Anvil Mining, a company that once counted itself the leading copper operator in the DRC, brought Dikulushi into production in October 2002. The deal included a 10 percent Community Trust - an arrangement meant to channel benefits to local Moero Sector communities. For two years the trucks crossed Lake Mweru. For the Bantu communities on both shores, the ferry and the trucking convoys were the most visible sign of a mining boom that was reshaping Katanga faster than the national government could keep up with. The concentrate travelled thousands of kilometres. The ore body stayed where it was. And the town closest to the pit, Kilwa, became the name around which the hardest part of Dikulushi's history would settle.

In October 2004 a small, poorly-armed insurgent group attempted a brief uprising in Kilwa. Congolese army soldiers of the FARDC 62nd Brigade were sent to suppress it. What followed has been documented by human rights investigators as the Kilwa massacre: dozens of civilians killed, many in summary executions, some buried in mass graves. Anvil Mining was later accused of having provided logistical support - vehicles and fuel - to the army units involved. The company denied wrongdoing and published a statement it said came from traditional chiefs of the Moero Sector denying any company involvement and praising Anvil's contributions to the region. Congolese and international investigations into the massacre have continued for years. The families in Kilwa have never received full accountability, and the weight of those October days has never fully lifted from the operation upstream.

In December 2008, with copper prices collapsing, Anvil placed Dikulushi on care and maintenance. Mawson West, a new operator, reopened the mine in July 2010. Yields came in lower than expected. In 2015 Mawson West mothballed it again. Financial pressure drove the company into the arms of Galena Private Equity Resources, a subsidiary of the commodities trader Trafigura, and it was delisted from the Toronto exchange in 2016. Finally, in 2019, the China-based JCHX group acquired the operation. Four owners in seventeen years, each promising to bring the deposit back to production, each discovering the same thing: mining copper and silver in eastern Katanga is technically feasible and politically difficult, and the remoteness that keeps the ore safe also keeps the costs stubbornly high.

Dikulushi is not easy to find from the air. It sits in rolling miombo country, the Moero Sector's grassy plateaus folding down toward Lake Mweru to the east. The pit itself is compact - a bright red-brown incision among green hills, with a processing plant, a camp and a narrow access road looping in from the northwest. The lake dominates the horizon when you turn east: 110 kilometres of open water dividing the DRC from Zambia, its southern end vanishing into the Luapula wetlands. Kilwa lies on the shore below, a mixed town of fishers, traders and mine workers whose lives have been braided with the pit's fortunes for more than two decades. The silver in the ore made headlines. The people on the lakeshore are the story that keeps going.