"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.

Inside Tsavo East National Park, the Athi and Tsavo rivers converge to form the Galana River. Most of the park consists of semi-arid grasslands and savanna. 

It is considered one of the world's biodiversity strongholds, and its popularity is mostly due to the vast amounts of diverse wildlife that can be seen, including the famous 'big five' consisting of lion, black rhino, cape buffalo, elephant and leopard. 

The park is also home to a great variety of bird life such as the black kite, crowned crane, lovebird and the sacred ibis. T

Tsavo East National Park is generally flat, with dry plains across which the Galana River flows. Other features include the Yatta Plateau and Lugard Falls.

Tsavo West National Park is more mountainous and wetter, with swamps, Lake Jipe and the Mzima Springs. It is known for birdlife and for its large mammals. It is also home to a black rhino sanctuary.[4]

“My take on Trump is that he is an inevitable creation of this unreal normal world,” Adam Curtis says. 

“Politics has become a pantomime or vaudeville in that it creates waves of anger rather than argument. Maybe people like Trump are successful simply because they fuel that anger, in the echo chambers of the internet.”

And, my, aren’t there a lot of bodies. More than 150,000 Britons have been killed by Covid: the equivalent in deaths of a twin towers terrorist attack happening on these shores every week for a year. 

Well over a million people report suffering long Covid, with one in six so ill they cannot carry out daily tasks.

A difficult question is how many new infections have so far occurred during this surge. Estimates suggest that 20% to 45% of the city’s people were infected during this wave.

Remarkably, the total number of infections Mumbai has seen since the pandemic began may be approaching the total number of residents in the city. 

This does not mean that almost everyone has been infected. It hints that reinfections could have been quite common, especially in the slums and during this wave.

Do you remember the end of Dr. Strangelove? When the Russian ambassador reveals the existence of the Doomsday device Strangelove makes the point that such weapons only have deterrent power if everyone knows about them.

Secret weapons have no ability to deter cataclysmic violence.

The reply from the Russian ambassador is one for the ages, “It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday.”

Remember this when we consider the curious question of the demise of Archegos Capital.

So I have to ask the question, “If you were the Chinese and you were now in a hybrid war with the U.S. how would you send a message back across the Pacific?”

This state of hybrid war, in effect a proxy for a direct military World War III began with the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and has been escalating for years. 

The entire Trump administration was one big hybrid war exercise of asymmetric attacks on each others’ capital markets and internal domestic policies — sanctions, counter-sanctions, tariffs, currency manipulations, etc.

Would you send warships some place or would you attack our credit markets?

Or more importantly would you plant literal financial tac nukes across multiple sectors of the financial world to combat any big push from the U.S. and Europe to foment a financial crisis on the eve of a conflict going kinetic?

Average number of new infections reported each day in Uganda rises by more than 120 over the last 3 weeks, 17% of its previous peak

Average number of new infections reported in Réunion each day reaches new high: Now reporting more than 1,000 daily

South Africa reports highest number of new infections since January

The answers to the questions MacIntyre and other experts are posing may influence the future course of the pandemic. 

For starters, the tiny nation has become a test case for two of the world’s most widely used vaccines. 

In the Seychelles, 57% of the vaccinated population received Sinopharm’s shot, and 43% got the Covishield vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc. 

Sinopharm’s inoculation has been donated or sold to countries around the globe, including Indonesia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe; 

Covishield makes up the bulk of shots distributed to poor nations in Africa and elsewhere through the Covax initiative, which seeks to make vaccine distribution more equitable.

What’s happening in Seychelles is very different from the experience of Israel, the second-most vaccinated nation, where Covid-19 infections have plummeted. 

The contrast could yield crucial insights into the efficacy of the different types of immunizations. 

In Israel the dominant vaccine was the messenger ribonucleic acid shot made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.

The pandemic has seen mRNA vaccines— Moderna Inc. makes another—being used in scale for the first time. 

Data from clinical trials so far suggest they are better at stopping Covid, tackling variants, and preventing the virus from spreading in the community. 

Sinopharm’s and AstraZeneca’s vaccines rely on more traditional methods, and their shots have been shown to have lower efficacy in studies.

What’s also apparent, so far, is that though there’s been a surge in cases in Seychelles, very few people are getting seriously ill. 

“We have only a few people needing intensive care. Two out of 40” in hospitals, said Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan in a May 10 interview. 

“The vaccine will protect people from getting serious symptoms.”

Still, more answers are needed. The government hasn’t disclosed what vaccine was administered in the breakthrough cases that make up a third of the total count. 

No agency has done any genomic sequencing to determine which variant is dominant on the islands, though the one first identified in South Africa, B.1.351, was detected in Seychelles in February.

On May 13, Jude Gedeon, the country’s public-health commissioner, said samples were to be sent to the Kenya Medical Research Institute for testing. 

The World Health Organization is also taking action. “We are very concerned, and we are sending a multidisciplinary team there to help the Seychelles government address the situation,” says Richard Mihigo, program area manager for immunization and vaccine development at the WHO’s regional office for Africa in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. 

“We are also in discussion with the government to conduct a vaccine effectiveness study.”

