The elements of power, p.24
The Elements of Power, page 24
About a month after the man who discovered the cobalt up and vanished, the local municipality formally restricted digging for minerals in Kasulo. According to Muteba, residents implored the mayor: “We used to mine in the bush, in the forest. You stopped us. You gave all the city to big industrial companies. Now we discovered minerals in our own plots of land, which belonged to our ancestors. And now you want to stop us? No, that is not going to work.” As Muteba recalled, “People started to throw rocks at the mayor, and the mayor ran away. And when the mayor fled, the digging really started.”
After Kasulo’s mayor took off, many residents began tearing into the ground beneath them. Some wealthier locals hired creuseurs to dig under their houses, with an agreement to split any profits. Two teams of creuseurs could each work twelve-hour shifts, chipping away at the rock with hammers and chisels. A pastor and his congregation began digging under their church, stopping only for Sunday services.
By the end of 2014, two thousand creuseurs were working in the neighborhood, with little regulation. Kajumba and his cooperative soon joined in the hunt for minerals. Yannick remembered this period as “the good times.” He told me, “There was a lot of money, and everybody was able to make some. The minerals were close to the surface, and they could be mined without digging deep holes.”
But the conditions quickly became dangerous. Not long after the mayor formally prohibited excavating for minerals, a mine shaft collapsed, killing five miners. Still, people kept digging, and by the time researchers for Amnesty International visited, less than a year after the discovery of cobalt in Kasulo, some of the holes made by creuseurs were one hundred feet deep. Once diggers reached seams of ore, they followed the mineral through the soil, often without building supports for their tunnels. As Hitzman pointed out, the heterogenite closer to the surface—the only type of ore people with hand tools could really expect to access—often contains the least amount of cobalt, as it has been subjected to weathering. Creuseurs in Kasulo were risking their lives to obtain some of the worst ore.
One of Kajumba’s teammates told me that their cooperative of six—during this period, he, Yannick, and Trésor linked up with three other creuseurs—used to regularly extract two tons of raw material from a single pit in Kasulo. But most of the best sites were quickly excavated, and the yield from newer pits was less than half as much. The team was also ripped off by unscrupulous traders and corrupt officials. When I first met Kajumba, in 2019, he lamented that he was struggling to pay his rent of twenty-five dollars a month. “Whenever we dig up a few tons,” he said, “I send some money to my family.”
* * *
Videos of Kasulo taken during the height of the 2014 cobalt rush show orange tarpaulins covering fresh pits and bags of minerals littering the streets. After Michael Kavanagh, the journalist, visited the district a year later, he published an article in The New York Times observing that the profusion of holes made it look “as if it had been bombed.” At one point, creuseurs tunneled beneath the main road running west to Angola, and the road subsequently collapsed.
Kajumba and his crew were part of this initial frenzy. They knew that picking at the rock beneath Kasulo’s sandy soil was treacherous, especially during the rainy season, but they were just happy not to be risking arrest, as they did when they broke into the big mines. One day in December 2014, Kajumba and other creuseurs were working a pit at Kasulo when they felt a rumble. “It was as if something was falling deep underneath us,” Kajumba recalled.
They knew that on the previous day, a group of creuseurs working in a neighboring hole had asked a local chief to perform a ritual over a new area where they had been digging. The creuseurs—who, after all, lived their days in fear of being buried alive—were superstitious. It was common to employ a magic practitioner, known as a féticheur, to bless mining work.
In Kasulo, the féticheur who had performed the ritual over the neighboring pit had warned the miners not to enter it for three days. If they went in before that, he’d said, they would anger a slumbering dragon that lived at the bottom. Once the three days were up, they’d been told, the pit would be safe—and full of minerals. Rumors of the pit’s riches spread, and a day later, some miners decided to disobey the féticheur. “Creuseurs have curiosity,” Yannick Mputu said. “They wanted to see what was down there.”
After Kajumba and Mputu felt the ground shudder, they rushed to the neighboring hole. Part of the tunnel had caved in, trapping their neighbors deep below. Some fifty people vaulted into the darkness, desperate to save their friends. Rescuers suffocated in the subterranean passages. Eleven of the trapped miners died, as did four rescuers.
