SAHARA, THE THIRST FOR GOLD

Fame, fortune, and treasure: the Sahara has become the new wild west, with hundreds of thousands of young Africans rushing there with a backpack full of hopes and a head full of dreams. Les Jours pitches its tent in the desert to conduct a chapter-by-chapter investigation into this new gold rush, the resulting unprecedented migration flow, and its effects on a region already struggling with countless challenges.

1. Fever

It’s 3am in the Saraha and the air is feverish. Two headlamps speed across the sand. Another pick-up pierces the darkness, then a third, further behind. Soon a line of hundreds of 4x4s stretches into the night, each kicking up sand as they race along. It is an incredibly windy night in February. Daylight soon creeps into the sky, replacing the blanket of stars and an almost full moon, and bringing a few drops of rain. Some would say this is lucky, because it’s so unusual. Mohamed Salem is delighted: he’s got a head start.

At 10 o’clock sharp, a new gold mining area will be officially open in the Sahara. The authorities have designated a point in Tamaya, some 40 square kilometres, where anyone can legally come to dig and look for gold. This is the latest site to open to gold prospectors since the start of the gold rush in the vast desert region in 2010. First in Sudan, then Chad, Libya, Niger, Algeria, Mali and now in Mauritania: gold fever has gripped the desert. Millions of young men have been digging away at this rock for over ten years, dreaming of their fortune.

There is gold everywhere in the Sahara, there has been since the days of ancient Egypt. The first records of gold mining in the world are Saharan, in the times of Ramses IV, on the border between today’s Sudan and Egypt. Yet what was then Nubia was quickly forgotten; the American wild west, Amazonian riverbanks, and above all the imaginary concept of Eldorado, are the first places that come to mind.

It took until 2009, and the rediscovery of gold in Sudan, for the Sahara to once again become a place for gold mining. The sites have just kept multiplying since, along with the stories of nuggets found. The Sudanese “gold rushers” came to Chad when the first ingots were found, the Chadians to Niger, the Malians to Mauritania. Migration from east to west was established by this sector that moves billions under the table. The new wild west. Mauritania is the latest country in the chain. Elsewhere in the Sahara, gold mining sites are already well known. Here, they’re springing up like weeds. This morning in Tamaya, GPS coordinates 20.433528,-15.506683, the gold rush begins again.

From the back of the pick-up truck, Mohamed Salem sees a cloud of dust appear on the horizon as they approach the gold mining area. He comes from Lahrach, a small rural community in the south of the country, not far from Senegal. There, they produce sorghum, niébé (a kind of black-eyed bean), watermelon, but not gold. Mohamed Salem was a farmer until 2016. When they found gold in Mauritania, he left the field for the mines. With a coat around his shoulders and his hood pulled up over a grey cap to protect against the cold nighttime winds, he’s ready for the gold rush. The pick-up lurches through the sand. As the tiny specks on the horizon, all signs of human life, get bigger, Mohamed Salem’s heart sinks. “Nobody cares about the schedule, it looks like they’ve already started!” Far from getting a head start, he’s late to the party.

The initial 10am rush didn’t happen. Tens of thousands of people, pickaxes slung over their shoulders, were already crossing by the end of the first Fajr prayer. The public company overseeing the opening, Maaden Mauritanie, said it had distributed around 16,000 badges. To be eligible for this golden ticket, you had to pay 5000 ouguiyas (13 euros), be Mauritanian and over 18. The figure seems heavily under-estimated. How many people are hunting for gold without a badge? How about the foreigners you meet everywhere? Estimates by gold miners’ unions range from triple (the most credible) to ten times (the least credible) the official number. It’s impossible to know for sure, and what does it matter anyway? There are gold miners as far as the eye can see.

Picture a 40 square kilometre plot in the desert, which sometimes looks like wasteland, and sometimes like a postcard, virgin sands free of any human presence, scoured by the winds. Flying sand bends the occasional skeletal shrub. Small dunes are formed by the winds. All at once, 40,000 people (we’ll go with this estimate) turn up, their heads bent, searching, turning back, busy. Everyone is in a hurry. They bring out metal detectors here, pickaxes there. One digs with his bare hands. Another runs. The chaotic lunar backdrop could be a scene from Mad Max. The wind will blow all day, gradually casting layers of sand over anyone unfortunate and exhausted enough to be sleeping without a tent for shelter.

Everyone rushed to Tamaya that day, Tuesday, 21 February 2023: 14-year-old kids, 60-year-old men, disabled people, chic ladies with handbags tucked under their arms, administrative executives, university geologists, men holding their coccyx with one hand and a pickaxe in the other, some in military uniform. And then there are the regular gold prospectors, the hardworking masses, the ones who actually go down to the bottom of holes tens of metres deep, who die in falls or collapsed tunnels, to the indifference of all concerned. They are recognisable at first glance from the way they dress, their shoes, hoodies, balaclavas and turbans. They’ve got the look of people for whom this morning rush is just one of many. Mohamed Salem is one of them.

He got out of the pick-up in a place known as Graviers (Gravel), one of the sites in the area where gold prospectors had already returned before being driven out by the State, leaving behind tiny crushed stones, gravel. 2.5km away is Azraïl (Azrael), a site named after the angel of death in the Quran, the one who separates the soul from the body according to the will of the Prophet “There have been many deaths in the mines here,” explains a passer-by, a well-dressed man in his thirties. He introduces himself as Salem Bebah, a novice in the gold world, but equipped with advice from many friends who work in the field. He’s fairly new to the great roulette wheel of gold: a few years under his belt, a few schemes in mind, but nothing more. “The pits often collapse, with gold miners at the bottom,” he says. With jackhammers and explosives, prospectors can reach unprecedented depths of 50, 80, 100, 130, even 150 metres below ground. The most central mining site in Tamaya is called Marhoum, a nod to an Arabic epitaph for “the dearly departed”. Another deathly tale! But that’s all in the past, you’ll be assured by anyone you ask about these names.

Back in Graviers, Mohamed Val, a man wearing a pink shirt and silver wristwatch, and carrying a smartphone in one pocket of his stylish boubou, is digging. The pickaxe in his hand is starkly out of keeping with the rest of his look. “For years, I heard my friends talking about gold; I wanted to give it a try, too. What if I found something this morning?!” He laughs, but his joviality masks a much less rosy West African reality. With a master’s degree from the University of Nouakchott, he’s a member of the highly privileged class who are qualified for intellectual work, but the bottleneck in the job market keeps him unemployed. Posts are co-opted for friends of friends, family members, it’s a closed shop. For others who enrolled at university as normal: nothing. Mohamed Val fears the prospect of downward mobility. “I come from a pretty wealthy background. How can I keep up that lifestyle if I don’t have any work?” The answer is gold.

A few metres away, Salem Bebah also cuts a fine figure in his traditional Mauritanian blue three-piece boubou. He’d been to look for a pit and comes over to us: “I’m looking for a good spot to set up.” He walks past Nagi Chourfa, the owner of several pits across the country, a man with no shortage of stories to tell about his gold endeavours, and Mohamed Salem. They don’t know one another, but all three grew up in this wild west, and are looking for just the right spot. That’s the main aim of this opening day. “People who start digging deep straight away are missing the point,” explains Mohamed Salem. “Gold works in stages, and today is just the first stage: claim your plot and prepare the rest.” He only digs 15cm deep in three tentative holes on a plot of 10 square metres.

Welcome to his kingdom: he has marked its borders by drawing long lines in the sand with his foot, the way you’d mark out a football pitch on the beach. “We’re just here to claim our territory,” the robust and experienced man repeats. “The rest comes later.” He straightens his hood. Next to him, an old man is wandering around. He has a scrap metal divining rod stuck inside an empty plastic soda bottle. “This works, I promise,” the old man assures us. “It’ll start turning when I’m about to find gold…” He disappears into the wind and sand as the sun begins to set.

At this point in the day, the gold prospectors can be divided into two categories: the most experienced, who scan, probe, mull things over; and what Mohamed Salem calls “Sunday gold miners”, who comb the area with their metal detectors, or perhaps even divining rods. The second group are hoping to find alluvial gold, the kind that lies on the surface or a few centimetres below.

