The elements of power, p.25
The Elements of Power, page 25
* * *
In March 2022, I heard that Mutumba was now the owner of Compagnie Antoine—an artisanal mining comptoir, one of the trading houses that bought hand-mined cobalt—and also ran an artisanal mining collective. I suspected he might have Chinese backers, and I wanted to speak to him about them.
He invited me to talk at a watering hole, a dimly lit sort of place, green with the glow of a beer ad above the bar. The men—for the other patrons were only male—were all smoking, watching a Mexican telenovela that had been translated into French. Mutumba was leaning low over a pool table. A cigarette hung from his lips, and he muttered for me to wait. After loudly winning the game, he strolled over to me and knocked another cheap stick out of a half-empty soft pack. The Mutumba before me had changed—his beard had filled out, and his cheeks were fuller. He was now, he declared, rich.
Tobacco ash kept falling in fiery chunks from the cherry of Mutumba’s cigarette onto his fashionably ripped jeans. “You’ve come here for business,” he said, slurring his words. “I am now very strong in business.” He had just that week received a permit, he said, brandishing a piece of paper signed by Fifi Masuka Saini, the acting governor of Lualaba Province. “I have Fifi behind me, and my Chinese,” he said.
Compagnie Antoine did not technically belong to Kalala, as such businesses were supposed to be owned by Congolese. Kalala, however, was Mutumba’s not-so-secret backer. Mutumba told me of recent trouble: The presidential guard, he said, had tried to seize his mine site on behalf of a member of President Tshisekedi’s family. “But we fought them off—the governor stopped it from happening,” he told me. I asked him if I could visit the site where the copper and cobalt he traded came from. He said I could, then maneuvered his face close to mine in a fog of fumed alcohol: “But, as I have said, I have become strong in business. Pay me $500.”
When I told Mutumba I couldn’t pay him to enter his mine site, he became agitated. He finally agreed to let me meet Kalala. But when the appointed day came around, he stopped picking up his phone, and people near his home in Kolwezi told me that they had seen him roaring drunk with a couple of Chinese men.
* * *
I contacted Mutumba again a few months later, and he agreed to meet me at my hotel in the evening. “We must do it quickly,” he said. “Tomorrow, I am going to the bush to buy cobalt for the Chinese.” I asked him if I could tag along, but he laughed: “Where I am going, there is no law. There is no protection for you.”
He told me to get into an idling taxi. Waiting inside was a woman with an updo that recalled the hairstyles of the Ronettes. Mutumba nervously laid out conditions: He would sanction questions; the lady with the updo would translate from French to Kiswahili; the interview would last only ten minutes. He was already drunk.
In the darkness, we entered the Chinese compound to the barking of dogs. It was not particularly large or luxurious, though it was in a relatively upscale part of town. A Congolese woman watched a child crawling about on a patio outside Kalala’s bungalow. Above them, mosquitoes buzzed around fluorescent bulbs that washed the front of the house with an anemic glow.
Inside, in a bare-walled room, two men in their late thirties were sitting at a table that was empty save for a cluster of condiments and a packet of Oreos. Kalala, who was the fleshier of the two and sported a wispy goatee, welcomed me, then bade me take a seat. The other, in a gray polo, went to an open window and started smoking. Kalala began by apologizing. He said he spoke neither English nor French but did speak Kiswahili, and then he proceeded to tell me why he had come to Congo.
Mutumba occasionally interjected with loud remarks in Kiswahili that sounded like they were meant to be witty. These elicited the kind of wry smile from Kalala that indicated tolerance rather than the tight brotherhood that Mutumba had boasted he shared with the Chinese businessman. “I came here to find a wife,” Kalala told me. “And now I am stuck here with my family.” He gestured at the woman with the young child who had followed us in from outside.
