Africa: A Mountain of Riches

The local tribesmen have long avoided fog-shrouded Mount Nimba in Western Liberia as a spot inhabited by duwa —the sinister “little people” who have old men’s faces and feet that turn backward. But Scottish Geologist Sandy Clark, a more prosaic fellow, found no such world of spirits when he scaled Nimba eight years ago. He found something almost as extraordinary: “a world of iron ore”—one of the largest reserves of high-grade ore (at least 260 million tons) ever discovered.

Since then, 17,200 men from 21 countries have labored and eight companies have invested $220 million to turn Nimba’s jagged 111-acre summit into a massive mine. Last week huge shovels scooped Nimba’s soft ore into 32-ton Haulpaks, native drilling teams dotted the mountainside and a fully automated crushing plant ground out ore for shipment to a man-made harbor at Buchanan.

Brand-New City. The financial genius behind Nimba is Swedish Financier Marcus Wallenberg, 64 (TIME, June 7), who saw the opportunities in Liberia and knitted together half a dozen Swedish mining companies and U.S. and German financial interests into a complex consortium called LAMCO—Libe-rian American-Swedish Minerals Co. LAMCO dispatched Geologist Clark to Nimba when almost everyone else in Liberia was searching elsewhere for iron. After Clark’s discovery, President William Tubman’s government gave the company exemption from taxes and a mining concession until 2023 in return for half ownership of LAMCO. A substantial junior partner in the project, along with LAMCO, is Bethlehem Steel, which invested $55 million and will take one-fourth of Nimba’s 7.5 million-ton annual output. The rest will go to German, French and Italian steel plants.

Dozens of top companies have had a hand in building the Nimba facilities.The U.S.’s Raymond International Inc. laid the 167-mile railroad from Nimba to Buchanan and built a seaport there from breakwater up. The Netherlands’ Phillips installed an electronic rail-traffic control system; Krupp made the ore-handling equipment. Aided by a maze of conveyor belts and closed-circuit TV control panels, LAMCO can load ore into a ship in less than nine hours after it has been mined. At the foot of Mount Nimba has grown up Liberia’s third largest community, where most of the company’s 470 foreign staff and their families live in comfortable houses designed in Swedish modern.

Too Much Rain. LAMCO has had its troubles. Liberia’s 180-in. annual rainfall has repeatedly washed away roads and railbeds. European and American managers quarreled under the strain of high-pressure work at high-level humidity. The Swedes unwisely promised to train Liberians for skilled-labor and executive jobs in advance, then found that during the hectic construction period they had no time to do any training. Though the company is belatedly catching up with its promise, it has ruffled feelings among the Liberians.

Still, Liberia has compelling reasons for not wanting to alienate LAMCO. Partly in anticipation of rich revenues from the consortium, President Tubman and his ministers went on a spending and building spree that landed Liberia in bad financial straits last spring. Tubman, 68, had to promise the International Monetary Fund that Liberia would enact fiscal reforms in return for an IMF loan to tide the country over until its profits from LAMCO begin to build up in six or seven years.