Wild Spirit by Annette Henderson Page B

had been cleared for roads or buildings, the red laterite soil was exposed. The texture varied from gravel in some areas to fine red dust in others, the product of countless aeons of weathering of the underlying ironstone rock.
    Work at the camp was based on a six-day week, Monday to Saturday, and workdays began with appel – rollcall. The men assembled outside the guesthouse to have their hoursof work for the previous day recorded, and to be allocated tasks for the new day. Work began at seven. The workforce consisted mostly of labourers, with a small number of carpenters, plumbers, electricians and masons – more men would be recruited as soon as sufficient houses had been built. Jacques Poussain, a French mechanic, was due to arrive in several weeks’ time with a team of Gabonese mechanics. The conditions of employment were regulated by the government, under an agreement which bound all mining companies, specifying classifications of workers and their pay levels. Labourers earned the equivalent of US$140 a month for a forty-hour week; specialists received more than double that. Mario calculated the wages, and the men were paid monthly in cash by Mbunda Fidèle, a small, serious man employed as bookkeeper and payroll clerk who also managed the économat .
    A basic clinic, known as the infirmerie , occupied a rough plywood hut opposite the surveyors’ quarters. There a male Gabonese nurse attended to a constant stream of women and children, and dispensed medications sent up by the French doctor in Makokou.
    Every second Friday was ration day, when each family received an allocation of dried salt fish, processed manioc, block soap, salt, paraffin and palm oil, according to government regulations. Preparing for ration day was a complex exercise that took all morning. Bulk supplies of all the items were issued from the warehouse early in the morning and delivered to the ration shed, a long concrete-floored pavilion with a tin roof. The 200-litre drum of palm oil had to be heated over a fire to melt it, the block soap had to be chopped into portions with machetes, and the drum of paraffin had to be fitted with a hand pump.
    The manioc came in cylindrical portions about thirty centimetres long called bâtons , encased in banana leaves and bound with vines – each weighed a kilogram. Mario travelled up the river every Wednesday to buy the manioc from the local villages. It was prepared from the roots of the cassava plant, which were pounded to a powder then soaked in water for a week to leach out the cyanide.
    The company aimed to provide every man with twenty bâtons of manioc a week, but this depended on the availability of supplies: when local stocks were short, rations were supplemented with rice.
    On ration days, there was a fixed routine. The women walked in a long line up the hill from the village to the shed, balancing large enamel dishes on their heads. They sat on the floor in a semicircle, with their dishes, empty bottles and flagons in front of them, facing fifty-seven identical piles of rations set out along the floor. Mbunda Fidèle presided. When he called out each worker’s name, the man’s wife came forward to collect her pile of salt fish, soap, manioc and salt, then took her empty bottles to be filled with paraffin and palm oil. As each woman completed her round, Mbunda marked off her husband’s name in an exercise book. The first time I witnessed this fortnightly ritual, I realised just how difficult it was for families to leave their home villages and come to an unfamiliar place where they had no direct access to their normal means of survival.
    Their diet wasn’t all manioc and salt fish, of course: SOMIFER also employed two local hunters to provide fresh game meat for the workforce daily. There was an established routine for this as well. Early each morning, Mario issued them with shotgun shells – cartouches – froma locked cupboard in the guesthouse.