The Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, a Belgian mining company, began extracting copper from this region in the early twentieth century, building the towns of Kolwezi and Lubumbashi around the mining operations. Copper became so central to the colonial economy that it often accounted for half of all export earnings. After independence in 1960, the state-owned Gecamines inherited the mines and the infrastructure -- and the political entanglements that came with them. Gecamines produced copper, cobalt, and zinc from operations at Kambove, Kipushi, and Kolwezi, running a smelter in Lubumbashi and a hydrometallurgical plant at Shituru. But decades of civil conflict, mismanagement, and underinvestment left Gecamines a shadow of its colonial-era predecessor, its assets parceled out to foreign joint venture partners who held the majority stakes while the Congolese state retained minority shares.

In 2008, the DRC government began reviewing roughly 60 mining contracts, seeking what officials called a "fair attribution of shares" and demanding that foreign operators demonstrate "social actions with a visible impact." The review exposed the volatile politics of Congolese mining. In 2009, the government revoked First Quantum Minerals' license to operate the Kolwezi tailings project after the Canadian company had spent $750 million on the property. First Quantum challenged the decision at the International Chamber of Commerce, but a Congolese court ruled in 2010 that its Lonshi and Frontier mines had been awarded illegally. The Kolwezi project was subsequently sold to the Kazakh firm Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. The message was clear: no foreign investment, however large, was secure against sovereign reassertion.

Chinese companies have become the most aggressive new players in the copperbelt. China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group holds the majority stake in the Deziwa mine. China Railway, through its subsidiary China Overseas Engineering Group, partners in the Luishia and Kalumbwe Myunga mines and the Sicomines venture at Dikuluwe and Mashamba West. CMOC Group, formerly China Molybdenum, purchased the Tenke Fungurume mine in 2016 and the Kisanfu mine from Freeport-McMoRan. Swiss giant Glencore remains the other major force, having absorbed Katanga Mining as a subsidiary and taken majority stakes in the Kamoto Copper Company and the Mutanda mine. The pattern across the belt is consistent: foreign capital extracts, Gecamines holds a minority share, and the workers -- many of them artisanal miners operating without safety equipment in informal pits -- bear the physical risk.

Copper may have drawn the colonizers, but cobalt is driving the modern rush. The same geological formations that deposit copper throughout the Katanga Supergroup also concentrate cobalt in quantities found almost nowhere else on Earth. As electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage systems demand ever more cobalt, the DRC's mines have become critical nodes in global supply chains. The Kolwezi district alone hosts multiple copper-cobalt operations, and the rapid growth of the cobalt industry has sent the city's population surging. Artisanal miners, working in dangerous conditions alongside industrial operations, extract ore by hand from informal pits -- a practice that has drawn international scrutiny over labor conditions and child labor. The wealth beneath this stretch of Central Africa is enormous. Whether it benefits the people who live above it remains the defining question of Congolese mining.