The official said he was aware that I was a researcher from America, and he wanted me to help raise awareness of the plight being faced by the artisanal miners who worked at Shabara and across the Copper Belt. He echoed the sentiments of Makaza near Étoile, Samy in Fungurume, and so many others I met—the Congolese people were being pushed over the cliff’s edge by foreign mining companies that kept appropriating more of their land each year. The COMAKAT official drew a line in the dirt with his declaration, “We will not leave,” but the issue was not as simple as pitting artisanal miners against
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