Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Africa (4)

Bateke foes often fled, convinced that the radiant warriors possessed magical powers. In a sense, they did: Because what made the Bateke glow, were pigments from Shinkolobwe—rich in highly radioactive radium and uranium—which they smeared on themselves.

But this “magic” came with a cost. “The Bateke would learn,” lamented Stefene Russell, in Poetry Scores, “that direct contact with radioactive material has its consequences; their flesh began to rot off their bodies. It was if hell had sprung a little leak and leached through the Earth’s crust”.

Thus the fate of Japan was foreshadowed, in the forests of the Belgian Congo. Hell had indeed sprung a leak—a radioactive ooze, in Katanga, that would irrupt into unearthly infernos over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet the foreshadowing did not begin with the Bateke—or even in Katanga. Nature is never devoid of instructive metaphors, especially in Africa; and all of them speak of power and possibility: Insinuations whose meaning and significance have, so far, eluded our lethargic elites.

Global Security.Com reports, for example, that Africa’s first nuclear reactor “is in a whitewashed concrete building at the University of Kinshasa campus”. The Belgians apparently installed the machine in 1958, it says, as part of the U.S. “Atoms for Peace Program”.

It is worth noting as well, that Kwame Nkrumah established the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission in 1961 and brought a reactor to that country—a prescient initiative, for which he was shortsightedly ridiculed.

But these were manmade reactors: Mere imitations of nature’s own nuclear knowhow. Indeed, when Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled chain reaction in 1942, under a stadium in Chicago, nature had already bested him in Africa: By nearly two billion years!

Africa is the only place on Earth, where sustained nuclear chain reactions are known to have occurred naturally—not once or twice, but 16 times! This happened in Gabon, just up the Atlantic coast from the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a place called Oklo.

Let me digress here, to explain that a “nuclear reactor” is an apparatus, in which rods of uranium pellets—or some other radioactive material—are inserted, as fuel. Neutrons are then fired into the fuel, to induce a chain reaction.

In a nuclear bomb, the reaction is instantaneous and violent. By contrast, a reactor is designed to do work (such as generate electricity or create new substances) over an extended period of time. Consequently control rods are moved up or down, to regulate the reaction and prevent an explosion.

Now, if this sounds like “rocket science,” that’s because it really is—at least for human’s! The trick is to slow the neutrons down, so uranium nuclei can capture them. Otherwise, they’ll zip right pass. Such a speed-breaker is termed a “moderator’. In 75 per cent of reactors, it’s light (ordinary) water.

At Oklo, nature made the trick look easy. “We tend to think that humans are the only possible source of complex machinery on Earth,” observed Graham Templeton, in Extremetech.Com. Yet nuclear scientists have been “humbled” by a natural technology “which actually predate their achievement…”

Using water as a moderator, a cluster of natural fission reactors generated energy, spontaneously, for some 300,000 years. Writing in Scientific American, Alex P. Meshik hypothesized that the Oklo reactor may have operated in spurts—turning on for 30 minutes, then shutting down for 2.5 hours.

Looking backward, Oklo can be envisioned as a nuclear metaphor:
Nature’s foreshadowing of the Atomic Age.

In 1915, the Shinkolobwe outcrop, with its bright patches of yellow pigment, apparently proved equally evocative to a UMHK prospector, who was searching for copper in Katanga.

To be continued.

J.K. Obatala