The highest point in Lubumbashi is the massive smokestack rising from the grounds of the abandoned state-owned mining facility. This sprawling and decrepit industrial complex is the city’s geographic center and from which it radiates. The second highest point in the city sits right next to the smokestack- an enormous dark pile of waste material from six decades of smelting the impossibly rich ores of the surrounding region, colloquially known as the “Copperbelt.”
The waste rock that composes the pile is referred to locally as scoria, scorie in French. The pile itself is about 20 feet shorter than it was when I was here last year, as it is slowly being resmelted in a new facility a hundred meters away, built and operated in a partnership between Gécamines, the Congolese state mining company, and the Belgian firm Unicore. The main product of this process is germanium, a rare mineral used in semiconductors and solar arrays, whose global export production is dominated by China.
All across the Copperbelt, piles of waste rock like this one are being processed with new technologies to produce minerals that weren’t used when the rocks were first dug up and melted down. The scoria also has other uses: its ubiquity and subsequent cheapness means that it is used as gravel, as sand in concrete, as road-filler, and any number of domestic and municipal uses that belie the latent toxicity of the material. The neighborhoods in the shadow of the smokestack contain some of the highest levels of soil-metal contamination of any city in the world.
I’m here for the 8th Lubumbashi Biennial, an international gathering of artists organized by the Picha Art Collective, founded by a group of Lubumbashi artists and colleagues to promote the city’s arts and artists. Lubumbashi was founded in the 1920s by the Belgian colonial regime and is now Congo’s second-largest city and the capital of the province of Katanga. Katanga sits on some of the planet’s most mineralogically diverse and rich soils and produces significant if not majority, percentages of the world’s cobalt and copper ores. My part in the Biennial is collaborating with two other artists: Toshie Takeuchi of Japan and Sixte Kakinda of Congo. Together, we are filling the exhibition space of the Picha Art Center, an old mine manager’s house from the colonial period, with artworks addressing the history of a single Congolese mine named Shinkolobwe.
If you haven’t heard the name, you’re in broad company. But you should know it, as it is a pin on which the world took a dramatic turn.
The Shinkolobwe mine produced some of the most highly concentrated uranium ore ever found on Earth, the primary source of fissile material for the Manhattan Project. The impossibly high levels of purity (up to 75%, where most mines struggle to yield 1%) made it possible for the US Army to design, develop, and detonate the first atomic weapons in just three years and then to build thousands more. The centrality of the mine to the highly secretive atomic project led to its removal from maps and its formal interdiction from news coverage during the first atomic decade. That secrecy and silencing eventually produced its momentum, and the name of the mine passed out of history to the extent that most people in the West think that the uranium ore that powered the Trinity test and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from Canada.
On that first day in the gallery at Picha, Toshie was installing a grid of photos on one of the walls. Antique postcards showing mineworkers moving ore at Shinkolobwe in hand carts, Belgian colonial administrators displaying chunks of ore from the mine, and archival images of children with grievous deformities suffered as a result of exposure to the Hiroshima blast were lined up carefully alongside a series of images Toshie had created by taking a sample of uranium ore from a Belgian museum and using it to fog photographic paper.
My part in the collaboration consisted of a big linocut map, which traces the passage of the Shinkolobwe ore through the industrial infrastructure thrown up by the Manhattan Project to rapidly refine and enrich the necessary metal for the experiments that led to the bomb’s creation. I had spent the previous four years researching, drawing, carving, and printing the map, which shows the Congolese ore’s passage through what are now some of the most radioactively contaminated sites in the USA- the former Linde Air factory in Tonawanda, New York, the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis, and the sprawling Hanford reservation in the steppe lands of eastern Washington. The central theme of the map is the missing workers: the Congolese men and women who dug the most powerful uranium on the planet out of the ground with hand tools, transported it to trains in wheelbarrows, and made possible the extension of American imperial power to every square inch of the globe.
Sixte and I gathered around Toshie’s laptop to examine a photo series she had assembled, satellite scenes of the changing Shinkolobwe mine site throughout the last few years. When the Belgians returned Congo to the Congolese in 1960, they closed and sealed the mineshaft at Shinkolobwe. Over the ensuing decades, informal miners repeatedly entered the site to dig through the tailings piles for the rich refuse left behind, and their small troughs and channels can be seen pitting the waste heaps on the satellite photos. The mine itself, located some 80 km northwest of Lubumbashi, is currently inaccessible to outsiders; proscribed by the army, the state and federal government, and the Congolese version of the CIA: the Agence National de Renseignements, whose Lubumbashi office I had visited during my previous trip in hopes of gaining permission to visit the site. A senior official gravely denied my request, saying that any such permission would have to come from the capital.
