Bong Town
Coordinates: 6 ° 48 ′ N , 10 ° 21 ′ W
Bong Town was a place in Liberia , now a district of the small town of Bong Mines and is located about 75 kilometers (as the crow flies) northeast of the capital Monrovia in the west of Bong County . The place is located on the southern edge of the Bong Range and was the capital of the mining area of the iron ore mine run by the DELIMCO (German-Liberian Mining Company) in the 1960s.
Todays situation
On the site where the German employees of the iron ore mine lived from the 1950s until the start of the war in 1989, the few ruins of the house are now massively overgrown by bush. Locals have only renovated or rebuilt houses on the edge of the street. The former "Bong Town" is located near the hospital and the large Protestant church. The neighboring town of “Nyenyen” is also one of the newly built settlements after Thyssen-Krupp left. The German factory settlement was abandoned in 1990 as a result of the civil war , it is now overgrown by the jungle and has become a ghost town .
The Bong opencast mine and the railway were taken over by a Chinese consortium between 2007 and 2010. It is unclear, however, whether mining operations will be resumed or the system will be expanded to develop further deposits. With several diesel locomotives, including three former Köf III of the DB, freight trains and special trips are operated, regular passenger traffic has been discontinued for legal reasons. The railway is also used by the local population with wooden draisines.
Bong Mines is a vibrant small town with a center at the former bus station, around fifteen schools, around a dozen parishes and many districts such as Old Varneystown, New Varneystown, Zaweata, Düsseldorf, Botota, Gbandi Community, Cephas Town, Niebla, Ketoya, Benduma, Ketekoya and much more. It houses a hotel, several bars, many shops and a number of craft shops. Bong Mines has three high schools, two of which are state-run, which are free, and about half a dozen private, so-called primary schools.
Local public transport is guaranteed by shared taxis and motorcyclists on all days of the week. The railway is alternately used either only to drive a few workers to the opencast mine or rarely and very slowly within more than five to eight hours for general passengers to the capital.
The road to the next larger town, Kakata, is paved and in good condition. There, on the outskirts of Bong Mines, there is an immigration officer checkpoint to prevent theft from the open pit. About halfway to Kakata there is a police checkpoint to mark the county boundary, called the "Iron Gate". The road opposite from Bong Mines to the west to Handii to the St. Paul River is covered with rough stones.
The large market hall in Bong Mines sells fresh food every day, but the weekly market in Handii is the largest shopping place in the entire Fuamah district every Tuesday.
history
At the end of the 1950s, a private group of investors from the Federal Republic of Germany acquired 70% and 30% from Italy a mining concession in the bong range area and founded the DELIMCO mining company. The then largest German foreign investment was intended to supply iron ore to the German and Italian steelworks. The iron ore mine in County Bong was planned and built by the “Exploration” union in Düsseldorf, which later changed its name to “Exploration and Mining”. Exploration and mining belonged to Barbara-Erzbergbau and this belonged 100% to ATH ( August Thyssen-Hütte ), which worked for five German steel companies and the Italian finsider. The local Bong Mining Company (BMC) was 51% owned by the Liberian state and 49% owned by investors from Germany and the state-owned Italian steel company. The financial investment was 100% with foreign investors. Ultimately, the state of Liberia provided the land, the ore bodies contained in it and the concession for mining. The first explorations began in the 1950s and the mine was built in 1962. The site was leased for 70 years. Most of the parts required for the construction had to be imported from Europe or the USA and were basically all transported by road (approx. 120 km from Monrovia to the mine).
In Liberia at that time there were four iron ore mines that had been producing for many years, such as the LMC (Liberia Mining Company), which was ultimately controlled by Republic Steel . LMC sold the mined ore as shipping ore , which means that the ore was crushed, washed and shipped. The Fe content at over 60%. For comparison: the “poor bone”, as the ore of the bong was called, was 38% Fe and had to be processed very laboriously. To mention Mano River, otherwise not impressive. The fourth mine in the Nimbabergen was by far the largest facility with a rail link of well over 200 km. Mano River and Nimba had ore of far better quality than “Bong”. LMC had been around since the late 1940s, and Mano River, Bong, and Nimba were built and completed in the late 1950s to early 1960s.
The Bong Mine Railroad was laid out as a transport route for the iron ore. It began in the Monrovia free port and led to the mining company's ore processing plant. The railway was later also responsible for the transport of building materials, mining technology and general technical supplies.
In its heyday, the German factory settlement of Bong Town had over 450 European, mostly German residents, who lived in a residential complex that was generously proportioned by German standards - a bungalow settlement. There were further residential complexes and a row house settlement for African workers nearby.
Bong Town had the following special features:
- the two largest gyratory crushers ever built in the world
- a heavy oil power station equipped with Sulzer machines (basically ship engines, each approx. 10,000 hp)
- its own waterworks. The water was pumped from the Saint Paul River about ten kilometers in an 800 mm pipeline
- a factory administration with a data center
- a small airfield
- the in-house transmission and communication system (only from around 1968) for private supply, later also TV
- a supermarket with international products, most of which were sourced in Monrovia
- a modern clinic with 100 beds; there has been close cooperation with tropical medicine institutes in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1970s , for example the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg
- a school (sometimes also a kindergarten)
as well as sports and leisure facilities (tennis club, golf club, riding club, shooting club, cart club, fishing club and an aero club).
An in-house security service and a local Liberian police station took over the protection of the settlement. The education and training of the Liberian employees was of great importance; this was the purpose of the school, which was open to the children of the German technicians as well as to the education of the African employees and their children. On the factory premises there was a training workshop based on the German model for training African skilled workers and service technicians.
During the Liberian Civil War , the mining settlement and the open pit area were raided several times by armed rebels and criminals. For the safety of the European employees, there were also some Italians and Austrians, the ore mining was stopped in April 1990 and the last employees and residents were flown out to Sierra Leone on three flights by a Transall of the Bundeswehr . At the end of the civil war (2003), a team of doctors and technicians from the aid organization Cap Anamur / German emergency doctors took over the hospital to care for the refugees and the rural population.
Now the hospital is back entirely to the government and has hardly any medication or bandages. Two doctors are officially employed there for 109 beds, of which a maximum of only a quarter are occupied due to a lack of material.
literature
- Detlev Wissinger: memories of a tropical doctor . Self-published, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-8311-3383-2 , Liberia, p. 392 .
Web links
- bong-town.com on the present and history of the Bong Town settlement (English)
- Alvin Worzi: Bong Mines Residents Frustrated by China Union's Woes. In: liberianobserver.com. April 13, 2017, accessed December 19, 2019 .
- Liberia: Mudslide in Bong Mines Leaves China Union Ore Plant Damaged. In: allafrica.com. September 14, 2017, accessed December 19, 2019 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Frederic Schneider: Impressions from visiting the "Bong Mine" . In: German Society for the United Nations eV (ed.): Blue series . tape 101 , 2007, ISSN 1614-547X , p. 61–65 ( dgvn.de [PDF; 3.3 MB ]). PDF; 3.3 MB ( Memento of the original from May 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ The Bong Mine Railway, Liberia Revisited, 2010
- ^ Marion Countess Dönhoff : German pioneers in Liberia . In: Die Zeit , No. 33/1965
- ↑ Bernd Huffschmid: Ore from the jungle. German steelworks secure their supply . In: Die Zeit , No. 19/1966
