In Sorowako

Sorowako,​ on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, is the site of one of the largest nickel mines on earth. Nickel is an invisible part of many everyday objects: it disappears into stainless steel, the heating elements of domestic appliances and the electrodes of rechargeable batteries. It was formed here more than two million years ago, when the hills that surround Sorowako began to emerge along an active fault. Laterites – iron oxide and nickel-rich soils – developed through the relentless erosion of tropical rain. When I rode my scooter into the hills, the ground duly changed colour, becoming red with blood-orange streaks. I could see the nickel smelter itself, a dusty brown hulk of gnarly ducts, town-sized. Truck tyres the size of small cars lay in piles. The road was cut out of the steep red hills and huge nets held back landslides. Mining company double-decker Mercedes buses passed by carrying workers. There were company pick-up trucks and off-road ambulances flying company flags. The ground was hillocked and pocked, with smoothed piles of red earth terraced into ziggurats. The site is guarded by barbed-wire fences, gates, stop lights and company police, who are responsible for patrolling a concession nearly the size of London.

The mine is operated by PT Vale, which is partly owned by the Indonesian and Brazilian governments, with Canadian, Japanese and other multinationals holding stakes. Indonesia is the world’s biggest nickel producer and Vale the second biggest nickel mining company, just behind the Russian company Nornickel, which mines Siberian deposits. In March, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nickel prices doubled in a day and the London Metal Exchange froze trading for a week. Episodes like this have led people like Elon Musk to think about where they source their nickel. In May, he met the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, to discuss possible ‘partnerships’. He is interested because nickel is required for long-range electric cars. The batteries in a single Tesla contain about forty kilos of it. The Indonesian state, unsurprisingly, is very enthusiastic about the shift to electric vehicles and plans to extend mining concessions. Vale, meanwhile, intends to build two new smelters and upgrade the one in Sorowako.

Indonesian nickel mining is a relatively recent development. In the early 20th century, the colonial government of the Dutch East Indies began to take an interest in its ‘outer possessions’, the islands beyond Java and Madura, which constitute the majority of the archipelago. In 1915, the Dutch mining engineer Eduard Abendanon reported that he had found deposits of nickel ores in Sorowako. Twenty years later, H.R. ‘Flat’ Elves, a geologist from the Canada-based International Nickel Company (Inco), arrived and dug test pits. In Ontario, Inco was using nickel to make coins, as well as parts for weapons, bombs, ships and factories. Elves’s attempt to expand the company’s operations to Sulawesi was foiled by the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in 1942. The nickel was left mostly untouched until Inco returned in the 1960s.

When it won the concession in Sorowako in 1968 Inco hoped to profit from plentiful cheap labour and from export contracts skewed in its favour. The plan was to build a smelter, a dam to power it and a strip mine, and to import Canadian personnel to manage it all. Inco wanted a secure enclave for its managers to live in, a well-policed North American suburb in the Indonesian forest. To build it they hired members of an Indonesian spiritual movement called Subud. Its leader and founder was Muhammad Subuh, who had worked as an accountant in Java in the 1920s. One night, he claimed, he had gone for a walk when a ball of brilliant light fell on his head. This happened to him every evening for some years and, he said, opened him to ‘the connection between the Divine Power that fills the whole universe and the human soul’. By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of John Bennett, a British fossil fuel researcher and follower of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Bennett invited Subuh to Britain in 1957, and he returned to Jakarta with a coterie of new European and Australian disciples.

In 1966 the movement set up a very unspiritual-sounding engineering firm called International Design Consultants, which built schools and office buildings in Jakarta (it also designed the masterplan for Sydney’s Darling Harbour). It proposed to build an extractivist utopia in Sorowako, an enclave separate from Indonesians, away from the mess of the mines, yet entirely provided for by them. The gated settlement of bungalows was completed in 1975 a few kilometres away from Sorowako, with a supermarket, tennis courts and golf club for foreign employees. Private police protected the perimeter and the entrance to the supermarket. Inco supplied electricity, running water, air conditioning, telephones and imported groceries. According to the anthropologist Kathryn May Robinson, who undertook fieldwork there between 1977 and 1981, ‘women in Bermuda shorts and with hair in rollers would drive down to the supermarket and buy a frozen pizza, stopping off on the way home for a cup of instant coffee in the air-conditioned, all “mod cons” home of a woman friend.’

The enclave is still gated and patrolled. Indonesian senior managers live there now, in houses with well-tended gardens. But the public spaces are overgrown, the cement is cracked, play areas rusty. Some of the bungalows have been abandoned and the forest is taking over. I was told that the emptiness was the result of the takeover of Inco by Vale in 2006, and the shift from jobs-for-life to contract work and a more itinerant labour force. The divide between suburb and Sorowako is now purely along class lines: the managers live in the suburb, the workers in town.

The concession itself is inaccessible, nearly twelve thousand square kilometres of forested mountains surrounded by fences. The small number of gates are manned and the roads patrolled. Sectors that are being actively mined – nearly 75 square kilometres – are fenced with barbed wire. One night I rode my scooter up into the hills and parked. I couldn’t see the slag heaps, which were hidden behind a ridge, but I watched as the molten leftovers from smelting, still at near lava temperatures, were poured down a hill. An orange light glowed, then a cloud rose in the darkness and spread until it was smudged out by the wind. Every few minutes another anthropogenic eruption would light up the sky.

The only way that non-company people can get anywhere near the mine is clandestinely, by Lake Matano, so I took a boat. And then Amos, who lives on the shore, led me through fields of pepper until we reached the base of what used to be a mountain, now a hollowed-out shell, an absence. Pilgrimages can sometimes be made to places of origin, and perhaps this is the origin of some of the nickel inside the objects that enabled my trip: the cars, the plane, the scooter, the laptop, the phone.