The elements of power, p.4
The Elements of Power, page 4
In some locations—in the suburb of Kasulo, for example, or in the vast Mutoshi superpit, or around the towns of Tenke and Fungurume—rocks containing cobalt were pushed to the surface, forming what some people called cobalt “super-caps,” mushroomings of rock where concentrations of the metal were particularly high.
As a result of this geology, the Copperbelt contains some of the world’s richest reserves of copper and cobalt. “We have found our largest mineral deposits in the places that are the confluences of all of these factors that are, in fact, geological flukes,” said David Evans, a Yale geologist whose field of study includes the formation of continents. “If they weren’t flukes, then we wouldn’t be in this situation—you could go out to your backyard and scoop up some cobalt.” In fact, in the towns and cities of the Congolese Copperbelt, that’s exactly what people would come to do.
Skip Notes
* In the early 1970s, reforms made by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko called for people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to have “authentic” African names. Today, Congolese usually have three names: a first name, a surname, and a postnom, or postname, which comes after the surname. Hence, Odilon’s surname is Kajumba; his postnom was given to him in honor of his paternal uncle.
Chapter 2
The Great Rock That Spreads All Over the Lands
Odilon Kajumba Kilanga in Kolwezi’s Gécamines neighborhood in 2022
By the time I met him, in September 2019, Odilon Kajumba Kilanga was thirty-two. He had lost his right front tooth in a brawl four years before. (“I was in a group of people who clashed with another group of people,” he said. “We didn’t get along.”) His eyes were sunken and hollowed, and his level gaze suggested he had experienced much more than a man should in several lifetimes.
Kajumba knew that some people had made it big in Kolwezi, but their number was vanishingly small, and once they’d made their money, they had often gotten as far from the pits as possible, moving on to brighter, airier places in South Africa or even as far away as Malta. The name of the island in the middle of the Mediterranean didn’t mean much to someone like Kajumba, though—it was just an impossible distance. Rather, he dreamed of making enough money to buy a restaurant, a small place where he could serve food and build a stable life, one in which he could afford to send his four children to school. He said that although many people he knew in Kolwezi wasted all their earnings on partying, alcohol, and even narcotics, he tried to avoid such temptations. Whenever I met up with him, he made a point of drinking cola.
For the moment, though, Kajumba was stuck in that suffocating little room, where the smells of manioc root mingled with human sweat and rushed the nostrils. The room was in a small stand-alone cinder-block structure on the edge of one of Kolwezi’s teeming cités populaires—slums where wastewater would run in rivulets down dirt hills into patches of garbage. Two walls of the room had been painted green in an effort to lighten the mood, but the color had become caked with grime. The windows were fitted with sheets of metal rather than glass panes. On one of the other walls, which were painted a liverish red, there was a picture of his brother. In the image, Amos, bathed in light, was depicted as an acolyte of the church that Kajumba and the two Mputus—Trésor and Yannick—attended. The church was the “thirtieth Pentecostal community in Congo,” a fading sign painted on the building’s facade proclaimed. It was better to have faith if you were poor and lived in Katanga.
* * *
It was not always so. The people of Katanga knew their undulating country was rich long before the Europeans conducted their soundings and their surveys. Katanga’s wealth wasn’t just in red metal; it lay in its land, hills, and high-altitude savanna, scattered with lakes and trees. If you had stood atop one of the region’s many hills in AD 1600, say, you would have seen swaths of woodland pocked with termite mounds. Perhaps, in a dembo or a dilungu—an area of low-lying ground where the drainage was poor—there might have been areas of high grass where antelope grazed. “The plains pullulate with strange animals whose equals don’t exist anywhere else,” an early European traveler to the region wrote, “and it’s an endless pleasure to contemplate the myriads of antelope moving from place to place.” By the great lakes of the Upemba Depression, which drained into the Congo River, there were strips of marshland where hippos bathed. Fishermen had lived in villages around the lakes for at least a thousand years.