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel (now a billionaire equity shareholder) was previously CEO of bioMérieux.

bioMérieux's founder, Alain Mérieux, is a personal friend of Xi Jinping, & he helped build the P4 lab in Wuhan.

Ethiopia’s general election, originally scheduled for August 2020 but delayed amid the Covid-19 pandemic, is set for 5 June. 

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is looking to secure a mandate for his Prosperity Party (PP), formed in November 2019 out of the parties in Ethiopia’s former ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), with the exception of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), with which he went to war in November 2020.

The conditions for holding the polls are worse than in 2020. 

Despite limited testing, by 20 April the Ministry of Health had recorded a cumulative total of almost 250,000 Covid-19 cases in a country with a population of more than 100 million. 

Separately, on 23 March Abiy told parliament that the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) was “in a major fight on eight fronts” against armed groups in north and west Ethiopia.

These fronts include the conflict in the Tigray region, where forces working with the ENDF – Amhara special forces and militia, and Eritrean troops – are fighting forces aligned with the TPLF, the region’s former ruling party that Abiy replaced at the end of November 2020 with PP affiliates as the transitional administration. 

The ENDF is also combating an insurgency by the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) in western and southern Oromia.

Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province is caught up in a security challenge that has captured global attention. 

The situation endangers tens of thousands of lives and has destabilised northern Mozambique. It also potentially threatens foreign direct investment in large-scale infrastructure, mining, exploration and other projects in the entire southern Africa region. 

At the root of the conflict is a governance challenge that includes allegations of deeply entrenched corruption in the ruling party, the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO). 

Poor governance and state absence have antagonised the local population and left a security vacuum. 

In the short term, the attacks need to be contained and the violent extremists driven out of the areas they occupy, such as the strategic port of Mocimboa da Praia. 

Substantial aid and support are urgently needed to respond to the humanitarian tragedy caused by the recent attacks during which 30,500 people were displaced. 

Overall, the insurgency has caused 2,838 deaths, of which 1,500 were civilians, and displaced more than 700,000 people.

To restore security, Mozambique’s government should develop a detailed intelligence picture on funding, arms sources, local collaborators and supporters and external linkages. 

Without intelligence and a detailed understanding of the context, security and development cannot follow. 

Mozambique requires a security capacity (police and military) stationed in Cabo Delgado that can quickly move by road, air and sea throughout the region and along the Tanzanian border. 

These security forces also need to patrol and secure the coastline. 

Institute for Security Studies research on Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin has shown that demobilisation is vital in dealing with violent extremism. 

Mozambique’s government and its partners must take a proactive and holistic approach. 

Formal screening and profiling are needed to ensure that innocents are reintegrated, and those with a criminal record are processed through the justice system. 

To effectively counter radicalisation at community level in Cabo Delgado, the Mozambican government should pursue broad consultations with community, youth, women, civil society and religious institutions. 

Initiatives to promote inter-community and inter-faith dialogue among the population will be needed. This could culminate in civil society or non-governmental platforms or committees to help resolve the crisis. 

In the longer term, the region’s recovery will depend on alternative livelihoods and poverty-alleviation measures to offset the local community’s reliance on the illicit economy, smuggling and the drug trade. 

That economy is deeply rooted in Mozambique’s large informal sector and will resist regulation.

The government must commit to the development and effective governance of the region. 

Without this, the people of Cabo Delgado are unlikely to provide intelligence, support the security forces and join development initiatives. 

There have been some steps in this direction. Maputo is mobilising $764-million from multilateral partners to finance the Integrated Northern Development Agency (ADIN). ADIN has four main pillars — humanitarian assistance, economic development, community resilience and communication. 

The government needs to ensure that all critical stakeholders, including the religious and private sectors and traditional authorities, support it. 

The education system must be reinvigorated to train and prepare locals for skills suited to new job opportunities. Authorities in Cabo Delgado would also need to invest in public works programmes to complement job creation in the formal and informal sectors and offer social activities such as sport to engage the youth. 

An important poverty-alleviation measure would be a cash transfer (or social grants) programme that would directly benefit the community and demonstrate the government’s commitment to development. ADIN has already earmarked $25-million for this purpose for families in Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Nampula province. After that, it could be funded by ringfencing government income from the natural gas resources that should start flowing in 2024. 

Finally, Mozambique must control and coordinate the foreign support now flowing through many aid agencies and countries eager to help. 

Its future income from gas allows some flexibility not available to other similarly afflicted countries. 

Support that is uncoordinated and comes with numerous conditionalities detracts rather than contributes to stabilisation efforts.

Maputo needs to own and drive the response to the insurgency and the recovery of local and investor confidence. 

No amount of private security advice, support or foreign troops and equipment can compensate for political leadership and the establishment of trust between people, the government and regional actors. 

Other sources said Shekau had been injured in the fighting but had escaped.

To date there has been no confirmation of the current situation in Sambisa forest. 

Officials have reported Shekau's death many times over the past 12 years since the launch of Boko Haram's insurgency.

Kajumba knew that the journey to Kolwezi was dangerous, but he said of the creuseurs, “If they tell you to come, you come.” 

At first, the work, though strenuous, was exciting; he began each shift dreaming of riches. He had some stretches of good luck, but he never made the big score that would transform his life. 