“This is the halal casino,” Nagi Chourfa explains. Casinos, like all gambling, are forbidden in Islam, and gold “is a bit like roulette, but it’s legal,” he goes on, leaning on his right arm. We’re sitting in a tent a few metres away from his pit, where the 11 Malian men he has hired are digging. His own gold rush was quick: a connoisseur of good deals and information passed on in exchange for a fee, he hasn't simply zoned out in the heat. He drinks tea, harangues the visitors, carefully watches anyone approaching. His hair is neat, his face smooth, his shirt crisply ironed over a casually crumpled boubou. Outgoing and friendly, he’s the kind of guy that everybody trusts. Sitting here, nothing would give away the fact that he’s the boss, but he’s the one who knows all the schemes and the whole sector inside out.

There are a thousand ways to play the game, but the trick of the day revolves around cartography. In the same way that the Klondike saloon saw under-the-counter sales of the names of rivers on the map in 1896, in 2023 there are under-the-turban sales of GPS points with high gold content in the rock. On his mobile, Nagi Chourfa shows me an app that gathers dozens of GPS coordinates. His photo gallery is full of the geological documents he has obtained. 

The geography of Tamaya has always been mouthwatering to the gold rushers: it is part of a vast terrain where one of the global leaders in gold, the Canadian company Kinross, was prospecting years ago. Owners of one of the biggest industrial gold mines in West Africa, Tasiast, around 20km away, the Canadians found gold in Tamaya but have never converted the permit from prospecting to exploitation. 

Rumour had it that there was gold here, but the authorities, who have long held hopes of the possibility of industrial exploitation, prohibited the gold rushers from digging. Anyone who tried was jailed. When Nouakchott finally decided to open up this land to smaller, artisanal hands, being unable to find investors, the prospecting data held by the Kinross geologists became an enviable means of access.

“Some Kinross employees started selling on GPS coordinates, gold-bearing depths… The Tasiast database was circulated,” explains a Maaden employee, who will remain anonymous in light of their confidentiality obligations. “And then there are rumours going around,” he adds, “that certain State dignitaries might also have GPS points.” Officially, mum’s the word. In this region, what goes unsaid often reveals more than any public speeches. “I’ve got an eye for spotting gold,” someone says. “Gold? I can sense it,” another ventures. In the kingdom of polite duplicity, there are no fools, and GPS coordinates are king. 

The first lucky winners at the halal casino didn’t go in for any of that; they were the fortunate ones in Tamaya, who would put dreams into the heads of 40,000 people within weeks. On the first evening, two people found gold on the new site. They were the first, the ones with the silver spoon in their mouths, who are talked about everywhere, even in cafes in Nouakchott. They found gold in Tamaya. The two men, whose anonymity reinforced the myth, discovered the precious metal in the middle of a Tuesday night.

The first, with a metal detector, on the site named after the angel of death, Azrael: 85 little grammes, which will be enough to secure the profitability of his plot. Another a few hours later, when the moon was high, with his pickaxe: just one metre down, he found rock “sprinkled with gold” as they say here. Hundreds of people gathered around, despite the hour, business had taken over. The offers were good. The most interesting? A 4x4 V8 Prado and six million ouguiyas (around 16,000 euros) to buy the future pit, with no guarantee it would be any good. The night’s luckiest man refused everything, keeping faith in his good fortune.

 

2. The Journey

Mohamed Abdelneby has a kraft paper envelope that he never lets out of his sight. It is decidedly crumpled after two years of being carried around from pillar to post. Carefully folded in half, sitting on a shelf in the kitchen where he works, it contains three documents: his Chadian identity card, his membership card for the second division football club Stars Jeunes Talent in N’Djamena, and the receipt for a loan request he has sent to the U.S. embassy in Chad. 

He doesn’t mention gold when our conversation begins, he’s all about football. At 18 years old and 1.92m tall, he is a defender, and he enthusiastically tells me about the latest match in La Liga, all while serving tea – the Sudanese way, with cloves and ginger and a large helping of sugar – for the customers. Mohamed Abdelneby arrived a month ago, after a long journey in search of the right opportunity in football, and now gold. Though he hasn’t yet been to a gold mine. He wasn’t there on Tuesday, 21 February when the feverish rush took off – too busy making tea. “I make 2000 ouguiyas a day, at least, it’s better than nothing.” 2000 old ouguiyas is 5.40 euros.

Like thousands of other young optimists in the Sahara, he set off hoping to find greener pastures. Ten years ago, there was a sense of “adventure”, as migration to Europe is known in West Africa. Now young Saharans are looking to gold. The videos of Libyan migrant ghettos and the thousands of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean have tempered enthusiasm for many who see this new form of migration, from east to west, as a path of hope, and more importantly, fewer risks. Since the discovery of gold in the Sahara, “a new form of migration has appeared, bringing to this (Nigerien) territory tens of thousands of people drawn to new economic opportunities” the regional authorities in the north of Niger reported in 2022.

From Sudan to Mauritania, intra-African migration has been overshadowed by the more newsworthy flow of migrants from Africa to Europe. The borders of the Saraha are paper-thin, State monitoring of desert areas is non-existent, and the few border posts there are, are easily avoided if you have the right driver. No agent, state or international, has yet been able to draw up a precise account of the number of prospectors who migrate through the desert in search of gold. “You don’t know who’s who on the gold mining sites in Tibesti,” Chadian President Mahamat Kaka Déby said in June 2002. “Who’s from Chad, who’s from elsewhere, but what you do know is there are a lot of weapons in that part of the world.”

Few indicators help to outline the extent of this phenomenon, but there are plenty of anecdotes. The mayor of a rural community in the north of Niger, with a population of a few hundred people for the year, confirmed in 2014 having seen 13,000 people barrel into town in just two weeks after gold was found there, then 30,000 within the month. The expulsions from sites in the north of Chad: tens of thousands in just a few weeks in 2018, according to the authorities. These estimates count tens of thousands of gold miners on each of the main Saharan gold mining sites. And there are hundreds of sites.

These gold migrants leave home with a backpack, a head full of dreams and a pocket not so full of cash. In the gold towns, base camps like Chami, where the owners of pits in the Sahara come to hire their labour, migrants end up in restaurants run by their communities. In Tabelot in Niger, the two main restaurants in the village are Sudanese-owned. In Arlit, also in Niger, the Eldorado bar is owned by Chadians. In Gatroun in Libya, a guest house welcomes Nigeriens. In Chami, it’s Café Soudan, a restaurant owned by a Mauritanian but managed by Sudanese people, which is the meeting point. There are around 50 people here, with an average age of 25, sipping tea prepared by Mohamed Abdelneby, waiting, hoping for the wind to fill their sails.

From Chad, Mohamed really only remembers the club Stars Jeunes Talents, which made him want to get serious about football. Confident of his talent, he believes he deserves better than Chad’s second division. A friend told him about Malian clubs where European scouts go to hunt for the next big thing. That decided it: they were heading to Bamako. The two friends jumped on a bus heading for Mali and the Stade du 26 Mars, the national stadium. But the dreams of European clubs faded as the months passed. His friend gave up; another Chadian he met by chance told him about Mauritania, and the gold being found there. “So, I came to make a bit of money here,” the young man says, stressing that he hasn’t abandoned his footballing dreams.

While he talks, bustling around the kitchen, another man, looking sleepy, comes in to order a coffee. Adam Mohamed has just woken up from a nap. He had been slumped in the adjoining room, a spacious lounge with no furniture other than thick rugs. A large television screen is tuned to the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera. This February afternoon, as the sun beats down on the sandy street, the would-be miners have nothing to do but sit in front of the football. It's match day: Juventus versus FC Nantes.

Below the television, three electricity sockets are taken over by phone chargers. The young Adam Mohamed, 18 years old, has taken his coffee back over to the television. The match comes to an end – defeat for Nantes – and a friend calls from outside. A ball has been brought out and is flying around. The players are all under 30, all from Darfur in Sudan, and have crossed the Sahara from east to west during their years searching for gold.

There’s Ahmed Khalid, whose Saharan adventure has been punctuated by several arrests for working in Libya; the fortunate Kader Adjeili who, like more and more feverish Sudanese gold rushers, decided to invest everything in a plane ticket; Mohamed Abdelneby, who left his tea urn for the occasion, and Abdou Mohamed Abdullah.

