"This is not a village of family ties, but of mutual interest," he went on.. "We have an established order, a commandant and our own police. Thieves and sorcerers are expelled. We don't accept the killing of elephants or okapis, but sometimes soldiers come with meat, and we are obliged to give them our coltan for it." 

            The miners get nothing for their efforts except a good time and maybe AIDS, and the girls sell the coltan to the kumba kumba,  guys who push bicycles laden with goods and produce for days along the ruined colonial roads until they get to Bunia or Beni, where they sell it to middlemen, if they aren't robbed along the way. These days the probability of making it to Beni in one piece was significantly better than to Bunia, even though the Samboko forest was a total crapshoot, so most of it goes to Beni, where since Bemba's soldiers have come to town, the big buyer is a well- known Tadjik Russian arms dealer named Commandante Viktor, who was active in Bosnia a few years ago and just appeared one day last spring. Commandante Viktor moves the coltan through Bemba's soldiers to Kampala, and from there, after the Ugandan high command has taken its cut,  most of it is flown up to Antwerp or Rotterdam, where the big-time dealers are, by commercial airlines like Sabena (which was recently exposed and announced that it was  out of the coltan business).    So there was no choice to take another motambusi back down to Beni. Again the horoscope was propitious. The only   incident was with an RCD officer who siphoned off most of our gas. From Beni I flew on TMK up to Bunia. There I had a four-hour one-on-one with Wamba dia Wamba, a brilliant man whose heart was in the right place, a man of towering moral and intellectual stature, but an academic, not a politician. He would make a great rector of the university in Kinshasa.  I told Wamba what Al Gore had said about Africa when I was doing a profile of him during his inept and ill-fated presidential campaign. Gore described the violent anarchy in central Africa as a process of "creative destruction" that was not unlike Prirogin's law of thermodynamics. Prirogin's law, for which he won the Nobel prize, pertains to open systems (in which the energy flows in and out). When the energy becomes more than the system can handle, it breaks down, but simultaneously a new, more complex and accomodating system develops. This was happening in the atmosphere, where excess CO2 was wreaking havoc with existing weather systems, Gore maintained, and new ones were forming. It had happened during the Renaissance, when Galilean science replaced the old Ptolemaic scheme, and  in Congo "the state," an invention and an imposition of the Europeans, was breaking back down into smaller historically and cultural more meaningful tribal units. 

          Wamba considered the analogy, and replied :  "One has to consider what form this law expresses itself in society," he argued. "Mobutu's notion of geopolitics was that each group can gather its fruits, and nature, which gives the fruit, will deal with the maintenance. But here an open system needs feedback and maintenance. In places where there is not enough space or resources for everybody, the notion of who was there first becomes the ruling principle, and the 'Nilotics" become the cause of everything. But the tribal units Gore is thinking of may not exist."  Wamba was not from Haut Congo. He was a Mukongo from Bas Congo, on the Atlantic coast, so he did not have local support. Twice two local warlords had tried to take him out, and the Ugandans had come to his rescue. Wamba's entourage was mainly from the diaspora, like Thomas Lusaka, a law professor who had taken a leave of absence from the University of Paris II to become Wamba's commissar of defense. We talked about the upcoming joint operation to clean up the poaching in Okapi. Lusaka understood that the animals were a big-button issue for the international community. "The replacement of my corrupt officers must be accompanied by a big campaign of sensibilization of the population," he said. "They don't understand that the okapis constitute a great treasure for them. Kenya, Egypt, and Turkey exist in great part thanks to money from tourism, and if we have peace, the tourists will return to Epulu. We had 8000 tourists as recently as 1991. I feel privileged to be a Congolese because I will leave to my children an inheritance neither Rockefeller nor Onassis nor Picasso left theirs : okapis, white rhinos, and mountain gorillas. It's inestimable as a heritage. If I can make these animals multiply, I will be proud of my life."   Lusuka was the most sensitive African defense minister I had ever met, by far.   The kind of person who gives you hope for Congo.   I wonder what has happened to him. He has probably gone back to Paris, with the departure of Wamba. 