Even as the mine remains out of reach in the real world, archived satellite images show a dramatic transformation in recent years. After my denial by the ANR agent last year, I opened Google Maps on my phone to examine the site and noted in great surprise that another mine appeared just one km east of the abandoned Shnkolobwe site. Returning to the present, in the gallery, the three of us gasped as we opened the application again- the first new mine had doubled in size, and a second mine had appeared just 1 km away to the west. The abandoned Shinkolobwe site was now ringed with a line of fresh-cut soil- presumably a trench or berm intended to keep artisanal miners out. The newest mine showed a huge plume of tailings extending to the north, and a close zoom revealed a fleet of gigantic earthmovers and ore trucks excavating a massive pit.
The following day, I arranged to meet Prof Basile from UNILU, one of the world’s eminent authorities on the biology of termites. When you fly into Lubumbashi, you can’t help seeing the regularly spaced mounds of the massive nests of African termite species dotting the ground between the vast and cavernous discolorations of the mines. These huge towers of dirt, constructed for hundreds (and occasionally thousands) of years, are a dominant feature of the dry forest and savannah landscape surrounding Lubumbashi. Prof Basile has established a small museum in Lubumbashi’s zoological park to showcase the impressive architectural and social achievements of these enormous colonies of what are, essentially, social cockroaches. The museum includes cross-sectioned specimens of mounds from several different species, showing the galleries and chambers where the termites grow fungus to eat or use fungus to decay woody matter, or where several species with different lifestyles cohabitate for their respective food-acquisition strategies to function in collaboration. Prof Basile noted that mining companies will use termite mounds as sources of information for the composition of the underlying soil, as the termites bring material up from deep underground to build the top layers of their mounds. From a panel listing a series of termite-related proverbs, he translated one: “Don’t add mud to a termite mound.”
“It means don’t give money to people who are already rich,” Prof Basile said with a wide grin.
I have my own rather strange reason for being interested in the mine- my father was recruited by the CIA to fly helicopters in Congo during Mobutu’s second coup in 1965. He faked his death in a scuba-diving accident to desert the British Royal Air Force. During his clandestine passage across the UK to meet his CIA contact in Belgium, he met the woman who would eventually become my mother. Since the principal reason for the ongoing US interest in Congolese politics and the installation of Mobutu was their historical relationship with the Shinkolobwe mine and the imperial power it had helped to summon, in a very real way, the mine is the whole reason that I exist.
At the opening press conference for the Biennial, Sixte was sitting on stage representing our project to the assembled Lubumbashi press corps, discussing the relationship between memory and history. He noted that at the Hiroshima Museum commemorating the holocaust unleashed through the atomic fission of Shinkolobwe ore. A letter from Albert Einstein on public display mentions the use of Congolese uranium in the Manhattan Project. “That paragraph is the only part of the letter that is not translated into Japanese,” said Sixte. “Most people in Japan have no idea about the historical relationship our two countries share through this context.” A journalist in the audience raised her hand to ask: “Isn’t it better just to let these parts of history lie, to refrain from dragging them back up?” Sixte shrugged and replied: “Unless we understand our history, we will continue to make strange choices based on our lack of understanding of why things are the ways they are.”
The following day was our exhibit’s opening, which started with a performance by Sixte in the basketball court across the street from Picha. With the scoria pile and the smokestack looming overhead, Sixte began his performance by drawing the word “Shinkolobwe” across the court’s surface in lines of black scoria. He was wearing a shirt sewn from fabric I had printed and brought with me from the states, a linoleum blackprint pattern that repeated in black and yellow inks; stylized images of the mine and the atomic cloud iterating in the warm orange light of Lubumbashi’s golden hour. Sixte began the performance in the Lubumbashi vernacular of call-and-response storytelling, asking the audience what they knew about the mine and writing their responses on sheets of paper, which he pinned to the ground with strokes of black scoria against the rising wind. At the end of his questions, he picked up the sheets, dusted them off, and read back to the audience their understanding of the mine and what it meant. Then he told them his version.
