The red earth around Kolwezi is the single most important patch of ground in the global energy transition, and most people driving electric cars have never heard of it. Thirty-five kilometres east of the city, a pit called Deziwa opens into the Lualaba plateau: an estimated 4.6 million tonnes of copper and 420,000 tonnes of cobalt lie in the rocks below. Cobalt makes lithium-ion batteries stable. Copper makes almost everything electric possible. Deziwa, adjacent to the sprawling Mutanda operation, is where some of it comes out of the ground - and where the deals to get it out have been anything but straightforward.
The paperwork begins in 2005, when the Congolese state mining company Gécamines agreed to explore Deziwa with a subsidiary of Copperbelt Minerals. A joint venture, Somidec, was set up: 68 percent Copperbelt, 32 percent Gécamines. In 2010, Zijin Mining of China offered $284 million for the Copperbelt stake. The Congolese government rejected the bid, saying the proposed sale violated its regulations. Three years later, in 2013, Gécamines bought the Copperbelt stake itself - financed with a $196 million loan from Dan Gertler's Fleurette Group, a financing arrangement that would later draw intense scrutiny from investigators tracking the flow of Congolese mining wealth.
In 2015 the China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group - CNMC - announced plans to develop Deziwa under Beijing's Made in China 2025 industrial strategy. Negotiations ran through 2016. Construction began in May 2018. The mine formally opened in January 2020. It now operates as Somidez, a joint venture between CNMC, which holds 51 percent, and Gécamines, which holds 49, with full ownership scheduled to revert to Gécamines after a fixed period. The $800 million deal to stand up the operation was criticised as opaque by the UK-based NGO Global Witness. A 2021 report by RAID, another UK-based investigator, documented what it described as regular violations of workers' rights at the site.
A modern open-pit mine is a surprisingly human place. The hauling trucks are enormous and the processing is computerised, but behind every shift is a workforce drawn largely from the Lualaba communities that have lived alongside the Copperbelt for generations - machine operators, electricians, metallurgists, cooks, drivers, security. Congolese workers do most of the labour. They are also the ones who bear the heat of the pit, the dust of the crushing circuits, and the consequences when safety systems fail. RAID's findings centred on complaints from this workforce. Around the margins, farming families have watched dambos dry and soils shift as the concentrator draws water. The question threading through every Congolese mining story is not whether the copper and cobalt will be extracted - they will - but who benefits, and on what terms.
From cruising altitude, the Deziwa operation is a pale scar on a green-brown plateau, the pit a terraced bowl stepping down in the red hues of oxidised copper ore. Tailings ponds glint turquoise in late sun. The road running west leads to Kolwezi, where most of the processed concentrate is trucked onward to smelters. To the north, the Mutanda mine spreads across the same mineralised belt. This is the Central African Copperbelt at full tilt: one of the richest concentrated stretches of copper and cobalt on Earth, now wired directly into the supply chains that will decide what battery ends up in what car in what city. The drama of the energy transition is not only in Shanghai boardrooms or California garages. A lot of it is out here, in a pit east of Kolwezi, under a sky that has seen all of it before.
Located at 10.79 degrees south, 25.78 degrees east, in Lualaba Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Best viewed from 10,000-15,000 feet AGL, where the terraced pit and adjacent Mutanda workings appear as reddish-brown bowls surrounded by green miombo. The nearest airport is Kolwezi Airport (FZQM), about 35 km west. Lubumbashi International (FZQA) is the major regional hub, roughly 300 km southeast. Afternoon convective buildups are common November through April; dry season June through September offers the clearest views.