The people living in Katanga’s millions of acres of clear forest had learned to live among the trees. In the miombo, as the forest was known, there were trees for heat and cooking (musamba, which makes a good charcoal), trees for building (the sturdy-branched muputu, or zebrawood), trees for healing (kafissi, whose roots had medicinal powers), and trees for harming (the bushman’s poison, whose sap was used to coat deadly arrows). There were, too, trees for eating, trees of myriad shapes, sizes, and colors that bore nourishment: the orange fruit of the mubambangoma, the single green thorn, the pulp of the yellow-flowered kabalala, and the wild golden custard apples from the tree known as mulolo. The land was lush and verdant after the rains, but during the dry season, it became cold and parched. The soil turned to dust and stained the trees ocher.
You also would have noticed villages—perhaps sending smoke into the sky, perhaps vibrating with drums and dances to please ancestors whose spirits were all-important. And mines had always been an important part of Katanga’s lived landscape. The most profitable of them were ruled over by powerful rulers. As the historian Eugenia W. Herbert has noted, the ability to work metal may have conferred regality or magical powers upon kings. In Katanga, the secrets of master smiths were passed from generation to generation, and sorcerers invoked ancestral spirits before mines were dug into the ground, chanting, “You who have preceded us, it is you who have opened for your children the entrails of the mountain. Grant that we may find treasure.” By the fifteenth century, cross-shaped copper ingots smelted in Katanga had become currency in regions across Central Africa, and the people of Katanga began to band together.
The kingdoms grew and the peoples of Katanga created armies and fought one another for control of resources, human and otherwise. Slaves were captured and traded between rulers and chiefs, sometimes over long distances.
Looking about the region sometime around 1600, you might have also seen a conflict between two kings, one known as Red, the other as Black. The date is only approximate because the peoples of Katanga did not use writing, although some used lukasa—“memory boards” studded with beads—to help them remember their history, which was passed down orally.
According to the most common version of the story, Nkongolo Mwamba, the Red King, was the descendant of peoples from east of the upper Congo River. As a boy, he had watched a colony of driver ants destroy a more numerous colony of termites, and he had resolved to dominate other men. Kalala Ilunga, the Black King, was a hunter who grew up in Nkongolo’s capital and helped him subdue some of the copper-rich lands to the south. One day, the Black King beat the Red King at a ceremonial game played with a rubber ball, causing the latter’s mother to burst into a fit of laughter. The Red King was so upset that he buried his mother alive and planned to kill the Black King. The younger man escaped, however, and fled across the upper Congo River. He ultimately returned with an army to defeat the Red King.
The dynasty that the Red King founded, that of the Luba people, would last until Belgian colonists arrived in the region. Praise phrases—short mnemonic poems that are still passed down in Katangese villages—composed for Kalala Ilunga reflect the expansive understanding of his kingship: Ami ne dibwe dya kyalantanda; kekudipo ntanda ya shile (“I am the great rock that spreads all over the lands; there is no land that it does not reach”) and Ami nkidopo mukalo na muntu (“I have no boundaries with any man”). The Luba king might well have been talking about Katanga today, or at least its minerals, which have spread, through technology, to every part of the globe.
Over the next two hundred years or so, the Luba Empire grew and split into other kingdoms. By the time the first written records of Katanga began to appear, the country was divided, broadly, into three kingdoms, or empires—the Luba, Lunda, and Yeke. (Other groups of people, including the Sanga, existed at the peripheries of these realms.) The alliances formed, and the wars waged, in the days before the colonialization of Katanga would continue to profoundly affect Congo into the twenty-first century. In his work on mining in Katanga, the social scientist Claude Iguma Wakenge points out how “politico-ethnic relationships,” many of which can be traced to the separation of the early Katangese kingdoms, continue to create informal governance structures and corruption in the Congolese mining industry. As one local administrator put it when speaking to Iguma in 2018, “The governance of the Katangese extractive sector is shaped with politics and ethnicity.”