* * *
It took me a little while to understand what Kalala was talking about. Why did he need to go to Congo to find a wife? Kalala explained that he was from a rural part of Shaanxi, in Central China. Thirty-five years of China’s one-child policy between 1980 and 2015 had led to a high rate of girl babies being abandoned or even killed. In 2005, in Shaanxi, Kalala’s home province, 130 boys were born for every 100 girls. The situation left the poorest men unable to marry, especially in rural areas. These unmarried men were known colloquially as guang gun, or bare branches.
Kalala had come to Congo at the age of thirty-six to escape the fate of the guang gun, he said, fiddling with the packet of Oreos on the table. He had wanted to start a business and get married. When he arrived, he quickly fell into Katanga’s mining industry. “The most important thing here is mines,” he said. He dreamed of riches. “You can get more than in China. In China, there is nothing special; here there is copper, there is cobalt. Here I am doing business. There in China, it was difficult. Here I have money, a house, a child.”
Entrepreneurs like Kalala are “all over Africa,” according to Deborah Bräutigam, a Johns Hopkins expert in China-Africa relations. There are numerous theories as to where such businessmen come from. Self-interested Western miners might invoke the idea of a “fifth column” of such workers as they point to China’s increasing control of battery minerals in Africa; scaremongering politicians in Europe, in the U.S., and in countries where there are large numbers of Chinese expat workers might use the racist rhetoric of the nineteenth-century “yellow peril.” In Congo, angry mobs occasionally attack Chinese businesses. Just over the border from Katanga, the firebrand politician Michael Sata won the 2011 presidential election in Zambia, in large part by stirring up Sinophobic sentiment. Such theories are occasionally given a boost when the international press reveals that the Chinese government is operating “a purported network of unsanctioned and illegal Chinese ‘police stations’ around the world.”
But far from being a vast organized mass guided by a central bureau in Beijing, most of these small-time Chinese businessmen are striking out alone, leaving their homes to find riches in the broader world. They are, in many respects, modern-day equivalents of the Western wildcatters celebrated in capitalist lore. A Chinese community website based in southern Congo evokes the mythos of the Wild West’s gold rush when it exhorts Chinese workers to come to “uncover the mystery of the Democratic Republic of the Congo…come to pan for gold, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is waiting for you!” Brautigam told me that such strivers leave China and “just go wherever they think they can make money.”
Kalala seemed not to be fulfilling this second goal. It appeared that he was getting by, but just barely. In the bush outside Kolwezi, I had seen myriad other Chinese traders who were doing much worse, living in conditions of extreme poverty under roofs made of little more than ratty tarpaulins. “I lost a lot of money in the mines,” Kalala told me. “Now Antoine takes care of the trading. I can’t work in the mines anymore.” At this, Mutumba grinned. “Business in this country is a big problem. The Congolese are always stealing.” Kalala looked at me levelly, and his colleague offered me a cigarette. “The Congolese have got a lot of resources, but they don’t know how to do business.”
Chinese workers in Congo face widespread discrimination, attacks, and suspicion by the Congolese. The government has no official integration policy for Chinese migrants, who are often seen as “invaders,” Ngoie has noted. On my travels in Katanga, I often saw Chinese residents belittled or yelled at. The Chinese community website has posted an “inventory of recent violent incidents against Chinese in the mining provinces of Haut-Katanga and Lualaba,” and it documents ten occurrences of violence against more than a dozen Chinese workers in the two provinces within the space of less than a month. “The public security situation in Lualaba and Haut-Katanga Provinces in the southeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is severe, and vicious cases involving Chinese citizens have occurred many times,” the website states. It details, between May 27 and June 19, 2022, a spate of armed robberies, execution-style killings, and attacks by “inhumane” robbers who used scissors to slice the mouths of their Chinese victims.
But Kalala couldn’t simply up sticks and go back to China. He was the child of petty traders and had no business back in Shaanxi. He couldn’t take his wife and child there, he said. There was nothing back in China for him. “To be honest, things are not good here either. It has become very difficult here,” he continued. These days, the government was always sticking its nose into things, and that meant more people to pay off. “My dream is to start a farm here and to teach the Congolese people how to cultivate. They have so much good land here, but they just don’t understand how to cultivate.”