Following another series of féticheur rituals, and another period of waiting, all the bodies were pulled from the hole. Some were horrifically burned. “The last person who escaped from the pit said that he saw a huge flame,” Mputu told me. The fire’s origin was unclear, but artisanal miners can unearth pockets of flammable gas. To Mputu and his colleagues, the accident had supernatural trappings. “The cause of the flame was none other than the dragon,” he told me.
Nine months after the cave-in, on September 4, 2015, another group of creuseurs in Kasulo burned a tire in an underground gallery to crack open a stubborn rock face. Five people asphyxiated from the fumes; thirteen others were hospitalized. After the incident, Radio Okapi, a media group sponsored by the UN, interviewed Kolwezi’s mayor, who said that a year earlier, he had sent a report to his superiors urging the closure of the artisanal pits. According to Radio Okapi, the mayor “expressed regret that no site was closed because of this request.” The report noted that more than a thousand holes had already been dug in Kasulo.
Kajumba and his collective regularly snuck into open pits owned by companies like Glencore and the Eurasian Resources Group. “We enter at night, we work, and leave early in the morning,” Yannick Mputu told me. He noted that creuseurs set something aside for the soldiers and the police, who supposedly prohibited outsiders from entering: “We give them a percentage of our earnings, and they let us in.”
* * *
In 2015, around the time of the second cave-in, Joseph Kabila Kabange decided to reorganize Congo’s provinces. He had fallen out with Moïse Katumbi Chapwe, who had wanted to run for president the following year; Kabila had given no indication that he was going to step aside, and by most accounts, he saw the wealthy Katangese political aspirant as a threat to his presidency. When Kabila asked Congo’s governors to back a constitutional change that would allow him to stay for a third term, Katumbi stepped down. “President Kabila wanted to have a third mandate,” Katumbi told me. “What I paid is the price for this.”
Kolwezi became the new capital of a region called Lualaba, named for a tributary of the Congo River that flows through the region. The first governor of Lualaba, Richard Muyej Mangez Mans, promoted himself as “Papa Solution,” a Congolese Mr. Fix-It. In 2019, when I first visited Kolwezi, many bus-stop benches were painted with this nickname. In an interview with the magazine Mining and Business, Muyej spoke critically of the cobalt “contagion” in Kasulo. Around fifteen thousand creuseurs were working on the site. “A plan is needed to avoid hasty movements that could turn into a humanitarian tragedy,” he said. “We have made a project proposal that we will submit to the authorities.”
The proposal’s particulars, which Muyej didn’t disclose at the time, involved granting Kasulo’s mineral rights to a foreign company: Congo Dongfang International Mining, the subsidiary of Huayou Cobalt, Chen Xuehua’s Chinese conglomerate. By that point, Huayou had begun supplying materials for iPhone batteries. In 2015, it had built two cobalt refineries. According to an internal presentation, by 2017, Huayou controlled 21 percent of the global cobalt market.
Chapter 32
Bare Branches
It was late on an evening in July 2022, and I was waiting for a call from a man named Antoine Mutumba, a Congolese copper and cobalt trader with whom Odilon Kajumba Kilanga had worked in the past. We had met just before the rains in 2019, the same afternoon I had first met Kajumba and the Mputu brothers over colas. In fact, Mutumba had introduced me to Kajumba, and now he wanted to bring me to meet his sponsor, a Chinese businessman who called himself by a name that recalled the ancestral Luba king, Kalala.
Kalala was among a legion of small-time Chinese traders who had come to Congo and profited after the twin system of industrial and artisanal mining crystallized in the wake of the 2002 Mining Code. Andrew Bell, a mining prospector who first went to Katanga in 2016, remembers being struck by the sheer amount of trading houses he saw in the 2010s. “Up until 2019, if you went along that road from Lubumbashi to Kolwezi, there were lots of little huts with Chinese names on them,” Bell told me. “That was Chinese middlemen who were buying from the artisanal miners. And so they basically sent containers full of dust off to China.” I saw them as well, before the governor of Katanga decided to centralize them at the Musompo market.
