Breaking Rocks
Breaking Rocks
Autofiction in response to Siddharth Kara's book Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives.
Author’s Note:
This story does not take place in the Congo. However, I suspect conditions are similar to what Siddharth Kara’s book Cobalt Red describes, and they’ve been going on for many years. His recent interview inspired me to extract this story from an unpublished manuscript.
I do not condone the behavior presented here. I’m also refraining deliberately from showing pictures of the women, men, and children working in the quarry because it feels wrong to present those images as a spectacle of misery. They are on google anyway if you want to see them.
Nor am I an expert on the subjects of mining, refugees, Ugandan politics, or HIV. I can only offer what I saw and how I felt, my own memory. And because it is a memory and not a recorded record, I use the label of Autofiction.
All our memories become unstable fictions over time.
Names and details are changed and any similarity to real people other than myself is a coincidence.
Please share with me in the comments whatever thoughts this tale causes you to ponder.
Recommended Soundtrack:
Breaking Rocks
*Based on a true story
Kampala, Uganda, 2005
We listened to the news as I drove Isabella to the top of Kinawataka’s rock quarry on the eastern side of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. The radio show’s host predicted rioting if President Museveni won again, reporting angry demonstrations already breaking out around the city. People no longer wanted the same leader for 20 years. Gangs of men called Kiboko, or stick squads, roamed the streets with homemade batons, stalking and beating protestors. Rumors circulated that the ruling party hired these young men for pennies, rather than using the police. Kampala was tensed up and braced for trouble. We passed people waiting in long lines holding yellow plastic jerry cans to buy extra water and petrol.
I’d just finished a research job for a German non-profit focused on government policy and gender equity, and I was now waiting for the American Embassy to process my paperwork so I could begin a new contract, this time for the U.S. Department of State. Isabella was researching HIV in discordant couples—married couples that had regular, unprotected sex, but only one had HIV. Some of her study subjects lived in the quarry. She’d brought me along this time, saying, “Charlotte, you have to see it. You just have to see it to believe it.”
Now, as we crept up the clay road, I wondered if this was really the best time to be exploring new terrain. The week prior, not realizing I was near a protest, I’d gotten accidentally tear-gassed, an experience I did not wish to repeat. Yet, I was curious, and Isabella seemed to need my company. She wanted someone else to understand what she’d seen, and I wanted to deepen our friendship beyond beers and jokes. I wanted to understand her work better, so I’d agreed to the trip. After all, she was the closest thing to a best friend that I had here.
The road above the quarry loomed over a cracked, rust-colored bowl of earth. Matatus, the public transport mini-vans of the city, inched around the massive open circle like rows of white ants. Dust from the dry season coated the green trees rimming the quarry with shades of brown and red. Isabella’s car had a broken AC, so we drove with open windows. Dirt kicked up by deforestation and the unplanned settlements covered everything. It hung in the air, collected on the dashboard, and burnt the inside of my nose. We’d long ago given up on staying clean and instead wore dark colors and showered twice a day, though sometimes I gave up on even that.
With an influx of displaced people fleeing from the violence of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in the north, the rock quarry doubled as an IDP camp. In the heat, with all the orange and red, the place looked like hell, felt like hell, and smelled like hell.
We parked and got out. The earthen powder swirled over my leather flip-flops, turning my toes the color of turmeric almost instantly. A young man, Peter, one of Isabella’s patients, approached our station wagon. His deep black skin, thin body, and tall frame hinted to me that he was from Northern Uganda, probably from the Acholi tribe. He spoke like a funeral director, ushering us inside to see the casket. Only instead of showing us a body, he said he wanted to make a film about life in the quarry before his HIV progressed to full-blown AIDS.
“Before I die,” he added.
His film was to be a dramatized skit, meant to warn people of the realities of AIDS and to scare them into using condoms.
“Men don’t respect women here,” he told me. “So, they have so much sex with so many women and spread HIV to everyone.”
As we stood in the scorching afternoon sun watching the outline of bodies below break rocks, he stepped us through the plot of the film, pointing to different locations where he wanted to shoot scenes, but I couldn’t concentrate on the storyline. My eyes fixed on the young women, also likely Acholi, in circles of four and five, scattered all over the bottom of the quarry. Ashy from the dust, they sat with their legs bent beneath them, chipping away at the large rocks, to form larger piles of smaller rocks. The rhythmic sound of the heavy metal picks hitting the stones echoed through the quarry, reaching all the way to the top of the high hill where we stood. I could only imagine the cacophony it created for the women beside the rocks.
In the economy of the quarry, everyone had a job. The middle-aged women sat and chipped. The children, from ages four to ten, collected the chips into larger piles. The older girls hoisted the piles into large plastic barrels. Teenage boys, muscular, shirtless, and slick with sweat, hauled the heavy barrels out of the quarry to the main road at the top of the hill. Then the husbands and fathers packed them into matatus to take into town and sell.
This cycle went on from sunup to sundown every single day. The whole process yielded about fifty cents in profit for the women chipping the rocks, the aspiring filmmaker explained. The children did not get paid, and the men selling the rocks in town made about a dollar a day.
We trudged down into the quarry, moving with deliberate steps, careful not to trip, until we reached where the opening of the film would be shot. Already out of breath, my thighs and glutes ached from only one trip down the steep incline. I marveled at how the men and boys moved up and down the quarry’s sides, carrying heavy loads on their shirtless, muscular backs without falling.
The women, who spoke no English, eyed us for a few seconds, then continued pounding rocks on rocks.