Inside the gallery, I had painted “What do people say about Shinkolobwe?” onto the wall in French and Swahili, and people were writing their responses on post-it notes and sticking them to the wall. A group of young artists cornered me to ask about one of my works: a vinyl banner featuring a photo of Detroit-area UAW workers who make batteries for electric vehicles out of Congolese cobalt. I had mailed them a big printout that said, in French and Swahili: “From Detroit to Lubumbashi: US autoworkers in solidarity with Congolese mineworkers” and in the photo printed on the banner they were holding it up with their fists raised. Some were smiling, some were serious. The group of young Congolese artists wanted to know who the people in the photo were. So I told them.
When they dispersed, another artist came over to introduce himself. “I work for an NGO that does social services for artisanal mineworkers,” he said. I said that I would be very grateful if he took the banner with him next time he went to one of the mining sites. He agreed to give it a shot.
Artisanal mineworkers make up some two-thirds of Congo’s mining workforce and produce 30% of the country’s ore. Laboring outside of the formal structures of big transnational mining companies, Congo’s artisanal miners are the people in the images that we in the west think of when we think about mining in Congo: big holes in the earth full of dusty people digging with hand tools. Child labor. Pit collapses. The bloodstain on the iPhone, the Chromebook, the Tesla. Artisanal mineworkers indeed dig metal in some of the harshest circumstances imaginable, but it’s also true that most of the money they earn from what they dig stays in their communities. The large-scale operations hire workers from far way, and their proceeds barely trickle down to the communities where the mines are located, instead lining the pockets of the political figures that distribute the contracts, and the foreign contractors that bring in the complex industrial infrastructure to dig the ore at scale. As the big mines poison the landscape and the water supply, agriculture becomes increasingly untenable, and artisanal mineworking becomes one of the only ways anyone in Katanga has to make a living.
In the lush LED-lit courtyard of a restaurant tucked away on one of Lubumbashi’s backstreets, a group of Congolese artists and Biennial attendees discussed the state of the mineral industry over dinner. Sometimes, it seemed like every conversation I joined at the Biennial ended up in this rhetorical place, circled around the mine, looking down into it and trying to see the future. The artisanal workers are exploited, no question, someone says, and mining is dangerous. But where there’s danger, there is often also money. There was loud laughter from around the table. Almost everyone in Lubumbashi knows someone who works in the mines.
I attended a performance by two young artists from Lubumbashi, Djo Kit, and Anthony Mutshipule, in the courtyard of a studio on the east side of downtown. Entering through an assemblage of red-and-white plastic warning tape required the audience to move past a steel barrel full of burning scrap, its lip painted dripping red and symbolizing the barrel in which Belgian gendarmes dissolved the body of Congo’s first Prime Minster, Patrice Lumumba, in acid taken from a storeroom at the state mining corporation’s warehouse on the edge of Lubumbashi. Lumumba was killed and dissolved shortly after independence, in a grove of trees just to the north of the city, for the crime of publicly stating that he was going to use Congo’s natural resources for the benefit of Congolese people. We all had to shield ourselves from the heat billowing off the barrel as we entered the courtyard. In the cooler air beyond it, we were invited to sit at a round table and write down whether we preferred the Congo of the past or the future.
I found myself talking with Sinzo Aanza, an artist and author from the Congolese city of Goma, whose installations examining Congolese history and futurity have taken the international art world by storm. He noted that what the past of Congo meant for many people in Lubumbashi was the period when the city was run by the state mining consortium, which provided housing, medical care, and cultural life to the residents of the city it had conjured from nowhere to house the people working in its mines. The working conditions were abominable, said Sinzo, but there was a kind of civic life that has been greatly degraded in the decades since.
The fire in the barrel was guttering, but the metal was glowing a deep and abiding red in the late afternoon light.
A few weeks after my return, US President Biden visited Angola to inaugurate the Lobito Corridor, a refurbishment of the colonial-era rail line that connects the Angolan port of Lobito to the mining districts of Congo’s Copperbelt. The first shipment of Shinkolobwe uranium left Lubumbashi via rail to Lobito in 1939, as the Nazis prepared to invade Belgium, and the Germanium being processed in the Umicore plant in Lubumbashi will follow it. As this article was being prepped to publish, China announced that it would respond to US sanctions by halting all sales of Germanium to the USA, making the Congolese supply of the mineral even more critical to the next few years of trade war, technological brinksmanship, and the so-called green transition.