The latter, a 2m tall beanpole, not great with his feet, comes from the outskirts of Al-Fasher, the capital of Darfur province, where war has been raging again since April. Since 2019, when he left his family, he hasn’t stopped drifting from gold mine to gold mine. Along the 5000 miles that separate Sudan from Mauritania, this 26-year-old man has only ever travelled on pick-ups, heading across the desert according to GPS points. “It’s the cheapest way, cars and lorries are always driving around the desert, between the different sites,” he tells me.

Travellers flag down a driver, negotiate a price, and pile into trucks that are often already very crowded. For 50,000 francs, 70 euros, you can cover hundreds of kilometres in the back of a vehicle as long as you have something to protect you from the dust. For Abdou Mohamed Abdullah, the uniform consists of tapered grey trousers, worn-out black flip-flops, a second-hand flannel shirt with short sleeves, a 90s-style long black coat and a little red beanie hat.

When he was on the Ouraban site, in Darfur, where he first started digging aged 16, one owner told him about sites in Chad’s Tibesti mountains. “He suggested we go to work in his pits, which were a four-day journey from the site where we were,” says Abdou Mohamed Abdullah. All gold migration stories start like this.

For six months, he worked on sites in Kouri Bougoudi, on the border between Chad and Libya. It was so unsafe that he left. He and some mates found a truck that could take them to Gatroun, a stopping point in the south of Libya, en route to Niger. There, he heard people talking about sites in Niger: Djado and Tchibarakaten... and off they went in another truck.

In Tchibarakaten, the Tuaregs are in charge. “Depending on where you are, the communities more or less run the land and the sites,” he explains. The Sahara is divided into a thousand different community-influenced areas, struggling to find ways to prosper since nomadic seasonal livestock migration began to decline. The Sahara is a crossroads between a dozen countries where trade and trafficking are cornerstones of the local economy.

The triangle between Libya, Chad and Niger is an area where the Toubous are the majority, while the Aïr mountains and the Algeria-Mali border are mainly inhabited by Tuaregs. Arab communities have been established in the north of the Darfur region, while the Mauritanian Sahara and north-west Mali are influenced by communities of Hassaniya speakers from western Sahara.

In one of his books, the Mauritanian writer Beyrouk tells the story of a griot in the desert, who has to seek exile in Timbuktu. The people are different, the culture is different, the language is different; people regard each other stoney-faced. “The desert is constantly moving, before it was the salt caravans and convoys going to the Mediterranean, now it’s men looking for work,” the writer tells me when we meet in Nouakchott.

Abdou Mohamed Abdullah kept travelling: Mali, Algeria, and then to Mauritania, where our conversation takes place. He is sitting at a table in Café Soudan in Chami, waiting to go and dig on the new site in Tamaya. To pass the time here, they tell the success stories of other men, and remind themselves that they could be in their shoes. They also discuss, between copious cigarettes, the craziest situations on their long journeys. For Adam Mohamed, who I met after his nap, the journey from Sudan was like a road trip (he travelled from Niger with a friend), made up of selfies on the back of trucks in the middle of the desert, smiles on their faces, making hand signs like French rapper Jul, whose music has made it to the Sahara. “There’s danger everywhere, of course, but personally I’ve never had a problem. Apart from losing my papers in Mali…” he admits, before adding with a laugh: “Not that they’re much good for anything around here!”

Ahmed Khalid is sitting beside him, listening, and chips in as Adam Mohamed tells his stories. A shy character, with his checked shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, this 20-year-old doesn’t have such fond memories of his travels. He left Sudan in 2020; since then he has been in the Sahara, searching for gold. 

He recounts step after step of his failed gold migration, but he’s still here. The only good memory? Making the trip from Gao to Timbuktu, in Mali, in a pinasse on the river Niger, that majestic serpent that weaves its way through the region, sometimes passing by sand dunes. End of diversion. Ahmed Khalid will not go back to Sudan until he’s made enough to build a house. Otherwise, what was the point of leaving?

The parents of these young gold miners have heard nothing about the problems, only the dreams of fortune: a European club for some, the promise of houses for others. For Mohamed Abdelneby it absolutely has to be football. But he also agreed to work in the kitchen at Café Soudan, because he’s afraid of the holes, of their depth and the dust that prevails down there. “My coaches always told me I had excellent lung capacity, what if I lose it by breathing in too much dust ?” he asks with almost childlike honesty. 

 

3. The metal detector, the frying pan for the Sahara’s golden eggs

On the main street in Chami, at the corner of a building, among the countless shops selling gold mining equipment, it would be no surprise to bump into one Samuel Brennan. Rumour has it that he was the richest man in California at the time of the gold rush in 1848: a simple pickaxe salesman. At the age of 27, he left his native Maine and moved to San Francisco, where he launched its first local rag the California Star. Alas, all his employees abandoned him after several months, when someone in a bar sold them dreams of gold. Young Samuel wondered: should he join the gold rush himself, or could he profit from the chaos in town? He decided to invest everything in his bank account over the course of a few months to buy out the entire stock of shovels and pickaxes in San Francisco. He created a monopoly. In just a few months, the retail sale of the equipment he had carefully acquired made him one of the richest men in the American West.

In the vast Sahara, a region already plagued by so many security and economic challenges, where does the money for thousands of pick-up trucks come from? Where do the 10,000 jackhammers that can be heard roaring in the middle of the desert come from? And where do they find the 100,000 pickaxes to turn over the sand? Everything seems to appear as if by magic in the desert, including the men. Unlike the American gold rush, news articles about the 21 February gold rush can be counted on the fingers of one hand. As though what happens in the desert stays in the desert.

In the streets of Chami, Salem Bebah runs from shop to shop. He’s not hunting the ghost of Samuel Brennan, but for equipment to get back to the zone as quickly as possible. The first day in Tamaya is over, the initial rush has made way for a second phase: buying equipment and hiring diggers. “I have to buy everything today and get back there, or someone will steal my pits,” he shouts as he dashes from one stall to the next.

Mohamed Salem has spent two days arguing noisily over the sites in Tamaya with other small landowners – a hole here, a pit there. Never dropping his hood or his guard, he’s thinking ahead. At last, he has three spots that he’s prepared to defend tooth and nail from anyone who comes to challenge him: two on the Marhoum “dearly departed” site and one at Graviers. He jumps onto a pick-up – he doesn’t have his own transport, “too expensive when I can hop on the back of a truck for a few notes” – and he’s back on the road to Chami to join the hunt for equipment and workers.

On the way, he tells me about their world, this “parallel universe” which works, he says, as long as the balance is respected. “If you don’t understand distribution, you don’t understand gold,” he begins. Distribution of gold revenue for workers and investors is a camembert wheel divided into three. One third for the owner, who, in exchange, must take care of equipment and food; one third for the man digging at the bottom of the hole; and one third for future savings and rainy days – replacing broken equipment, investing in new machinery, unexpected costs.

There is a sacrosanct universal rule in the world of Saharan gold mining, which is not written in any contract or on any piece of paper: your word is all that counts. And what does it matter if the owner is an entrepreneur, genuine or otherwise; a jihadist group affiliated to al-Qaeda that got its hands on a gold mining site; or a group of armed bandits imposing their own law? The amounts are always more or less in the order of 30%. Sometimes it’s 25 or 22 for the worker, but that’s rare. It’s the pit owners who hire the diggers, in places like Café Soudan, or outside the processing centres. 

Nagi Chourfa, the Mauritanian gold veteran who is always one step ahead, didn’t wait to secure his pits before gathering his teams. While Chami is crowded with bargaining landowners, he is calmly serving the day’s third round of tea in his tent in Tamaya. For him, work has already begun. He was proactive, before the gold rush, calling in Kassim Coulibaly, a seasoned gold miner, to recruit his teams of workers before he even knew where to dig. This morning, his main pit is already several metres deep, and a dozen men, none of them over 25, are taking turns with the pickaxe. They’re young and easily exploited, they’ll gladly accept being paid with a few grams of gold.

As sand and then the earth below flies around the soon-to-be pit, Kassim Coulibaly gives orders to his men. He grumbles, says that he’d love written contracts, but is well aware that that’s not the norm. Paperwork has never been his forte. This Malian was in no way destined to end up in gold, much less in Mauritania. He’s one of thousands of West Africans to try their luck in Europe. He landed in Paris in 1999, in the place with the world’s second-highest Malian population after Bamako: Montreuil. With no papers, he found a string of odd jobs, before starting an adventure in underground labour (even then!) when he was hired (on the black market, of course) to work for a maintenance company on the Paris metro.

