The Elements of Power

CHAPTER 2

THE GREAT ROCK THAT SPREADS ALL OVER THE LANDS


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, includ‑ ing 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.