The elements of power, p.35
The Elements of Power, page 35
That morning, he arrived at his job site, illegally entering Glencore’s KCC concession around 7:00 a.m. (Glencore stressed that miners like Ilunga trespass on land that has been permitted for industrial mining and that the company has taken active measures to try and prevent them entering.) There were no safety briefings or registrations: Ilunga’s team paid off any guards who asked questions and headed for a shaft dug into a secluded area near the mine. Hundreds of other miners were doing the same, starting their day at the bottom of the global battery supply chain.
Toward 9:00 a.m., the ground rumbled, and the pit where Ilunga was working collapsed. He was quickly crushed, suffocating under the soft soil.
Eight hours later, Françoise was awaiting her husband’s return when her nephew came to her with the news. “There was a cave-in this morning, and your husband is dead,” he said. She burst into tears.
The family rushed to the mine to try and recover the body, but when they arrived, the rescue teams had come and gone. There was no one to help them remove Ilunga’s remains from the ground. It took them two days to find his body; when they finally got it out, they took it to the Cimetière Mwangeji, where they held a hastily arranged funeral.
“The government didn’t help us during the death of my husband,” Françoise said. “There were lots of deaths that day. I don’t have the exact number.”
“At least a hundred and fifty people died there,” Françoise’s nephew told me when we were sitting with her. “The government said only four people died, so they only bought four coffins.” The rest were wrapped in sheets and lowered into the ground.
Françoise Ilunga in Kolwezi, 2022
When I met Françoise, she was struggling to make ends meet: Without any income from her husband, it was hard to bring up her seven children. She had grown to hate mining. “It’s a bad work,” she told me. “It only brings us death and destroys the mentality of people.” But every day she was reminded of her husband’s death, because every day she returned to sell manioc roots at the edge of a nearby mine site. She had taken up the work in the wake of Ilunga’s death, and hated it. It was squalid, and she barely made enough to feed her children. But she would never allow her children to go down into the mines. She wanted them to go to school. “We suffer a lot,” she said. “But I still have hope.”
* * *
Such cave-ins were regular occurrences in Kolwezi. “They just follow the veins, and the way they do is extremely dangerous,” Charles Carron Brown, the consulting mining engineer, told me. “The accident rate in artisanal mining is appallingly high.” When I visited Kolwezi two months after the landslide that killed Ilunga, I was ushered into the office of Erick Tshisola, the chief of staff to the minister of mines for Lualaba. He was on the phone and gestured for me to sit. “Yes, Excellence,” he said, speaking to the governor, confirming that there had been a cave-in. “Two deaths and nine wounded,” he continued. “No, we haven’t told the families yet…. Maybe they can give some money to the families?”
Tshisola hung up and looked a little embarrassed—we had caught him at a bad time. “At Tenke, there were uncontrolled creuseurs,” he admitted. “At three a.m. they snuck onto the concession, and there was a landslide.”
A month later, in June, as international investors flew in for a mining conference in Lubumbashi, more than forty creuseurs were killed in a landslide after breaking into KCC. Odilon Kajumba Kilanga and his friends were also at the site that night, but they were working a different seam. “The worst thing I’ve seen as a miner is the sheer number of dead bodies when there were cave-ins,” Kajumba told me when we spoke later that year. The KCC cave-in was one of the worst. Glencore shares briefly plummeted on the London Stock Exchange but rebounded when it became clear the cave-in wouldn’t affect the firm’s operations.
The night after the landslide that Kajumba witnessed, a Glencore employee told me, “People snuck back in and continued digging.”
* * *
A widely proposed solution to the artisanal mining conundrum is traceability, which has advanced in fits and starts since the practice was enshrined into the country’s 2002 Mining Code. This would involve tracking of the supply chain, which some companies have said can be done using blockchain technologies. The European Union has even planned “battery passports” to be implemented from February 1, 2027, which will show the origin of each of the minerals mined for use in particular batteries.
The problem with such schemes is that they rely on sometimes extremely shaky information; people input that data, and people, especially in a poor country like Congo, are susceptible to all kinds of external influences. A supply chain is only as clean as its dirtiest link, and in Congo, a country with high levels of poverty and corruption, links can be very dirty indeed. Traceability “is not intrinsically driving the supply chain to become more sustainable,” said Ilka von Dalwigk, the director general of Recharge, a battery industry trade body in Europe. She said that the EU should be focusing on new schemes to promote social sustainability in poorer countries and poorer member states.
Companies have also been trying to address the issue of data insecurity. Benjamin Clair, the founder of Datastake, a start-up that seeks to, as he put it, “develop and deploy software so that local stakeholders can digitize their available information and provide data,” said that there are ways of remunerating local communities for providing data along the supply chain. “There’s a ton of data available locally from local actors, and there’s a ton of demand for data, for impact monitoring, for risk management, for opportunity assessment, for market research,” Clair said. “So let’s just find ways to connect this supply and demand of information.”