It was too loud in the quarry to talk, so after a few uncomfortable minutes we climbed back up the hill and Peter the filmmaker ushered us into his family’s home. It was a two-room structure made of clay, stones, and sticks. Breathless, hot, and happy to be away from the sun, I sat down on a wooden bench and gave the filmmaker’s mother some money from my purse, to buy everyone cold sodas. The mother thanked us in Luo, the language of the Acholi people, and handed me a handkerchief. I wiped the sweat from my face and looked at the white cloth. It appeared to have tan foundation all over it, though I was wearing no makeup. The dust. It was forever a topic of conversation, thoughts, and fears during the dry season. If you ate food or drank water contaminated by the dust it could make you very sick because it contained dried human feces, as many people lacked access to toilets, running water, or a proper sewage system.
Peter continued to talk about his movie ideas, but all I could think of was the women in the quarry.
His mother returned with the sodas, and I sucked warm Fanta through a bent plastic straw.
“No one talks about what it feels like to have AIDS in your heart,” said the filmmaker, “not what happens to your body, but what happens to your soul. I want to give them something to talk about.”
“That’s a really good idea,” Isabella said.
I wondered if war alone had produced the dire situation in the quarry. Was it entirely the fault of Joseph Kony, the insane rebel leader who believed he was being ordered by God to force children to kill their parents? Whose responsibility was this situation? The people’s? Museveni’s? America’s? Everyone’s?
How could one person cause so many people to struggle so much and how could anyone here keep believing in God? But they did.
Caught in my own thoughts and emotions, I sat on the bench in a daze. Isabella looked like she was fading too. We finished our sweet orange sodas and nodded to everything Peter said. Yes, yes, yes. His film sounded truly amazing.
But then we had to say, “No.”
He wanted us to give him money for the film and I was ready to give him all the money I had just to ease my own confused feelings of disbelief and guilt; the world was so unapologetically unfair. But we couldn’t. Though our typical weekend cocaine and cocktail budget would have financed his entire project, we had to say no. Buying sodas for everyone was one thing, but handing over a larger sum of money to a single person to fulfill their last dying wish… That was something else, something Isabella’s job forbade.
He was one person among hundreds who were poor, suffering, and dying of AIDS.
Isabella’s American employer issued strict guidance to all its foreign volunteers, doctors, and researchers, prohibiting them from providing personal financial assistance to individual patients. If we gave anyone money, Isabella would lose her job. I hoped we weren’t giving him false hope and wondered if I should have come at all… What purpose did we serve here?
Instead, we agreed to take the English version of the film’s script with us, to read over it and provide feedback, to correct any spelling errors.
We left the mud house and drove silently out of the swirling dust and back into the center of Kampala. Effigies of President Museveni and the opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, hung throughout town from mango trees and phone polls. As we listened to the radio again, the Ugandan government announced that all the banks would soon shut down for the election, so Isabella and I stopped and withdrew large stacks of Ugandan shillings. The currency was so devalued that you needed a wad the size of your face to equal 100 US dollars. Military, police, and the UN patrolled the city. I hated driving around with so much cash; I couldn’t afford to lose the money. Carjackings weren’t common, but they happened, especially to white people, and we also had to deal with another kind of petty thief: corrupt police officers.
Sure enough, on the way, three different police officers stopped us for bribes. Luckily, before leaving the bank, we’d hidden the bulk of the money, tucked it under a seat, and put just a few shillings in our wallets to pay off the police.
After almost an hour of driving, we reached the compound in Kololo where we’d be staying until the elections ended. An American USAID family working on food security that Isabella knew thought we should use their house during this unsafe period since their property had armed guards and an alarm system that called the U.S. Marine Corps stationed in Kampala. A high perimeter wall with razor wires surrounded the lush hillside estate. They’d left the country for the month and gone to Lamu, Kenya, to wait out the election drama on the beach.
The USAID house was a mansion to us, and it came with a personal chef from the central tribe of Uganda. He was getting paid monthly anyway, so the American couple insisted we make use of his services. The older man could supposedly cook any menu. We asked for lasagna, chocolate cake, homemade pizza, and apple pie. These were not easy items to find in Kampala, you couldn’t just go buy them in the grocery store pre-made, and we didn’t have an oven in our apartment, so I was immensely excited about the chocolate cake especially.
He gave me the shopping list of ingredients and prices to approve. I looked at it, then handed him the money, and off he went to the store. Wow, this is the life, I thought, a mansion, pool, chef, and maid — and all on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime. How had we gotten so lucky?
After the chef left, we called Babu and asked if he could deliver drugs for the weekend. We planned to invite our Ugandan boyfriends over to party at the house’s large swimming pool, to blast music and dance, safe behind the razor-wire-rimmed walls.
“I’m out of coke,” Babu said when he arrived on his motorbike. “Your muzungu cousins have bought everything and the borders are locked. You take E instead.”
“Are you serious?”
“Take the pills and have fun.”
I sighed and paid him for the wrong drugs. “Are you worried?”
He shrugged. “About the elections? No matter who wins the riots are coming.” He paused. “Unless it rains really hard, then everyone stays home, and it will be fine.”
I told him to stay safe, whatever that meant.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to the village. You’re my last stop.” Then he waved goodbye and sped off on his bike.
No one was happy with the ecstasy; they all wanted coke, but we crushed the tan pills, cut their powder into lines, and snorted them up like dust.
Later, the next day, we would eat chocolate cake and cry. Later that year, Peter would die, his film unfinished, but the quarry, the President, and Joseph Kony—they carried on.
THE END
Epilogue:
The quarry still haunts me. Before sharing this piece, I went back into my diary and found this that I’d written in reaction to the experience:
I am grateful to have money in my wallet.
I am grateful to have many clothes and shoes to wear.
I am grateful that I was not a child slave.
I am grateful that I do not mine rocks.
My problems are nothing.
I am no one.
I love autofiction and it's a big part of how I write sf. Have you read Rachel Cusk? Not sf at all, but great autofic.