Shinkolobwe is in the midst of a pleasant savanna of hills and acacia trees in a region called Katanga, where people have been farming more than two thousand years with tools made from wood and copper picked from the ground. This place, and the rest of the Congo, had been the private preserve of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had claimed the territory for himself when the European powers were beginning to plant their flags around Africa in the 1870s. Leopold promised to run “this magnificent African cake” for the charity and benefit of the natives.
Congo instead became a gigantic forced-labor camp. The Africans were threatened with brutal beatings and the amputation of their hands and even beheadings if they failed to collect enough ivory tusks or lumber to satisfy the quotas of Belgian managers. The government of Belgium took over the estates in 1908, preserving the system of forced labor under the rule of monopoly companies. The largest was a mining giant called “Union Minière de Haut Katanga” which started exploiting copper in the southern tail section. Delighted executives called it un scandale géologique – a “geological scandal”—and built an empire of mills, furnaces and rails in the bush. Locals were paid the equivalent of twenty cents a day to break rocks and push carts. It amounted to a version of debt slavery: taxes were kept purposefully high and workers were not permitted to select their own occupations. The men slept eight to a hut in settlements ringed with barbed wire to prevent them from leaving before their contracts were up. Typhoid and dysentery were rampant.
One of these sites had been Shinkolobwe, where patches of high-grade uranium had been found by chance in 1915. The workers were made to carry sacks of the velvety black stone – then used only for radium-based cancer cures -- more than twenty kilometers to the railhead, where they were sent to port and then shipped by ocean steamer to Belgium. The tailings were simply thrown away. By itself, it was considered worthless: a trash rock.
When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, the company moved its headquarters to New York. The U.S. would soon become the world’s largest user of its cobalt, which was an important metal for the manufacture of aircraft engines. The Congo mines started operating around the clock. And by then, an ominous realization had began to dawn among a handful of scientists in European and American universities: that the overburdened nucleus of U-235 was just on the edge of cracking asunder and might be broken with a single neutron. The mine would go on to supply nearly two-thirds of the uranium used in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, and much of the related product of plutonium that went into the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
For the next two decades, Shinkolobwe enjoyed a mystique as the number-one producer of the most powerful substance on earth. “A freak occurrence in nature,” one Army colonel called it. “Nothing like it has ever again been found.” Access to the site was forbidden, and the closest a visitor could get was to see the giant block of pure uranium the company put on display in the nearby city of Elisabethville. Visitors were warned not to get too close with their cameras, lest their film be fogged and ruined. A sign said: Attention. Bloc Radioactif!
The Belgians had expected to rule their colony for more than a century, but increasing violence in the capital convinced them to step aside and grant Congo its independence in 1960. With American backing, a 29-year-old army officer named Joseph Desiree Mobutu seized power in a coup and would, over time, set himself up as a secular messiah even as he looted the nation as systematically as King Leopold. He took a cut from virtually every business in his country, siphoning off $4 billion, and building luxurious marble palaces for himself all over his dirt-poor country. The once-promising economy went into a tailspin. Roads fell apart. Farms dehydrated in the equatorial sun. Union Minière’s property was nationalized, and then looted.
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20 Comments
Add CommentThis is a great story! Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNuklear energie, Nein Danke
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisvery good informative article
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting. Maybe it's in the book, but I was waiting to read about the actual radiation levels in and around the cave. I'm sure he didn't go there without a geigercounter...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"We were there for several minutes before I realized that I still had the letter of authorization from the police official in my backpack. I hadnt needed to withdraw it because we hadnt encountered a single roadblock. Nobody was guarding Shinkolobwe. We had walked right in."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTranslation: I was conned by a corrupt cop.
Very interesting exerpt. I was already intrigued by the book before reading this, now I know I really want to read this book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSooo...Does that mean i can buy Uranium on Craigslist lol? Obviously just being facetious but somebody malicious might be doing that this very minute!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI guess you can... @ http://www.unitednuclear.com/ It looks like it's not a joke but that they actually do business.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere is the science?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh..the safest energy source on the planet!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt what point does the intenational community say "this resource is unable to be managed by the corrupt and greedy legacy of the Belgian colonialists and their spawn now in charge (the greed just comes with the poverty of spirit so equally abundant in human nature) and so the UN will oust the current regime and return to them a country where certain activities will not be administerd by the soveriegn itself but by international oversight." The sooner the better. As instabilities in national security arises, it will become a more and more unavoidable measure...and who knows, maybe it will result in a future Congo that is not all screwed up by its collective ignorance and obsession with personal power.
