My contact found me in the morning. “Mr. Andrew Baily, of the bleeding heart liberal press, I presume,” he said pleasantly in English with a French accent. I saw his clay-coated boots first. He crouched before me, soiled blue jeans tucked into the boots, flannel shirt without sleeves straining to hold in his gut, sun-leathered face, maybe forty, sunglasses, a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. Brown teeth. “I am Marcel Devoe, of the blood sucking, imperialist European diamond cartel. Assistant to the assistant crew chief for Seguela mining. Can I get you some breakfast?”
He treated me to kedjenou, a chicken and vegetable jumble sealed and cooked in banana leaves. We ate in the depot’s café, sitting in bright orange, molded plastic chairs.
Devoe said, “This is not a good time for you to come. The celebration days are here, and the Mandés and the Wè tribesmen get lazy. They’re from Ghana, you know. No work there. They dig slower the closer we get to La Fête de Diamants.”
I raised my eyebrows.
He struggled for an English word, “A holiday… a vacation day… I do not know the word. On the new year’s day, the employees can keep one diamond they find. It’s a tradition from the DeBeer time.”
“That’s generous,” I said through a kedjenou mouthful. “A diamond for each.”
He smiled. His teeth were discolored.
“No, no, no. One diamond for all, the best one, except the Seguela mines have given nothing but industrial grade stones for years. Still, they hope for another Light of Peace.” He dismissed the hope for a worthwhile diamond with a derisive snort.
“I don’t know that one.”
“The last big stone, 434 carats in the rough, found in Sierra Leone thirty years ago. Nothing like the Cullinan, 3,106 carats, or the Excelsior at 995 carats. You’d think that must be huge. It’s not! The Cullinan was no bigger than a woman’s fist, a little glass potato. But who dreams of those? Diamond mining is ditch digging. So many hundred ore buckets produce so many tiny, flawed stones, only good for saw blades and polishing dust. No, the real money is in production, and the workers give up a good day to hunt for a grand gem to retire on. Listen to them; they already know what color BMW they will park in garages they don’t have. Every hut with a TV and microwave. Stupid workers. If they found such a stone, what makes them think the company would let them keep it?”
“Wouldn’t they?”
He shook his head, as if his mind already lingered on different things. Perhaps he mourned the lost work day.
His car, a rusty little coupé with a Korean name I didn’t recognize, rattled at even low speeds and had no shocks, so every pebble jarred us as we drove north. The de la Maraoué National Forest passed to our west, an impenetrable leafy wall exuding green smells and piercing monkey shrieks. To the east, though, stretched flooded coffee fields punctuated with occasional tin-roofed sheds as far as I could see. Devoe rolled a joint with one hand and held it out to me. I shook my head. He said, “I’m supposed to offer you a bribe, too, so you will write pleasing articles. It’s standard procedure. Money? Drugs? Women? No? Well, I thought not.” He didn’t look surprised or upset.
He waved toward the jungle. “There’s a fortune in timber in there. If you bleeding hearts would leave us alone, we’d be rich men. The entire country used to look like that, impassable with trees. Gold mines with bark.” He pointed his chin at the fields as we passed five children sitting by the road, their black skin splotchy with mud. “Money when they knocked the trees down, and crop money every year since.”
I bit my tongue. My friends were involved in efforts to save the rainforest.
Soon the road climbed as we left behind both the fields and jungle, although vegetation choked every little valley and ravine. Savanna grass covered the hills. Dispirited telephone poles drooped with power lines for many miles, but they vanished behind as the car clattered on. We passed through villages, houses no more than plywood leaning on beat-up frames beneath ubiquitous metal roofs. But I also saw long expensive fences, and winding driveways, leading to beautiful ranch houses, their windows glittering in the mid-morning sun.
We turned west before reaching Seguela, into the high country.
“They ignore the curse, of course,” said Devoe.
“Excuse me?” The land fell away so steeply below my window that I’d been concentrating on what was road and what was air. Devoe drove carelessly, draping his wrist over the steering wheel.
“All the big stones are cursed. Evil follows the big ones. If you could get the diamond without the bad luck, that would be a trick. The man who first stole the Hope Diamond was devoured by dogs. Who would want that? It sank the Titanic, you know.”
“Uh huh,” I said. Tough looking brush, higher than our bumper, filled the middle between the two, ratty ruts our road had become, and it scraped the car’s bottom.
“Yes, an American millionaire owned it, and the Atlantic took him. His granddaughter committed suicide after wearing it.”
“So the workers don’t make enough money, and they hang on for La Fête de Diamants thinking it might save them?” I didn’t figure Devoe would give honest answers if there were abuses, but it wouldn’t hurt to put my cards on the table.
He downshifted to get us through a deep puddle, then jumped into the higher gear when we were through. My feet suddenly felt damp. Water drained through the floorboards.
“My great-grandfather told me when he lived in the Alsase, he plowed his fields with two horses who lived twenty years each. The first year he gave them sugar cubes from his coat pocket to reward them for their work.”
We crested a small ridge, and the land before us flattened. Low mountains shaped the horizon.
“What’s your point?”
Devoe laughed. “He only gave them sugar the first year. For the next nineteen, when he wanted them to pull harder, he put his hand in his pocket. They’d break their backs as long as they thought he’d bring something out. He never did. You know, someone writes a story about the pits every couple of years. It never makes a change. Africa is not like America.”
I made notes, resting the pad against my knee, the pen jumping with every jolt, recording my impressions. Conrad wrote about Africa, but he traveled on the Congo, beating up current in an underpowered boat, the vegetation crowding against his windows. Here, the grass rolled away, spotted with trees and brush. For miles nothing changed: no animals, no people, just hills and curvy road winding between them. We met no other cars.
“Is this the main road?”
“There’s a train and an airport, but it is easier this way for me.” Devoe nodded his head back to boxes piled where the car’s rear seat would have been.
“What is it?”
“A man has to make a living. An assistant to the assistant manager’s job, whew! The paycheck does not keep him in socks. I have family in Europe. They expect money every month.”
We turned a sharp corner around a thick cacao trees stand, and entered Seguela. Crumbling brick facades whipped by my nose, inches away. Pedestrians slipped into doorways as we passed. Then we hit a larger street, crowded with busses and rusty streetcars screeching down the middle. I had no time to form an impression other than dusty age. I saw no shiny thing. As quickly as we entered town, we left, climbing for several minutes on a path that tried to rip the transmission right from the car’s bottom. John the Baptist, the patron saint of roads, would have found nothing to like about this trail. One more good jolt and I figured my head would be on a platter. The clutch clattered while Devoe cursed the car up a last, rock-laden, rutted stretch that would have challenged a four wheel drive vehicle.