The main open pit at Nchanga is more than four miles long, one mile wide, and 1,600 feet deep. Together with nine smaller satellite pits arranged in a crescent around Chingola, the operation covers nearly 30 square kilometers - the second-largest open-cast mine in the world. The deepest point of the pit sits 400 meters below the surrounding Copperbelt plateau. Beside it rises a 300-foot-high hill of tailings, the crushed rock left behind after the copper has been pulled out. Open-pit mining began here in 1955. Seven decades of removing rock have produced not just copper but a landscape shaped entirely by its absence. The underground mine runs alongside the open pit and still produces about 45 percent of Nchanga's copper, drawing from three orebodies - the Lower Orebody, Block A, and Chingola B - that together averaged 93,000 tonnes of contained copper per year over the past decade. The East Mill processes open-pit ore. The West Mill handles underground. Cobalt gets its own plant. The tailings leach facility pulls copper cathodes from what everyone else considered waste.

In 2015, 1,826 Zambian villagers did something British courts had never quite seen before. They sued Vedanta Resources - the UK-listed parent company - and its Zambian subsidiary, Konkola Copper Mines, in London. They argued that pollution from Nchanga had contaminated their water, damaged their farmland, and sickened their families, and that the British parent company was legally responsible alongside its Zambian arm. The case became known as Lungowe v Vedanta Resources plc, named for lead claimant Dominic Liswaniso Lungowe. It climbed all the way to the UK Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in 2019 that the villagers had the right to sue Vedanta in English courts. Vedanta settled in January 2021 without admitting liability. The settlement amount was not disclosed. The precedent, though, was set: British multinationals could no longer assume that distance and a subsidiary structure would insulate them from legal accountability at home for harms caused abroad. Earlier, in 2011, the Lusaka High Court had already required £1.3 million in damages for sulphuric acid contamination of the Kafue River in 2006. The same year Vedanta posted profits, the rivers were still running wrong.

The Kafue River drains the Copperbelt. Its water sustains villages, farms, fish, and eventually - through its confluence with the Zambezi - much of southern Zambia. When Nchanga's processing systems fail, it is the Kafue that carries the evidence downstream. The 2006 sulphuric acid spill was one such failure. The 2015 copper sulfate contamination was another. In 2020, the mine's own operators warned of a different kind of failure: heavy rainfall had destabilized 350 meters of the open pit's edge, and an estimated 20 million tonnes of material was expected to collapse. For a pit this size, that is geology announcing itself on its own timeline. The communities nearest the mine have spent decades watching these announcements. Their farmland has absorbed the tailings dust. Their boreholes have reflected the chemistry of whatever was leaking at whatever moment. In 2014, the mine reported £320 million in profit. The gap between those numbers and the conditions outside the fence is the story Lungowe v Vedanta forced into a courtroom.

Copper built modern Zambia, and Nchanga is where much of that copper has come from. The operation sits at the geological heart of the Copperbelt, a stretch of central African crust so mineral-rich that Belgian and British colonial powers divided it between them at the Congo-Zambia border and extracted fortunes while paying locally almost nothing. Nchanga's current owner, Konkola Copper Mines, is a joint venture between Vedanta Resources and ZCCM Investments Holdings - the Zambian state's mining investment vehicle. The ownership is shared on paper. The consequences of a pit four miles long, and a tailings pile three hundred feet high, and rivers that sometimes run orange, are not shared evenly at all. Zambia depends on the copper. The people of Chingola depend on the water. Those two dependencies have been negotiating their relationship, in courtrooms and in rivers, for as long as the mine has been here.