Most of this earlier exploitation had a low impact kept so by the sheer physical difficulty in penetrating, accessing, and working in the area and getting gold out to the trade routes of the East, across Uganda, Kenya, and to the sea.
Since before Biblical times, gold has had value: it is no invention of the modern technological world that drives man to seek for gold.
But in recent times, the massively expanding human population, coupled with the forced migrations caused by war and genocides, and the need to survive in whichever way possible despite the consequences have changed all that.
Forget the sort of gold-mining we are used to on the Witwatersrand: it simply hasn’t happened in Congo. The resource is too scattered over too large an area, and the logistics of establishing such mines in that area are formidable and probably uneconomical.
The Belgians tried it between 1911 and 1960 with only marginal success, and, it has to be admitted, with very localised impact on the environment as most mines were underground.
Surface disturbances were limited to a few roads, occasional hydro-electric power stations (which benefitted the local communities anyway, while they still worked) and small urban settlements around the mines.
But the allure of gold has attracted artisanal miners in their hundreds of thousands over virtually the entire northeast region from Kivu province northwards to Ituri.
It is like the Johannesburg goldfields of the 1800s chaotic, frenetic and ruthless. These multitudinous miners, equipped with little more than picks, shovels and determination, have, like an army of ants, altered the riparian zones of almost every single stream and river course over a vast area.
The valleys have been dug over as if by rampant giant moles, the streams channelised, the water used to wash out the gold (with additions of both cyanide and mercury) the forest cut down for use as wood and housing poles and the upper slopes cleared of forest for the growing of crops, mainly cassava, maize and bananas.
Such has been the impact on the rivers, that the valleys are no longer resemble the shape that they once were.
In many places V-shaped valleys, which formerly had rocky–based clearwater streams in them, have given way to what looks like a sort of vlei several hundred-metre-wide open expanses of reeds that have built up on the sediments released from the disturbed river-banks.
Some of these valleys are now seven to 10m deep in sediments, deposited by rivers of liquid mud that simply cannot hold any more suspended matter.
These unnatural vleis are scattered with the skeletons of numerous dead trees, the former forest growing along the river-banks that has been drowned by the rising water table dammed up by the mass of deposited liquid mud.
It is horrific to see how the landscape has been destroyed and altered. The rivers are dead. Our reason to visit the Congo was to do a survey of both fish and aquatic insects and we found very little left!
Only in the very few places where little artisanal mining had taken place, were there streams where the water was anything other than orange, flowing mud.
Here and there, we found relic populations of what must have existed before the miners’ onslaught – the last few (eight 10 species) survivors of the 150+ species of fish recorded for this escarpment area and a portion of the second-most species rich aquatic community in the world after the Amazon, with around 700 fish species known, and many surely unknown.
Everywhere you look, you see signs that the river banks have been dug and churned over. As we watched, men with shovels were diverting water-courses though home-made pipes of hollowed-out tree trunks, to wash out the gold.
Steep banks, all made of that famous red lateritic Congo soil, were being shovelled into the water without the slightest concern for any downstream user, let alone the natural environment.
Most streams and smaller rivers are now less than 10cm deep, over a bottom of countless metres of soft red silt: a horror to see, and a moonscape in its sterility and lack of natural diversity.
All in the name of gold. The nearby town, where we were based, houses around 54 000 people, and we were reliably informed by a group doing a social survey there, that 80% of the population was involved in gold mining activities.
Yes, that’s 43 200 gold miners or people involved in the activity! One day, while we were in a small wooden shop, in a tiny unnamed village, sheltering from the equatorial sun, we saw the trade in gold happening right in front of us.
A man came into the shop and unwrapped a small package. Inside were two tiny gold ingots, the size of the keys on your cellphone.
These were weighed on simple balance-type scales using matches: one match = 1/10 gram, and he received a bundle of Congolese franc notes at an equivalent rate of US$37/gram.
Nearer to Bunia, we were told, he would have got $44/gram but it was still good money for a few days work.
Our security guard told us that he could earn a month’s security officer’s wages, digging for gold, in two to three days if he chose to do so.
If you go on Google Earth to the Bunia area of the northeast Congo, you will see a pale green area with patches of brown all along the escarpment where the mining takes place. The rivers are bright red-brown.
Further west, the pale green turns dark green (the forest) as the escarpment drops down into the real Congo basin along the Ituri valley.
Here, the forest is magnificent: massive, multi-storied trees, often with buttress roots, virtually untouched… or so it looks.
However the rivers are still reddish-orange, laden with silt, witness to the upstream activities. The legacy of a massacred upper catchment is felt far, far downstream in the misty and atmospheric depths of the Ituri valley.
We ventured down to the Ituri River one day, a journey of only 30km from where we were staying, but which took over four hours on roads which are actually worse than those shown in any Congo movie!
Our Toyota Landcruiser suspension was not up to the task, and dropped us in a heap upon the road, but as with everything in the Congo, you have to make a plan, so after cobbling it together again with wire from our fishing equipment, we eventually arrived at the Ituri river, somewhat upstream of the fabled Ituri rain-forest, the last home of the okapis.
We were faced with what looked like a classic jungle river about 400m wide, and fringed with high, thick forest.
However, photographs sourced from the literature, and taken just a few years ago, showed the water as deep and clear.
The Ituri is now red-brown with silt, and carries this toxic load downstream to the Aruwimi, and thence to the Congo River itself.
It can be imagined what it’s effects will be the slow smothering of the aquatic environment, the reduction in light penetration that gives the river its life, the loss of the plankton, the mayflies, the stone flies, the caddis, the fishes and all the other myriad creatures that for millennia have brought such a diversity of life to this huge Congo basin.
All just for gold. It is sad to see it slowly dying before your eyes, for the forests of the Congo should be revered places.
It is politically correct these days to point fingers at the huge multi-national companies, those whose overseas investors and beneficiaries should ‘know better’ but this is not the case here.
The occasional commercial mine (there are very few of them, and most of them are in ruins) seem to have had very localised impacts.
But the swarming masses of humanity despoiling the rivers with not even the slightest thought or care for the destruction that they are doing are the villains in this scenario.
Our colleagues who were doing the social survey of the local communities, found that there was almost zero environmental awareness or concern among the local population.
This is not a story that the first world (and I include South Africa in that category) wants to hear. It it is so much more convenient (to borrow Al Gore’s word) to blame the multinationals, while conceding a measure of largesse to the man-in-the-village as a mere ‘victim’ of someone else’s greed.
But the reality is that the Congo landscape is bleeding, haemorrhaging its life-blood soil down its massive waterways, to pollute, smother and destroy one of the last remaining tropical rainforests in the world and who, one asks, is going to do anything about this? The solution, if there is one, won’t be convenient at all, will it?
