Obuasi Market

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Including risking their lives each day down homemade gold mines called Galamsey. The ‘Galamsey’ boys seem to be unpopular in the town and with the Anglo Gold Company. I spoke to various people and all warned me about going there because they are dangerous, or they will rob me, or they have big machetes. The machetes I could believe, the dangerous part I couldn’t. Only one way to find out…

Leaving at 7am I bought 15 bananas, a loaf of bread, some corned beef and my first pack of cigarettes all to act as appropriate introductions should anyone need convincing. I began the 4km climb up the hill, promptly got lost but found a likely looking lad who introduced himself as a Galamsey boy. I said I was going with him, he said ok. So we walked on up, collecting various people on the way: Eric, Frank, Richard all very normal guys and conveniently all smokers! I have heard people talk about making friends over a cigarette outside a pub; it is something I have missed out on but it works amazingly well.

We arrived at ‘Coral Snake,’ as it is known. Still a little nervous as to what I might find – I should say that although I thought they would be friendly people, I did leave everything valuable back at Kris’ house. To say I was welcomed with open arms would be an exaggeration, but after talking to various leaders and promising to show my pictures to the self appointed ‘chairman’ I was allowed to come and go freely for a couple of days, being invited to eat and given water.

Coral Snake

I went down one of their holes and how anyone can move or even work down there is beyond me. It might be the worst job in the world, dropping down filthy holes, with no air, only a cheap torch strapped to your head for light and no protection other than the pieces of wood you have lodged into the rock to try and offer some support. Last week one of them died having fallen down an open hole and this is not uncommon.

Out of Hole

I got to know a couple of them quite well. They were plain and simple guys from the village trying to earn a bit of cash – and who could blame them, they had nothing else. Richard was trying to make $300 so he could complete this year at school. Eric wanted me to send any of my friends to visit Obuasi so he could be their guide and sell them gold.

Emmanuel

Having said that, there was something fairly sinister and intimidating about the Chairman and his helpers. The Galamsey are recognised as being pretty efficient and mining gold yet the money from this certainly doesn’t end up in the pockets of the workers, or even the pocket of the chairman (although he drives a smart 4 x 4). The question is then where does it go? Someone somewhere is getting very rich, very fast at the expense of the local society.

Stanley

Exterior View of the Mine

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I caught a ‘tro tro’ down from Wa, Ghana, where I had been arguing with the immigration services about my visa. There is a moment before each one of these charades where everybody decides which character to play. The aim is to come to an agreement over the price but to get to this various threats are made; my role is to start off being very reasonable and then get very angry very quickly. Language is not usually a factor in these conversations; everyone knows what is going on.

Leaving all that behind, I arrived in Obuasi in the southern half of Ghana, to draw the AngloGold Ashanti Goldmine which is one of the largest in the world. As usual you have to get past the person hired to tell you it’s not possible – on this occasion it meant delivering a letter to a very understanding managing director, Kwesi. After that meeting, everything was possible. I am staying with Krystofhg Biegal, the general manager of the mines and the most remarkable man: Polish born, Australian living and Russian and English speaking, he has a character and accent to match. As if there was any chance that you might forget him, when he shakes your hand he gives it a sharp tug towards him. It was Krystofhg who organised my trip underground.

Shaft Silhouette

The next morning I had a safety induction which I rather naively thought would be the usual health and safety jargon. Following this I was given what I thought was an equally unnecessary amount of safety gear; hard hat, goggles, face mask, head torch and battery pack, orange overall, large belt, hard toed boots, ear plugs, gloves and a self rescuer which will give you 45 minutes of oxygen if something should go seriously wrong… but only if you are relaxed, if you panic you will have 25minutes! Stanley’s parting words ‘oh and you can take photographs but you may be asked not to as some of the explosives we use are digitally sensitive. Also you may need your earplugs; we limit the decibels to a maximum of 93 but it’s quite loud’.