          As I drove out to  the airport, two tanks came  screaming out of a hangar next to the arrivals building.  Ultracool Ugandans, wearing aviator shades and dangling cigarettes from their lips, were perched in the cockpits.  "Trouble in the barracks," my driver told me. A third putsch attempt by the two local warlords was just getting underway.  A good time to be getting out of Dodge . I watched a  single-engine plane come in for a landing. Frazer and Kes Smith, right on time from Nairobi.       Frazer was a short, stocky South African and Kes was a reserved but intense red-haired Englishwoman without an ounce of body fat , a real-life Katherine Hepburn, while the down-to- earth, supremely practical Frazer was her Spenser Tracy. Kes had designed the UNF project with Terese Hart was going to be its coordinator. She  had been fighting since l983 to keep the  northern white rhino from going extinct. The last 26 on earth were in Garamba Park, an hour north of Bunia, on the Sudan border. 

          Garamba was an island of tall-grass savanna in an ocean of forest, swarming with elephants, buffalo, hartebeest, kob, warthogs, and roan which were recovering nicely from being  halved by Kabila's retreating soldiers in l998. Kes spotted four new rhinos from the air, bringing the total up to 30. There were also 144-plus  northern savanna giraffes, which are geographically closest to the Nubian giraffe and  resemble them closely except for having very white legs. The giraffes were  holding their own, being somewhat protected by a local belief that eating their meat gives you leprosy.

           Up here there were no negative forces up here and no coltan, and thanks to the tsetse fly, very few people at all. But there was gold. There had been an outbreak of the lethal Marhberg virus in one of the mining camps.  And the poaching was still  intense. Every month the guards were getting into a firefight with deserters from the SPLA, (the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, which has been waging a civil war against Khartoum for the last nineteen years), who had sneaked over the border in search of bushmeat. The guards were well armed and trained, paramilitary anti- poaching bush tactics being one of Frazer's areas of expertise. If three warning shots in the air didn't work, they shot to kill. Since l987 six of the guards at Garamba have been killed and 13 wounded in shootouts with poachers, six have been killed and six wounded by attacking animals.  We met with the SPLA's political consultant, a coal-black, bearded man named Hassan, to discuss a second joint operation to capture the deserters. The first "oppression," as Hassan pronounced it, had been successful except that some of the SPLA regulars had stayed on and were harrassing and living off the local villagers. Most of the local Azande were nominally Christian or Muslim, but the old animistic beliefs persist, such as that certain sorcerers known as Bugulu, who sound not unlike Navajo chindi or skinwalkers, can turn into lions after they die, or even before. In fact one of the guards was thought to have been killed by a Bugulu who had slipped into lion mode.   It was probably here that I was bitten by an Anopheles mosquito that transmitted the resistant falciparum malaria that I came down with a week after my return to the States. My lariam tablets did nothing for it, but it was quickly knocked out by a cocktail of three fancidar tablets and two different antibiotics, kotexin and doxycyline which a friend of the Smiths had luckily turned me on to. Falciparum malaria is nothing to mess around with. I nearly died of blackwater fever, one of its complications, in the Amazon in l976. Another complication is cerebral malaria. If you get that, you're done for. 