Now in his mid-thirties, he is a laconic man who becomes animated only when he is discussing God or his favorite soccer team, TP Mazembe. 

Mining no longer holds romance for him; he sees the work as a symptom of his poverty rather than as a path out of it. 

When you are a creuseur, he said, you are “obliged to do what you can to make ends meet,” and this necessity trumps any fears about personal safety. “To be scared, you must first have means,” he said.

Kajumba joined the mining economy relatively late in life. In Kolwezi, children as young as three learn to pick out the purest ore from rock slabs. Soon enough, they are lugging ore for adult creuseurs. 

Teen-age boys often work perilous shifts navigating rickety shafts. Near large mines, the prostitution of women and young girls is pervasive. 

Other women wash raw mining material, which is often full of toxic metals and, in some cases, mildly radioactive. 

If a pregnant woman works with such heavy metals as cobalt, it can increase her chances of having a stillbirth or a child with birth defects. 

According to a recent study in The Lancet, women in southern Congo “had metal concentrations that are among the highest ever reported for pregnant women.” 

The study also found a strong link between fathers who worked with mining chemicals and fetal abnormalities in their children, noting that “paternal occupational mining exposure was the factor most strongly associated with birth defects.”

This year, cobalt prices have jumped some forty per cent, to more than twenty dollars a pound. 

The lure of mineral riches in a country as poor as Congo provides irresistible temptation for politicians and officials to steal and cheat. 

Soldiers who have been posted to Kolwezi during periods of unrest have been known to lay down their Kalashnikovs at night and enter the mines. 

At a meeting of investors in 2019, Simon Tuma Waku, then the president of the Chamber of Mines in Congo, used the language of a gold rush: “Cobalt—it makes you dream.”

After Kasulo’s mayor fled, many residents began tearing away at the ground beneath them. Some wealthier locals hired creuseurs to dig under their houses, with an agreement to split the profits. 

Two teams of creuseurs could each work twelve-hour shifts, chipping at the rock with hammers and chisels. A pastor and his congregation began digging under their church, stopping only for Sunday services.

By the end of 2014, two thousand creuseurs were working in the neighborhood, with little regulation. 

Kajumba and his coöperative soon joined in the hunt for minerals. 

One man on Kajumba’s team, Yannick Mputu, remembers this period as “the good times.” 

He told me, “There was a lot of money, and everybody was able to make some. The minerals were close to the surface, and they could be mined without digging deep holes.”

But the conditions quickly became dangerous. Not long after the mayor formally prohibited excavating for minerals, a mine shaft collapsed, killing five miners. 

Still, people kept digging, and by the time researchers for Amnesty International visited, less than a year after the discovery of cobalt in Kasulo, some of the holes made by creuseurs were a hundred feet deep. 

Once diggers reached seams of ore, they followed the mineral through the soil, often without building supports for their tunnels. 

As Murray Hitzman, the former U.S.G.S. scientist, pointed out, the heterogenite closest to the surface often contains the least cobalt, because of weathering. Creuseurs in Kasulo were risking their lives to obtain some of the worst ore.

Drug and alcohol use are rampant among creuseurs. Kajumba said that, though many people he knew in Kasulo wasted all their earnings on narcotics, he avoided such temptations. Whenever I met up with him, he made a point of drinking a cola.

Children who work in the mines are often drugged, in order to suppress hunger. 

Sister Catherine Mutindi, the founder of Good Shepherd Kolwezi, a Catholic charity that tries to stop child labor, said, “If the kids don’t make enough money, they have no food for the whole day. Some children we interviewed did not remember the last time they had a meal.”

Researchers estimate that thousands of children work in mining in Kolwezi alone. Mark Canavera, a faculty member at Columbia University who focusses on child welfare, has spent time in Kolwezi. 

“I don’t think the government has any capacity to monitor children’s involvement in this,” he told me. 

“Even if it did, it doesn’t have a framework for thinking about what is child labor and what isn’t.” 

In such a poor region, parents often expect their children to supplement the family’s income, even if the work is dangerous.

At a school run by Good Shepherd, I met Ziki, a serious boy with large dark eyes. He was fifteen but, because he had been malnourished for long periods, he looked much younger. 

His parents had been killed in a roadside accident when he was three; afterward, he was sent to live with his father’s sister. 

“My aunt sent her kids to school but sent me to the mines,” he said. “I was full of bitterness.” He joined a team of boys who roved across Kolwezi.

I was initially skeptical that Ziki had begun working at such a young age, but Mutindi said that she has seen many such cases. 

“The younger children of four, five, six, seven, these will mainly be collecting—picking stones,” she said. 

“It’s amazing how they know the value.” Children are eventually given such jobs as washing ore or carrying heavy sacks of rocks to traders who loiter near the sites on motorcycles. 

When I visited Kolwezi, streams alongside the city’s main roads teemed with women and children washing minerals.

As Ziki and his friends grew older, they began entering pits dug by creuseurs. The tunnels were square, four or five feet across, and about sixteen feet deep. It was infernally hot inside them, and oxygen was scarce. 

“As you were descending, there were rocks that you held on to,” he recalled. 