Safety Gear

We took the ‘cage’ down 3500 feet, which was a hardened version of your average lift, operated from the surface by a system of bells, dictating up, down, loading, unloading and which level. Arriving on level 35 was like stepping into a new world. It was spectacularly unattractive, there were pipes held up by chains above your heads, wire mesh covering the walls and hand painted safety signs everywhere. We crossed over a bent looking set of rails where five guys were pushing a cart of cement sacks which were levered along by a stick until they got stuck in the door way.

We walked five minutes to the workshop, which could happily house four or five London buses. The only problem being the tunnels in and out which are only big enough for a 4 x 4 vehicle or the small and immensely powerful scoops they use to shift the ore, that pivots in the middle whilst stationary to get round the tightest bends.

I am accompanied by Mohammed the shift manager, and we drive to the front wall on level 30, where they are drilling holes to place explosives for the afternoon blasting. Mohammed seems to be in a patient rush with his guest to do his rounds but I am determined to try and draw, which I do in some fashion.

Scoop Driver

Let me try and describe what was, without a doubt, the most challenging place I have ever drawn. It was pitch black. The noise at the front wall was deafening so I had earplugs in, which put all communication other than hand signals out of the question. I was standing, trying to support my A2 board and hold my ink and a cloth in one hand, whilst drawing the drilling 10ft in front of me. Occasionally moisture and spray from the drilling would land on my arms or the drawing board. The self-rescuer and the battery were heavy but I took the thick rubber gloves off to stand a chance of drawing quickly.

Underground Drilling

The whole scene was lit only by our head torches which give a sort of tunnel vision. There are problems with this past the obvious; everyone knows when you are looking at them and therefore becomes self conscious when you are drawing them, the torch doesn’t quite shine where you are looking, it reflects off the white page brightly into your eyes and you blind the person you would like to have a normal conversation with. What was quite reassuring about the whole situation was that I really didn’t have time to stop and think about composition or nice lines or colour (because there is none) and so it became an exercise in drawing the situation quickly in its rawest form, which may or may not have worked but I enjoyed not worrying about the outcome.

Eric

Eventually Mohammed left me with Eric to do his rounds and I could take my time to record this extraordinary place. At one point Eric, who had worked in the mine for 19 years, tried to stand on my right to block the spray from the drilling and the wind from the ventilation shaft (it works to drop the temperature down from a natural 33°C to 29°C to make it more comfortable for the workers). After several hours of drawing, I was covered in dirt and sweat and ready for the cage, just as the blasting started. Similar to air raid films, you could just hear thuds and echoes a long way off and somewhere above you but you could tell they were powerful.

Underground Machine Drilling

We sat waiting for the cage for about 15 minutes and then everything went quiet. We waited a little bit longer and then Eric explained they were probably just testing the brakes, which they do each day. Mohammed who has now joined us, phones up to the top. There was a surface power failure so we were trapped down there and more importantly, people were trapped somewhere in the shaft. They reassured me with their usual African optimism that it would be fixed soon, ‘maybe 15 minutes time,’ so we waited as 15 minutes came and went, then 30 and 45 minutes. Eric fell asleep, the guy opposite fell asleep, I drew, then fall asleep, and when we all woke up there was still no sign of any movement. About 30 of us were now gathered and after several more phone calls there was still no decision, ‘…we are trying to decide whether to wait for the lift or drive you to the surface which will take 45 minutes…’ So we waited 40 minutes and then drove.

Driller Study

You do not imagine that it’s possible to drive out of a mine from 1.5km underground, but for the next hour it was like exploring another world. Again you can only see where the lights look and so on tight turns we were driving into complete darkness, occasionally meeting a giant snaking machine coming the other way which reversed agilely into a tiny hole to let us by. A little while later we were met by a South African who had been sent down to get me out. There was some concern that they were showing a visitor their worse side but actually it was the side I had come to see, the normal side, how people react when things go wrong and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. An hour of tunnel later, we arrived at level six, at the bottom of a giant open pit mine, 7km away from where we started – which gives you an idea of just how large an operation it is.

Waiting To Be Searched

Map of Dogon region

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I have now been in Mali for over a month and what a country – this should be on everyone’s visit list, although I will say that it’s not possible to see the whole thing in two weeks and even three weeks is a push.

