How Gold Is Driving the Spread of Ebola
Mining has been the lifeblood of this remote Congolese hill town for decades. Now, it is fueling the spread of a devastating outbreak.
By Declan Walsh
Visuals by Arlette Bashizi
Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi reported from a gold mine in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak.
After the local Islamic State affiliate attacked his farm, Mumbere Saidi fled to the gold mines in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, trekking 200 miles across one of Africa’s most dangerous war zones.
He found backbreaking work in a remote mining town where he panned for gold. When times were good, Mr. Saidi, 27, sent a few dollars back to the parents he left behind. When they were bad, he struggled to feed his wife and baby daughter.
At least he felt safe, until last week, when an invisible enemy struck Mr. Saidi inside his home.
“The disease got him,” said his brother, Kondu Ganda, also a miner, using a common euphemism for Ebola in a town where many avoid the word.
Behind him, Red Cross workers in white protective suits removed Mr. Saidi’s body from their mud-walled home and carefully placed it in a coffin.
For over a century, gold has been the lifeblood of Mongbwalu, a remote hill town in Ituri province that draws people looking for work from across Congo and beyond. But now Mongbwalu is at the epicenter of the devastating Ebola outbreak sweeping this region, and gold is helping to drive it.
Experts now believe that the outbreak, already the third largest on record, began in Mongbwalu as early as February. Yet the authorities failed to detect it until May 15, in part because it was caused by a lesser-known virus, Bundibugyo, for which there is no treatment.
By the time a crisis was declared, the Bundibugyo virus had already been spreading for weeks through Mongbwalu’s gold mines, among men who work cheek by jowl in rough conditions, trading gold that often crosses nearby borders.
Now, they are falling sick and dying.
When Mr. Saidi fell ill last month, it first seemed to be malaria. As his condition deteriorated, increasingly desperate relatives carried him to six different clinics in search of a cure, his brother said. Nothing worked.
After his death, neighbors clustered quietly outside Mr. Saidi’s home, which is perched on a hillside amid banana groves and twisting paths. Five people had already died on their street, they said; word came through that a sixth had fallen ill.
“Another person has started bleeding up there,” Mr. Ganda said, pointing to a house.
Mongbwalu, in the Kilo-Moto gold belt, has long embodied the tragedy of Congo’s abundance. Belgian colonists opened the town’s first mines over a century ago, using forced labor. Cycles of exploitation, corruption and conflict followed. Under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the mines were badly mismanaged. After Mobutu was ousted in 1997, and Congo fell into turmoil, militias and warlords battled over Mongbwalu’s riches.
During one particular brutal period between 2002 and 2003, at least 2,000 civilians were killed in and around Mongbwalu, Human Rights Watch later found.
Now Mongbwalu is largely peaceful, even as ethnic conflict rages in the surrounding countryside, and most of the mining is done by small-scale miners who work the informal mines dotting the town’s edge. Many come from other provinces of Congo, especially North Kivu, which itself suffered an Ebola outbreak between 2018 and 2020.
A mineral-rich region
DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC
OF CONGO
Areas
with Ebola
cases
Informal
mining sites
Ituri
Province
Some cases
reported in
Uganda
But the lure of Mongbwalu is what is making it so dangerous.
The gold economy fuels a flow of workers, traders, prostitutes and smugglers from Congo and neighboring countries. Town authorities now believe that more than 80 people died from Ebola in the weeks before the outbreak was detected, and things have only gotten worse.
“We fear we are just at the start of our misfortune,” said Jean-Pierre Bikilisende, a former town mayor.
On the edge of town, gold seems to be everywhere. Following a winding path through tall grass, Arlette Bashizi, a photographer for The New York Times, and I suddenly found ourselves next to a wide stream where dozens of men in mud-splattered clothes shoveled sediment.
They sifted the sandy goop by feeding it into wooden sluices powered by clattering generators, then mixed it with mercury to extract gold nuggets. Given the perils of the work and the threats many had fled, few said they were bothered by Ebola.
Bienvenue Bironyi, a miner from North Kivu, had heard that people were dying. But, he added, he did not know what precautions he could realistically take.
“We’re still working from morning to evening,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”
The pay was an indisputable factor. Gedeon Abimana said he made between $136 and $272 a week, depending on his team’s gold haul. That is great money in rural Congo, although it came with considerable health risk: his job involves handling mercury with his bare hands, which can cause serious illness, including neurological damage.
He shrugged. “What can we do?” he said. “We have no choice but to work.”
The town could not stop, either. Heavy-duty mining trucks rolled down the unpaved main street. Motorcycle taxis clustered on corners, waiting for fares. Children in neat school uniforms skipped home. Soldiers and miners chugged beer in bars.
Michel Anguma, a gold miner in rubber boots, downplayed the calamity. Certainly, people were dying, he said as he strolled home after work. “Just back there, I saw people going to bury someone,” he said.
But gold workers could not afford to worry.
“Nothing is above God,” he said with a shrug.
He spoke under a cluster of trees filled with screeching fruit bats, which scientists say can act as a natural reservoir for the viruses that cause Ebola.
As with much in this outbreak, little is certain, including how many people are actually sick. In recent days, a surge in testing capacity at government laboratories was starting to give a clearer picture of the number of confirmed Ebola cases in Congo. About 300 people are suspected to have died so far.
But the head start the virus enjoyed as it spread undetected through Mongbwalu this spring means the true extent of the outbreak remains unknown. And with gold prices hovering near historic highs, the incentive to keep mining is powerful.
Beyond the town, Chinese operators run semi-industrial gold plants, government officials said. Last year, a British company called Horizon announced it was building a major new gold plant.
“We didn’t come here to spend five years studying,” a Horizon executive told a packed public meeting in September, according to the provincial government website. “We came to build.”
At a separate informal mining site, known as Kanza Kanza, miners were taking some precautions. Some local leaders wore face masks and told me they had reduced the number of miners sleeping in each tent from five to three.
But mostly, it was business as usual in Mongbwalu. Armored vehicles carrying U.N. peacekeepers lumbered through rutted streets. Nightclubs remained open, including one located yards from the hotel rooms where officials from the World Health Organization, here to help fight Ebola, were staying.
The town airstrip was temporarily closed due to Ebola restrictions, and at a nearby military base, soldiers observed strict hand-washing regulations. “At first, people didn’t believe the virus existed, but slowly they are coming around,” said their commander, Col. Bahati Nuru.
The virus seemed to be seeping in everywhere, including the military. At the beleaguered town hospital, health workers had just defused a crisis created by a distraught soldier.
After the soldier’s son died from Ebola, he blamed the medical staff for the boy’s death. “Fortunately, he was not armed,” said Dr. Alex Bogole, a hospital medic. “But he was carrying a knife, and threatening people with it.”
During a visit to the regional capital, Bunia, last week, the Congolese health minister, Dr. Samuel Roger Kamba, said the greatest difficulty in an Ebola outbreak was not deploying medical teams, but persuading communities to follow public health measures.
Like others in Mongbwalu, many gold miners appear to think that Ebola either does not exist or is a moneymaking scheme concocted by local doctors and foreign aid groups. With no treatment or approved vaccine available, many patients go to the hospital only to die soon after, deepening the distrust.
“Crazy stories are going around,” said Shadrack Toko, an official at Kanza Kanza. “They say that people brought to the hospital are being injected with poison, or even having their genitals cut off.”
As we walked back to our car, we came across Deborah Singo, a village leader, gold miner and virus skeptic. “I heard about it,” she said cagily of Ebola. But to really believe in it, she said, “I need to see it first.”
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.