Technically Kinsevere is three deposits: Central Pit, Mashi, and Kinsevere Hill. The ore bodies are stratiform, lying in alternating bands of dolomite and weathered terrigenous rock, the kind of geology that rewards open-pit extraction. The dolomitic formations beneath make excellent aquifers, which is useful when you need to sustain a Heavy Media Separation plant and an electric arc furnace, and complicated when you want to prevent groundwater contamination downstream. The mine sits in Kipushi Territory, a part of Katanga that has been producing copper for European and American markets since the Belgian colonial era. The Democratic Republic of Congo holds more than two-thirds of the world's cobalt reserves, and the axis that runs from Lubumbashi toward the Zambian Copperbelt is where much of that metal comes from the ground.

Gecamines, the Congolese state mining company, owned the Kinsevere deposit outright until the early 2000s, when it leased the site on a 25-year term to Moise Katumbi's Mining Company Katanga. By June 2006 the Australian firm Anvil Mining held 70 percent of the operating joint venture, with MCK keeping 30 percent. Anvil then bought its way to 95 percent, paying Katumbi enough to fund his governorship run the following year. Anvil invested roughly 400 million dollars in a new SX-EW plant (solvent extraction and electrowinning, the process that takes dissolved copper and deposits it as pure metal on cathode sheets). The Heavy Media Separation plant, the original infrastructure, shut down in June 2011. Anvil expected 36,000 to 38,000 tonnes of copper that year. After upgrades, the plan was 60,000 tonnes a year.

In September 2011 a Hong Kong-listed company called Minmetals Resources made a 1.3 billion dollar bid for Anvil. Anvil's board accepted unanimously. Gecamines immediately argued the ownership change triggered a review of the lease and threatened to block the deal. Minmetals extended its offer deadline repeatedly while negotiations ran. In February 2012 Gecamines relented; the Minerals and Metals Group completed the takeover the same month. Eight years later, in March 2020, a court in Kinshasa froze some of the operation's assets in response to a 258 million dollar wrongful-termination suit brought by Katumbi's old Mining Company Katanga. Three Congolese non-governmental organizations accused MMG of pressuring magistrates to influence the outcome. Africa Intelligence countered that the NGOs were working for Katumbi's political interests. The NGOs denied it. The case continues to work its way through the courts.

In October 2020 MMG announced it would halt mining at Kinsevere to rebuild the processing plant for oxide ore rather than sulfide. Nothing came out of the pits in 2021. In March 2022 the company unveiled a 600 million dollar expansion aimed at 80,000 tonnes of copper cathode per year, plus 5,000 tonnes of cobalt hydroxide. That cobalt is the more interesting number. It goes into lithium-ion batteries, and those batteries go into electric vehicles and mobile phones and grid-scale storage systems in Europe, North America, and east Asia. The red dust that settles on workers at Kinsevere ends up, through a long chain of intermediaries, in the devices that power the everyday lives of people who will never hear the mine's name. The pit keeps deepening. The politics keep shifting. The copper keeps moving.