The Ore Nobody Had Named Yet

In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and the world was busy watching Europe, I went back to Uganda.

I went back as a businessman, not a returning refugee. The country that had expelled my family when I was seven was where I chose to build my first business. I didn't think of it as symbolic. It was where the geology was.

I had trained as a geochemist and I knew what the ground in this part of central Africa held: tin ore, tungsten ore and tantalite. Columbite-tantalite is a dull black ore that mineralogists understood and almost nobody else did. It had particular industrial uses and a modest but reliable international market. Artisanal miners in Uganda, Rwanda and what was then Zaire were digging it out with no reliable link to the buyers who needed it. I was the link.