Luishia mine sits in what was then Katanga Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo - one of dozens of copper and cobalt operations in a region the mining world knew simply as the Copperbelt. The original open pit was mined from 1913 to 1949 by Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, the Belgian colonial mining company that effectively ran much of southern Congo as a company fief. The geology was generous. The deposit was a reduced facies-type body of copper and cobalt, and over its operating life the mine produced 4.1 million tonnes of ore at an average grade of 8.3 percent copper. That is a very rich ore by modern standards. The wealth that came out of Luishia - and hundreds of mines like it - built fortunes in Brussels, Antwerp, and London. What it built in the Congo is a more complicated question.

Mining work in colonial Katanga was brutal. The pay was poor, the housing was worse, and industrial injury was constant. In 1938, workers at Luishia answered those conditions with arson and sabotage - a language that needed no translation. In December 1941, miners at Luishia joined those at neighboring mines in a general strike across the area. This was not a minor labor action. It was a coordinated refusal during wartime, when the Allied demand for Congolese copper was at its peak and when the colonial administration had every reason to respond harshly. The men who organized it understood their leverage exactly. They also understood the risk. These strikes are often remembered in textbooks as labor history, but the people who made them were not abstractions. They were workers with families in mine camps and villages up and down the belt, who decided that the conditions of their work were not tolerable and acted on that judgment.

The original pit closed in 1949, but Luishia was not done. A 2007 assessment of the main Luishia mining permit described a property of about 1,729 square kilometers containing a defined resource of 26.1 million tonnes of ore, with average grades of 2.95 percent copper and 0.68 percent cobalt. The review suggested practical production of 3,000 tonnes of ore per day through large-scale open-cut mining. By 2008, the main Luishia orebody was controlled by a consortium of Chinese and local Congolese investors - a shift that mirrored a wider change in Congolese mining, as Chinese capital moved into territory that had once been the exclusive preserve of European firms. The ownership had changed. The ore was the same ore, and much of the labor was still done by the same kinds of workers, in the same landscape, with many of the same risks.

About 75 km northwest of Lubumbashi, the Luishia South project covers 16.2 square kilometers to the south of the main orebody. A small historical pit was worked there between 1923 and 1928 through shafts and tunnels; about 350,000 tonnes of ore at 8.6 percent copper were identified. Most of it was eventually mined out in a small open pit. After the formal mine closed, artisanal miners - independent workers digging by hand or with simple tools - kept working the site sporadically. They are part of the story too. When big operations leave, artisanal miners often remain, taking on the risk and the low pay that formal operations no longer find profitable. Small-scale and artisanal mining across the Copperbelt supports tens of thousands of families; it is also associated with serious safety and child labor concerns. Luishia South is a microcosm: a property that has passed through colonial extraction, artisanal survival, and modern formalization attempts.

In March 2006 the Congolese government issued a permit to exploit the Luishia South project. Chevalier Resources acquired 57 percent of it. In November 2009, African Metals Corporation announced a binding letter of intent to buy Chevalier. By August 2011 the company estimated an inferred resource of 14.7 million tonnes at 1.1 percent copper and 0.3 percent cobalt - translating to 161,700 tonnes of contained copper and 44,100 tonnes of contained cobalt. Then politics intervened. In November 2011, the mine was evacuated because of violence surrounding the Congolese election. Work resumed only after Joseph Kabila's re-election. In 2018, African Metals sold its Luishia South interest to Excellen Minerals SARL and to Simeon Tshisangama, president of TSM Entreprise sprl. Ownership ping-ponged through Canadian-listed shells, Congolese entrepreneurs, and Chinese partners - the usual choreography of modern African mining. Beneath all of it, the ore body was unchanged. So was the basic arrangement: workers underground or in the pit, extracting minerals that will heat, wire, and power places they themselves may never see.