men the high desert of eastern Washington in the United States, there is a wide blue bend in the wide and winding Columbia River that surrounds a site known as the Hanford Reservation.
Dotted along the river at regular intervals are enormous windowless concrete structures: a decommissioned nuclear reactor built in the early 1940s to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for America’s nuclear weapons program.
The reactor surrounds one of the most contaminated landscapes on the planet, with underground tank fields and acres of contaminated soil that contain the radioactive legacy of the rush to build the first nuclear bomb.
But the contamination is not unique.
It shares a certain quality with several other sites found in the US, where the American atomic weapons program, the Manhattan Project, processed the uranium ore needed by scientists and military authorities to design the bomb, build it, use it in two cities in Japan. – and then to build thousands more.
The sites, from Hanford to the poisoned suburbs of St. Louis and Cincinnati, to collapsed industrial structures in Buffalo and Middlesex, New York, show remnants of K-65 contamination.
This is the name given to the waste left from the processing of certain bodies of highly concentrated uranium ore; the most concentrated uranium found on the planet.
The source of the uranium is the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
First developed under the Belgian colonial administration in the 1920s, the mine’s powerful uranium ore (some at a concentration of 65%, while many mines struggle to produce ore with 0.03%), was ignored because mining radium to supply radiation. cure sweeping Europe.
European scientists only began to imagine the explosive power found in the nucleus of the uranium atom when World War II broke out, and the special stone Shinkolobwe became the subject of an international struggle for control of the power that seemed likely to reshape the world.
US military authorities in wartime worked hard to ensure that Shinkolobwe’s ore power could be withheld from the enemy. Ultimately, this ore helped win the war – nuclear bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, forcing Japan to surrender – and was later used to develop the vast US nuclear arsenal.
A network of wartime spies who denied the use of Shinkolobwe’s ore to the Nazis turned their attention to hiding the mine’s location, and even its name, with the word “Shinkolobwe” on maps for decades.
When Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba rose to prominence in the late 1950s, promising to liberate the Congolese country from long colonial and postcolonial exploitation, the US and Belgian intelligence machines moved frantically to prevent the victorious nationalist movement from taking over. control the regions in the southeast of the nation.
This is where most of the country’s mines, and Shinkolobwe, are located.
Just a month after taking power in June 1960, Lumumba was overthrown with the collusion of American intelligence. He was transferred to Katanga province, and then killed just 80km from Shinkolobwe under the supervision of agents of the Belgian mining consortium Union Minière.
In 1960, the mine was closed and the entrance was filled with concrete.
The story of a secret mine with a huge ore inspired the US comic artist Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1977 to create the character of Black Panther, an African king who rules a secret kingdom with advanced technology powered by magical metals, zealously guarding it. rapacious outside world that will exploit.
Today the mine is abandoned, after the extraction of all usable uranium and the following six decades of artisanal and informal mining for cobalt and other minerals.
There is speculation that a Russian company has expressed interest in reopening the mine, even though the uranium has been depleted for a long time.
The DRC’s mineral wealth continues to power much of the world’s rapid technological development, although little of that wealth goes towards improving the lives of the people, including children, who work the ore.
The rare metal that powers our smartphones (they use technology developed in the service of the US defense industry) is mined by miners who work in worse conditions than the Shinkolobwe uranium miners in the 1940s.
The legacy of the mine is still felt by the descendants of expatriate Congolese mine workers in South Africa, where the Congolese Civil Society of South Africa has, for the past six years, organized an annual conference called Missing Link.
The event aims to bring awareness of Shinkolobwe’s history to a world audience, and to link the history of people around the world who were affected by what was done with Shinkolobwe’s ore.
Isaiah Mombilo and Yves Salankang Sa Ngol, directors of the group, spoke about the effect of decades of work in the Shinkolobwe mine on the people who are now elders, as well as their descendants.
Cancer, in-utero deformities and other health consequences are reminders of the history of manual labor involved in yielding some of the rarest and most powerful ores on the planet.
The stories of the people who did this work, and the survivors of Shinkolobwe mine history, are just beginning.
This article was first published in The Continenta pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with Mail & Guardians. It is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.
Hidden: The Shinkolobwe mine supplies uranium ore for nuclear bombs.