There are a couple of things I have particularly enjoyed seeing and experiencing here. The first, organised by Fromhere2Timbuktu, was the third annual Festival of Camels in Tessalit. The Tuareg people have suffered immensely under the pressure of the recent kidnappings, often being used as scapegoats when no one knows who to blame. They made this small traditional festival an opportunity to prove to the outside world that they were open and welcoming. Unfortunately many tourist groups were stopped in Gao by the police and not allowed to continue to an area now agreed to be very dangerous indeed. Our trip however had been organised to travel with a military convoy to Tessalit and back.

Guitarists at Tuareg Festival

The convoy was an experience in itself (convoy being used in the loosest sense of the word,) with ten or 12 vehicles charging across the desert three or four abreast, trying to avoid the dust from the car in front. The convoy was only there to make the festival available to us as tourists so for that reason I didn’t want to do too many drawings of guns and soldiers and miss out describing this amazing little festival.

Camel races

There were only 30 tourists and their guides permitted to go up to the festival, which made it all the more special but very sad that so few people could experience what turned out to be a fantastic two day event. The local Tuareg people all dressed up in their amazing finery with clothes that turn their skin blue giving them the name ‘Les hommes bleu’. We heard some great music from a band called Tinariwen and other local bands, all celebrating traditional Tuareg life with the role of the Camel as a significant backdrop. The second day saw a six kilometre camel race, a parade of camels and a competition for the most beautiful woman.

It is unlike any festival you will have seen in the west; a thousand people and 30 tourists, all enjoying the music coming from a stage with goat skin sides. When the bigger bands came on, the 4 x 4s were pulled up at the back like a drive-in for people to see over the giant turbans in front. At one point all the camels came into the seating area with their jockeys who danced on their saddles in their booboos and waved their whips above their heads.

Aside from this moment of mayhem there is a certain civilised air to it all. Women sit in one section – it’s not obligatory at all but it is just how they do it – there are a number of chairs, people sitting cross legged at the front and standing at the back. An area is left at the front for three men and three women from the crowd to do the traditional Tuareg dancing.

I thought I was lucky enough to get on to the stage to draw, but actually in hindsight I think if you asked nicely anyone could stand at the back and watch, and a lot of people did. Afterwards everyone retired to their goat skin tents, which all faced one direction to minimise the wind and the sun. It was well worth the trip – but it’s 35 hours of travelling so it’s not to be squeezed into a week.

Dogon scene

My second memorable experience was the Dogon Country, which is one of the few places I can say that has taken my breath away. I have seen busy market cities and never ending desert before, but this is something that would be hard to find anywhere else. To start with, the geography of the place is extraordinary; you have a 200km of 600ft escarpment running from North East to South West. At the top and the bottom of this live the Dogon, a name perhaps derived from the French for people of the Ogon – ‘de Ogon’ – d’Ogon.

Dogone scenery

The history behind the Dogon is that during the 15th century they arrived in Bandiagara and lived side by side with the Tellem, a community of miniature people who built their houses high up in the escarpment and gathered fruits and hunted animals in the Seno-Gondo Plain.

Dogon children

Eventually the Dogon drove the Tellem out, either by using up their hunting ground for growing crops like millet or by actually chasing them away. It remains a mystery where the Tellem went. You can however see their incredible, delicately built houses on the face of the escarpment, where the Dogon now bury their dead, winching them up with rope made from the young Baobab bark.

Dogon child

The area is one of the few places that has remained non-Muslim, because of the difficulty in accessing it and the traditional Animist culture has largely been retained. It is one of the few areas in the world that has benefited from intense tourism, allowing them to keep their sensitive and somewhat different way of life. Aside from the desert the Dogon country is one of the few places you would need to take a guide for trekking and a 4 x 4 to get there. We drove the entire length of the escarpment in about four hours. You should also remember to take a pocketful of Kola beans as payment for taking photos.

A month ago we set off from London in two Toyota Land Cruisers. I am travelling with a man called Guy Lankester who was born in Zimbabwe and now spends six months of the year running bespoke tours in West Africa. So far he has organised everything, which is great for me because I can spend what little time we have trying to draw. Some of the drawings are below. The others you can see here.