Kalala was tired: The night before, he had been at the casino until 1:00 a.m. “The casino is the only thing to do here apart from work,” Kalala told me. “In the casino, Chinese can spend a hundred thousand, four hundred thousand dollars a night.” Mutumba cut in. He had to go—he had cobalt and copper to buy in the bush tomorrow. I wondered if Kalala really knew or cared whom Mutumba bought off to find minerals, what he was up to in the bush. Nobody in the room wanted to talk about the specifics of business, but I imagined that no one would object to Mutumba buying low, selling high, and ignoring anything else.
Chapter 33
Papa Solution
In mid-2017, Chinese workers arrived in the village of Samukinda, half an hour northwest of Kasulo, and quickly constructed two dozen houses with corrugated-iron roofs. Kasulo residents were ordered to leave their neighborhood within two weeks and take a payout of $2,500 or move into one of the houses at Samukinda. The Congolese government revealed that a mining permit had been granted to Congo Dongfang, which would remove the topsoil and then wall off what had once been the neighborhood. Creuseurs from an approved cooperative would be allowed to mine the site, and Congo Dongfang would become the exclusive buyer of Kasulo’s ore.
A consortium of local civil-society organizations wrote to the governor, Richard Muyej Mangez Mans, protesting that the evictions were illegal, but he pressed on. Zanga Muteba, the baker, told me that on a rainy day a few months later, employees of Congo Dongfang “came with huge trucks to crush our houses.”
Getting to Samukinda from Kolwezi takes about forty minutes. I made the trip in May 2019, noticing how faith inflected everything in the region: On the road, I passed the Mount Carmel health clinic, the Salon Apocalypse hairdresser, the Light of God tire shop. Eventually, the road became unpaved. Trucks carrying sulfuric acid threw up plumes of dust as they trundled toward factories where raw minerals were processed.
As I walked through the village, children laughed and pointed at me, shouting “Chinese! Chinese!” The customary chief of Samukinda, a wizened lady named Nama Mavu, told me that the smallest ones among them hadn’t seen non-Chinese foreigners. Samukinda was seldom visited, even though factories and mines had been built nearby. Mavu assigned two young men to escort me to the houses that Congo Dongfang had built. A row of modern-looking white buildings rose in the distance. As they came into focus, it was clear that their construction was slapdash.
Few of the homes were even occupied—most of the original residents of Kasulo had just taken the payoff, gritted their teeth, and moved to another sector of Kolwezi. Those families who had chosen to take a house had been shown a brochure with beautiful pictures. But the homes Congo Dongfang built for them turned out to have no electricity or bathrooms. The roofs leaked, and the well at the corner of the development was dry. Moving to a small village with no transport into the city made it impossible for people to keep their jobs, if they had them. Most of the families moved away after a few months.
Muteba was one of the few original displaced residents who remained in Samukinda. He did so only because he had nowhere else to go. In his seventies and retired, he wore a soiled lab coat over his emaciated body. He welcomed me into his house, which was stifling hot. The roof was only roughly attached to the walls. There was little decoration save the moldering skin of a small animal that Muteba had hung up. He had also dug himself a lavatory pit, which was covered with a board. “The water here, it’s not good,” he said. “The smell of acid and pollutants comes out of any hole we try to dig for water.”
The old baker was bitter, ill, and suffering from diarrhea. He recalled his home in Kasulo. “It was a big parcel of land,” he said. “It had at least fifteen trees—avocado trees, mango trees. All that was mine.” He wondered how long he would last out in the bush inside the collapsing home that the Chinese miners had built for him. “We were chased out of our homes like animals, and now we suffer like strangers.”
