Guinean migrants turn dust into gold!

Dakar, June 27: It looks like a medieval alchemist's den, this tumbledown shack where young Africans use bubbling blue acid to turn dust into gold.

Bent double over tablets of stone, half a dozen men clutching rocks grind sand and earth into tiny particles. One cranks a wheel to fan the flames of a furnace dug into the ground, sending sparks flying up towards the wooden roof.

The hive of activity, tucked away behind a family compound in the heart of Senegal's bustling capital Dakar, is part of a cottage industry which survives on the scraps swept up at the end of each day off jewellers' floors.

Around 50 Guinean immigrants scrape a living washing and separating out traces of silver and gold from the dust before selling it back to the jewellers to be made into rings, bracelets and necklaces for European tourists.

Some work on a city-centre beach near the jewellers' shops, carrying out a preliminary wash with seawater before filtering the sandy mixture over wooden sluices. The deposits they collect are then sold to the 'laboratory' for chemical separation.

''Guineans are specialists in gold. It's a gold mining country,'' said Michel Kamara, 54, one of the first generation to earn a living in Dakar recycling gold dust before passing the trade on to their children and cousins.

Collecting gold dust in this way is not unique. Jewellers' warehouses and factories in North America and Europe do it daily.

Most have machines that capture the dust and direct it through a filtering system to re-convert it to its solid form.

But Senegal seen as a haven of relative prosperity in turbulent West Africa attracts migrants from around the region, particularly Guinea, one of the world's poorest countries despite deposits of bauxite, iron and gold.

Most of Guinea's 10 million people live on less than 1 dollar a day and political unrest has brought the country to its knees, sending thousands over the border to Dakar, where many earn a living as fruit sellers or running small street-corner stores.

Recycling gold is an employment of last resort. The panners can earn up to $3 a day if they are lucky and find decent deposits among the waste, but often go home empty-handed.

On the world market, gold is currently fetching around 20 dollar a gram.

''They come here if they don't get other work because they know this place they've got family, friends here,'' Kamara said, speaking lilting English learned in his time as a sailor.

Garbage That Glitters

At Soumbedioune, a stretch of Dakar beach sandwiched between a sewage outlet and a courthouse, the treasure-hunters have set up a line of slanted tables to act as sluices to separate out what is valuable.

Their relatives have worked this patch of beach for decades, meaning some of the jewellery tailings have been dug up, sifted and smelted again and again from the blackened sand.

''We work for a month, we collect everything together, then we sell it,'' said Mamadou Samba Ba, 21, dressed in a sweat-stained green T-shirt and torn shorts, the Atlantic Ocean lapping at his feet.

''Sometimes you find 2 grams, sometimes 8 grams, sometimes nothing,'' he said, holding up a small plastic sachet of filtered black residue ready to be sold to the 'laboratory'.

Some have even found washed up pieces of jewellery lost on Dakar's teaming streets and flushed through sewers into the sea, or thrown into the water by wealthy Senegalese told by their marabout, or Islamic teacher, to make a sacrifice to the ocean.

Local fishermen further up the beach building pirogues traditional long, wooden boats view the Guinean gold diggers with mild bemusement and disbelief that they can survive by scavenging on the rubbish-strewn sand.

But in the alchemist's den, hidden on a dusty backstreet in Dakar's populous Medina neighbourhood, the immigrants have the last laugh.

''When the sand arrives from Soumbedioune we give it a second washing, grind it and filter it,'' explained Yoro Ba, who after years working on the beach decided to set up the laboratory to avoid the prying eyes of the fisherman.

The powder is then cooked and ground again on the stone tablets to provide as large a surface area as possible before being dissolved in heated acid.

''When we put it in acid it strips out the brass and copper. It's just silver and gold that are left. Then we simply sell it back to the jewellers,'' he said with a smile, pulling a 250 gram bar of refined silver from the back of his jeans.

Reuters