* * *
In 1806, two enterprising mixed-race Portuguese traders, or pombeiros, arrived in the area and described for the first time to the outside world a hilly country governed by powerful master smiths. One, Pedro João Batista, wrote in his diary that “green stones (malachite) are found in the ground, called ‘catanga.’ ” This was probably the first written instance of the name Katanga. Batista’s words were later translated into English as an exploration mania gripped the colonial European powers; to a certain type of Victorian Brit, Frenchman, or Belgian, the mere mention of the journey of the pombeiros would have conjured some magic. The same green stones that Batista wrote about are the ore from which cobalt and copper are extracted today.
When the German explorers Richard Böhm and Paul Reichard traveled to Katanga in 1880, they reported back that the area was ruled by a king named Msiri,[*1] who, they claimed, kept a large collection of human skulls hanging “like hats on pegs” near his abode. Msiri’s empire was known as Garenganze, and his people were the Yeke, named after the Sumbwa word for a guild of elephant hunters. Other missions ensued, and, in 1894, Jules Cornet, a young Belgian geologist in the service of King Leopold II, declared that the land was a “geological scandal” because it was so rich in minerals. By that point, Leopold had claimed the Congo Basin as his personal territory, saying that he wanted to bring trade and civilization to the heart of Africa. Missions like Cornet’s suggested that extraction for profit, not humanitarianism, lay at the heart of Leopold’s intentions from the very first days of colonialism.
The king urged Cornet to keep his discoveries of the country’s rich minerals secret. It was rumored that Katanga’s rivers and streams were full of gold. The British also had designs on the region and its fabled wealth, and the competition between Britain and Belgium became known as the “scramble for Katanga.”
Cornet began his work on the quiet, drawing up the detailed maps of minerals and ore bodies, replete with charts and cross sections of the mineral-rich earth beneath. They are still consulted by miners looking to make a fortune. In a drafty annex of the Archives of the Royal Palace, in Brussels, the librarian looked at me askance when I asked to see boxes of archival material from the Union Minière, the Belgian company that came to mine southern Congo. It was 2022. “Most people who come here to look at those boxes,” the librarian said. “They’re looking to find gold.”
* * *
Msiri was not a local—he was something of a colonist himself. From his homeland to the east, in what would become Tanzania, he had followed his father, a successful copper trader, to Katanga in the 1830s. Lured by the province’s riches, Msiri began to set up a state in Katanga around 1856. To build his empire, he used strategic marriages and brute force and benefited from rich mines of the Copperbelt. A decade and a half later, he had seized a chunk of territory roughly the size of Alabama. Msiri brooked no opposition and used his superior army to capture slaves on a massive scale. He sold these slaves to traders and made them into concubines. By 1891, the Sanga people, to the south, began to fight back against Yeke intrusion into their ancestral lands.
Msiri needed foreign trade not only to acquire modern weapons but also to fight against his enemies. Arab slavers were cutting into his bottom line as they seized more and more men from Central Africa to work as slaves on clove plantations in Zanzibar, on Africa’s east coast. Although European nations had forbidden slavery early in the nineteenth century and used antislavery campaigns as pretexts for creating colonies in Africa, they often treated the Africans they had supposedly liberated from bondage as little more than slaves.
Global markets were having a growing effect on Katanga: Cloves were a commodity buffeted by the winds of international commerce. The king, who had an almost preternatural understanding of such forces, opened new trade routes with the west coast of Africa. At first, Msiri welcomed European visitors to Bunkeya, and they were impressed by the Yeke capital: Frederick Stanley Arnot, a missionary who chose to live in a series of huts near the king’s palace, wrote in a letter that “life and property, I have no hesitation in saying, are safer here than in much-favored England.” But king or no king, African territory not occupied by a European power was considered terra nullius, “no-one’s-land,” ripe for the taking.
