TWTBACD Ch.3 - The Thread That Holds the World Together

Chapter 3

The Thread That Holds the World Together

South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo — 1983–2019

revolution

Ch.3 opening: Congo's living forest and the weight beneath the soil

The kuba cloth pattern that Amara Mutombo learned from her mother had no name in any language that was not itself the pattern.

This is the nature of certain kinds of knowledge: it resists translation. The king's pattern — the diagonal geometry in red and black that had been the visual language of Kuba royalty for three hundred years — could be described in words, but the description was not the knowledge. The knowledge was in the hands, in the counting, in the specific quality of attention that the loom required and that the loom, over years of practice, produced in the person attending to it.

Amara was born in 1983 in a village in South Kivu province, in the eastern reaches of what was then Zaire, in a house her grandfather had built from materials that came from the forest that began at the edge of the village garden and extended, in 1983, as far as a child could walk in a day in any direction.

The forest was not abstract to Amara's childhood. It was specific and present: the shade-temperature at the edge where the garden ended and the trees began— the sound of the canopy in wind, which was different from the sound of the canopy in rain— the specific birds whose calls marked the hours more reliably than any clock— the mushrooms that her mother could identify by sight and smell and which were safe or dangerous according to rules that had been refined by the village across several generations of experience.

Her mother, Grace Mutombo née Kabila, was a weaver of the first order — the specific distinction the village used for someone whose patterns were worth preserving and teaching rather than simply using and forgetting. Grace had learned from her own mother. Amara learned from Grace. The learning was not a curriculum. It was a lifelong proximity.

At the same time that Amara was learning to count threads, the world beneath the ground of South Kivu was becoming valuable in ways that the village could not yet see but would eventually feel. The mineral — coltan, officially columbite-tantalite, the ore from which tantalum is refined — was present in the rock formations that underlay eastern Congo in quantities that would, as mobile phones became ubiquitous and tantalum became essential to their capacitors, make South Kivu one of the most coveted geological territories on the planet.

This coveting was, for the village, mostly invisible in Amara's childhood. The artisanal mining that her father's generation practised was small-scale, cash-supplemental — a few men with picks and buckets in the rainy season, selling to buyers who came from Bukavu and who paid prices set by markets Amara's father could not see. It was precarious. It was also, in the 1990s, still manageable — the forest was still large enough that its loss to mining activity was local rather than systemic.

Amara married Joseph Mutombo in 2005. He was also from the village, also the child of miners and farmers, also growing up in the specific mixture of subsistence and small commerce that characterised life in South Kivu in the late twentieth century. He was steadier than she was, more patient, less driven by the quality she felt in herself that she could only describe as a need to make things — to produce, from raw materials, objects that had not existed before she made them.

The forest around the village had changed between Amara's childhood in the 1980s and her young adulthood in the 2000s. Not catastrophically — the forest was still there, still vast, still audible — but measurably. The edge had moved. Clearings that had not existed in her mother's time now existed. The distance you could walk in a day before reaching undisturbed forest had increased from the edge of the garden by perhaps two kilometres. Two kilometres was not much. It was also, in a forest that had been continuous for millennia, not nothing.

By 2019, Amara had three children — Adaeze, Kwame, and Zuri, ages sixteen, twelve, and three — and a loom that had been in her family for four generations, and a kuba cloth business that sold to buyers in Bukavu and, increasingly, to buyers in Kinshasa and Nairobi and, through an NGO marketplace, to buyers in Europe. She also had a husband whose coltan mining operation had been absorbed by the expansion of larger operators, who had taken a settlement, and who had bought a second-hand truck and was figuring out what to do with it.

Beneath their feet: the minerals that would build the devices that would run the AI that would change everything. Above their heads: the forest, still standing, still speaking, still — for now — there.

Ch.3 close: Ancient pattern, modern pressure — a world on the edge of discovery