“If you held on to the wrong rock and it loosened from the wall, you would tumble into the hole. I would bump into older people who were going down into the pits, and they would tell us, ‘You children, if you enter you will die.’ ”

Ziki worked at mine sites around Kolwezi for eleven years. Although Congo’s government periodically claimed that it was cracking down on child labor, few adults tried to stop him from working. 

“Soldiers would hunt us,” he recalled. “If they caught you, they would beat you.” He went on, 

“If you sold your minerals, when you had money, there were street kids, thugs, who could stop you on the road and snatch your money. To pass safely, you had to pay five hundred francs”—about fifty cents—“so you could have safe passage. If you gave them nothing, they would beat you.”

Copper has been mined in Congo since at least the fourth century, and the deposits were known to Portuguese slave traders from the fifteenth century onward. 

Cobalt is a byproduct of copper production. In 1885, Belgium’s King Leopold II claimed the country as his private property and brutally exploited it for rubber; according to “King Leopold’s Ghost,” a 1998 book by Adam Hochschild, as many as ten million Congolese were killed. 

But, because of local resistance and the inaccessibility of the region, large-scale commercial mining didn’t begin in the south until the twentieth century.

Kolwezi was founded in 1937 by the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, a mining monopoly created by Belgian royal decree. 

These colonialists may not have matched the atrocities of King Leopold, but they still saw the country in starkly exploitative terms. 

They understood that the best way to extract Congo’s mineral wealth quickly was to create infrastructure. 

The company cleared the thickets of thorny acacias and miombo trees that had grown atop Kolwezi’s rich mineral deposits and built the town across the area’s rolling hills, with wide streets and bungalows for Europeans, whose neighborhoods were segregated from those where Congolese workers lived. 

Locals were used to create this infrastructure, and to labor in the mines, but, as Hitzman put it, “the whites ran everything.”

After independence, the southernmost province, Katanga, was viewed as a prize by Cold War powers. 

In the sixties, Katanga unsuccessfully tried to secede, with the support of Belgium and the Union Minière. 

Then, in 1978, Soviet-armed and Cuban-trained rebels seized Kolwezi and several hundred civilians were killed. 

Before the insurrection, the Soviet Union appeared to have been stockpiling cobalt, and, according to a report by the C.I.A., the attack set off “a round of panic buying and hoarding in the developed West.” 

Cobalt, the report declared, “is one of the most critical industrial metals.” Then, as now, the mineral was used in the manufacture of corrosion-resistant alloys for aircraft engines and gas turbines.

The West’s solution to the market instability was to prop up the country’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who presided over an almost farcically kleptocratic regime. 

The country’s élite sustained themselves, in part, on the profits from the mines. Gécamines, a state-controlled mining company, ran a virtual monopoly in Katanga’s copper-and-cobalt belt, and owned swaths of the cities that had been built to house miners.

By the early nineties, Mobutu and his cronies seemed to have stolen everything they could, and Congo was falling apart. As the country drifted toward civil war, the Army pillaged Gécamines, and former workers sold off minerals and machine parts in order to feed their families. 

In 1997, Mobutu went into exile. The disintegration of Gécamines transformed Congo’s mining landscape. 

Creuseurs began digging at the company’s largely abandoned sites, selling ore to foreign traders who had stayed behind after Mobutu was deposed.

Congo became mired in a series of wars in which more people were killed than in any other conflict since the Second World War. 

The country’s next leader, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was assassinated, in 2001, and his son Joseph took over. 

Both Kabilas funded their war efforts by selling Gécamines sites to foreigners. 

By the time Hitzman arrived, in the mid-two-thousands, Gécamines had become a shell. “Some of the best geologists I’ve ever met in my life were still working for Gécamines, and hadn’t been paid for three years,” Hitzman said. “It was sad as hell.”

Some creuseurs in Odilon Kajumba Kilanga’s collective used to work for Gécamines. 

Yannick Mputu, who is from Likasi, three hours east of Kolwezi, told me that he once reprocessed tailings at a company mine in his home town, adding, “When Gécamines closed, we had to go to Kolwezi.”

The collective regularly sneaked into open-pit mines that are now owned by companies like the Swiss multinational Glencore. 

“We enter at night, we work, and leave early in the morning,” Mputu told me. 

He noted that creuseurs put something aside for the soldiers and the police who supposedly prohibit outsiders from entering: “We give them a percentage of our earnings, and they let us in.”

In June, 2019, more than forty creuseurs were killed in a landslide after breaking into a Glencore-owned mine in Kolwezi. 

Kajumba and his friends were also at the site that night, but they were working a different seam. 

“The worst thing I’ve seen as a miner is the sheer number of dead bodies when there were cave-ins,” Kajumba said. 

The night after the Glencore landslide, a mining-company employee told me, “people snuck back in and continued digging.”

Videos of Kasulo taken during the height of the 2014 cobalt rush show orange tarpaulins covering fresh pits and bags of minerals littering the streets. 

Michael Kavanagh, a journalist, visited the district a year later, and published an article in the Times observing that the profusion of holes made it look “as if it had been bombed.” 

At one point, after creuseurs tunnelled beneath the main road running west to Angola, the road collapsed.