Leopold was determined to have Katanga for himself. His men rolled into Bunkeya in late 1891. A Belgian officer, Omer Bodson, shot and killed Msiri after he refused to accept Leopold’s rule. The Belgians hoisted the flag of the Congo Free State, a yellow star on a deep-blue background, over Bunkeya, and then they began to plunder the territory. They needed ivory—tons and tons of elephant tusks—to satisfy the bottom line for Leopold.
By 1893, the Belgians had created a regency in Katanga that included Msiri’s descendants. They used imported labor too. Long caravans of migrant workers, often from the Kasai region, were brought to Katanga on foot from hundreds of miles away. The Sanga people, known for their elephant-hunting prowess, intensified their guerrilla warfare, which they now focused on the new Yeke-Belgian order. Clément Brasseur, the Belgian lieutenant who had been assigned to run part of Katanga, decided to employ brutal tactics to suppress the rebellion, allowing the Yeke to raid and take slaves. According to a later inquest into violence in the Congo Free State, Brasseur was known by the locals as Nkulukulu, after a bird “whose inner wings are bloody red.” As a magistrate later explained, “the natives say Mr. Brasseur was only happy when he had blood up to his armpits.” By early 1899, just over eight years after Msiri’s death, the Sanga were defeated and Katanga had been forced into submission.
* * *
Much has been written about Leopold’s murder of millions of Congolese in his crusade for rubber, in Congo’s North, but little about what happened in the South. Kajumba’s living conditions in 2019 harked back to the stage of colonization that came next. In fact, his room seemed to have been lifted directly from Vocabulaire de ville de Elisabethville,[*2] one of the first collections of Congolese testimonies of life in southern Congo after Leopold had been censured and the Belgian state took control. The Vocabulaire describes the lot of “Domestics” who worked under Belgian colonialists in the early part of the twentieth century. The Belgians “brought a bad sort of slavery to us, the Congolese,” the unnamed narrator bitterly recalls. “In that respect the Whites had a very bad spirit indeed. Because they thought [it good] to build for us black people just a one-room house.” The Belgian masters would have large homes with extra rooms, but they would often keep animals in them rather than give them to their servants.
In the twenty-first century, the only difference was that Katanga’s big houses were inhabited by Congolese politicians and businessmen who had figured out how to hawk their country’s wealth and keep most of the profit. A few foreign businessmen—mostly Chinese, Lebanese, Belgian, and Israeli—joined their ranks. The lives of this select elite were spent in palatial mansions decked out in acres of marble. They frequently chartered private planes to South Africa, Zambia, the Middle East, and Europe, flying out of Kolwezi’s tiny airport. For fun, they rode Jet Skis on nearby Lake Nzilo.
Around Kajumba and Trésor’s home, a few of the trio’s meager possessions lay scattered about. At first, they were embarrassed to show me around. An old cathode-ray television sat in one corner, and two shoeboxes (Made in P.R.C.—the People’s Republic of China) filled with combs rested on the shelf beneath it. Atop the TV and on a nearby ledge had been placed some shampoo bottles, tubes of toothpaste, and a single toothbrush; in a bucket, some cassava and a long knife. Behind the bed, a hanger that was suspended from a nail in the wall held neatly pressed suits, shirts, and jackets, many with natty checks and stripes. It was essential for Kajumba and his roommates to keep up appearances. “No matter how you live, you still have to look good,” Trésor told me. And then there was the bed itself, barely big enough to fit one person, let alone three grown men with long, lanky limbs.
Skip Notes
*1 Also called Msidi or Mushidi by contemporary writers.
*2 The Belgians founded the city of Lubumbashi and called it Elisabethville after Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria, wife to King Albert I, the third king of the Belgians. The name was changed to Lubumbashi in 1966.
Chapter 3
The Beginnings of a Battery
The ink was barely dry on M. Stanley Whittingham’s chemistry doctorate. The twenty-seven-year-old chemist was keen to get away from Britain’s postimperial grayness. It was February 1968, and he wanted, as he remembered, “to go someplace where the sun shines.” Whittingham, who sported a sweep of black hair and thick spectacles, began to look for jobs in California.