“We worked at night, when the Parisians were asleep. We went down into the stations, repaired whatever needed repairing, and we were gone again before the first metro even started up,” he says, standing in front of a gold mining pit in the middle of the Sahara desert in west-central Mauritania. A different world. But Kassim Coulibaly doesn’t regret chasing his first migrant dream, like thousands of West Africans, born in countries with a floundering economy, where the future is a thousand times greyer than the bright skies. “After eight years, the delays on getting a residency permit got too much for me, and I wasn’t earning all that much. So I was in the main travel agency in Montreuil and I asked them for the next flight to Bamako.”

It's the region’s second dream, yellow and underground, that paved his way to success. “I earn much more here,” he says, his body frail but his gaze steely as he shouts at his flock. In one of life’s little ironies, the four kilos he found underground in 2020 allowed him to… send his son to study in France. Legally.

While Kassim’s Malian tones regulate the workers’ pickaxe blows, Nagi Chourfa has returned to his neighbouring tent. More tea is served. He talks about his equipment like his children. His favourite metal detector? The GPZ-7000 made by the Australian company Minelab, the global market leader. “I bought it from Texas in 2016 for 12,000 dollars, plus the customs charges here. It cost me a lot, it’s true… But it’s the most effective, by far, along with the Gold Monster-1000,” he says.

No metal detector, no gold rush. It was the key tool in the beginning of the great gold race in 2009. The gold discovered in the Sahara had always been alluvial, until the rush forced people to look deeper. You can get detectors in all colours, all formats: large frying pan shape, small, long handle, short, headphones or speakers. “They were brought from Sudan, from Niger over to Mauritania, Sudanese traders set up a business,” explains Sadek, a businessman in his sixties. He lost three teeth years ago and is missing an eye – a veteran of the Sahara, the kind who has seen it all, ever since he was born. Like all the hustlers here, he got into gold when it was discovered in Mauritania in 2014. He claims – which is impossible to verify – that he was the first to import one of these machines from neighbouring Mali.

The best-known detector is the one Nagi Chourfa shows to anyone who wants to see, the GPZ-7000, launched on 16 February 2015 by Minelab, who then claimed it was “the most advanced gold detector in the world”. The Canadian company specifically created this model, and the Gold Monster for the African market, having discovered the enormous potential at the end of the 2000s. At the time, the small company was already leading the (niche) market in metal detectors – for professional and military use as well as leisure. It was taken over by the Codan group, an Australian wholesaler of military communication equipment looking to diversify into mine clearance and metal detection equipment. The wholesaler wanted to focus on profits: production in Ireland was moved to Malaysia, and the company had to seek out new markets.

Lucky break! In 2021, Minelab, now a subsidiary, was contacted by a reseller in Dubai who mentioned opportunities in Sudan. The Saharan gold rush had begun. Minelab tried to enter the market with just the one reseller. “It was a time when the Sudanese would bring photos of a metal detector on their mobile phones to buy one, they didn’t know anything more than that, and we weren’t producing much,” says Mark Wellington, Minelab’s General Manager for the Middle East and Africa. Several months later, metal detectors were out of stock all over the world. The Sudanese market was booming. 4000-dollar detectors were selling for 30,000 dollars under the counter, and the company experienced three-digit growth. 

At the company’s headquarters in Adelaide, heads remained cool, and the real question was how to make the most of this solid gold vein. It took Minelab just one year to open an office in Dubai, the hub for African gold, and look for resellers in every country in the Sahara. The result: each time the gold rush seized a new Saharan country, Minelab was on the scene. “In January 2016, we had 8000 GPX detectors in our warehouse here in Dubai when the gold rush started in Chad. Our stock disappeared in 10 days! They came to the warehouse day and night, it never stopped,” says Mark Wellington.

Between the Sudanese gold rush in 2009 and those in Chad and Niger in 2013 and 2014, the company hit turbulent times. Its after-sales service was plagued by the return of dozens of faulty machines that the company did not recognise as its own, despite them all bearing its logo. It turned out to be a strange tale from China. The head of Codan received a call from the Australian intelligence services: the company had been targeted by hackers. While on a business trip to China, a Codan employee had had their data stolen when they connected to a hotel Wi-Fi network. The detector plans had been copied – the Sahara and its prospects had sparked some Chinese jealousies! Thousands of fake Minelab detectors started flooding the Saharan market at that time, forcing the company to consider a counterattack. “We worked side-by-side with the police in China and in Dubai, who were able to do a number of raids there, and over here,” Mark Wellington tells Les Jours on a conference call from Dubai. “In 2016, the Dubai police seized and destroyed nine million dollars’ worth of fake metal detectors.”

Back in Mauritania, old Sadek lounging on a sofa in Chami, and Nagi Chourfa in his tent in Tamaya, are never short of praise for the importance of metal detectors but, they warn, the market is changing. Detectors allowed them to find the nuggets on the surface, a crucial marker in the beginning, both of these characters admit, but they have been quickly replaced by the jackhammer. Hooked up to a generator, this is the tool that enables them to follow the vein deep underground. The roar of the hammer and the constant rumbling of the unit is in sharp contrast with the Olympian calm of the desert. Together, the two machines have created an omnipresent soundscape, found on every gold mining site in the Sahara. “That is the sound of gold coming,” smiles Mohamed Salem.

 

4. Mysterious Chami

The contrast between Chami’s empty town hall and the town itself, groaning with people, is striking. There’s hardly anything here besides the large Mauritanian flag, centre stage at the top of its mast in the courtyard, and a little sign on the outer wall announcing that this is an official building. Inside, the rooms are empty and the sand is already through the door. The office is minimalist: a large, pristine desk, a portrait of the president, Mohamed Ould El-Ghazaouani hanging on the wall and four chairs for possible visitors. That’s it for Limam Ould Sidi, the mayor of one of the most important towns in Mauritania today, and certainly in the future.

Chami is one of those towns that look like they’ve come straight out of a black and white silent film. Charlie Chaplin could be dancing in the middle of the street, like in his 1925 film, and it wouldn’t make things seem much more surreal. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, in the Mauritanian desert, half way between the financial and political capitals of Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, this is the Sahara’s gold capital. There is no other town in the vast desert that, like Chami, was built entirely around gold.

There’s Gatrun, in Libya, Tinzawatene in Mali, Djanet in Algeria, and Arlit, in northern Niger, which are almost mandatory stops on the gold migration route from east to west, but they date back to long before gold arrived. More importantly, they are only that: stopping points. Whereas Chami is the base camp, the town where all the prospectors head to invest. It’s the town closest to the pits, where they buy their equipment, drum up good business, rest after weeks of digging. On Monday 20 February 2023, the night before the gold rush on Tamaya, tens of thousands of people buzzed around here late into the night.

You can imagine this town: windy and dusty, screwed up plastic flying in the constant breeze. Imposing bulldozers and other diggers, with a price tag taped to the front, wait to be bought or leased. On Monday 20 February, the only tarmac in Chami, Highway 2, around which the town is built, was jammed. As night fell, dozens of pick-ups loomed in queues besieging the town’s service stations. They are the nerve centre of the town. With no petrol to supply the essential (and polluting) generators, it would be impossible to be self-reliant on the gold mining site, and therefore to stay there at all. So the drivers fill their tanks plus dozens of 50-litre canisters crammed in the back.

After the excitement of the gold rush, petrol stations continued to be a busy meeting point. At the main one in Chami, a street tea seller tries his luck with minibuses transporting passengers who have just arrived in town. They bring more new gold rushers, with dozens already hanging around a few metres away, waiting for someone to take them on. Like shadows pacing up and down the town, they wait for a landowner like Salem Bebah to come, today or tomorrow, and offer them a job. Some wait weeks without a result. As for Salem Bebah, he’s just finished a trip round the shops, where calm has been gradually restored after the excitement of the first few days. From Mohamed Lemine, a major local shopkeeper with an imposing moustache, he bought a pickaxe and a tarpaulin. In the shop next door, the owner has no stock left. “People are chasing a dream here,” he says. “I got into town two days ago after months on the sites. I’ve already lost a lot of money there, I rented this little spot to try something, maybe I’ll make more here.”