Another solution is the formalization of artisanal mining, whereby people who do it receive safety training and equipment. Kasulo was one such project, although when I visited, the safety standards appeared to be limited. Carron Brown argued that it was in the government’s best interest not to allow artisanal mining, because creuseurs make sites less economically viable. “The artisanal miners go down following the high-grade veins,” Carron Brown said. “They can take a deposit that would have been extremely valuable to a commercial mining company, and in so doing they ruin the deposit, because they take out the high-grade portions of it. So that means that the low-grade portions can’t be mined.” But Carron Brown acknowledged it would be hard to stop the practice. “It’s very difficult to sort of put the cat back in the bag once you let it out.”
At the Mutoshi mine in Kolwezi, another formalization scheme was instituted by Pact, a human-development NGO based in Washington and jointly funded by Chemaf and Trafigura. The Mutoshi formalization project ended in March 2020.
It was hard to tell if Mutoshi was a success: I was not permitted to visit during my trips to Kolwezi. But Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, a professor and human rights expert at the University of Geneva, managed to interview sixty miners and local residents at the mine in 2023. Her research showed how safety improvements and the integration of women—who were previously thought to bring bad luck to male miners—had tangible positive effects on the local community. Child labor was eliminated, and school attendance rose as mothers were able to support their children with extra income.
It appeared that formalization increased salaries and quality of life. “There were over 3 million hours worked without a lost-time injury and no artisanal mine fatalities at the fenced Mutoshi pilot site during the roughly two years of the pilot project,” Baumann-Pauly wrote. “Since the end of formalization in March 2020, there have been seven work-related deaths, most related to tunnel collapses.” She noted that local businesses had suffered, and that an estimated three hundred children now mine on the site every day because many of the women who were supporting their families during the formalization period are earning less. Formalization had its critics: Monopsonies, in which single buyers of minerals are able to dictate prices, don’t usually work out so well for the people selling minerals at the bottom of the supply chain. But, Baumann-Pauly argued, at least they allowed for the “setting and enforcing [of] basic human rights standards for the extraction process.”
* * *
Kajumba thought formalization was just another scam to pay miners less. Since Kasulo had undergone its formalization process, the prices that Congo Dongfang paid for ore had cratered. By 2019, he wanted out. The Glencore cave-in that year convinced him that risking his life in an artisanal pit was simply not worth it.
He continued mining until 2021 but resolved to save up and find another job. When he was hired at a restaurant, he decided to quit artisanal mining. After he lost that job, he occasionally went back down into the pits to make ends meet. “I was able to help my family, thanks to what I earned from being a creuseur,” he said. “But there were lots of problems. We did this job without security.”
Yannick and Trésor Mputu, Kajumba’s colleagues and roommates, continued mining and working with Antoine Mutumba’s cooperative. The last time I saw Trésor was with Mutumba in 2022. I was outside church with Kajumba when we bumped into them. They were going to a party, they said, with Kalala. Did we want to join? Kajumba shook his head. He was less and less interested in Mutumba’s world and the world of the creuseurs. He saw it as deadly.
Kajumba’s resolve was impressive. Some people would stay in the mines no matter how dangerous they were. When last I met with Kajumba, in 2022, he told me he was hoping to get a subcontracted job with Ivanhoe, but it never materialized. We stayed in touch, and he told me that shortly after, he had managed to find work at an engineering firm. “I am trying to fight and to organize myself little by little,” he said in 2024. “And to find solutions to go forward a bit.”
An artisanal miner named Jolie, Manono, 2022
Chapter 48
Detained
On the morning of July 13, 2022, I had planned to meet some people who said they could introduce me to Gédéon, the “cannibal” warlord whose group was blamed for most militia activity in Katanga. In 2009, he and six of his followers had been sentenced to death by a court in Likasi, but he had escaped from prison and fled into the hills around Upemba National Park, where he began to reconstitute his militia with the tacit help of some figures in the military. Following a speech made by a Yeke princess, he started to say that he wanted to kata Katanga, or “cut Katanga,” and began agitating for a separate state. Occasionally, his Bakata Katanga—as his militia came to be called—attacked mine sites around the region and raided the road upon which minerals left Congo. In 2016, Gédéon decided to turn himself in and was kept under house arrest, but then, in 2020, under Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, his forces attacked town, and he went on the run again.
I had been told that Gédéon funded himself through artisanal cobalt mines, although the allegations seemed far-fetched. Nevertheless, I wanted to ask him myself what involvement he had with the mining world. One of the people I was supposed to meet on July 13—Willy Nkuwimba, the demobilized militia member who said he still supported Gédéon—had told me that the warlord had been getting mining licenses for an artisanal cooperative outside Lubumbashi. By my reasoning, if some of the cobalt that powered the world’s cars and cell phones was benefiting a cannibal warlord (or a purported one, at least), the outside world ought to know.
By 2022, Gédéon had been on the lam for two years. He was accused of planning several attacks against military barracks in Lubumbashi. Nkuwimba insisted that he could connect me with the warlord and urged me to send an interview request to Gédéon by way of a personal video greeting.