Kajumba and his team were part of this initial frenzy. They knew that picking at the rock beneath Kasulo’s sandy soil was treacherous, especially during the rainy season, but they were happy not to be risking arrest, as they were when they broke into the big mines. 

One day in December, 2014, Kajumba and other creuseurs were working a pit at Kasulo when they felt a rumble. “It was as if something was falling deep underneath us,” Kajumba recalled. 

They knew that, the previous day, a group of creuseurs working in a neighboring hole had asked a local chief to perform a ritual over a new area where they had been digging. 

Creuseurs, many of whom have little formal education and enter pits every day fearing that they might die, can be superstitious. 

Magic practitioners, known as féticheurs, are sometimes employed in the hope of increasing the chances that a fresh pit will contain bounties of cobalt and copper.

Such rituals are often benign, but they can have a sinister side. Among the prevailing superstitions in the region is a belief that having sex with a virgin girl will enhance one’s luck in the mines. 

While I was in Kolwezi, Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, showed me photographs of the bruised corpse of an eight-year-old girl who had been abducted and raped by a creuseur the previous week. 

(The miner was later apprehended; she sent me a video of him in prison.) 

Children frequently die while being raped. In one case, Mutindi said, she saw the body of an eighteen-month-old infant who had been raped by a creuseur.

At Kasulo, the féticheur who had performed the ritual over the neighboring pit had warned the miners not to enter it for three days, to avoid angering a dragon that, he said, lived at the bottom. 

The creuseurs were told that the pit would then be safe—and full of minerals. Rumors of the pit’s riches spread, and a day later some miners decided to disobey the féticheur. 

“Creuseurs have curiosity,” Mputu said. “They wanted to see what was down there.”

After Kajumba and Mputu felt the ground shudder, they rushed to the neighboring hole. Part of the tunnel had caved in, trapping their neighbors deep below. 

Some fifty people vaulted into the darkness, desperate to save their friends. Rescuers nearly suffocated in the subterranean passages. Eleven of the trapped miners died, as did four rescuers.

Following another series of féticheur rituals, and another period of waiting, all the bodies were pulled from the hole. Some were horrifically burned. 

“The last person who escaped from the pit said that he saw a huge flame,” Mputu told me. 

The fire’s origin was unclear, but artisanal miners can unearth pockets of flammable gas. 

To Mputu and his colleagues, the accident had supernatural trappings. “The cause of the flame was none other than the dragon,” he told me.

Nine months after the cave-in, another group of creuseurs in Kasulo burned a tire in an underground gallery, in an attempt to crack open a stubborn rock face. 

Five people asphyxiated from the fumes; thirteen others were hospitalized. After the incident, Radio Okapi, a media group sponsored by the United Nations, interviewed Kolwezi’s mayor, who said that a year earlier he had sent a report to his superiors urging the closure of the artisanal pits. 

According to Radio Okapi, the mayor “expressed regret that no site was closed because of this request.” 

The report noted that more than a thousand holes had been dug in Kasulo.

The first governor of Lualaba, Richard Muyej Mangez Mans, promoted himself as Papa Solution. 

In Kolwezi, many benches at bus stops were painted with his nickname. In an interview with the magazine Mining and Business, Muyej spoke critically of the cobalt “contagion” in Kasulo. 

“A plan is needed to avoid hasty movements that could turn into a humanitarian tragedy,” he said. “We have made a project proposal that we will submit to the authorities.”

The proposal, which Muyej didn’t disclose at the time, involved granting the mineral rights at Kasulo to a foreign company: Congo Dongfang International Mining, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Huayou, a Chinese conglomerate that, among other things, has supplied materials for iPhone batteries. 

China is the world’s largest producer of lithium-ion batteries, and Huayou has made a huge investment in Congo. 

After acquiring mineral rights in the region, in 2015, it built two cobalt refineries. According to an internal presentation, by 2017 Huayou controlled twenty-one per cent of the global cobalt market. 

(A Huayou spokesperson said that Congo Dongfang followed international standards in developing Kasulo, and plans to “gradually eradicate all forms of human-rights violation with a responsible supply chain.”)

China and Congo have a long history. During Leopold’s reign, Chinese workers were shipped to Congo to help build the national railroad. 

In the nineteen-seventies, Mobutu turned to Mao’s regime for technical collaboration on infrastructure projects. 

By the nineties, the Chinese were becoming the bosses: the Beijing government and myriad Chinese businesses began making heavy investments in Africa, particularly in resource-rich and regulation-poor countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Peter Zhou, a Chinese-born financier who has worked on a few mining deals in Congo, said that in such countries “there is corruption, there is lack of the rule of law, which gives you more autonomy to be entrepreneurial.” 

(Zhou emphasized that he hadn’t directly witnessed or engaged in corruption.) 

In 2007, Joseph Kabila made a six-billion-dollar infrastructure deal with China that included a provision allowing the Chinese to extract six hundred thousand tons of cobalt.

The journalist Howard French, in his 2014 book, “China’s Second Continent,” writes that in Zambia, Congo’s neighbor, Chinese companies invested so extensively in copper mines that the flood of foreign money was said to be influencing elections. 