I had spent several years trying to meet someone like Kalala in Congo. Mutumba had always promised he would put me in contact with the Chinese traders for whom he performed odd jobs: He started out as a car mechanic and had one day fixed a car for a Chinese businessman named Zhou. “Zhou would call him every time he needed a vehicle repairing,” Jeef Kazadi, my guide and translator, who knew Mutumba from his trips to Kolwezi, told me. “This is how he came into the world of the Chinois. That’s how they knew Antoine could work for them.”
The businessman took a shine to Mutumba and employed him to sort out various issues around town—disputes over prices, deliveries, hiring. Soon, he introduced him to an associate, a copper and cobalt trader who went by the sobriquet Kalala and had a taste for liquor. Mutumba also liked a drink, and he and Kalala became close. “There is corruption, there is lack of the rule of law, which gives you more autonomy to be entrepreneurial,” Peter Zhou, the Chinese mining banker, said of the way that some Chinese think about working in Congo. (Zhou is not related to the Zhou with whom Antoine originally worked.)
The trader welcomed the young Congolese into his compound, a set of bungalows encircled by a low white wall and guarded by dirty, mean-looking dogs. Mutumba became Kalala’s factotum, always ready to fix a vehicle, a deal, or a broken relationship.
At the time, Mutumba told me that the Chinese would bring him wealth and prestige. When I interviewed Moïse Katumbi Chapwe, the former governor of Katanga, in Zambia in 2019, he reminisced about his time in office, and about how he had cracked down on illegal traders like Kalala. “I was the only one who went to chase people from the mines who were stealing,” he told me. “Behind every thief there was a Chinese. And behind every Chinese, there was a politician.”
Mutumba seemed determined to prove the adage: Behind him were Chinese traders, and behind them were powerful political figures. When I asked to meet the traders, Mutumba demurred, making excuses before finally telling me that it was not the right time. Kalala was typical of the Chinese traders who worked with Congolese artisanal miners rather than the large industrial ones—they were secretive and seemed to be striking out alone.
* * *
Many Congolese resent Chinese small-timers like Kalala who work in Congo’s South. They call them the petits Chinois, or little Chinese. Racism against them certainly abounds in areas where they have been perceived to be successful. Sometimes, the small-timers will be targeted, their shops ransacked and their homes burned. “Listen, you know, the big companies working in DRC, most of them are not the real problem for artisanal miners,” Vidiye Tshimanga Tshipanda, a close adviser to the Congolese president, told me in mid-2022. “The biggest problem for artisanal miners is the thousands of little Chinese and Indians and Lebanese, these companies who are working in the DRC illegally and ruining the cobalt market. The way they work is that they are lending some money to the artisanal people, to the cooperatives. Then they buy the copper and the cobalt, cheating about everything—the purity, the quantity, the humidity, everything.”
I had often heard the same complaints from miners like Kajumba. I was told, for instance, that the Chinese had changed the calibration on their Metorex fluorescence analyzers—chunky, gun-shaped machines that indicate how pure a piece of cobalt ore is. “So they don’t pay a fair price. They don’t pay the right price,” Tshimanga told me. “But, also, they don’t care if it’s a child who is in the mine. They don’t care if it’s a woman, pregnant woman. They don’t care about security. They don’t care about anything. And for a little piece of money that they can give the population, the miners, the artisanal miners, are fighting their battle to find the maximum of product.”
Tshimanga bemoaned the greed of foreign traders, people like Kalala, but then told me something about the importance of small-scale traders to the global economy. “We can’t let that continue, especially when you see the interest that represents,” Tshimanga said, speaking of a government plan to centralize cobalt buying and bypass small traders entirely—a plan that, incidentally, resembled one proposed by Richard Muyej Mangez Mans, Lualaba’s governor, in 2018. “When today you are talking about twenty percent of the Congolese production is artisanal production. When you say twenty-plus percent with the actual statistics, that means that you can double it, because officially, they never give the right numbers.” He continued: “We can say that thirty to forty percent of the production coming out from DRC is artisanal products. That means that it [the production of artisanally mined cobalt] represents the biggest cobalt company of the world.”
