A mountain gorilla family moving through mist and bamboo on the slopes of an active volcano, undergrowth that has barely changed in a million years. This is Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest protected area, sitting inside a country that also holds the second-largest rainforest on Earth.

Now picture the other Congo. A coltan mine collapsed there this March, killing more than two hundred people, seventy of them children. The mines around it are controlled by an armed group backed by a neighbouring country, and they supply roughly fifteen percent of the world’s tantalum, the metal sitting quietly inside whatever device you’re reading this on.

Both are the same country. To understand how, we have to go back further than Zimbabwe’s story did, because Congo’s wound is older, and it runs deeper. It starts with a king who decided a whole nation could simply belong to him.

Before Zimbabwe lost its minerals to the Rudd Concession, Congo lost something even more extraordinary. An entire country became one man’s private property. In 1885, European powers meeting in Berlin handed King Leopold II of Belgium personal control of the Congo Free State, a territory around seventy six times the size of Belgium itself. Leopold never once set foot there. He ran it as a business, extracting rubber and ivory while the Congolese paid for it with their bodies.

The system worked through quotas, enforced by Leopold’s private army. Villages that fell short faced beatings, hostage taking, and execution. Soldiers had to account for every bullet fired, and the accepted proof was a severed hand.

A Liverpool shipping clerk named Edmund Dene Morel noticed something was wrong just by watching the cargo. Ships left Belgium loaded with weapons and came back loaded with rubber and ivory. No trade goods ever went in. The rubber wasn’t being bought. It was being taken. Morel became a full time investigative journalist, and British consul Roger Casement travelled the Upper Congo in 1903 and documented villages emptied from thousands of people to a few hundred. His 1904 report forced the first real scrutiny of what Leopold was doing.

Historians still debate the exact numbers. They agree on the scale. The population is estimated to have fallen from around twenty million to roughly ten million, through killing, starvation and exhaustion. Belgium annexed the territory from Leopold in 1908. Extraction simply continued for another fifty two years.

This is the part of Congo’s history most readers have never heard, and it explains almost everything that came after.

Congo won independence on 30 June 1960. Patrice Lumumba became its first elected prime minister. Eleven days later, the mineral rich province of Katanga, home to the copper and cobalt this story keeps returning to, declared its own secession, backed directly by Union Minière, the copper company with the most to lose from a strong central government.

Lumumba asked the United States and the United Nations for help ending the secession. Both refused him. Desperate, he turned to the Soviet Union, and that single decision was enough. The CIA director called him “a Castro in Africa” and ordered his removal treated as urgent. Lumumba was captured, flown to Katanga, and handed to the very secessionist leader who had helped drive him from power. He was tortured, then executed by firing squad on 17 January 1961, with Belgian officers present. His body was later dissolved in barrels of acid.

The officer who helped deliver him to his killers did not disappear. Joseph Mobutu seized power in 1965 with American and Belgian backing, renamed the country Zaire, renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko, and ruled for thirty two years. In 1967 he nationalised Union Minière itself into a new state miner called Gécamines, worth remembering since it resurfaces later in this piece. In practice, the wealth simply moved from a foreign company into one man’s hands. Estimates of his fortune range from under forty million pounds to nearly four billion, taken while the country’s infrastructure collapsed around him.

When his regime fell in 1997, the collapse triggered wars that killed more than five million people, mostly through disease and starvation. It remains the deadliest conflict anywhere since the Second World War, and almost nobody outside Africa has heard of it. Congo’s first elected leader was murdered within seven months of independence, over the same copper province still shaping the war covered later in this piece.

Before the war happening right now, it’s worth pausing on what’s at stake. Congo’s mineral wealth is estimated at eighteen trillion pounds, roughly the combined GDP of Europe and the United States. The country controls 70 to 80 percent of the world’s cobalt, essential to every battery in every phone and electric vehicle on Earth. Nearly ten million people were displaced inside Congo in 2025 alone, the highest figure on record. And the Rubaya mines alone supply an estimated 15 percent of global tantalum demand.

This isn’t history. It’s happening while you read this.

In North Kivu, in eastern Congo, sits a mining town called Rubaya. The hills around it hold some of the richest coltan deposits on Earth, the ore refined into tantalum, the metal that makes capacitors work inside every phone and laptop. In April 2024, a Rwanda backed armed group called M23 seized Rubaya’s mines outright.

