Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

When the Congo Free State passed in ownership from King Leopold II to the Belgian government, the colony was renamed the Belgian Congo. At independence in 1960, the nation was renamed Republic of Congo. In the early 1970s, Joseph Mobutu commenced an “Africanization” campaign in which all colonial names were replaced with African ones—Élisabethville became Lubumbashi, Léopoldville became Kinshasa, Katanga became Shaba, and Republic of Congo became Zaire. In 1997, Laurent Kabila invaded the country, took control from Mobutu, and renamed it to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Being a Katangan by birth, he renamed Shaba back to Katanga. After Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001, his son Joseph took power and later subdivided the existing eleven provinces of the country into twenty-six. Katanga was broken into four provinces. The two in the bottom half—Haut-Katanga and Lualaba—encapsulate all the nation’s copper-cobalt mines.