I was a gold-digger child
July 1996. I completed my CPE (Certificate of Primary Education) exam at the same time a gold mining site opened 44 kilometers from my home village of Koper, in southwest Burkina Faso. I was 13 years old, my brother Salam was 15. Like many of our friends in the village, we set off for the gold mine. We rode our bicycles with a pack of cigarettes in our hands; it was the first time in my life that I smoked. After several hours on the road, completely exhausted on our bikes, we saw the first huts of the gold mining site. In front of us was the incredible scenery of a teeming makeshift town built on a mountain landscape, where the sounds of mills, motorcycles, cars, and other machinery intermingled. I had never seen anything like it. In this hostile environment, we were left to our own destinies, like all children. Our friends in the village advised us to always ask for forgiveness: “If someone hits you with his machine, ask for forgiveness, because here might is right”.
Our first job was to pound pieces of stone into flour. We just didn’t have enough strength for this job, and only managed to grind one dish into powder for a miserable wage. Then we did other small jobs related to gold digging: fetching water from the pump to sell it, washing dishes in restaurants on the ground, going down into galleries several meters deep to dig, crushing stones...In our innocence, this harsh and hostile environment felt like a gust of freedom, because we were free to do what we chose.
By putting myself at the level of the children, I chose to tell the story of carefree youth dreaming of forging their own destiny, but which is crushed by a system of violence where the lure of gain rules the souls.
Today, many years later, I am a writer-director and also a doctoral student in law. This life as a gold-digger child was a step in my journey, but I continued my studies. My brother, on the other hand, chose to leave school for a gold-digging job, which he later abandoned. Our two lives took different paths, but we can both consider ourselves exceptions; most of the time, child gold-diggers become adult gold-diggers and move from site to site, in perpetual search of fortune. For both my brother and I this experience served, in the midst of all the hardships we went through, to shape the beings we are today.
I was a gold-digger child, and I returned 22 years later to a gold-digging site to tell the story of the lives of Rasmané, Mensah, and Dramane, who are mirrors of my past.
An initiatory tale of a sacrificed youth
With the distance of several years, I realize to what extent these artisanal mining sites are catalysts for a Burkinabe youth in search of fortune and a better future, which only gold seems able to provide. By putting myself at the level of the children, I chose to tell the story of carefree youth dreaming of forging their own destiny, but which is crushed by a system of violence where the lure of gain rules the souls. The innocence of childhood is transformed in a few months into the brutality of adult life. If they want to be respected, these children have no choice but to become the products of this system at the cost of their youth. Their minds and bodies are transformed, contaminated by this gold rush, like a kind of compulsory moral decay.
These teenagers don’t know what gold is used for, they don’t understand the traffic that is built around its sale, but they end up its victims, more corrupted day after day by the hope of making a fortune.
Through Rasmané’s journey, I wanted to tell the story of this passage, of an innocence sacrificed for the needs of a better life. It is not an investigation or a report on gold digging; it is a sensitive documentary on the trajectory of children on the threshold of adulthood, told in the context of the unbridled system of artisanal gold digging in Burkina Faso.
In a capitalist world, the quest for fortune becomes the main engine of change, essential to the hope of a different life, of a transformed destiny. But it is always those at the bottom of the ladder, those who have no choice, those who dream big, who end up crushed by the machine, crushed by the work, eventually regurgitated as exhausted, desensitized adults. By presenting the story of children in this context of gold mining, I wanted to situate myself with those who are at the very bottom of the ladder, to try to document these experiences that would otherwise remain invisible, to not close my eyes on a system that dictates their individual lives. These teenagers don’t know what gold is used for, they don’t understand the traffic that is built around its sale, but they end up its victims, more corrupted day after day by the hope of making a fortune. The mining sites are adult worlds, microcosms dedicated to the lure of gain, with all it deviances. If not pervasive, violence, drugs, and prostitution are nevertheless realities, and form the environment of these children.
In general, even the children of gold miners grow up on the sites, become adult gold miners, and start families. A chain is perpetuated, moving from one place to another, always with the same dream.
Death hovers over men and nature
On the gold mining sites, several thousand children have to fight like adults to earn their place. To this brutal life is added the anguish of accident. Artisanal gold mining sites are based on an increasingly dangerous system of pits. The depth of the pits, their instability, the lack of oxygen, and the disorder of the blasting are all factors that put these children in constant danger of death. Each year, on one site alone, there are more than one hundred fatalities, and several hundred accidents. When an incident occurs, work stops for a moment, and people gather around the defective pit, their eyes terrified.
From their point of view, my characters fight with the means at hand to build themselves, even if in the end the “dream of gold” turns out to be only fantastical and almost unattainable.
All of them have at least once “escaped” death. Afterwards, it remains with them permanently, in a corner of their mind, prowling their consciousness. Then it is chased away by the imperatives of work, the superior quest for fortune. To change their lives they are ready to tempt fate again the following day, at the bottom of the pit. They try not to think too much about it, not to doubt too much. But the anguish remains there, inscribed in the self. It is part of the process that deteriorates their innocence.
In metaphorical resonance with this erosion of innocence, I wanted to represent the devastating impact of gold mining on the natural landscape. Trees are steadily felled to serve the mining activity. The green landscape is smoothed, the bare earth punctuated by makeshift shacks and the multiple holes of the galleries. On the outskirts, the waterways are polluted by chemical substances such as cyanide, used in the transformation of the ore. On a daily basis, the smoke from the mills corrupts the air with a grayish color, just as cigarettes harm Rasmané’s body, who smokes all day long.
I wanted to leave a place in my story, visually, for this corruption of nature. Through the parallel between the degradation of nature and the degradation of the lives of these children, we see two elements of the world’s future that are corrupted by mining activity.
Resilience at the heart of the film
The film is built on my personal experience as a child gold miner. I am not trying to make a “miserable” film or another film about “the poor African children” who suffer. What interests me in this project are the beings under construction that these adolescents are. They are the product of an environment that shapes them, just like millions of other children around the world. From their point of view, my characters fight with the means at hand to build themselves, even if in the end the “dream of gold” turns out to be only fantastical and almost unattainable. Hope remains the resilient force that characterizes childhood. Relying on the life force of childhood and rebuilding oneself, as was my case, is the positive note of this project.
Boubacar Sangaré