You have to go back 20 years to understand how gold shaped this anthill of a town in its own image. “In the beginning, there were just 54 villagers and a well,” begins the mayor, Limam Ould Sidi, as if telling a children’s story. The man, in his 50s, dressed in an elegant boubou, is part of one of the families that founded Chami. “There was just a nomad camp, which took care of the well where herds would come from around the region to look for water, and a fishing village, Imraguen.” They are a small community living in this region of Mauritania, by the water, and live off what they make from fishing.

In 2005, the RN2 highway was opened to link Nouakchott and Nouadhibou. Four years later, in 2009, General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz was elected president and wanted to establish towns in the desert: his legacy for Mauritania, he thought. One thing was for sure, they needed one on this route. Before the administration could decide where to put it, a businessman, Mohamed Ould Bouamatou, had sniffed out the opportunity in the meantime and opened, along the tarmac of the national highway, the Gare du Nord, a restaurant/inn/petrol station/bakery for travellers making the 450km journey. He quarrelled with the president, became an opposition candidate, and was forced into exile. The Gare du Nord is still there – it has no train or tracks, but it does have good food and petrol.

According to Nouakchott’s rumour mill, this quarrel became the origins of Chami: you can’t build a town in a place where your main political rival stands to make money. So, they looked around 50km further down the road. The pit in Chami caught their attention, and the decision was made! In 2012, the first stone was laid and two years later, Chami was officially a town. Limam Ould Sidi took over the town hall, and, at snail’s pace, the tiny village began its expansion according to urban development plans. And then came the gold…

“One day in 2016, the gold rush started,” the mayor tells me. “We woke up really early and saw hundreds of vehicles arriving, with no warning. They came from all over. In a few months, the town had grown in a way that wasn’t very organised, and that’s still happening today, but there’s no choice, you have to adapt. The main thing for us is how to live alongside a new reality that brings pollution and waste. Imagine on Monday [20 February, the night before the gold rush] 40,000 people came here. Everyone drank two or three plastic sachets of water and thew them on the ground when they were empty. That’s more than 100,000 plastic bags in one day.”

Chami resembles Dawson City, the temporary base for hundreds of thousands of gold miners in 1898 in Yukon, in what is now Canada: a boomtown that was once a fishing camp where restaurants, gold outlets and brothels sprang up along the main trade route. It all started with an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, on 17 July 1897: “Latest news from the Klondike: Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!” The masses rushed there. Dawson City is also the birthplace of the Trump family fortune: Fred, Donald’s grandfather, opened a restaurant-motel there, The Artic, which quickly became a hangout for prostitutes.

In Mauritania, a Muslim state, alcohol is prohibited, and don’t even mention prostitution. But the city of Chami s different. Bedroom doors will open if you have the cash. In this Ivorian restaurant where people eat braised fish and attiéké (a side dish made from cassava that is traditional in Ivory Coast), five West African women are talking among themselves in English. No one speaks English in the desert. The atmosphere is not Mauritanian, cases of beer are hidden under the counter, some of the men are smoking shisha, and most noticeably, none of the women are from here. “I can say two words in Hassanyia Arabic,” says the landlady from Ivory Coast, whose name has been withheld. “Come” and “1000 ouguiyas”. 1000 old ouguiyas is 2.70 euros. In the doorway to the establishment, despite the rising afternoon heat, a young woman without a headscarf is sitting in the shade. A young black man comes to sit beside her. The police station is only a hundred metres away, but she’s not hiding anything.

Chami is at once a village where everyone knows everything about everyone, and a town where foreigners can quickly find their place. They now outnumber the original population. On the ground, in the sand, you’ll find a Jack of Hearts here, a nine of Spades there; torn playing cards no doubt thrown down by unlucky gamblers. Heitani Mohamed, a 54-year-old town councillor in Chami, based around 30km away, is concerned: “Many families from here have left town since the gold came.” There is already property speculation, the man explains, seeing how quickly Chami was growing, many bought land in anticipation and rent it to “the gold people” on a monthly basis. Nagi Chourfa, the gold veteran I met on the site in Tamaya, is one of them: after building a house in Chami, he rents it by the month to Sudanese bulldozer traders. The room can fetch rent of 20,000 old ouguiyas a month, around 50 euros.

The town has been scarred. The huge gold processing plant, where all the minerals extracted from the pits are taken to be ground and processed, has branded it with a hot iron. It’s a 42-hectare plot with dust flying around it constantly. Admittedly, it’s on the edge of town, but it seems to have become its new nerve centre. It could easily be mistaken for an open-air factory, some sort of quarry, so loud it could deafen passers-by.

All the rock from Tamaya and the surrounding gold mining sites is transformed there: it is ground, then processed in large water trays full of mercury. This rare metal, which is toxic to humans and has been banned in the EU since 2017, allows the gold to be separated from everything else. Once processed, the final gold-mercury amalgam is burnt by a blowtorch at 500 degrees, the boiling point of mercury which makes it evaporate, leaving only the gold. What this story fails to mention is that this mercury attacks and pollutes everything: the men around it, their clothes, the sand on the ground, the buildings. At the heart of Chami is a giant pollution machine, which for the moment worries no one but scientists. The workers in the Saharan processing centres handle the metal casually and without protection. Most of them come from Sudan “because there are skills that only they have, we don’t know how to do that,” explains Nagi Chourfa.

The authorities can assure, for the moment, that no cases of complications linked to mercury have been detected. Why, then, do they want to move the processing centre some 50km away from the town? “We understand the concerns, but we don’t have clear health data to be able to judge how dangerous the use of mercury is,” says mayor Limam Ould Sidi. The main concern, in his eyes, is handling visible pollution, especially plastic, to protect his town. He warns: “If we don’t handle that, everything will end up in the PNBA,” the Banc d'Arguin national park, a globally unique ecosystem combining marine and Saharan features, particularly known for being an essential stopping point for certain species of migratory and breeding birds. Opposite his town hall, on a scrap of wasteland, three excavators are for rent, displaying signs to that effect. Their owner, two anonymous local sources tell me, is the Mayor himself. Clearly everyone in Chami has a dose of gold fever.

 

5. The great gold truck heist

What happened on Sunday 9 April 2023? At seven in the morning, shots were heard in the Taghraba pass, on the trail between Arlit and the gold mining site in Tchibarakaten, in the middle of the Sahara in northern Niger. For several hours, nothing got out: the survivors had to reach the telephone network to raise the alarm. “Attack on gold convoy, injuries and fatalities”: the first short messages started to circulate on Saharan WhatsApp groups in the early afternoon. Then photos, in the evening, showing the lifeless bodies of Nigerien soldiers in the back of a pick-up. Unrecognisable under their blood-stained uniforms, in a white truck riddled with bullet holes. That was it.

The attack, which caused a real stir in Niger, raised concerns: was gold about to impact security in the north of the country? The region had until then been calm in comparison to troubled neighbour Libya, Chad embroiled in deadly quarrels between the army and rebel groups in the north, and Mali in open conflict for over a decade. This central crossroads in the Sahara, an age-old route for trade and migration, has been the setting for a growing number of attacks by bandits in recent years. Across the Sahara now, only in Mauritania and Algeria do the authorities show any hint of controlling their borders; elsewhere, the desert is a libertarian highway on which gold travels quickly and often with snags along the way. “There is a double problem with gold: our young people who dream of riches are killing themselves down the pits to extract it, and when it’s brought to the surface, men are killing each other to steal it.” This is what I was told by a councillor in Tessit, Mali, several months before the start of this investigation, when we spoke about the fighting between jihadist groups linked to the Islamic State and others linked to al-Qaeda for control of the gold mining sites in the area. The statement can be applied to the whole of the Sahara. 

At dawn on 9 April, a convoy of gold prospectors left the gold mining site in Tchibarakaten, on the border between Algeria and Niger, in the direction of Arlit and its processing centre, Guidan Daka. Four Land Cruiser and Toyota Hilux pick-ups belonging to the authorities secured the convoy: two from the Nigerien army and two from the police. Between the vehicles at the front and back of the procession, another 40 gold miners’ pick-ups formed a long, mechanical snake along the stony track winding through the mountains of the Aïr massif.

The landscape is arid and desolate, a few old screes punctuate the tyre tracks left in the earth by previous travellers. There are no other signs for the drivers except their lifelong knowledge of this region where all information is transmitted verbally, over tea, from elders to the young. Nestled in the mountainous area of Tagharba are old weapons caches and back bases of former rebels from the two Tuareg rebellions in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, they are used by traffickers of every kind. It is here, in this gulley, that the attack took place.