Beijing was blamed for increasing Africa’s debt burden, and an essay in the magazine New African accused China of “a new form of colonialism.”

These days, most of the cobalt in southern Congo comes from industrial mines, which are largely owned by Chinese companies. 

In 2016, China Molybdenum paid the U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan $2.65 billion for a controlling stake in Tenke Fungurume, a giant copper-and-cobalt mine about two hours east of Kolwezi; 

three years later, China Molybdenum acquired another stake, for $1.14 billion. Zhou, who worked on the Tenke Fungurume deal, divided the current Chinese involvement in Congo into two phases. 

At first, he said, companies had to take significant financial risks, because “there was a lack of infrastructure—the cost base is high to transport all the materials.” 

They also had to pay bribes to government officials and Gécamines executives. 

During this phase, Chinese companies were incentivized to make money by whatever means possible. 

“If you conduct your business without, you know, a proper return, then you can’t justify the risk,” Zhou told me. During this period, he said, mines had few safety protections.

With sufficient infrastructure in place, Zhou went on, the “Chinese are now conducting business in a more moral way. They have to keep the people in a peaceful mind-set, so they started to build a social relationship—training locals in how to grow out their culture, their schools.” 

He continued, “There’s less gray conduct now, and more of a sort of transparent business.”

Congo Dongfang offered the families of Kasulo either a lump sum for their plots—up to twenty-five hundred dollars—or a new home in Samukinda. 

A consortium of local organizations wrote to Governor Muyej, protesting that the evictions were illegal, but he pressed on. 

Muteba, the baker, told me that on a rainy day a couple of months later, employees of Congo Dongfang “came with huge trucks to crush our houses.”

Around this time, Joseph Kabila announced that, after eighteen years in office, he would not run for reëlection. In January, 2019, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo became President. 

The following spring, I met with Governor Muyej at his fortified compound in the center of Kolwezi. Muyej said that Tshisekedi would likely maintain the course set by Kabila—“a flight that we must take to get out of poverty.”

Muyej told me that he hoped to diversify the local economy through tourism and agriculture. 

Mining, he said, exacerbated inequalities—“enormous mineral wealth beside a population that lives in enormous precarity.” 

In 2018, Forbes praised Muyej’s governorship as “a model for bringing together economic prosperity, political transparency and social impact.” 

Yet it’s hard to imagine Kolwezi becoming a travel destination anytime soon. 

On a recent trip there, I tried to visit Katebi Lodge, a new lakeside resort. At the entrance, a metal gate topped with barbed wire, I was shooed away by a police officer toting a Kalashnikov. Apparently, the lake was too polluted to allow visitors.

Muyej often cited the building of a new governorate office—a gaudy structure rising above a sea of ramshackle cinder-block houses—to show how he had modernized Kolwezi. 

Renovations of the local soccer stadium and the town’s central roundabout, which features a statue of mine workers, were financed by mining companies.

Muyej told me that he hoped to reform the mining sector, in part, by reducing child labor and by centralizing the market where traders buy cobalt, thus instilling transparency in the supply chain. 

Critics have called such reforms cynical bids to control and tax artisanal production for personal gain. Muyej, his family, and officials close to him have profited from the mining boom. 

The Governor’s son Yves is the C.E.O. of a logistics company in Kolwezi; on LinkedIn, one of his employees describes himself as the site supervisor of the Congo Dongfang mine. 

Muyej’s cabinet chief, Yav Katshung, is a lawyer whose firm does work for Congo Dongfang. (Katshung and Yves Muyej both declined to speak to me.)

Muyej said that as many as a hundred and seventy thousand creuseurs work informally in his province. Among the forty or so sites where artisanal miners are employed as day laborers is the Congo Dongfang mine in Kasulo. 

Only eight hundred or so creuseurs work there, however, and that has stoked resentment. Jacques Kayembe, the president of an artisanal mining collective, told me, “Kasulo is a village that is built on mineral deposits, but not enough creuseurs can legally work on official artisanal deposits, and that’s a problem.”

Whenever Muyej tried to reason with creuseurs who had sneaked onto industrial concessions, he was attacked with stones, and in 2019 there was so much unrest in Kolwezi that the military was sent in. 

It has become common to see soldiers carrying machine guns and rocket launchers around the city. When I first visited the area, in 2019, a toll booth outside the city was riddled with bullet holes.

 A local journalist travelling with me said that a policeman at the booth had recently been murdered by gangsters.

Since the emergence of covid-19, Congo’s south has endured a series of lockdowns. Kajumba said that creuseurs like him “continue to work, but the situation is difficult.” 

Companies have furloughed workers, adding to their frustration. Several months ago, a Congolese friend sent me a video of miners protesting for back pay at a Chinese-run mine in Kolwezi. 

As pandemic restrictions continued, my friend sent me footage of protesters burning tires in the streets.

Last year, the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa announced that two Congolese citizens had leaked documents revealing numerous improprieties at Afriland First Bank, a Cameroon-based institution where Muyej had at least one account. 

Muyej, it was revealed, had been moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through the bank. 

He is now under investigation in Congo for corruption, and his vice-governor is running Lualaba. 