Global Witness dug into what happened next. M23 taxes every kilogram that leaves the mines, three pounds a kilo on top of just over two pounds to Rwanda, generating an estimated six hundred thousand pounds a month. More than a hundred and twenty tonnes crossed into Rwanda every month in the months after the takeover, mixed with legitimate production, then exported with paperwork meant to prevent exactly this. Seven Rwandan export companies handle roughly eighty five percent of Rwanda’s declared coltan, and Global Witness found direct evidence that at least five routinely buy coltan smuggled out of Rubaya. Those exporters sell on to smelters that Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nvidia, Toyota and Honda all report using in their own supply chains, according to Global Witness’s research, a credible, well documented link rather than a proven one. Several of the companies dispute any connection to conflict coltan and point to their own due diligence checks.

Then, in March 2026, the ground gave way. A landslide collapsed the Kasasa mining site at Rubaya. Congo’s Ministry of Mines confirmed more than two hundred deaths, roughly seventy of them children. M23’s own officials disputed the toll, claiming only five had died and blaming bombings instead. A miner who helped recover more than two hundred bodies told the Associated Press something that has stayed with me.

Within days, mining resumed on the same unstable slopes. For the families depending on it, there was no other income to fall back on.

If Zimbabwe’s smuggling ran through cigarette dealers and diplomatic pouches, Congo’s runs through something quieter. Swiss commodity trading. Offshore banking. One well connected middleman.

Israeli businessman Dan Gertler became, in effect, the gatekeeper to Congo’s mining sector. Companies wanting access to its diamonds, gold, copper and cobalt found working with him close to a requirement. The 2017 Paradise Papers investigation revealed how closely Glencore, the Swiss trading giant, worked with him to secure a major copper deal, and the US Treasury sanctioned him that year for what it called hundreds of millions of pounds in opaque, corrupt mining deals.

Sanctions did not end it. Glencore kept paying Gertler royalties anyway, an arrangement Bloomberg called rare, possibly unprecedented, for a global corporation choosing to work around US sanctions for one business partner. As of 2026, a nearly seven billion pound deal for two of Glencore’s biggest Congolese mines is still stuck over his ongoing royalty claims. Nobody involved denies the money is owed. The argument is only whether that should still be allowed.

Every mineral in this story eventually reaches a body.

In 2016, Amnesty International documented children as young as seven working Congo’s cobalt mines, some for twelve hour shifts, carrying loads for a pound or two a day. Amnesty traced that cobalt into the battery supply chains of Apple, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen, companies doing little at the time to check where their materials came from. By 2024, the US Department of Labor found more than three quarters of miners in Congo’s cobalt sector may be working under coercion or debt bondage.

The cost has never been only economic. In 1999, Congolese gynaecologist Denis Mukwege opened Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, meaning to focus on maternal deaths. His first patient wasn’t there to give birth. She was a rape survivor whose reproductive organs had been destroyed by armed men. In 2010 a UN representative called eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, a description grounded in research estimating four hundred thousand women were raped across the country in a single year. Panzi has since treated more than eighty thousand survivors.

In 2012, months after Mukwege told the UN the scale of it, gunmen broke into his home. His guard died protecting his family. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. He is still practising in Bukavu.

Zimbabwe’s story had a modern twist: the lithium rush, a new mineral wearing the old pattern. Congo’s twist is bigger, and it happened at the White House.

In February 2025, with M23 advancing across eastern Congo, President Tshisekedi offered President Trump access to Congo’s critical minerals in exchange for help against the rebels. On 4 December 2025, Tshisekedi and Rwandan president Paul Kagame stood beside Trump in Washington and signed the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity, alongside separate deals granting American companies access to critical minerals in both countries.

Trump’s own words tell you most of what you need to know. “We’re going to take out some of the rare earth, take out some of the assets and pay,” he said. “Everybody is going to make a lot of money.” Barely a week later, M23 pushed further, into the town of Uvira, contradicting the ceasefire it had just signed. By mid 2026, Rwandan troops were still on Congolese soil, and more than seven million people remained displaced.

