Night was falling on Eastern Africa and Melania Baesi still had not heard from her sons. The two had left that morning to work at an increasingly turbulent gold field where the family had a small pit mine.
A week before, armed police had evicted tens of thousands of peasants from the area. They wanted to clear the way for Kahama Mining, a Canadian-owned company that had been granted mining rights to the site.
Most of the miners fled from the police. But some, like her sons Jonathan and Ernest, returned to work the shafts. It was clear that police threats alone would not scare them away from the Bulyanhulu gold fields.
On August 7, 1996, Kahama’s bulldozer sputtered to life and rolled onto the Bulyanhulu gold fields.
It began pushing sand and rubble into the mines.
That evening Melania Baesi was waiting for news of her sons. At 10 p.m., her friend Mafuru Butondo burst into Baesi’s home. He could hardly get out the words.
Jonathan and Ernest were dead, he told her. They had been buried alive, he said, along with his own brother and as many as ten others.
This is the first time Baesi’s story has been told outside Africa. It tells of the summer when a Vancouver-based company with support from the Canadian government took
possession of a billion-dollar gold find in East Africa.
It is not an easy story to tell. People like Butondo say they have faced police intimidation whenever they spoke out.
“As a result, we shut our mouths,” he said. “Our loved ones rotted under the rubble that was pushed into the pits by the Caterpillar.”
Police took away Baesi’s only photographs of her sons.
But human rights lawyer Tundu Lissu has struggled to ensure not all stories from that summer are lost—stories about tens of
thousands of peasants evicted from their homes; stories of mothers, fathers, daughters and sons who fear the worst about their loved ones. As many as 52 were allegedly buried alive deep in the shafts of their small mines.
Click here to read The Company’s Story
