Nkasi’s move to the big city that was soon to become the colony’s capital was due to a twenty-milligram grain of glass that had been found years before at a spot many hundreds of kilometers to the east. In 1907 Narcisse Janot, a Belgian prospector traveling around Kasai with a geologist, found a chunk of crystal that did not look entirely unpromising. Because he did not have the instruments needed to carry out a petrological assay, he put it in a tube and took it back with him to Brussels. When he got home however, he forgot about it and the tiny stone remained among the many geological samples brought back by the expedition. It turned up again only years later. Further analysis proved that it was, indeed, a diamond.31 A veritable rush ensued. Kasai turned out to be the source of high-grade diamonds fit for jewelry, but also of a rougher sort in great demand for industrial use.
At other spots as well, the colony’s substratum proved to have highly welcome surprises in store. Back in 1892 the young geologist Jules Cornet had discovered extremely rich veins of copper in Katanga: areas such as Kambolove, Likasi, and Kipushi seemed particularly promising. That evening in his tent, he noted: “I would not dare to venture a figure concerning the enormous quantity of copper present at the sites I have recently examined: if I did, it would sound all too outrageous and unbelievable.”32 King Leopold II made him swear to keep his discovery a secret, so as not to rouse Britain’s interest. Probably not unwise: the copper deposits of Katanga proved to be the richest in the world. Some areas of substrate contained up to 16 percent pure copper. In a few rivers in the hilly northeast of the country, close to the border with Uganda, two Australian prospectors found a number of unsightly chunks of metal that gleamed in the sun: gold. The sites at Kilo and Moto would develop into the most important gold mining area in Central Africa. And in 1915 another prospector in Katanga found a yellowish, extremely dense stone that reminded him of the work of Pierre and Marie Curie. Later analysis showed the stone to indeed be very rich in uranium. The place where it was found became the Shinkolobwe mine—for decades the world’s major supplier of uranium ore.
Beneath its surface, Congo turned out to conceal a true “geological scandal,” as Cornet put it. It was almost too good to be true. Until then, the economic exploitation of the area had been aimed exclusively at its biological riches—ivory and rubber—but now a far greater wealth was found to be lying a few meters under the ground. Katanga, the rather unpromising region that Leopold had annexed almost by accident in 1884, suddenly turned out to contain an improbably vast treasure trove. In addition to copper and uranium there were major deposits of zinc, cobalt, tin, gold, wolfram, manganese, tantalum, and anthracite coal. The discovery that the colony was sitting atop these immense mineral riches came, by the way, not a moment too soon. Revenues from rubber harvesting had begun sinking rapidly as from 1910. The world price for rubber was in free fall. In 1901 rubber had accounted for 87 percent of Congo’s exports; by 1928 that was only 1 percent.33 “These days,” a traveler noted in 1922, “one no longer—or almost no longer—refers to rubber in Congo.”34
It seemed like a historical déjà vu: in the same way that the rubber boom had arrived just in time to offset the dwindling ivory trade, mining began just in time to replace the ailing rubber industry. There is no other country in the world as fortunate as Congo in terms of its natural wealth. During the last century and a half, whenever acute demand has arisen on the international market for a given raw material—ivory in the Victorian era; rubber after the invention of the inflatable tire; copper during full-out industrial and military expansion; uranium during the Cold War; alternative electrical energy during the oil crisis of the 1970s; coltan in the age of portable telephonics—Congo has turned out to contain huge supplies of the coveted commodity. It has easily been able to meet demand. The economic history of Congo is one of improbably lucky breaks. But also of improbably great misery. As a rule, not a drop of the fabulous profits trickled down to the larger part of the population. That dichotomy, that is what we call tragedy. Nkasi, who once worked by the sweat of his brow to empty sacks of jewel-laden earth, profited very little indeed from the entire diamond business. Today he is poor as a pauper.
For the colonizer, however, these finds were extremely important. They signaled the start of the local mining industry, even today the most important branch of Congolese industry by far. But extracting and processing ore was not the same as buying tusks or commandeering baskets full of rubber. To achieve a profit here, one had to make huge investments. Crushers and rinsing installations had to be built, ovens, foundries, hoists, and rolling mills. What’s more, the most important minerals came from regions far from the ocean. If Africa resembled a giant pear, then Katanga was “if not its heart, then certainly one [of] its best seeds.”35 That called for the construction of new railroads, harbors, telegraph lines, and roads.
All this was financed by the Belgian state and private capital. The gold-mines of Kilo-Moto were at first entirely state owned; the enterprise went public in 1926. In other places one reverted to the system of concessionaries, the same arrangement that had made “red rubber” possible. Those companies operated with private capital, but there was also usually a lavish retombée (fall back, beneficial effect) for the colonial treasury. That took place not by means of direct taxation (before World War I, a tax on profits was still almost unheard of), but by the mandatory relinquishing of large packets of shares to the colonial government. That stock portfolio made it possible for the treasury of the Belgian Congo to fall back on what were often extremely ample dividends.
In 1906 three companies were set up that would play a crucial role in Congo’s mining activities: the Union Minière de Haut-Katanga (UMHK), the Société Internationale Forestière et Minière du Congo (Forminière), and the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga (BCK). Half the Union Minière’s starting capital came from British investors, the other half from the Generale Maatschappij, the powerful Belgian holding company that had maintained a firm grip on the national economy ever since 1822. The company focused largely on Katanga. After the initial extraction activities had been carried out by a private company—the Compagnie du Katanga, run by Albert Thys, the same industrialist who had built the railroad in Bas-Congo—the Comité Spécial du Katanga (CSK) became involved. The CSK had a very special legal structure: it was not a classic enterprise but a semigovernmental organization run by the colonial state, a partnership sui generis, with public-private funding and unique privileges. It laid claim to exclusive mining rights for half of Katanga, and was also charged with the region’s political administration. The CSK, although more a company than a government, even had its own police force. It was a state within the state. This odd situation continued even after the Union Minière came along in 1906. Economic and political interests remained tightly interwoven. As the supreme industrial colossus in Katanga, the CSK often had more say in the colonial administration than the colonial administration did in the company. The colonial government, for example, facilitated the recruitment of workers for the company. Katanga, in short, was subject to a form of administration unlike that in the rest of the country. It was that, among other things, which would later fuel the region’s struggle for independence.
Forminière was set up with American capital. Because the diamond deposits were so widely scattered, the company was originally allotted a prospecting stake of no less than 100 million hectares (about 39,000 square miles), later reduced to 2 million hectares (about 7,700 square miles) with fifty mines in the area around Shikapa and Bakwanga. In 1913 Forminière extracted 15,000 carats in Katanga; by 1922 that had grown to 220,000 carats.36
BCK, finally, the third company set up in 1906, was a private railroad company founded with French-Belgian capital and charged with the construction of a rail connection between Katanga and Bas-Congo. It was along this line that ore was to reach the ocean without leaving the territory of the Belgian Congo. The only other alternative would have been to cross through Portuguese, German, or British colonies, thereby generating troublesome forms of dependence. The new railroad was finished in 1928. But BCK was involved in more than simply building railroads. The company also owned enormous mining rights, which would later serve it very well indeed. Its concession turned out to contain one of the world’s largest deposits of industrial diamonds. The profits were spectacular and almost half of them flowed into the Congolese treasury.37