1942 April | Busanga, Death of The Old Forest

Then – Congo, Busanga, Lualaba, 100 Kms North of Kolwezi, 276 kms from Panda Likasi, July 1941 to April 1942

The iridescent haze vibrates in phase with the constant roar cascading down the slopes of the nearby hill. It is animal, primal. It is the crash of mighty waterfalls, the boom of excavations, the clang of titanic anvils and the screams of angry mobs. And it lasts until the Sun flees at the bellow of a steam whistle, fit for a cruiser. 

The Busanga pit.

She reaches the top of the hill, right at the edge of the woods, and sneaks a peek, out of dread, out of curiosity, out of disbelief.

As far as the eye can see, ochre ground, laterite, cracked and atrophied over a cluster of jagged anthills crawling with the ceaseless movement of humanity, hungrily gnawing at, toppling and gobbling up anything standing in its way. The entire area shakes with the effort of eating away at the primordial forest. An oil spill of desiccating virus.

Everywhere, obsessive frenzy, a clattering din. Suzanne freezes at the treeline. The aeons-old forest shily huddles at her back and avert its eyes. 

Faster, faster, the sludge is late, late for a very important date. More, more, the war is hungry! For bullets and buckles, pins and medals. Saws, pickaxes and shovels rise and fall in chromatic chimes. Sweat drips. Hands blister. Engineers calculate, surveyors measure, foremen check, workmen trudge, tip and walk back under a sky that has no time nor mercy. François, her husband, must be down there, one of the guys trying to keep the trenches straight, waving from behind their theodolite.

So many of them, everyone in regulation khakis. She can’t be sure, and she can’t stop the motion. 

The sludge flow hurries along the clever wooden arteries and capillaries of drains and sluices, a system that covers the ground. And grows even as she watches. A buzzard would say, a hellscape of metamorphic ochre made of din and dust. Rivers of sludge are poured in carts and whisked to the washery. Sort, smelt in the blast furnaces. And with a final belch of smoke, copper can finally rest in ingots, ready for its destiny, be it to build, feed or kill. 

You cannot quench the pit’s hunger for the deepest, darkest, green malachite in the world.

Mining shafts are too restrictive. Off with them! No time for craftsmanship! Slice the ground, dice it, churn it, load it, carry it away under the open sky. Manifest the urgency of extraction. Show in all directions that everything here has but one goal: malachite for copper and cobalt, cobalt and copper. Humanity needs it! War demands it! 

And somewhere down there, her François fine-tunes the flow lines. 

It had once been 5 guys, a manual drill and a borehole. Then 10 guys, heaps of shovels and sieves. Then 20 guys, foremen, trenches and toolsheds. And now, there is this here: a human production line eating up the ground, spitting it back out in carts, as fast as it could, ever faster. A dizzying spinning top of activity, lowing and humming without pause. 

Humanity here has united to fulfil the quota of the open pit. 

They have come from far and wide, a few from the local communities, many more from Kasaï, Zambia even, thousands of kilometres away. And Belgium, naturally. Everyone is contracted, often for 3 years. And most just sign again and again into this new life here. The company has purpose-built for them a whole new village, just beyond the mine. Perfectly aligned rows upon rows of perfect modern, tidy, identical huts. Even bungalows for the foremen. And a recreation hall, a concert and movies hall. A company shop. 

It is no real village though: it exists, like its people, only for the mine, to do the job. 

Yet, it is aspirational. You can buy status and pride. The opportunities are for you to grab. You can build a better life with a better family, with sports, schools, evening classes, dispensaries and maternities. And the best pupils will go to seminaries, to come back and spread God’s plan to Congo. Populations transfixed by advantages, a social closed circuit. And the exactingly symmetrical village, is just an engineered nostalgia, a reminder of places no-one really wants to ever see again.

Everyone’s interest is that everyone benefits. And the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga does a roaring business.

The community does not really have its own local language. How to find common ground between Luba-Luala, Swahili, Bemba, Kiluba and others? So, it is Pidgin French, a vehicular language, spoken, maybe laughed in, rarely yet thought in: an alienated slang. François has pushed his dictionaries and grammars at the back of the trunks. Even Swahili is marginal here. 