* * *
A few days later, escorted by company representatives, I visited the Congo Dongfang mine in Kasulo. Signs by the gate said that children and pregnant women were forbidden from entering. Inside the compound, the land that had once been a bustling neighborhood was now just a giant red crater. I saw no children during my visit, but Odilon Kajumba Kilanga told me that they still found their way in; responding to written queries in 2021, a Huayou spokesperson said that the company planned to “gradually eradicate all forms of human-rights violation with a responsible supply chain.”
My minders cautioned me not to wander too close to the creuseurs, as they were liable to be violent. Not long before my arrival, a group of them had set some company trucks on fire. “At CDM there were lots of messes,” James Kitangala, an official from the regional mining ministry, told me. “These people are weird. They can burn you alive without batting an eyelid. They killed a Chinese with their mining tools.” But there was scope for improvement now that Kasulo was being “formalized,” as he put it. “Artisanal miners now have the opportunity to be well led,” he said.
Kajumba noted that Congolese had been employed to mediate between the creuseurs and company officials. Often, the demands of the creuseurs were not met, and they went on strike. “You go in to work and say, ‘No, I won’t do anything,’ ” Kajumba said. “The Chinese will feel unsafe and call in the police.” The police, he added, do the company’s bidding: “They know they will get a gift from the Chinese, so they will threaten you with tear gas and batons.” Kajumba said that he had been tear-gassed by police at Kasulo. “Everyone ran to save his life,” he remembered. “We felt defenseless.”
Upon my arrival at the mine, I had been given a long run-through of safety protocols, but as I approached the creuseurs, it was clear that they had only rudimentary equipment. Plastic jerricans, cut roughly in half and tied to ropes, were being used to haul ore. Many creuseurs were shoeless, and I saw none wearing helmets or goggles, even though a confidential 2018 audit by the Korean conglomerate LG Chem had criticized the site for a lack of proper safety equipment.
Some creuseurs washed ore in dirty ponds by the pits. “The Chinese are cheating us,” one of them murmured. “They’re telling us the ore is less pure than it is.” Kajumba said he had stopped working at Kasulo six months earlier because he felt that he was being treated unfairly. “It’s as if you were working to suffer even more,” he told me.
In a warehouse at the site, I watched a man in a spiky red hat, his face grim, pulverizing ore on a concrete floor as two Chinese overseers scrutinized creuseurs from behind a barrier of chicken wire. No Chinese employee interacted with me, and nobody responded when I waved in greeting.
* * *
As Kasulo was being readied for its new incarnation, Joseph Kabila Kabange announced that, after eighteen years in office, he would not run for reelection. In January 2019, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo became president in an election that most observers said was rigged. Once in office, Tshisekedi, a Luba-Kasai by ethnicity, began to install people from his ethnic group throughout the apparatus of power. Augustin Katumba Mwanke’s parallel system paled in comparison with the new regime, as Tshisekedi’s advisers traveled the length and breadth of the country looking for vaches laitières, milking cows.
Congo Dongfang International Mining overseers watch a Congolese worker evaluate minerals at the Kasulo mine in 2019.
Scandals followed Tshisekedi’s appointments. In 2022, Vidiye Tshimanga Tshipanda, one of the president’s top advisers, was caught on tape negotiating with two people posing as mine investors. As captured in two videos posted online by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Tshimanga said he could help them get a mining deal because he had close ties to the president. “I will take my—how you say that? My percentage of the investment,” he said. (He was later acquitted of corruption in a Kinshasa court for lack of evidence.) “At least the Kabila people were efficient,” Charlotte “Maman Ocean” Cime Jinga, the former mayor of Kolwezi and a national deputy in Moïse Katumbi Chapwe’s party, told me. “These people just steal.”
In May 2019, I met with Governor Muyej at his fortified compound in the center of Kolwezi. A portrait of Kabila, the former president, hung on the wall. Muyej said that Tshisekedi would likely maintain the course set by Kabila—“a flight that we must take to get out of poverty.”