* * *
One night in October 2019, fueled by curiosity and a couple of beers, Mutumba suggested we visit a Chinese-run casino with his wife. Kolwezi had several of these establishments, the facades of which were generally adorned with dancing lights. Inside, the place was sparse, its beige walls undecorated and thick with the fug of cigarette smoke. At a metal grille, a grim Chinese man dealt me chips. I tried to strike up a conversation, but no dice. Mutumba appeared to be enjoying himself, even though the Congolese with me were stopped at the door and forced to wait by the bar; they were not allowed to gamble, because, the casino’s Chinese staff stated, Black Africans could not be trusted with money. The sentiment was shared by a host of drunk South Africans at the roulette table—the Chinese stuck to blackjack—who addressed a Congolese croupier as “black man.”
No one really knows how many Chinese live in Congo; there are no censuses, and many people overstay their visas to work illegally. Some estimates I heard in the South ran as high as one hundred thousand. Fly into Lubumbashi on one of Ethiopian Airlines’ daily flights and you will be joined by hundreds of Chinese workers. In an essay from 2018, the Congolese political scientist Germain Ngoie Tshibambe pointed out that for Chinese, the country’s South was a place where they imagined they could do “prosperous business.”
Though there are no formal “Chinatowns” in Congo’s South, there are what the French scholar Emmanuel Ma Mung calls “a parade of Chinese signs” over new restaurants, shops, and medical centers in the region. Few Congolese use these businesses; they are generally relatively expensive and, as locals told me, they don’t have a taste for Chinese cuisine. They mainly cater to Chinese workers, who stay in Chinese-run hotels and eat at Chinese restaurants. The Chinese mostly interact with the Congolese in two ways—first, as Ngoie has noted, Chinese clinics have become popular among locals for their cheap treatments, and second, of course, they interact on mine sites, although even this contact is sometimes limited. In 2011, Jean Jolly, a French journalist, reported that one of CDM’s directors of external relations had not even visited the mine site that he represented, though it was only four kilometers away from him.
Outside work, most Chinese avoid even the modest mingling with locals that some other expats attempt. “There are cultural differences where, you know, local Congolese tend to gather together, associate together with their own group of people; the Chinese gather together because of language barrier, or culture,” Peter Zhou, the Chinese mine financier, told me. Very few of these Chinese residents know French or Kiswahili, the most spoken languages in Congo’s South.
Some of the Congolese I talked to spoke of racism directed at them by Chinese workers; Kevin Kumbwa, a Congolese translator who speaks Mandarin, told me that “Chinese people are coming here for business to make money, you get me, so they can never be our friends.” He would overhear his Chinese employers say of the Congolese, “These people, they don’t really think.”
Ady Nawezi, the former minister for youth in Lualaba Province, told me that he used to rent a property to Chinese businessmen. Whenever he came to check on them, he noticed that they had a room filled with piles of ready money. “When there was a problem, they would fix it with cash,” he told me.
At some mine sites, the punishments visited upon Congolese workers by their Chinese bosses are reminiscent of the colonial days. In a widely shared video, a guard with a Kalashnikov slung across his back is seen beating a man lying seminaked in the mud, his arms bound at his back. Behind the camera, a man speaks Mandarin and then yells the word for beat in Kiswahili: “Piga, piga!” In the shot, eight heavy trucks of the type used to transport cobalt ore idle in the background.
Along with the constant complaint I heard from creuseurs around Kolwezi—that the Chinese were cheating them on ore prices—people would say that because labor and safety standards were poor in many parts of China, the Chinese who had arrived in Africa were simply acting in ways they were used to at home. “If they work without shoes there, how can they be expected to give us shoes to work here?” goes a common refrain among locals. One Western mining official I spoke to told me of a mine site he had visited that called to mind an internment camp. “The Chinese were barefoot, they were digging with shovels, and they couldn’t leave,” he said, explaining to me that the mine he had visited was owned by a small Chinese company, not a big multinational. “It’s sad to me, because the Chinese are mining in the way Westerners were mining in the ’40s and ’50s—cowboy mining.”