“An ambush, that’s what it was. They find a hiding place and scatter into the mountains. Tagharba is a corridor through the mountains. And once you go in there, it’s over,” says Issouf, a 30-year-old pick-up driver, who calls himself a “Saharan scam artist”. He drives all kinds of goods through the desert, and he was in the convoy when the bullets started to fly. “We heard gun shots. The police in the truck at the back of the convoy tried to fire with their 12.7mm [calibre machine gun] but it jammed. It was the two army vehicles that chased the bandits. But it was a trap.” The Nigerien military vehicle that sped off in pursuit was met by the attackers who appeared all at once, say three sources, like something out of a spaghetti western, nine bandit pick-ups lined up side by side. “They were waiting, it was all planned,” says Issouf. The bandits were equipped with AK-47 assault rifles, RPG-7 rocket launchers, and their trucks fitted with 12.7mm machine guns. The final toll of the attack: five dead soldiers, weapons stolen by the assailants… and the ingots? 

The silence from the army, the distance that separated this face-off from the rest of the convoy, and the politically sensitive nature of the attack, make it difficult to get the full story of what happened. “Anyone who says they can give you all the details of that attack is a liar, the people in the convoy were a long way from the attack,” Issouf says. In Arlit, the planned destination of the convoy, the story spread by word-of-mouth. It raised dozens of questions, exacerbated by an avalanche of rumours. First thing in the morning on Monday, 10 April, the day after the attack, a strange voice note was passed from Whatsapp to Whatsapp without anyone knowing who had recorded it. It was a man, who some would later call a soldier. He accused some of his colleagues of colluding with the men who carried out the attack, and he accused the local authorities of being too quick to release the suspects when they had been arrested.

The army, complicit in armed attacks in the desert? At the start of 2022, 122 kilos of gold disappeared following an attack on a convoy transporting gold miners between Dirkou and Agadez, in the same region of northern Niger. An armed unit was incriminated. Since the attack on 9 April, the same question has been asked. The authorities were quick to react: the public prosecutor in Arlit denounced the “ludicrous messages” attempting to “disrupt public order.” To avoid any more being released, he added: “There is a search underway for the author of this audio.” There is no news of whether he has been arrested.

On another trail, another rumour circulated on the same day. A name came out of the hat: Bahardine Maydoune. Old photos surfaced of this Libyan, a member of the Arab Ould Souleiman tribe, living in Sebha, in the south of the country where he works. A highway bandit and part-time hijacker, he is “an essential player in the security of southern Libya,” says a prominent citizen of Agadez who knows him well. “But I can guarantee you, it wasn’t him who attacked the convoy.” Sources close to the authorities in Arlit and the region of Agadez, and others close to informal trade circles, have all confirmed that neither Bahardine Maydoune, nor elements of the army, were the authors of the attack. So why so much noise around Bahardine? A video showing him and his men after hijacking a trafficker’s pick-up truck loaded with tramadol had “angered the owner of the drugs who was now trying to find him and take him out,” said a source from the Ould Souleiman Arab community. 

“There is a mafia at work in this area, and they’re very organised,” explains Mohamed Anacko, president of the regional council of Agadez, and one of the most influential figures in the region in his role as the former leader of the Tuareg rebellion in the 1990s. “There are a number of actors behind this attack [on 9 April], including Tuaregs from Aïr and Toubous from Chad,” he explains. A variety of armed agents throughout the region: the Aïr mountains, inhabited mainly by Tuareg communities, have their share of small-time bandits, while the triangle between Niger, Chad and Libya gathers myriad armed men, mainly Toubous and Kanouri.

In response, the locals organised. A “peace and security” committee, a group of representatives of different trades in the area, mainly gold miners, was set up in 2022 after the bitter report that people from Arlit had lost a total of 178 vehicles in bandit hold-ups. “Ever since gold was discovered, there’s a growing threat from armed bandits,” laments the committee’s chair, Ahmed Ouakaya. “Of course, there have always been bandits in the Agadez region, but before the gold, they were manageable, it was just ‘residual banditry’, young Tuaregs from the Aïr mountains doing little robberies on mopeds, they were local kids,” he explains, mentioning the existence of “safeguards” to stop these kids forming militias. But with the gold came “bandits from Chad, from Sudan, they’re not Nigerien anyway,” he gripes. “And they’re a different kettle of fish: they’re better armed than our security forces!” Each country in the Sahara accuses its neighbours of being the root of all its problems, whether it’s in the fight against jihadist groups, traffickers, or now gold bandits. These accusations are often coupled with deadly community grudges.

In the small air-conditioned administrative office in Arlit where the committee meets, the dozen members grumbling at the beginning of the meeting seem to wake up when these “foreign bandits” are mentioned by the chair. They describe a foreign hydra threatening a highly lucrative business in which they all have a stake. “They’re ‘ruining’ the kids and the town, we’re heading for disaster,” explains Ibrahim Ahmadou, president of the gold mining company Aïr Or, and a member of the committee, who reports having lost a kilo of gold in the attack on Sunday 9 April. Whether it’s down to foreigners or not, the situation has deteriorated in the north of Niger. In 2023, officials announced the launch of a large-scale military operation, Operation Garkuwa.

In this region, everyone knows someone who has gone into gold. None of them has anything good to say about it. The latest tale, told to me on the back seat of a taxi by a pensioner who, with a heavy heart, cursed the gold – the wretched gold that took away her grandson, who was killed in a fight between bandits and gold miners on the Libyan border at the beginning of 2023. “Everything is dangerous here now, they’ll start shooting over any little thing, and in just a few minutes you can be robbed and left stranded in the desert – or worse,” explains Jafar. He is a Nigerien fixer in his thirties from Arlit, who keeps his closely shaven head and beard covered by a scarf. He tried his luck with gold, too, when the rumours emerged in 2014. To no avail.

 

6. Algeria, a new frontier for the gold rush

Gunshots have rung in Issouf’s ears, more than once. He uses his hands to mime the rapid movement to the left and right of his head. Every time, it was in Algeria. At the age of 33, he still has a boyish face with an easy smile, which he tries to make look serious by occasionally readjusting his snug turban. A self-proclaimed professional scam artist, he drives far and wide across the central Sahara where he has worked for 25 years. He knows this desert well. “The only place I’m afraid? It’s Algeria, obviously. Over there, they’ll kill you without warning.” The central Sahara, its heart is in the north of Niger, bordered by Algeria, Libya, Mali and Chad, is a hub for trafficking: humans, with migrants dreaming of Europe; drugs, with the African route for cocaine arriving from Colombia on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea and destined for Europe; weapons, given the number of conflicts in the region; and lastly, gold, with astronomical quantities to be transported without getting robbed.

This vast region, tens of thousands of square kilometres, has always been a highway for Toyota pick-ups, loaded with goods as diverse as they are illicit. As far back as he can remember, Issouf has always been confident about these vehicles. First as an apprentice – this slight man, always wearing an oil-stained t-shirt, his hands blacker than black, was always the one who had to find a spot on the back of a truck, or on the roof, or on the nerf bar if it had them. He started in 1999, when he was 9 years old. Then he became a truck driver, and now he owns his own. Always with the same goods in the back. Gold came along and disrupted everything in this precarious balance. “With the fall of Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, I left my home region of Arlit to focus on trips between Niger and Libya. There was a tonne of work, between migration and the imported products. But with gold, bit by bit people moved away from Libya and rediscovered Algeria.”

In the Sahara, nuggets were found after the string of prospectors arrived. No state had successfully clamped down on it until Algeria did so, between 2009 and 2014. The country – whose southern border with Mali has been the main sanctuary for AQMI (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), a jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda, for over ten years – has had an iron grip on its gold reserves for years: there’s no question of hordes of gold prospectors showing up here like in neighbouring countries. So when they did start to arrive, Algeria made an unequivocal rule: arrest, prison, deportation. 

Every week, the Algerian army publishes its ‘operational results’, which are all the statistics for the raids they carry out in the desert. Between 4 and 10 October 2023, the army arrested “312 individuals and seized 30 vehicles, 216 generators, 126 jackhammers and a metal detector, as well as quantities of explosives, detonation tools and equipment used in illegal gold mining operations.” Photos of soldiers surrounding gold miners, always with their backs to the camera, are published as testimony to the hunt for prospectors carried out by the Algerian authorities. These figures are for one particular operation, but the gold miners I met all have memories of others. The Algerian desert has become a new frontier, its myth constructed by raid after raid, 200 years after the American West was won in the great gold rush. 