The book should be required reading for everyone in the world. Another fine example of destruction from beneath the ground on up. Seems not one major country has had radio-active free hands. And it seems the Chinese are Africa's favorite client or is that baron these days? They are wood pulping their arses off there now, destroying forests. What's next? I see them importing Chinese people by the province.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdoug 1 said "At what point does the inte[r]national community say ""this resource is unable to be managed by the corrupt and greedy legacy of the Belgian colonialists and their spawn now in charge (the greed just comes with the poverty of spirit so equally abundant in human nature) and so the UN will oust the current regime and return to them a country where certain activities will not be administerd by the soveriegn itself but by international oversight.""
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to say this is unlikely, that the UN could, possibly, make a moral resolution condemning what's going on there and that the regime is not going to be removed, but will never act on it, and then at some point the US could sign this into law, but not act on it, and then when a president finally does he'll be blamed for not consulting the world and UN which condemns the intervention they themselves helped draft resolutions upon, and which his predecessor signed into law.
doug 1 said "At what point does the inte[r]national community say ""this resource is unable to be managed by the corrupt and greedy legacy of the Belgian colonialists and their spawn now in charge (the greed just comes with the poverty of spirit so equally abundant in human nature) and so the UN will oust the current regime and return to them a country where certain activities will not be administerd by the soveriegn itself but by international oversight.""
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to say this is unlikely, that the UN could, possibly, make a moral resolution condemning what's going on there and that the regime is not going to be removed, but will never act on it, and then at some point the US could sign this into law, but not act on it, and then when a president finally does he'll be blamed for not consulting the world and UN which condemns the intervention they themselves helped draft resolutions upon, and which his predecessor signed into law.
The poor planet earth must be silently wailing over the fact it gave birth to the wicked and voracious predator called human beings. This species arrogantly believes itself to be the most intelligent animal, but ironically it is the only life form that has been surreptitiously dragging itself to mass-suicide in not so a distant future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a geologist and a mining company executive, and having worked for the past 9 years in the African mining business, I can tell you that Zoellner is factually cahallenged and is also straining, through inuindo, misinterpretation of facts and implications, to fabricate the notion that that there is something sinister and mysterious about mining in the Congo. Abandoned mines are found all aross the world and there is nothing special about them . An abandoned mine is simply an abandoned hole in the ground no matter where it is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmall scale local miners ("galemsey") work in every mining district in Africa both active and abandoned. If there was uranium worth mining (even at galemse wages) at Shinkolobwe there would have been a large contingent of galemse there. If there was no one working the day of his tour, there is no no uranuim left - period.
Also note that galemse are never going to produce the huge tonnages of ore that are requred to support the develoment of a nation's nuclear weapons program. U235 constitutes less that 1% of the urnium atoms in the ore and the uranium atoms typically constitute less that 1% of the ore, and ore tyically constitutes less than 10 to 20% of the rock that must be moved to get the ore. And since the Shinkolobwe deposit has been mined out and abandoned, the uranium grade is probably extremetly low. A few barrels of low grade ore grabbed by a galemse is never going to pose a threat o anyone, even a truck load of barrels full of uranium ore is a drop in the bucket of what is needed to develope a weapons program.
His tory is simply an romatic account of being swindled by the Congolese while traveling about Africa. No facts nor information otherwise in his story.
Is the author for real, or a sensationalist? I saw him interviewed by John Stewart (who was flippant, as expected) but was surprised at the equally flippant and misleading responses. He looks to me like a quickie biography specialist, not someone with in depth knowledge of the subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFascinating. It is interesting that a Google Earth search does not locate a place with the name Shinkolobwe. Considering the historical and potentially dangerous significance of Shinkolobwe, it is surprising that there is no listing. Is there another geographic name?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid
The mine can clearly be seen on Google Earth at 11 degrees 02 minutes 59.53 seconds North and 26 degrees, 32 minutes and 52.79 seconds East. The imagery is of high quality, which is sort of odd in the middle of nowhere, except of course when there is a uranium mine to watch.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfufu
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is disgraceful that mining companies are not made to restore land into a fit condition after abandonning workings. The cost of doing this should be included in the unit cost of nuclear-powered electricity. If this were so, such countries as France would soon think twice about building new reactors...
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