             In Bukavu, it being impossible to see the gorillas because of the attack on the mapping commission,  I continued my investigation of the coltan trade. Most of the coltan seems to come from in and around Bahuzi Biega Park. There are half a dozen airstrips in the forest where "a collection of wheeling and dealing Rwandan officers," I was told, pick the stuff up in helicopters or small planes and fly it directly  to Kigali. Some very impressive villas are being built, and some very fancy cars are being driven in Rwanda's capital. There are rumors that the coltan is being used to finance Rwanda's heavy-handed presence southeast Congo. A few months back,  President Paul Kagame reportedly sent a thousand suspected génocidaires who have been awaiting trial for seven years in their prison uniforms, which look like pink pajamas, to expedite the effort to get as much of the coltan as possible before Rwanda has to pull out of Congo, which it is under mounting international pressure to do. The Rwandans, in collaboration with the RCD, are moving about a hundred tons a month to Kigali. They control the bulk of the traffic.     The biggest dealer in Bukavu is Madame Gulimali, a Pakistani woman who owns the Supermatch cigarette factory. She sends 15 drums every two days down to Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi.  Another big dealer is a rich Indian businessman named Ramnik Kotecha. He moves 25 tons a month. Then there a dozen smaller dealers who often go in together and charter a plane to take them the forest and get what the Rwandans miss. In one of Bukavu's shantytowns I found three  comptoirs, shacks reminiscent of the California gold rush where people were cashing in their little plastic bags of coltan. Some American dealers are buying directly in Bukavu and Goma (where there is also a lot of coltan in the vicinity, outside of Virungas Park), but the real action is in Kigali.    Kigali, the end of the road for me,  was crawling with Belgian, German, Russian, American, and Chinese buyers. My driver had been conned by a woman from Arkansas who had arrived a year ago and put the word out that she wanted to buy a million dollars' worth of coltan. She showed my driver her $50,000 machine for assaying the ore and rented his car for a year on credit then skipped town without paying him and sold the machine to Madame Gulimali. The Swiss Embassy was said to be buying, and the American Embassy wasn't forthcoming about what it was doing.  "Coltan is a very sensitive subject," the economic officer told me. "If you want to talk to me, the UN will have to get permission from the State Department."   But I wormed it out of another of our diplomats that the biggest buyer of coltan in the world is an outfit called Cabot High-Performance Materials, based in Boyerstown, Pa.. The next biggest is H.C. Stark, a German Company, despite its recent denial that it had anything to do with the mineral, then the Red Chinese company, Ningxia. Barrick, the huge Canadian mining conglomerate, is getting tons from the Uganda Zone. Its board of directors include Papa Bush (who with Howard Baker and the televangelist Pat Robertson are also involved in joint venture between Carlisle and some Camerounians) and ex-Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney.

          Back in the States, I called Cabot and spoke with Paul Rutter, one of the company's buyers. He said he did most of his buying in Anterwerp and Rotterdam, where top-grade, 30% pure, still unrefined ore fetches $80 or $90 a kilo. He said there was no way of telling whether it came from Australia or Congo, "but most of our coltan comes from Australia. We only buy a small percentage in Kigali. I'd guess that 10% of our stuff  is from Congo."  I asked what the Congo's total production was, and Rutter said, "any figure would have to have a huge error bar, but I wouldn't faint if I had to throw a dart at $25 million a year. But I think there is the potential for some serious business in Congo. These are just artesanal mines scratching the surface." Just what I wanted to hear.   Cabot refines the ore, separating the tantalite from the columbite (also known as niobium), which is used in high-temperature alloys) and impurities like iron, titanium, and silicon. It sells half a million pounds of pure tantalite powder, $100 million worth,  mainly to capacitor companies around the world.  There is obviously  major investigative work  to be done on the full fleshing out of  the sordid snookering of  Congo's coltan, and maybe a Pulitzer prize, a best-seller, or even a movie, for whoever does it. But it ain't going to be me.   The UN has appointed  a commission to investigate  the illegal foreign harvesting of resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its preliminary report, which came out this spring, concluded that a lot of coltan is leaving Congo and that this is deplorable, but whether the commission,   whose mandate has been renewed, will produce anything besides the usual hand-wringing remains to be seen. Somebody managed to keep all the American companies out the report. But Cabot and a number of other companies have been shamed with the help of photographs of  butchered gorilla carcasses to close down their Congo operations. 

            Life hasn't been the same since I found all this out.  Now every time I go on line or slip the key into the ignition or flip the lid of my cellphone or watch my son catching Pokemons on his Game Boy, I  wonder whether a gorilla or an okapi was sacrificed so these high-tech marvels could be at our disposal. . It's the same uneasiness I feel when I pop an M & M and remember the child slaves in the cacao plantations in Ivory Coast, or when my boys start kicking around their soccer ball, which was probably stitched by Vietnamese kids their age working 14 hour shifts. But   I suppose it is  better to know  the terrible cost of being one of the lucky few who enjoys the fully accessoried modern life-style. As a Rwandan dealer told me in Kigali  he was talking about "the Americans" as if they were all the same, failing to differentiate between the benevolent and the rapacious faces of capitalism, "Isn't it ironic that the same people who are protecting these parks are the ones who are destroying it ?"