Paved with green not gold

Copper is everything that matters in Katanga, and especially Kolwezi, the biggest mining town. Copper employs the people and pays for the services. It’s a pretty metal but the scars that the mines leave on the landscape are the very opposite. The mine dumps are a dead grey in colour, and tower over the small mining townships at their base. At closer quarters one can see the massive holes of opencast mining: impressive in scale, but botanically completely dead. Scattered between the mine dumps and opencast holes are the rusting remains of the old operations, with nothing more than a few workers maintaining the works until a rich uncle buys the place and gets them running again. Even driving to the new mines, with their newly painted offices and even some lawns, the landscape remains dead.

You don’t see much copper outside tourist markets, where it is sold in the form of bas-relief pictures of women carrying water pots, or nursing children. Another favourite is a plaque in the shape of the country, with a few geographical references or the odd picture of an elephant or buffalo engraved on it. The sister product of copper is malachite, a bright green stone of great beauty, which is tortured by curio makers into the most absurd shapes in a misplaced effort to make something beautiful. Malachite beads can be quite nice, but the ones available locally are neither nicely polished nor well shaped. Nice as a souvenir, maybe, but special – no!

Of course the mines are proud of what they produce, but the offices of most of them are very utilitarian. There’s one exception: a Lebanese-owned company whose offices are an enticing seraglio-like warren. The rooms have all-round friezes of copper panels depicting mining operations, and are separated by low arches framed in malachite. In the walls are aedicules housing mining scenes also made of malachite, with toy bulldozers, cranes and lorries busy about their work. No space is free of either copper or malachite. It sounds awful, but has, in fact, the attractive oriental feel of a carpet bazaar.

One of the charms of driving around is that one can spy large green stones poking from an exposed cutting, or come across green stones in the gravel of the road. The streets of the towns may not be paved with gold, but they really are paved with malachite. The availability of malachite, of course, allows crazy paving fans to have great fun, because green paving is basically the same price as grey or brown. So in front of the town hall, or by our (modest) hotel pool – anywhere where there is crazy paving – there it is: malachite. Usually it is in a thin layer, too thin to be used for anything else, over the local grey stone. Occasionally you see cadmium too – a delightful vivid blue.

So if you’re coming to Kolwezi bring a big suitcase.