Kolwezi sits in the old Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mining center for a century and counting. The state enterprise Gécamines opened the Luilu refinery here in 1952, feeding it ore from open pits to the west and spitting out copper concentrates. What the refinery could not recover went into the Kingamyambo tailings dam and down the Musunoi river system. Decades of those leftovers are now geological features in their own right. Pits, waste rock dumps, tailings deposits - they define the landscape around town. The infrastructure that was once good has worn down: schools, hospitals, water systems, roads, all poorly maintained by the early 2000s. The labor force remained skilled, and Gécamines no longer offered the social support of earlier decades. Unemployment ran very high. When foreign companies arrived talking about extracting the remaining metals, expectations were enormous.

The pitch was elegant on paper. Build a plant to reprocess the Kingamyambo tailings dam and the Musunoi river deposits. Squeeze out around 70,000 tonnes of copper metal a year and up to 14,000 tonnes of cobalt hydroxide - the kind of cobalt that now flows into lithium-ion batteries the world over. Metso ND Engineering, based in Durban, was chosen to build the gear. In June 2004 the Canadian firm Adastra Minerals acquired the reclamation rights from the DRC Ministry of Mines. By early 2006 Adastra was assembling financing, and at the same time fending off a hostile takeover from a larger Canadian rival, First Quantum Minerals. First Quantum won. The project ended up operated by a consortium in which First Quantum held 65 percent, with Gécamines and institutional investors holding the rest.

In September 2009 First Quantum stopped work at Kolwezi. Roughly 700 people lost their jobs. The company had already sunk about $750 million into acquiring and developing the property when the DRC government revoked its license. First Quantum filed an action against the government at the International Chamber of Commerce Court of Arbitration. In June 2010 a Canadian edition of the Financial Post traced the property to a British Virgin Islands shell called Highwind Properties, allegedly linked to a major shareholder of the DRC copper venture Nikanor. Two months later the Kazakh-controlled Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation emerged as the real buyer through its BVI subsidiary. First Quantum accused ENRC of misleading investors about the disputed title. None of the 700 dismissed workers got their jobs back in the meantime.

In January 2012 the parties settled. ENRC paid First Quantum US$1.25 billion. First Quantum dropped its arbitration against the Congolese state. ENRC got clean title to the Kolwezi tailings and First Quantum's other DRC assets. The government escaped further international censure and the prospect of paying damages itself - facing, as one reporter put it, thousands of furious Congolese people who had lost their jobs when the assets were seized. The tailings project is now majority-owned by the Eurasian Resources Group, as ENRC's successor is known. The dumps are still there, the wind still lifts their dust, and Kolwezi remains the improbable center of the world's cobalt supply chain - a town that keeps mining its own past because its past is still worth more than most nations' futures.