A shame, truly, but you cannot dismiss either the pride in everyone’s eyes, here. 

There is a cold logic to this. Any prejudice or difference, cultural, social, ideological, political, or religious, could become a spark, and that would be detrimental to production. Only numbers tell, the rest is of no relevance. Quotas are exhausting, expectations high, so are nerves. The huts and bungalows distil a new society, papering over the relentless social emptiness and anything that could light fires. A volatile social experiment, built on the brooding resentments of communities hastily thrown together by necessity, united by only one objective: the output of sludge.  

Unified in one thought: extract more. Whatever the cost and the risk.

Even the Belgian workers reacted as they would have done back home, before the war, in Brussels or Charleroi: they went on strike in Likasi/Jadotville on the 13^th October! Suzanne is appalled. And by the 3^rd of December, the locals joined in! Great example, great progress, she tchips. The Force Publique had to machinegun a few hundreds to restore order, but that had left a bitter taste. What’s next? pondered Tam-Tam Radio, the Busanga rumour-mill of housewives, looking over their shoulder. 

For Suzanne, it is time to leave the woods and the pit to fight it out, and she walks back to her house at the top of the bald hill.

Maybe, once, everything around here had been ugly to start with. Or beautiful. There is just no way to tell anymore. There had been water, few people, just an ancient forest. And there was a village once, just here, on the edge of the woods. It is a toolshed now. She wonders what has become of the chief and the griot, once the village was swallowed by the pit? Did they move to Leopoldville, fading in the crowds there, irrelevant now, or did they just drift away like smoke when the villagers left? 

The mine is the only relevant reality now, the only sound, the only sight, the only smell. 

She soon reaches her bungalow, a brickhouse in mock Swiss style, complete with tiled, asymmetrical roofs, modern amenities and spacious rooms. The clean-cut nostalgia for something that does not exist yet. California? And a view. Of sorts. To the East the mighty Mitumba mountains slope towards Rhodesia, to keep the promise of the forest. The mighty Congo somewhere over there, past the desolation of the pit. 

You need to have imagination here. She does not. But she has an infinite resilience. Keep at it. Endure. 

Hunt if you must, dear. No that is it for me. The picture with a local hunter with a haunted look and a flintlock… I know, but what did we agree on about propriety? Exactly. Ah, socialising? Not yet. The neighbours: 13 men, 7 women and one priest washed-up here, for the mine. The girls are almost the only kids around, did you notice? There is always Church, to dedicate the mine and its workers to its Patron Saint, Sainte Barbe, every 3rd of December. Exactly, the day the strikes started in  L’bashi. 

Busanga 1941, neither Europe, Congo or Africa, a place up between arrow-straight lanes 55a and 68f. A utilitarian pause, soulless.

Smiles drained, memories wilted. Drudgery.

Let’s never talk about it ever again. There was Cameroon, and then there will just be Panda. 

To the South East, the ancient woods loom, brooding, waiting. For us? Even here, even now, they ooze infinite patience, rooted in the wealth they grew on since time immemorial. So welcoming, so embracing, so lush; truly the First Garden. 

The trees still feel the Congo roar nearby, hear the beasts that live among them. Here, the trepidation of life is smothered by a pall of silence and the nonchalant breeze that whispers of eternity.

The patience of stars waiting for the skies to turn and the ants to go. 

Now – Busanga Sino-Congolese Hydropower Dam Project 

KINSHASA, 2023 Oct. 6 (Xinhua) – President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Felix Tshisekedi inaugurated on Friday the Busanga hydroelectric power plant, […] in the southeastern province of Lualaba. 

The hydroelectric plant […] will guarantee the power supply for the regional mining enterprises, promote local industrial, economic and social development, and further alleviate power vulnerability for local residents.

…

4 villages were forced to evacuate to make way for Busanga hydropower plant:  Kamalenge, Monga Lubuza and Wafinya. 

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You read part 35 of Transvaal Blue Skies: the true story of how, early last century, Suzanne moved to Africa and built her laager. This is a series of loose dots weaved in a chronological thread, wrapped into a story to be plucked and observed, heard and remembered, recognised and judged. Suzanne Dulière was my grandmother.  Follow the story sign up here to receive the weekly article. More photos and videos on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.