According to Radio France Internationale, the Congolese authorities have accused Muyej of not being able to justify forty per cent of his cabinet’s expenses. 

(A representative for Muyej said that the Governor had done nothing wrong, and welcomed an audit of his finances.)

Huge sums of money continue to change hands in the region. In December, China Molybdenum paid Freeport-McMoRan half a billion dollars to acquire a controlling stake in Kisanfu, a copper-and-cobalt concession east of Kolwezi. 

At a recent conference sponsored by the Financial Times, Ivan Glasenberg, the C.E.O. of Glencore, said, “China, Inc., has realized how important cobalt is.” 

He continued, “They’ve gone and tied up the supply.” He warned that if Chinese companies stopped exporting batteries, this could hamper the ability of non-Chinese companies to produce electric vehicles. 

Last month, catl, a Chinese conglomerate that develops and manufactures lithium-ion batteries, acquired a hundred-and-thirty-seven-million-dollar stake in the Kisanfu mine. 

Tesla works with the company to make its car batteries, and catl has supplied batteries to Apple. Recently, according to witnesses at Kisanfu, a cave-in killed at least four creuseurs.

In the spring of 2019, I visited the Congo Dongfang mine in Kasulo, escorted by company representatives. Signs by the gate said that children and pregnant women were forbidden to enter. 

Inside the compound, the land that had once been a bustling neighborhood was now a giant red crater. (I saw no children during my visit, but Kajumba told me that they still find their way in.) 

My minders cautioned me not to wander too close to the creuseurs, as they were liable to be violent. Not long before my arrival, a group of them had set some company trucks on fire.

Kajumba said that Congolese had been employed to mediate between the creuseurs and company officials. Often, the creuseurs’ demands were not met and they went on strike. “

You go in to work and say, ‘No, I won’t do anything,’ ” Kajumba said. “The Chinese will feel unsafe and call in the police.” 

The police, he said, do the company’s bidding: “They know they will get a gift from the Chinese, so they will threaten you with teargas and batons.” 

Kajumba said that he had been teargassed by police at Kasulo: “Everyone ran to save his life. We felt defenseless.”

At some sites, the treatment of Congolese by their Chinese bosses is reminiscent of the colonial period. 

In a video shared with me by Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, a Congolese guard with a Kalashnikov slung across his back beats a man who is lying, semi-naked, in mud, his arms bound. 

Behind the camera, a man otherwise speaking Mandarin starts yelling “Piga! ”—the Kiswahili word for “beat.” 

In the background are seven of the trucks that Congo Dongfang uses to transport cobalt ore.

Upon my arrival at the mine, I had been given a long explanation of safety protocols, but as I approached the creuseurs it was clear that they had only rudimentary equipment. 

Plastic jerricans, cut roughly in half and tied to ropes, were being used to haul ore. Many creuseurs were shoeless, and I saw none wearing helmets or goggles, despite the fact that a confidential 2018 audit, by the Korean conglomerate LG Chem, had criticized the site for a lack of proper safety equipment.

Some creuseurs washed ore in dirty ponds by the pits. “The Chinese are cheating us,” one of them murmured. 

“They’re telling us the ore is less pure than it is.” 

Kajumba said that he had stopped working at Kasulo six months earlier because he felt that he was being treated unfairly. “It’s as if you were working to suffer even more,” he told me.

In a warehouse at the site, I watched a man, his face grim, pulverizing ore on a concrete floor as two Chinese overseers scrutinized creuseurs from behind a barrier of chicken wire. 

No Chinese employee interacted with me, and nobody responded when I waved in greeting.

One night in Kolwezi, I went to a Chinese-run casino with a few Congolese friends. I was immediately allowed inside, but they were stopped at the door and told that they could not gamble. 

Black Africans, the casino’s staff explained, can’t be trusted with money. At a roulette table, a host of drunken white South Africans addressed a Congolese croupier as “Black man.”

It’s unclear how many Chinese live in Congo, though estimates range from fewer than ten thousand to as many as a hundred thousand. 

Before the pandemic, Ethiopian Airlines’ daily flights from Addis Ababa into Lubumbashi were filled with Chinese passengers. 

When these workers arrive in a mining town, signs in Mandarin guide them to Chinese-run hotels, shops, and restaurants. 

Outside work, the Chinese rarely mingle with the locals. Very few of them know French or Kiswahili, the most commonly spoken languages of Congo’s south. 

In a 2017 essay, the Congolese political scientist Germain Ngoie Tshibambe wrote that many Chinese find their time in Congo lonely and difficult. “It is no paradise for migrants,” he noted.

Few locals patronize Chinese restaurants, which tend to be relatively expensive and not to their taste, but Chinese health clinics have become popular. T

he clinics offer a rare opportunity for casual social interaction—perhaps more so than at the mines themselves. 

In 2011, Jean Jolly, a French journalist, reported that one of Congo Dongfang’s directors of external relations had never visited the mine that he represented, two miles away.

Congolese who work at Chinese-run mines said that their supervisors were often racist. A Congolese translator who speaks Mandarin told me, “Chinese people are coming here for business to make money, so they can never be our friends.” 

He had overheard Chinese employers saying of the Congolese, “These people, they don’t really think.”

