The man who makes money where no one else dares to go

The mineshaft is dark, the air humid and starved of oxygen. I follow Marcus Edwards-Jones out of the muddy tunnel towards a window of light and at last we emerge into the evening. The sun is going down over Rwanda’s green hills, dotted with banana groves and eucalyptus stands, with a river snaking away into the distance. Around us are men carting away lumps of rock, which on close inspection are streaked with veins of a black metal called tantalum, a high-value mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones, nuclear reactors and spaceships.

‘I’ve never seen a deposit like this,’ says Marcus. ‘It’s all been worth it.’ I first met  Marcus in Oxford in 1985. We said hello on the stairs at a Piers Gaveston party, both of us dressed in togas. Soon after that I returned to Africa to be a correspondent, while he went into the City to work in brokerage firms. I ended up covering a string of wars, as he migrated from analysing European equities to the things that have provided him with momentum ever since – giving advice on how to raise investment for hydrocarbons and minerals in the world’s frontier markets. ‘My life has been one long busman’s holiday, visiting places others don’t want to,’ he says as we wander down the muddy track from the mine we have just visited together. This may be a new project and I brought him here because I love Rwanda and the economic transformation that has happened since the genocide I reported on in 1994. When I compare my years as a journalist with his career in finance, I sense we were looking for similar things.

During our conversation I work out that Marcus has done business in 19 different African countries, most of them dangerous or frontier markets that no investment bankers would dare to see.