Zambia: buying tourmaline

I decide to renew my contacts in Zambia and invest in our own rough there. Zambia is mineral rich and setting up a mining concern in Zambia is pretty straightforward.

I decided to go and see a closed tourmaline mine to look at possibilities to open the mine myself. This meant a quick trip to an area that I have not visited before.

We decided to buy some tourmaline that we could lay our hands on to test the market before we open our own mine. There are 3 areas that are well known for tourmaline. We decided to go to the Eastern Province in Zambia.

We started off in Lusaka and visited some crowded markets and landed up on the third story of a ramshackled building. This office was manned by Senegalese. The prices started at $2 per gram and after heavy negotiations we manged to get a better price. The parcel contained stones in many colours. See the photo below

This parcel is going to make stunning colourful beads. We then set off to Nyimba in the east of Zambia. The rental car was only good for the tar roads and not for offroad driving to the mine. Our Zambian partner told us it is only 200 km that turned into 320 km. We stopped on the way to look at the fish stands at the Luangwa river. 

This was real Africa.

One of the roads we travelled

The juke boxes were at full blast and the happy half drunken souls were dancing in the tar road. The basket sellers were ever hopeful that they were going to make a sale. We bought a few bags of dried smelly fish for the miners. The smell was something.

About 10 km further we hit a large pothole but survived. This was the beginning of 50 km's of potholes. Some fairly large. Ouch! We stopped on the way to look at an abondoned mine that has produced gem quality tourmaline before. We want to open up the mine again. Aparently the bulk of the material from here was all gem quality. Even some Paribas blues. Wow! We will keep you updated when we open the mine. Maybe we can get a contact for a National Geographic video when we start opening up the mine. It sure is pretty in that area. The only hassle are Elephants, lions and Hyena. And Malaria.

We stopped to look at another deposit of tourmalated quartz. These are also worth mining. Our final destination was Nyimba. Let me warn you about potential scams. We connected with some locals and asked them to arrange some showings the next morning. We parted with around R360 for travelling expenses etc.

Breakfast was a typical Zambian meal. The fish was Tilapia. Delicious!

The next morning our new 'friends' told us that there were some Senegalese buyers the day before and that he failed to get any material for us to buy because of these buyers. Imagine the disapointment after having traveled so far. We just had one mediocre parcel to look at that turned out to be almost just black tourmaline.

We turned our vehicle and started heading back to Lusaka in the late afternoon. Enroute we decided to confirm the 'friends' story at a roadside stand. It turned out to be all lies. The miners were eagerly awaiting us. We ended up buying 31 kg of gem quality tourmaline. It was hectic. Negotiating and pleading*&^%$# At one stage we came to a deadlock and after climbing in the car and turning our vehicle towards Lusaka we broke the deadlock when they saw that the money is leaving. It was such fun.

The goods are on the way to China now and will be made into beads soon. It was quite a capital outlay with some material costing almost $1 per gram.

It was dark when we left. This turned out to be a mistake. The potholes were waiting for us. I forgot about the monster pothole and when I hit it I knew we were in trouble. We have just spend all our Zambian money and here we were with 2 flat tyres on the side of a malaria infested road. Well we limped into Lusaka the next morning totally beat but satisfied. I had some tyres to fix. A visit to the Ministry of Mines was neccesary to clear the gems. The process is not easy but I know my way around the place and we managed just in time to get the plane back to South Africa.

Future plans is to open our own Rose quartz, Sodalite and amazonite mines.

Have fun and leave us a note when you have read this.

Gerdus