Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara

Author:Siddharth Kara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

TILWEZEMBE

West of Shabara, the road pushes deeper into the fringes of a grim wasteland. Villages recede from the roadside into a vaguely discernable landscape choked by haze. The smog that was once heavy and obscuring near Lubumbashi has become stifling and oppressive. All seems darker here. The path forward is no longer clear. Whatever semblance of life existed up to this point vanishes entirely when we reach Tilwezembe.

Tilwezembe is a smaller mining site than many of the industrial copper-cobalt concessions in Lualaba Province, but it plays an outsize role in the violent and degrading nature of mining in the Congo. Based on everything I have seen and heard, Tilwezembe is the largest industrial site at which almost nothing but artisanal production takes place. The concession is located a few kilometers west of Mutanda and just under two kilometers south of the highway down a dirt road near the village of Mupanja. Mupanja is located near the end of the Lualaba River, which flows more than three thousand kilometers in a bold arc across the heart of the African continent before emptying in the Atlantic. Henry Morton Stanley started his epic journey down the Congo River about one thousand kilometers due north of Mupanja. The Belgians built a hydroelectric dam next to Mupanja in 1953 to provide power to UMHK’s copper mines in the area. The dam formed a lake, which the Belgians named Lac Delcommune after Alexandre Delcommune, who led the first Belgian campaign in 1891 into Katanga to try to sign a treaty with Msiri on behalf of King Leopold. He was also the first person to greet a battered Stanley when he finally reached Boma in 1877 after tracing the Congo River. After independence, the Congolese renamed Lac Delcommune to Lac Nzilo (“Young Lake”).

In addition to providing hydroelectric power to the mines, the river is also a source of fish and fresh water for local communities. Fresh, however, is not the correct word—the water is heavily polluted, a condition that local residents attribute to toxic runoff from nearby mines. The environmental researcher at the University of Lubumbashi whom I met after my visit to Kipushi, Germain, took samples from the river water near Mupanja and found particularly high levels of lead, chromium, cobalt, and industrial acids. When I inspected the water, it had an unnaturally dark color and was topped with slicks and sludge. There were a few areas of bubbly foam collected along the riverbank, in addition to scatterings of dead fish. I recalled the words of Reine, the student in Lubumbashi, who said that my heart would cry when I saw what the mining companies had done to the forests and rivers. I felt both sadness and outrage as I watched children splashing innocently in the toxic waters. Men fished for dinner from the bridge above the river, and women washed clothes along the riverbank as white-breasted cormorants floated by. The people of Mupanja were being contaminated in every possible way.

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