Having missed the 2am ferry from Dover, we arrive in Paris a little later than planned to arrange our Malian visas (there is no Malian embassy in London; Algerian you can do in London, Tunisian you don’t need as a UK national). This usually takes 24 hours to be ready. After that we had a very easy run down to Lyon where we stayed on the floor with some Tuareg people, and onto Italy to catch the 24-hour ferry to Tunis.

Genoa

My first real opportunity to draw came in Genoa, where Africa seems to begin. A seething port of people, mostly men with their cars packed with everything you can imagine; sofas, mopeds, fridges, dining room tables, and anything that doesn’t fit inside goes on top. Every official we came to said ‘splendid’ and being English we were happy to agree, only later realizing that it was the name of the boat (the other option leaving the next day was ‘Excellent’).

Genoa boat

I would suggest booking a cabin on the boat, as with three beds and a shower it may be the last luxury for a while. I don’t think it is possible to avoid the visa/passport/vehicle paper queues in Tunis port – it took us a couple of hours, and, as I have come to learn, it is easier not to fight or hurry anything in Africa.

Tozeur cafe

After that we headed for the desert, spending a night in a perfectly clean hostel in Kairouan, where there is also a 5 star hotel (Hotel La Kasbah) if it is luxury you are after. The next morning we made a small detour past the giant salt lake called Chott el Jerid. Big enough to feature on Tunisian coins, it is worth driving past before arriving in Tozeur where I had an opportunity to draw the small dark reed market buildings, the friendly shop keepers and the café culture which replaces European drinking.

Before you get to the Algerian you will have had to organise a guide, as it is the law to travel with one ‘for your own safety’. And it is important to get the right one. For that reason I am not going to recommend ours! Travelling with Guy meant that visas and itineraries were all organised, (your guide should be able to do this,) but you will need to check in at each police post and this slows down the driving – along with having to stop for traditional Tuareg tea, which you will learn to love.

Police post

All that organised – Algeria begins to become a fascinating place to visit. Little oasis towns, usually understated in the guide books, are very welcoming to tourists, with cheap rooms available or camping if you prefer. I should also add there was always a more expensive option, although it was not one that we ever took. Each town is usually half-a-days drive away so when we were organised it was possible to drive in the mornings and see the sights in the afternoons. We weren’t allowed to drive much after dark, (another precaution taken after having so much trouble in the 90s) but this did not worry us because we were happy to see the giant Sahara desert and its indescribably large ergs in the sun light.

A Berber

Often we were invited into people’s houses to eat, usually around one big bowl of rice and meat with sauce. I found that the longer I spent in little places such as El Golea and In Salah, the more I enjoyed it, and enjoyed getting to know the shops, the prices and the local food.

As we got further south we left behind the Arabic influences and attitudes and moved into Tamashek territory. The Tamashek or Tuareg are a community of people that live in the southern half of the Sahara across Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. They are very welcoming and we found ourselves drinking tea with them a lot. The tradition being three small glasses; the first for death, the second for life and the third for love – this is the sweetest!

We were aiming for Tamanrasset, which was the real reason for going all that way. It sits just to the West of the Hoggar mountains and there is some impressive scenery to be explored, including Assekrem, a rival for the Grand Canyon. It is possible to explore the area by camel on a 28 day trek to Djanet over the mountains, though it’s not for the faint hearted. We stayed in the very friendly Campement Toulef just outside Tamanrasset.

As a town I found Tamanrasset had a lot of things to draw; a large market, infrastructure, generous and friendly people, mechanics and jewellery stores. However if it is museums, libraries, historic buildings and other tourists that you are looking for there aren’t very many. Their history is very oral like a lot of Africa’s. So we were really there for the desert, the people, a sense of achievement and the experience. All of which we got.

Our next objective was to get in to Mali…The border areas of Algeria, Niger, Mali and Mauritania are not safe at the moment, as they are home to bandits searching for tourists and selling them on for ransom or to terrorists.

