Pili Hussein wanted to make her
fortune prospecting for a precious stone that's said to be a thousand
times rarer than diamonds, but since women weren't allowed down the
mines she dressed up as man and fooled her male colleagues for almost a
decade.
Pili Hussein grew up in a large family in Tanzania. The
daughter of a livestock keeper who had many large farms, Pili's father
had six wives and she was one of 38 children.
Although she was well
looked after, in many ways, she doesn't look back on her upbringing
fondly.
"My father treated me like a boy and I was given livestock to take care of - I didn't like that life at all," she says.
But her marriage was even more unhappy, and at the age of 31 Pili ran away from her abusive husband.
In
search of work she found herself in the small Tanzanian town of
Mererani, in the foothills of Africa's highest mountain, Kilimanjaro -
the only place in the world where mining for a rare, violet-blue
gemstone called tanzanite takes place.
"I didn't go to school, so I didn't have many options," Pili says.
"Women
were not allowed in the mining area, so I entered bravely like a man,
like a strong person. You take big trousers, you cut them into shorts
and you appear like a man. That's what I did."
To complete the transformation, she also changed her name.
"I
was called Uncle Hussein, I didn't tell anyone my actual name was Pili.
Even today if you come to the camp you ask for me by that name, Uncle
Hussein."
In the tight confines of the hot, dirty tunnels - some
of which extend hundreds of metres below the ground - Pili would work
10-12 hours a day, digging and sieving, hoping to uncover gemstones in
the veins in the graphite rock.
"I could go 600m under, into the
mine. I would do this more bravely than many other men. I was very
strong and I was able to deliver what men would expect another man could
do."
Pili says that nobody suspected that she was a woman.
"I acted like a gorilla," she says, "I could fight, my language was
bad, I could carry a big knife like a Maasai [warrior]. Nobody knew I
was a woman because everything I was doing I was doing like a man."
And
after about a year, she struck it rich, uncovering two massive clusters
of tanzanite stones. With the money that she made she built new homes
for her father, mother and twin sister, bought herself more tools, and
began employing miners to work for her.
And her cover was so
convincing that it took an extraordinary set of circumstances for her
true identity to finally be revealed. A local woman had reported that
she'd been raped by some of the miners and Pili was arrested as a
suspect.
"When the police came, the men who did the rape said:
'This is the man who did it,' and I was taken to the police station,"
Pili says.
She had no choice but to reveal her secret.
She asked the police to find a woman to physically examine her, to
prove that she couldn't be responsible, and was soon released. But even
after that her fellow miners found it hard to believe they had been
duped for so long.
"They didn't even believe the police when they
said that I was a woman," she says, "it wasn't easy for them to accept
until 2001 when I got married and I started a family."
Finding a husband when everyone is accustomed to regarding you as a
man is not easy, Pili found, though eventually she succeeded.
"The question in his mind was always, 'Is she really a woman?'" she recalls. "It took five years for him to come closer to me."
Pili has built a successful career and today owns her own mining
company with 70 employees. Three of her employees are women, but they
work as cooks not as miners.
Pili says that although there are more
women in the mining industry than when she started out, even today very
few actually work in the mines.
"Some [women] wash the stones,
some are brokers, some are cooking," she says, "but they're not going
down in to the mines, it's not easy to get women to do what I did."
Pili's
success has enabled her to pay for the education of more than 30
nieces, nephews and grandchildren. But despite this she says she
wouldn't encourage her own daughter to follow in her footsteps.
"I'm proud of what I did - it has made me rich, but it was hard for me," she says.
"I
want to make sure that my daughter goes to school, she gets an
education and then she is able to run her life in a very different way,
far away from what I experienced."
No comments: