The houses of the Gécamines estate in Kolwezi are receding. Gradually erased from the cadastre, they were driven out by the advance of the mines bordering this district built in the 1930s for the workers of the “copper eater”, the nickname given to the Mining Union of Haut-Katanga (UMHK) at the time. of the Belgian colonizer, renamed Gécamines after independence in 1960. The shares change hands. Industrial means evolve. But the activity has remained the same since the dawn of time: scraping, digging, sorting the earth to extract copper and cobalt. And so much the worse for the families living on the seams.
The town and its people belong to the mine, not the other way around. Kolwezi has become in a few years the world capital of cobalt, an essential element for the manufacture of electric batteries. Capital of the Lualaba province, a stronghold of Congolese exports, which has one of the worst malnutrition statistics in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
In the city of Gécamines, on the other side of a high concrete palisade barring the entrance to the mining site – now owned by a Chinese company, Sicomines –, a hovel is falling into ruin. “The residents were cleared out [chased out],” said Léonard Zama, an activist with the civil society organization Lutte pour lechange, better known as Lucha. On the edge of the neighborhood, the primary school and the Methodist Church have closed. More secure enough. Too cracked by the shock wave caused by the dynamite explosions of the miners.
“About 40% of the neighborhood has been eaten away in recent years,” notes Marcellin Mukembé-Mubedi, a teacher at the Kolwezi Higher Pedagogical Institute and a leading specialist in the city’s history. A few kilometers away, in the Mutoshi district, it is the activity of artisanal diggers which, like leprosy, is eating away at the houses. “We cannot exclude that one day the city will have to be moved further east”, adds the historian, recalling that such a radical project had been mentioned in the 1970s.
Fortune of the miners and despair of the miners
The Gécamines city is a victim of the colossal riches of its basement. However, one would not bet a Congolese franc on the presence of this underground treasure by contemplating the poverty of the hovels of sheet metal and earth bricks erected along dusty and unhealthy alleys. If Kolwezi had its heyday, a past as sparkling as copper, it made the fortune of the miners and often the despair of its miners.
There has been little positive impact for the inhabitants while the presence of these minerals has been identified for ages. Long before the industrial era, “the oldest metallurgical traces of the activity of the ‘copper eaters’ who brought malachites [copper carbonate] to low furnaces date from around 400 BC ., it is an immensely rich site,” says Marcellin Mukembé-Mubedi. This artisanal exploitation produced a currency of exchange, the copper crosses which have become emblematic of Katanga. “We have found them as far south as South America, in Brazil,” explains the historian, pointing to one of these crosses hanging on the wall of his living room.
It will be necessary to wait for the beginning of the 20th century, after the First World War, to switch to a completely different dimension. “The UMHK managed the Congolese copper belt of which Kolwezi is one of the links. The mines were running at full speed, even at night. The agglomerations of the region profited from the fruits of this industrial success. There were good roads, well-organized urban centers, hospitals. But these flourishing cities were also marked by colonial apartheid. In 1960, Kolwezi had 4,000 whites and 20,000 Congolese. Each community had its schools, its hospitals, its cultural centers. These two worlds did not mix”, explained the Belgian journalist born in Kolwezi Erik Bruyland, author of Cobalt Blues, in an interview published by Le Monde, October 3, 2021.
A descent into hell under Mobutu
The city of Kolwezi as an urban center did not emerge until 1937, five years after the start of construction of the railway line that would connect it to the Angolan port of Lobito, 1,500 km away on the Atlantic coast. A few architectural remnants remain from this time, in the “European Quarter” along Kasa-Vubu Avenue, from the headquarters of the former UMHK to the cathedral. But it’s mostly the ghosts that lurk.
Near the disused train station, the Impala Hotel is nothing more than a squat where rags hang on clotheslines. There remains, hanging on the wall, the stylized head of an impala antelope. Young men irritated by an alien presence play with beer caps on a cardboard checkerboard. In May 1978, the hotel was popular with Europeans passing through. Several hundred expatriates, mainly executives of Gécamines and their families, gathered there when the rebels of the Katangese Tigers movement took control of the city. Several dozen corpses of Europeans, massacred by the rebels, were discovered in the hotel by the legionnaires of the 2nd REP parachuted into the city during Operation Ebonite to free the hostages. The event sounded the death knell for the massive European presence that had already declined since independence in 1960.
The city would continue a descent into hell to the rhythm of the wanderings of Mobutu Sese Seko, leader of the DRC (from 1965 to 1997) long undisputed before being driven out by arms. Kolwezi and Gécamines lived in symbiosis. “Gécamines njo mama, Gécamines njo baba!” “Gécamines is my mother, Gécamines is my father”, we used to say, recalls the researcher Benjamin Rubbers in a long paper published in 2006 in the Cahiers d’études africaines describing the collapse , in stages, of mining between its nationalization by Mobutu in 1967 and the beginning of the 2000s.
Victim of a “vicious circle with no other way out than the collapse of the building (…), the money entered and disappeared immediately”, analyzes Benjamin Rubbers. The company is dismembered, vampirized by Mobutu and his clan then by the Kabila father and son, successive presidents from 1997 to 2019. All dipped into the fund, then sold the company by apartments over the years. Today, Gécamines produces almost nothing.
The Chinese got their hands on the mines
It is no longer she who makes the law in Kolwezi. It was without it that the city became the cobalt capital of the world and a major center for copper mining. The rebirth of the city dates back to the signing, in 2008, of the “contract of the century”, valued at 6 billion dollars, signed between the Congolese State and a consortium of Chinese companies. The deal gave them cobalt and copper mines in exchange for infrastructure investments.
Fifteen years later, the balance sheet is that of a fiasco. Chinese companies have gotten their hands on the mines. They control 80% of cobalt production. But where are the thirty hospitals, the two airports, the approximately 3,000 km of railway lines and the 7,000 km of roads that they had to build all over the country? A bloody report from the Inspectorate General of Finance, published in February, finds that the “deal of the century” has resulted in a form of “economic colonization” by China.
“Anyway, Kolwezi would have had none of this,” said Charlotte Cime-Jinga, former mayor of the city from 2008 to 2016. “Katanga was giving up its mines and others were taking advantage of it. Everything had been decided in Kinshasa without involving either the city or the province,” she adds. “In terms of urbanization, the Chinese haven’t done anything. They took refuge in the infrastructure built by the Belgians,” confirms Marcellin Mukembé-Mubedi. The cobalt emperors lurk in the shadows, sealed off in a few new but charmless casino hotels, in their cities or on the mining sites.
“Kings of Corruption”
“They got their hands on all the business and don’t share anything,” laments a trader, intermediary between artisanal diggers and mineral processors. Not so long ago, this activity supported hundreds of Congolese families alongside Lebanese and Indian businessmen. “There are only Chinese people left, they don’t pay a lot but they pay cash,” says our source, who himself preferred to join a Chinese partner rather than disappear. “They control the whole chain from exploitation, industrial or artisanal, to the production of finished products in China, without even leaving room for local subcontractors”, complains a small Congolese entrepreneur.
Above all, he adds, they are the kings of corruption. But there have been no miracles in terms of local or national governance. “Where does the mining royalty money go that companies pay to decentralized territorial entities [city, region…]? asks Jean de la Paix Mibangu, director general and creator, twenty-five years ago, of Free Community Radio (RCL). “The state announces increased production but the population sees nothing. Everything goes into the pockets of the new rich linked to power. The local authorities make so much money in Kinshasa that they are untouchable,” he accuses.
Courageously, ignoring administrative pressures and harassment, the RCL echoes these abuses and dysfunctions on a daily basis. “They are afraid of us because we have the population behind us,” the journalist wants to believe. The rebellious spirit of Kolwezi is wavering but is not yet dead.
