“Mama, it was your birthday yesterday. I was far away and couldn’t celebrate with you. But I appreciate the astuteness you’ve shared with me throughout my life. My little girl and I, our daughter and I, love you with all the potency of our two hearts that beat to your beauty and generosity.”
THAT LETTER GAVE ME the vigor I needed to look for Yoro, to give birth, but I grew unsettled as I began preparing for the trip. I was confronting this without Jim for the first time. And as if dealing with this at my age wasn’t daunting enough, the letter shook me up in another way. As you must have read, Yoro explained she was about to be taken to mine uranium. Uranium. The central ingredient of the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium. In my little girl’s hands. It’s a relatively abundant material in the earth’s crust, but can only be mined cost-effectively in regions where there is a high concentration of it, and where nobody cares about the ensuing environmental contamination from the extraction process, neither the country’s government nor the international companies that hold mining rights. Which is to say, this type of mining takes place only in the trash dumps of the world, the landscapes that are of no interest to anyone, the air that can be poisoned because the lungs they fill belong to people who have no value whatsoever, the neglected class. Nuclear energy is much cleaner—I’ve heard it said so often—but believe me, I know something about uranium, and I know that, aside from the risks of accidents in nuclear power plants located in developed countries, the most polluting phase is the first one, the site of extraction, not only for the environment and nearby cities, but also for the hands of the people who mine it without knowing they’re being murdered. Even if the workers knew their lives were at risk, they’d continue extracting the uranium because death by starvation seems more imminent than death by radiation poisoning. You can feel hunger—it pricks every day—but radiation poisoning is a silent killer. Besides, you know that in Africa there are always more workers than jobs. A thousand ants for each tiny crumb of bread. If they don’t explain the risks of exposure, it’s not for fear of being left without laborers, only that there’s no time to waste; the white queen orders them to extract material, no break. Time isn’t only gold in Africa. It’s more valuable than that. Time is uranium. Africans aren’t informed about the hows and the whys of the death that is coming because the need to fill their bellies, or their sons’ or daughters’ or parents’ bellies, is far more urgent. Starvation, that physiological law, doesn’t hide; on the contrary, it is made manifest. Radiation, on the other hand, is the way death satiates its own hunger: silence.
Uranium. Just the name to me was like something straight out of hell, like Uranus, that god, son and husband of Gaea, Mother Earth. Uranium changed my life. It took my parents, grandparents, and friends away; decimated my city; destroyed my country; insulted the human race. Yet there it was, to all countries the most coveted gold, radioactive gold that Yoro was now extracting, handling, someplace in Africa. In an African mine, where no doubt the process didn’t follow any safety measures for workers, who are in reality slaves, as I came to see for myself later on.
I’ll skip the details of my preparation for the Africa sojourn. First, because I have to finish this testimony today. And anyway, let me just say that it’s not about the journey for me. Whenever I go somewhere, be it short distances on foot or long ones by train, I go directly from the departure scene to the arrival scene. The in-between is always like a big empty space I sneak into so I can find my own world. I’m not interested in itineraries, only where I come from and where I’m going, which in my case are not existential issues but practical ones.
So I will limit myself to saying that I made it to a desert worn out by one of these mines, the Rössing mine in Namibia. It had taken a few weeks for me to get all the details together, so I decided to start in this country, where Yoro had said in her letter they were going to take her. If I didn’t find her there, I would continue on to the Congo.
The Rössing mine is in the Namib Desert some thirty-eight miles from Swakopmund, the German colonial city where I am today, where, as I learned in my previous stay, the residents like to brag about their buildings and wide streets with fairy-tale houses in the shade of palm trees planted rigidly equidistant from one another, scrupulously aligned, like teeth adjusted by the best German orthodontist. They are proud of their urban design, but also of the special attention the Germans paid to the population as compared with other colonizers. Apparently they built schools. What good folk, those Germans. What they don’t tell you is that the schools were just for white people. But I didn’t see any schools in Swakopmund, only the slave labor camps, the first testing grounds for the concentration camps the Germans would later bring to Europe, along with the eyes, brains, and other organs of Africans preserved in formaldehyde for racial studies. Just a few years ago, Germany finally returned the skeletons they’d taken. Now the descendants of the colonialists pat the shoulders of Africans who lost their grandparents, greeting them like buddies; they surf together in the sand dunes of that desert and invite their international friends to come and record them speaking North American slang with their state-of-the-art cameras. A friend of mine told me not long ago about two members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces who surfed the dunes or more like staggered down them on a kind of board. I thought it was nearly as ridiculous as their ill-named peace mission, which not even staggeringly have they actually been able to complete.
The Namib Desert is the most important tourist attraction and the country’s greatest source of revenue, more so even than the mines. Swakopmund is a major tourist enclave, bordered on one side by the icy, though striking, vistas of the Atlantic coast, and on the other three sides by the Namib Desert. The climate is cloudy and humid, and the legion of ships that get beached in the fog along the coast are an attraction in and of themselves, uncanny shipwrecks that people on land, adults and children, pick apart to sell off the materials until there’s nothing left. Tourism, one of the country’s few sources of revenue, is being put at risk by the uranium being exported to the UK, France, the United States, and my country, Japan. So why should I care about any of this at this stage in my life? I guess if I’m writing about it, it’s because it still matters to me, but let me get back to what I really care about: Yoro, whom I hoped to locate in the desert mine.