Having left Tamanrasset for Bordj – Mokhtar, we had a stunning drive of 600km with no road, just sand track, through some brilliant desert landscape. We comfortably and quite safely camped out over night. Our guide made Tugula, a type of bread, from semolina and water which was cooked in the sand under the fire, broken into tiny pieces and mixed with our meat sauce.

Timimoun

Having checked in with the friendly Algerian Army in the morning, we arrived in Bordj – Mohktar. Little did we know that four days later we would be doing the same trip in reverse in the early hours of the morning in turbans and boubous for disguise.

The next day we tried to cross the border. We always had a back up plan for crossing between Mali and Algeria. Following the recent spate of kidnappings the plan was to send our tourist-looking vehicles with our two guides who were of no interest to bandits and take another vehicle on the other route to Gao – 900km away. In short, (as you may have read in the Saturday Times,) this plan fell through and it turned out we were the target of a kidnap attempt, which meant we were all too happy to turn around and head for the safety of Tamanrasset. A decision that paid off when our guides took our cars over the border and were stopped and tied up by armed bandits looking for us. Four hours later they were released and continued amazingly with the cars to Gao.

This left us with a scary 600km drive back to Tamanrasset and a decision to make.

Did we now risk the border with Niger, public transport and 2100km detour to Gao or fly to Bamako and wait for the cars and drive up to Timbuktu? Eventually the flight was too tempting. That is one great thing about Tamanrasset: you can get in and out easily to Algers, Niamey, Bamako and the West.

This gives me the opportunity to write about Algers where we waited for our connecting flight to Bamako. As an illustrator it is an impressive city; white buildings with bright blue shutters all in different stages of disrepair. Palm trees and large European influenced buildings are all backed up onto the sea and there’s a commercial port too. Accompanied by a high hill behind it, there’s the usual chaos of public transport and the busy ‘casbah’ market – it is somewhere I could have drawn for a week.

To be fair to Mali and Algeria I should add that this problem of kidnapping is very much local to border areas, where there are vast spaces of unchartered territory and a thousand places to hide. I also believe that it is not vast network of terrorists or even Al Queda as our governments would have us believe. This means that you are not going to be targeted from anywhere with people, so public transport and towns are always safe, as is your hotel or campement.

The only other thing I would say is to read the FCO website, but immediately after to speak to somebody with local knowledge. Understandably the FCO have to err on the side of caution and so have a tendency to blanket areas as ‘no go’ which can be very off putting but is not necessarily a reason not to go to some wonderful areas, as we did, away from the trouble.

For more information about trips to West Africa visit: www.fromhere2timbuktu.com. Guy Lankester has become somewhat of an expert in West Africa and very natural with the locals. It was his contacts that warned us about the kidnap attempt so he is worth speaking to.

I also read a couple of very relevant books on my journey: Dead Aid by Dmabisa Moyo; The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa by Jeremy Keenan; Between Sea & Sahara by Eugene Fromentin.

Globalista is proud to  support illustrator George Butler on his 6 month, 8500km overland adventure through Africa. From 1st January 2010, we’ll be posting on the Travel Journal monthly updates and illustrations of George’s epic journey, as he negotiates his way through the witch towns of Ghana, attends a festival in the desert, meets the BaAka Pygmies in Cameroon and much more. Find out more at www.georgebutler.org

We recently had the idea of setting up an illustrator-in-residence position at Globalista. We felt that we were in a good position to be able to support and help promote a talented young travel illustrator, whose work we could also start introducing to our website to develop the quality and style of our design, to support the excellent travel content that we are collating on our site.

George Butler is the illustrator whom we have invited to take up this post of illustrator-in-residence. To start with, the position will very much be an informal one but the idea is that we can post his travel illustrations and travel stories, and in time we hope to be in a position to sponsor George on his various trips abroad.

George studied at Kingston University (2004-2007), and has since been employed by Granta magazine and Descent ski company to name a few. He has also already won several awards for his illustrations, including the Reportage Award at Kingston University in 2007.

You can find further details about George and his brilliant work at www.georgebutler.org and do get in touch with George directly via his website or with us, if you like what you see.