Creuseurs around Kolwezi frequently complained to me that Chinese-owned mines had replicated the harsh conditions of China’s own mining industry. 

Congolese often say, “If they work without shoes there, how can they be expected to give us shoes to work here?” 

A Western mine official told me he had visited a mine in Congo, owned by a small Chinese company, that had many Chinese laborers. 

It reminded him of an internment camp: “The Chinese were barefoot, they were digging with shovels, and they couldn’t leave.”

Peter Zhou, the Chinese-born financier, referred to the locals in Congo as his “Congolese brothers,” and argued that many big Chinese-run mines in the region had implemented strong safety standards. 

Recalling his first visit to southern Congo, Zhou said, “I wasn’t too surprised about the poverty, because I grew up in Shanxi Province, in the interior of China.” 

When he met with Congolese families in roughly constructed homes, he was reminded of the cinder-block rooms of his youth.

Zhou acknowledged that there was “a lot of corruption” in Congo’s mining sector, but he maintained that, with enough economic prosperity, the gray economy in Congo will fade, much as it has in China. 

“My Western friends come to it and say, ‘There are significant risks associated with business here,’ ” he said. “I see something familiar.”

During one of my visits to Kolwezi, Kajumba invited me to the cramped room that he shares with Yannick Mputu and Mputu’s brother, Trésor. 

I followed Kajumba down an alley in one of the town’s sprawling working-class neighborhoods. 

We entered a courtyard, hung with drying linens, that smelled strongly of sewage, then passed through a green doorframe covered with printed fabric.

Inside, the walls were painted various bright colors. Above a bed facing an old cathode-ray television was a rack of neatly pressed suits, shirts, and jackets, many with natty checks and patterns. 

Even though Kajumba struggles to get by, he keeps up with the latest fashions. On the day that I visited, he was wearing an orange gingham button-down paired with a black-and-white-speckled baseball cap.

Creuseurs take pride in the ingenuity required to do their job well, and some of them told me that they like the irregular working hours. 

But Trésor Mputu, who has two children living in Likasi, told me, “As a father, I wouldn’t accept my son going to the mines.” 

Yannick nodded. “I would want, through my labors, to enable my children to go further,” he said. “I want them to be able to study in good conditions, and for them to be able to leave the country to develop themselves.”

Even if artisanal mining supports poor families in the region, it’s hard to applaud it. The lives of most creuseurs are short and marked by suffering. 

Many have physical and psychological injuries from mine collapses and other accidents, and from violent confrontations with the police and the Army. 

Ziki, the former child creuseur, recalled an incident that took place when he was about twelve: 

“One Friday, we were sitting down, and soldiers came into the mine—they caught us. They threw us to the ground. They sprayed us with water and then began to whip us. We began to cry and ask for mercy. And we swore to them that we would never come again to this place.”

Soon afterward, Ziki left his group of friends, who had begun drinking and smoking heavily, and wandered around mine sites by himself. 

He began sleeping at sites, eating little and being abused by soldiers. At one point, he was taken hostage by older creuseurs who accused him of stealing their wares. 

In a stroke of luck, members of a CBS News crew met him while he was washing minerals. They encouraged his family to take him and his siblings out of the mines. 

“They asked my grandmother, ‘Aren’t these children capable of studying?’ ” he said. “My grandmother promised to take us back to school.” (CBS viewers donated money for their schooling.)

Kenya’s biggest bank by market value plans to grow its customer base to 100 million by targeting small businesses and mining sectors in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

Equity Group Holdings Plc, which has operations in seven African markets, plans to exploit lending opportunities outside its home base where risk-based pricing of loans remains out of reach two years after the government repealed a law on interest-rate caps that ate into margins.

By the end of this year, Equity wants to beat Rawbank Sarl to be the market leader in the DRC, the central African nation with a population of more than 90 million people, Chief Executive Officer James Mwangi said in an interview. 

Equity combined operations of its unit there with those of Banque Commerciale du Congo Sarl, in which it acquired a stake last year.

The merger of BCBD and Equity Bank Congo, formerly known as ProCredit, almost tripled the group’s cash and cash equivalents, and increased the amount of dollar loans to 41% of its book, Mwangi said.

“Becoming a systemic actor in all the markets we operate in means increasing the number of customers,” Mwangi said in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. 

“With the insights, capabilities, and the competence that we’ve built within the bank, and with the ability to leverage on technology and innovation, we could be able to do what we did in Kenya for over a period of 30 years in 10 years.”

Equity will take an even shorter time to replicate Kenya’s success in Ethiopia when Africa’s second-most populated market opens up financial services to foreign investors, Mwangi said. The main driver of growth will be private-sector credit demand, he said.

In Kenya, private-sector lending is 27% of gross domestic product, compared with 42% before the East African nation’s government introduced the rate cap. 

A rapid increase is achievable if banks can be allowed to price loans to people currently considered risky borrowers appropriately, he said.

“The opportunity to bounce back to above 50% private sector to GDP should be achieved within two years,” he said.

Conclusions

A Dash for Growth [driven by the DRC acquisition which I believe will prove a Jewel in the Crown] in a pandemic Year.