“These days, the almost industrial scale of artisanal mining has become a real subject of concern for the authorities,” says ‘ALN54DZ’ an Algerian blogger specialising in defence issues. “There is a real war on gold mining, especially in the last four years, with more and more arrests. You have to appreciate it was a ‘minor’ issue in the beginning, but there were more and more people coming, it would have turned into a real problem if the army hadn’t taken things in hand.” In 2020, Algiers tried to regulate the sector with a ministerial ruling: the use of mercury, cyanide, and explosives are banned, chemical processing is prohibited, and sales have to be made over an official counter. Predictably, gold miners prefer to take their gold to neighbouring Mali or Niger, where neither the State nor its army will nibble away at their nest egg. By way of borders between Algeria, Niger and Mali, there is only the occasional terminal here and there, complemented by Algerian border posts, to mark official passage from one country to the other. Otherwise, it’s a void. Algeria has even tried to build a Donald Trump style wall out of sand, but it’s easily evaded if you know the right routes, the right GPS coordinates. 

“Crossing is easy. It’s on their territory that things get complicated. You can’t go more than a few hours, the Algerian army is everywhere, they’ve got companies everywhere,” says Jafar. He is a Nigerien fixer in his thirties from Arlit, who keeps his closely shaven head and beard covered with a scarf. He tried his luck with gold, too, when the rumours emerged in 2014. He lost a bit of money, decided to cut his losses and go into trafficking, odd jobs. He is a little king in the Saraha on his trucks: trader, trafficker, crack dealer and whisky salesman to the gold mining site… He’s a man who’ll try anything and go anywhere, despite the risks, despite the bandits. “Maybe he’s one of them?” someone grins; he doesn’t deign to reply.

When he reaches Eldorado, one of the busiest bars in Arlit, Jafar puffs up his chest and walks right in. It’s become a habit, he practically lives here. He quickly greets a few sickly-looking customers on his way to the table at the back. Jafar is that sort of character, straight out of a Western and into real life. No one would be surprised to find out he had a Colt in his belt. Like many people in this version of the wild west, he does in fact own a gun, an AK-47, old but still working, hidden under his grandmother’s bed some 30km from here. Tonight, it’s beer and whisky in his favourite bar, whose name is naturally a reference to the gold rush. The owners are rumoured to be Chadian. No one really knows, but everyone agrees they’re not Nigerien – a source of despair for plenty of people in this desert region where youth is synonymous with unemployment. “Even the hookers aren’t from here,” one man sighs.

Jafar has scars that make him scratch his belly often, an episode usually followed by him frantically lighting a cigarette. He explains that it is Tuaregs and Arabs, nomadic communities in the area, who drive the vehicles when you have to cross the Algerian border. “We know what we’re doing, where we’re going and who we might bump into, all with the [satellite telephone] Thuraya.” These drivers, including Jafar, ferry gold rushers from Niger and Mali to their pits in Algeria. These journeys are expensive, given the risks: “I have to have my apprentice on the roof of the truck the whole time the gold miners are digging, so he can check in real time whether he can see any clouds of smoke from army vehicles.” As soon as you spot one, that’s the starting signal: you pick up the equipment, get the diggers out from the bottom of the pit, and put your foot down to try to make it back to the Nigerien border before the soldiers get there.

Sometimes, it’s too late to leave. When he talks about his “Algerian years”, Aminou Issa, 27, a shy lad who has ticked off many of the gold mines in the Sahara, speaks with a disturbingly consistent monotone. It’s impossible to draw a precise map of the sites he has visited: he can only give the vague directions of a digger, a worker at the bottom of the pyramid who is happy to be driven wherever a landowner needs him: “Dahab site, 600km from Tamanrasset, 10-hour drive.” Aminou Issa came from Agadez to Tamanrasset via Arlit.

“In Dahab, the [gold mining] site is more organised than the border, there are lots of people. The army often does raids, they come onto the site in a bunch of pick-up trucks, and we go off to hide a few kilometres away and wait for them to leave,” says Aminou Issa. His story, corroborated by six other gold miners who shared the experience, is told in three parts: the arrival of the soldiers at the same time as the gold miners flee into the surrounding mountains, the theft of their equipment, and the sad fate of those who couldn’t get away. “In February 2022, as usual, we ran when they arrived, but we couldn’t get far, we saw their pick-ups with our own eyes. At each pit, they stopped to pierce the water cans with knives and took the generator and threw it down into the bottom of the pit. Then they got a tyre covered in petrol, set fire to it, and threw it into the pit. I lost many of my friends, trapped at the bottom of a burning pit.”

And then there’s this rumour. Another one. It’s impossible to corroborate, but every one of the prospectors I’ve met who have set foot in the Algerian desert knows it. It reinforces the myth of the Algerian border as dangerous and deadly. Seen from bordering countries, Algeria is the massive regional power with the powerful army and scathing diplomacy. Anyone crossing that border knows they’re risking their life, it’s for people who know the desert best, Jafar explains. This story, the story of a woman, seems to pass from gold miner to gold miner in the Sahara. Without asking, it will crop up in the middle of any conversation about Algeria. In six months of investigating, it has come up in no fewer than 17 interviews! “This one particular woman, she’s the commander of the Algerian companies along the Nigerien border,” Issouf says. Of course, it is impossible to corroborate the existence of this woman, but the rumour continues to spread, from Arlit to Niamey. “When she catches gold miners, she chops off their testicles to make sure they don’t come back.”

Every time, the interviewee mimes the gesture of the chop. According to some, she was stabbed to death in 2017 by a Nigerien gold prospector. According to others, she’s still prowling around the Sahara with her soldiers. No one can name her, or knows what she looks like (“Who could take a photo of this woman? When you see her you’re in no position to take photos,” several interviewees have joked.) She probably doesn’t even exist, but she symbolises the violent and ruthless view that gold miners who go to Algeria have of the country.

At Guidan Daka, the main processing centre in the north of Niger, located a few kilometres from Arlit, the trucks arriving from the Algerian border, loaded with hundreds of bags of stones supposedly rich in gold, are legion. They make the journey between Arlit and the border every day to load up these bags that fill the pick-ups. Migration is clearly visible here, as is the gold trade. In the town’s huge processing centre, clouds of mercury dust swirl around Africans of a thousand different nationalities grinding rocks from Algeria, Mali, Niger, everywhere. Adam Mohamed and Abdou Mohamed Abdullah, waiting at the Café Soudanais in Chami, have both been there. Everything here exudes gold, and the insecurity that goes with it. Bursts of automatic gunfire again pierced the calm of dawn at the entrance to the town the day before we arrived. “But that’s how it is, we have to make a living, so we live with the insecurity,” says Issouf the scam artist. “When you’re born in Arlit, grow up in Arlit, you have no other choice. Look at our skin. People who’re born here, it’s like being born in radiation, we’re kind of the contaminated ones in the desert.”

 

7. The golden age of jihadism

Sitting on his rug, making tea, the old man doesn’t crack a smile and repeatedly glances at the satellite phone beside him. It’s October 2022 in Bamako. 11 people, civilians, were killed the previous day by Islamic State troops in scrubland in Tessit, in the north of Mali. It’s a case of reprisals, says Alassane, who coordinated the evacuations remotely. He is a councillor in a beleaguered rural village, which did not choose to be at the heart of fighting between all parties to the conflict in the region. Fighters from al-Qaeda, Islamic State and armed ex-rebel groups clash there for control of strategically important territory, for influence… and for gold.

“It will never stop, until the last person in Gourma is dead, they will keep flighting their war. What’s the point of fighting over a plot of land when there’s no one left there?” he asks, weary of a conflict that is over a decade old with no end in sight. He pours another tea, fiddles with his phone – he’s waiting for news. And, as if sharing a bad story, he tells me about the north of Mali. “It all started in 2012. There were rebels and there was the army; the rebels were intent on their independence,” he says. The state they dreamed up is called Azawad. And then there were other combatants, with their dark flags. Al-Qaeda, then Islamic State would go on to adopt these franchises (it’s almost like McDonald’s: you make contact, meet someone in charge, he agrees, and voila! In a few months you can be wearing their colours). Meanwhile, François Hollande, then President of France, decided to deploy 4500 French soldiers. A ray of light seemed to appear when a peace agreement was signed between the State and rebels in 2015, with the now ex-rebels committed to remaining Malian.

