Mutoshi's corporate history reads like a deal sheet. It was, until 2005, owned by Gecamines, the Congolese state mining company, together with a private DRC firm called EMIKO. That year the Australian-Canadian firm Anvil Mining paid US$12.5 million for a 70 percent stake. In October 2005, an Indian-connected company called Chemaf contested the deal, claiming prior rights from a 2003 arrangement with EMIKO. The dispute became a minor test case of whether Congolese courts would uphold mining contracts. Anvil mined the tailings from late 2005 until 2008, with progressively worse results as rainfall washed the coarser, richer grains downstream. In 2016, Chemaf, now a subsidiary of Dubai-based Shalina Resources under Shiraz Virji, acquired the site. In 2022, the Swiss trading giant Trafigura agreed to finance Chemaf with $600 million to turn Mutoshi into an industrial operation producing cobalt hydroxide. The ownership keeps changing. The ore underneath stays put.

Between 2018 and 2020, Chemaf and Trafigura ran what industry analysts called a formalization pilot at Mutoshi. Thousands of artisanal miners, locally called creuseurs or diggers, were registered, issued helmets and identification, and concentrated into a fenced area where they could dig for cobalt ore and sell it through an official channel. The program was a response to years of reporting by Amnesty International and others, documenting how cobalt from artisanal sites, including children's labor, had been ending up in batteries sold by major electronics and automotive brands. Formalization was meant to improve conditions and provide traceability. It reduced the worst abuses without eliminating the hazards. The work remained physically brutal, the wages uncertain, the lung disease likely. These were not quaint traditional miners. They were people making a livelihood in a region where formal jobs are scarce and the price of cobalt, set in London and Shanghai, decides whether dinner happens.

In March 2020, as the pandemic spread, Trafigura suspended the artisanal operation at Mutoshi. Families who had relied on daily pay lost it. Some kept digging anyway, elsewhere, in less organized sites where no one was counting bags or checking for children. In December 2020, Trafigura announced that the artisanal program would not resume. The ground was being reserved for Chemaf's industrial expansion. Bulldozers and heavy trucks would do what thousands of hand-diggers had done before. The decision was defended as necessary for cleaner production and easier supply-chain verification. For the families of the creuseurs, it meant the gate they had been walking through for two and a half years was now closed. Industrial mining produces fewer jobs per tonne, and those jobs require training and equipment most former artisanal miners will never receive.

Between 1960 and 1987, the original Mutoshi plant washed ore and discharged mineralized waste into the Kulumaziba watercourse. Decades later, when Anvil Mining arrived, those tailings were themselves economic: 102,000 tonnes of copper were estimated to remain in the first 7.5 kilometers of the deposit. That is the kind of detail that captures how mining works here. Waste from one era becomes the resource for the next. Rivers that were poisoned in the 1970s hold value in the 2020s. The Kolwezi Klippe, the geological formation that includes Mutoshi, was deposited by chemical processes billions of years old. The human history on top of it spans a century of extraction and about a decade of trying to figure out how to do it less cruelly. Mutoshi will keep producing for years. Whose lives it touches, and how, will keep being negotiated.