“These people are taking advantage of the weakness of our State”: in the DRC, the “cobalt capital of the world” at the heart of the Sino-American rivalry

It's noon and the walls are shaking. In the Gécamines estate in the mining town of Kolwezi, in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Jean Masengo, around sixty years old, leaves his house with his family to take shelter a few hundred meters away. A precaution that has become almost daily.

In the neighborhood's homes that are still standing, the windows vibrate, the cracks widen and the dust infiltrates. A few steps away, on the other side of a long wall, lies the immense copper and cobalt mine of COMMUS, a Chinese company whose excavations tear apart the landscape.

Kolwezi is the capital of Lualaba, in the heart of the “Copperbelt”, one of the richest regions in the world in copper and cobalt, which extends as far as Zambia. Exploited for more than a century, copper is used in the manufacture of electrical cables, wind turbines and even solar panels, but also in the data centers essential for development...