Yet nothing changed. It’s now October 2023, and the war has resumed in the north of Mali. Again, it’s about Azawad, even if what are now the neo-rebels haven’t officially made a move. France eventually packed its bags and left in a huff, after being forced out of the region by putschists who the country can’t stand (and the feeling is mutual).

In Tessit, far away from the telephone network, away from politics, the war has never really stopped. The town has been almost completely blockaded by jihadist groups for over nine months. At the start of July, Islamic State fighters were surprised by those of the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (JNIM in Arabic, a group affiliated to al-Qaeda). “This is just another page in our war, they’ll be back, with more resources, and it’ll start all over again,” the old man says. In Gourma, there has been incessant fighting for years. This is the context in which “they found gold in our home, in our soil, under out feet,” says Alassane, who pre-empts my next question: “We wish they’d never found anything, given how many problems it brings.”

After Sudan, Chad, Libya, Niger and Algeria, the Saharan gold rush gripped northern Mali in 2017. Here, gold is almost a national passion: the “king of kings” in the 14th century, the Emperor of Mali, Mansa Kankou Moussa, the richest man in the world according to West African records, had so much of the stuff, that he distributed it all along his pilgrimage to Mecca… and the price collapsed. This was more gold than anyone had ever seen. You have to admit he was thinking big, with an entourage of 60,000 people and 12,000 slaves in his caravan. But the 14th century was a long time ago. In the mountains of northern Mali, it took until the 1970s for geologists from Russia and France (that rivalry is nothing new!) to detect gold, in In Darset, in the region of Kidal. But it has never been exploited on an industrial scale. Everyone knows it’s there, but no one has seriously harnessed it. Just like in Chad, Libya or Niger, it was Sudanese hands which, like an army of ants, arrived in their thousands in 201[sic].

The Soudanese led the gold rush in the Sahara. And in Mali, it’s a free-for-all. “There was a lot of money to be made there discovering gold,” says Ari. We met at his home in Agadez. A member of the Tuareg community of Ifoghas (like Iyad Ag Ghali, head of al-Qaeda in the region), over the years he has developed a trade network linked to gold mining across the Sahara, but his main area of operations is in the north of Mali. He sports a bushy beard and smokes cigarette after cigarette. Ari buys gold on the sites and sells it on later, elsewhere, for a much higher price. He makes the most of his Ifogha origins for travel and trade: in Mali, all the Saharan gold mining sites are run or influenced by armed groups of jihadists or former rebels.

This is the case in Intahaka, GPS coordinates 16°20'27"N;0°37'29"W, 90km from Gao, the main town in the region and a former base camp for French soldiers in Operation Barkhane. Intahaka is the main gold mining site in northern Mali, according to those who have been there. In early 2018, the Sudanese (them again!) found gold near the village of the same name. The gold rush took hold of the area: Whatsapp voice notes, short texts, calls to friends, smartphones vibrating and ringing – time to do business. “From the start, we quickly sent a mission of 40 pick-ups to secure the site,” says Ismaghil Arahmate, who was then one of the local heads of security at the gold mining site, on behalf of the former rebels grouped under the banner of a coalition called Cadre stratégique permanent [permanent strategic framework], the CSP. “We had to oversee that, otherwise it would have been an absolute shambles,” he explains. 

Yet, since nothing is free in this world, the CSP got its hooks into the mine. If you want to go in, you pay; want to hire equipment, you pay; want to leave, you pay. The CSP implemented a system of coupons, which are printed by a ‘com’zone’ (zone commander), 2000 miles away in Bamako, and then transported. They will happily share them via WhatApp, as proof, if needed, that “everything is properly managed.” Although, since the signing of the peace agreement in 2015, they have denied taking the place of the State, it’s certainly the impression you get here. At the time of writing, the Malian state has never controlled Intahaka.

“Intahaka is the only place where the armed groups from across the north of Mali are present and not fighting amongst themselves, which just goes to show, when you’re talking about money…” smiles a local civil society activist who regularly travels there. Although several places in this part of Mali are contested daily, over gold, there is a “peaceful coexistence” between the different armed groups, according to a euphemistic 2020 report by a group of UN experts. One particular example being the Adrar des Ifoghas massif: straddling Mali and Algeria, this is land belonging to the Tuaregs of the same name. Some are jihadists, others “just” rebels. “All that, that’s just war posturing, at the end of the day we’re all Tuaregs above anything else,” one friend likes to say. The franchises are still there. In the mountains, Tuareg control has never been contested. It’s true that the French military operation Serval tried, in 2013-2014, to root out the jihadists who were sheltering there; and French commando operations in the region were set up to hunt ‘High Value Targets’ (i.e. the biggest jihadi fish), but the land, ultimately, has never been under their control. And the French are no longer active in the Sahel region.

Obviously, without fighting, business is better for anyone who is willing/able to deal with those in charge locally. The lack of armed conflict makes this sanctuary area almost unique in the Sahara. “Things are better than anywhere else for us traders, in terms of security,” says Issouf the self-proclaimed scam artist from Arlit, who has often travelled through land under Tuareg influence along the border between Mali and Algeria: “In Niger there are bandits; in Algeria the army; too many problems in Libya and Chad; but here, there’s none of that.”

He often stops at Ighraban, an imposing processing centre. It’s similar to Guidan Daka in Arlit, and Chami in Mauritania, part of an almost systematic route for gold migration across the Sahara. The vast majority of people I’ve met for this series have been there. One driver says: “I go to Arlit, I ask people if they want to come and work here, I take them in the pick-up, there are so many people going back and forth.” He describes the route between Arlit and Ighabaran (a day-long journey, 50,000 francs, around 80 euros) as a particularly busy section of the Saharan highway, hundreds of trails with no indication of what they are except for a few tracks in the sand. Ighabaran was once a small village, with a population of a few hundred, sitting on the border in the mountains. Around it, there are other small villages whose names have become associated with the war: Boghassa, the birthplace of Iyad Ag Ghali; Talhandak, where Abdelmalek Droukdel, head of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb, was killed during a French special forces airborne operation in 2020; Tinzawatene, where Barkhane carried out a number of raids hoping to find the al-Qaeda leader… There is gold in all these places, and jihadists.

However, for Issouf the scam artist, for Adam Mohamed, and even for Ari the trader, Igharaban is less synonymous with ‘jihad’ than with ‘job’. “Okay, so you don’t really have the right to smoke here, or take photos. And okay, there aren’t really any women,” Adam Mohamed tells me. “But apart from that there’s no problem, quite the opposite!” In a desert where no holds are barred, Adam Mohamed appreciates that “Over there, pit owners will pay you on time and not try to screw you over.” Neither he nor the other gold prospectors I met who have been there share the ideology. Their cooperation with the jihadist groups, according to the findings of the International Crisis Group research centre, is “more about pragmatism than belief. They side with whoever has power locally.”

The 64,000-dollar question that torments western chancelleries: is gold mining a major source of financing for jihadist groups? All parties in the sector (except groups with jihadist links who we were unfortunately unable to interview as part of this series) say no. Yes, Ari says, there is a tax, but the extraction is not managed by these groups.

‘Zakat’ (the term in Islam for alms intended for the poor, and adopted to mean a tax for jihadist groups in the Sahel and Sahara) is sometimes paid on gold mining sites but not always, according to different witness accounts. Otherwise, gold entrepreneurs work independently from the armed men. Yet the fear of a link between gold mining and the financing of large-scale jihad has continued to grow year on year among local authorities. But for the moment, insists a senior member of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), there is “no conclusive evidence that would tend to show that it has become a major source of financing more important than the taxation found everywhere else in the region.”

Adam Mohamed earned 15,000 francs (25 euros) per month working in Igharaban as a shopkeeper for a Tuareg for two months. He wasn’t unhappy there, he admits, but he heard about Mauritania’s new Eldorado, so he hit the road again, on the back of a pick-up. For him, Mali was just a stop along the way, but exiled councillor Alassane knows its sad story: the gold could have been beneficial to the region, but it ended up being yet another layer in the ‘mille-feuille’ of problems. “Our land, our farming traditions, our culture – in two generations, it’s all gone.”