Nearly ten million people were forced from their homes inside Congo in 2025 alone, more than the population of New York City, uprooted in a single year, over what lies beneath their feet. Eighteen trillion pounds of mineral wealth sits under this ground, and the people living on top of it survive on less than four hundred and fifty pounds a year. That gap is not geography or bad luck. It is a king, a company, a dictator, a militia and a peace deal, each taking their turn at the same resource, while the wealth kept moving one direction and the people on top of it kept paying for it.

The same hills that hold the coltan also hold roughly two thirds of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas, guarded by more than eight hundred rangers who go out every day inside an active war zone. The Congo Basin rainforest still stands, still holds more biodiversity than almost anywhere else on the continent, existing in spite of everything happening around it.

Zimbabwe showed the pattern. Congo shows what happens when it runs unchecked, at industrial scale, for five generations in a row. It has never gotten anything close to the attention its scale and its history deserve.

Next in this series: Sierra Leone, the country that put the words blood diamond into the world’s vocabulary. Most people know the phrase. Almost nobody knows the war behind it.

Further reading: Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed, by Fidel Bafilemba and John Prendergast, with photography by Ryan Gosling. Bafilemba lives and works in Goma, the city M23 occupied in January 2025, and traces this same supply chain from the inside of the story rather than the outside.

If this series matters to you, follow me here on Medium and subscribe to my newsletter so you never miss the next part:

Cally

Writing with heart, publishing with purpose🪶

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Sources:

Wikipedia, “Casement Report”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casement_Report
Missed History, on Leopold’s Congo Free State: https://www.missedhistory.com/article/king-leopold-congo-rubber-terror-genocide
Wikipedia, “Assassination of Patrice Lumumba”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Patrice_Lumumba
Justseeds, “The Assassination Site of Patrice Lumumba”: https://justseeds.org/the-assassination-site-of-patrice-lumumba/
Afrikan Identity, on Gécamines and Mobutu: https://afrikanidentity.medium.com/the-resource-trap-and-the-anatomy-of-congo-inequality-in-the-heart-of-afrika-b9c38c025407
Wikipedia, “Mobutu Sese Seko”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko
Semafor, on Congo’s £18 trillion mineral wealth: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/13/2026/us-firms-step-up-push-for-dr-congo-mining-maps
Free Market Foundation, “The Curse of Congo’s Wealth”: https://freemarketfoundation.com/the-curse-of-congos-wealth
Global Witness, “Who buys Rwanda’s smuggled coltan?”: https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/transition-minerals/who-buys-rwandas-smuggled-coltan-the-global-journey-of-conflict-coltan-from-drc-to-the-worlds-electronics/
Al Jazeera, on the Rubaya mine collapse: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/4/more-than-200-killed-in-landslide-at-drc-coltan-mine
ICIJ, on the Paradise Papers and Dan Gertler: https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/us-sanctions-mining-magnate-accused-of-corruption-in-the-congo-reversing-trump-era-move/
Bloomberg, on Glencore and Gertler: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-15/gertler-flexes-his-power-as-glencore-bows-to-congo-pressure
Billionaires Africa, on the stalled £7 billion Glencore deal: https://www.billionaires.africa/2026/05/04/trumps-mining-push-in-dr-congo-puts-sanctioned-israeli-billionaire-dan-gertler-back-at-the-center-of-a-9-billion-deal/
Amnesty International, “This Is What We Die For”: https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/this-is-what-we-die-for-human-rights-abuses-in-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-power-the-global-trade-in-cobalt/
Council on Foreign Relations, on Dr. Denis Mukwege: https://www.cfr.org/articles/dr-denis-mukwege-surgeon-rape-capital-world
NPR, on Mukwege’s Nobel Peace Prize: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/05/654675123/denis-mukwege-and-nadia-murad-win-nobel-peace-prize-for-fighting-sexual-violence
Wikipedia, “2025 DRC-Rwanda peace agreement”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_DRC%E2%80%93Rwanda_peace_agreement
AllAfrica, on the Washington Accords: https://allafrica.com/stories/202512100087.html
The East African, on 2025 displacement figures: https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/news/east-africa/drc-and-sudan-record-highest-idp-numbers-5461844
Natural World Heritage Sites, on Virunga National Park: https://www.naturalworldheritagesites.org/sites/virunga-national-park
WWF, on the Congo Basin: https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/congo-basin/
Sojourners, on Fidel Bafilemba: https://sojo.net/articles/activist-fidel-bafilemba-0

CJ Lindy

This article was originally published on Medium by CJ Lindy