Our meeting had been set to take place at the bar of Hotel Ouagadougou, on the outskirts of Lubumbashi. I knew some of the people who crowded into the dingy dive that morning (Nkuwimba and Mura Mutomb, who described himself as Nkuwimba’s assistant), but I did not know the rest—grim-faced men who spoke neither French nor Kiswahili, only Kiluba, the language of the Katanga Luba. They were introduced as Gédéon’s “emissaries.”
The negotiations were winding. Nkuwimba and Mutomb had been introduced to us by the head of a local civil-society organization. This person had told Jeef Kazadi Kamwanga that they were demobilized members of the Bakata Katanga militia, and he had even said they had taken part in peace negotiations in 2016. We didn’t have any reason to distrust them.
* * *
During the meeting, I noticed a series of men in tight-fitting football shirts hawking cheap Chinese radios at the bar. I went outside and was just sitting down when a large, fleshy man placed his hand on my shoulder. I was impelled toward the door of the hotel restaurant. “Come with me,” he said, firmly. “Routine immigration check.”
My immediate thought was that I had fallen into a scam. The fact that the radio sellers had also drawn up behind the man with his hand on my shoulder reinforced the feeling that something untoward was happening, and that the large man was not an immigration officer.
The man, who would later introduce himself to me as “Joseph,” kept insisting that he was from the Migration Directorate of the Congolese government. “We won’t keep you long—it’s routine,” he insisted, hustling me through the dimly lit lobby. He pushed me outside into the bright afternoon, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw soldiers, Kalashnikovs drawn, jumping from the back of seven pickup trucks.
“My passport,” I said, feebly. I had left the passport inside, tucked into a satchel with my cameras; inside, too, was Kazadi, who had been helping me set up the interview. If I could only get to Jeef, I thought, he would be able to explain to this Joseph guy that it was all a mistake, that we were journalists, that we were fully accredited to be working in Congo.
* * *
I convinced Joseph to let me return to the restaurant: Inside, pandemonium had broken loose. Kazadi was on the floor, the barrels of several rifles aimed right at him. A man in a gray abacost—a type of safari suit pioneered by Mobutu Sese Seko—was barking orders. “Tie him up!” he shouted, and a plainclothes officer began to tightly bind Kazadi’s arms using his sweater. Wincing, he looked at me and slowly shook his head.
I was being detained, taken to an unmarked two-story building in the center of town. Joseph, who had originally packed me into the car outside the hotel, turned out to be an officer in the Agence Nationale de Renseignements, or ANR, Congo’s secret police. Kazadi and I, along with the six purported members of the Bakata Katanga, were taken to different areas of the agency’s headquarters. The building was almost farcically unkempt: Wires dangled out of walls where lights should have been, even in the main conference room, and a man with a can of black paint was painting the windows. I sat watching for hours as he painted the grilles without bothering to cover the glass, flecking the glass with paint.
I was guarded in a series of conference rooms by Mechaque, a fresh-faced member of the special forces who, after a few hours of chatting and smoking cigarettes with me, took me through the mechanics of his RPK light machine gun. He told me he had used it against Bakata Katanga rebels, whom he barely distinguished from bandits. “This is a weapon for killing people,” he said with a smirk. “Much of the time, they only have bows and arrows and machetes.”
My phone, my books, all my effects, were confiscated. I asked—politely at first, then more and more forcefully—to speak to the U.S. embassy. Each person I talked to seemed to reply from the same script: “Don’t worry. You’re safe. Treat this as your own home.” At first, I was annoyed at being held up—precious, expensive hours of reporting time were being wasted by bureaucratic nonsense—but I soon became more and more worried, especially when I heard what sounded like shouts and screams from the cellblock where Kazadi had been taken.
Finally, late at night, I was moved to a brightly lit conference room with exposed wiring, as elsewhere in the building. The man in the abacost was among my interrogators. The questions they asked became increasingly nonsensical. I was apprised that someone had told them I was planning to smuggle a separatist leader out of the country to supply him with weapons.
“That’s absurd,” I replied. “I’m just a journalist. How could I smuggle rebels out of the country?”
The interrogator who was writing up the transcript of our interview—in longhand—looked up at me. “Well, you might not have the means, but your employers are powerful and rich,” he said, smiling. I realized I was caught up in a story where everyone believed the most extreme conspiracy theory offered to them. My working hypothesis about Congo, formed over some four years of writing about the country, was now being proved in the most terrifying way—namely, that people had been gaslit, lied to, and repressed for so long that their senses of reality had been irretrievably warped.
At another point in the interrogation, the agents asked me whether I believed in God, and whose fault it would be if “the inevitable” were to happen to me in the course of my reporting. When I asked what they meant by that, the man in the gray abacost looked up from his notes and replied: “The inevitable? The inevitable is death.”
* * *
I was given a thin mattress and told to sleep on the floor of the conference room. A guard sat and smoked nearby, keeping a close watch on me as I swatted mosquitoes and tried to rest. I worried for the people at home: When I travel on reporting trips, I try to check in each evening to let people know I’m okay, and I hadn’t checked in. The next morning, someone asked me for fifty dollars so they could buy me cornflakes and milk. I hadn’t eaten since the arrest, so I gave it to them.
