This dissertation explores the role of mining in African state-making and civil society. It begins with the question: why, despite persistent economic decline and disastrous social consequences, have Congolese (DRC) workers, residents and officials maintained a deep attachment to foreign capital and corporate enterprise in the country’s mining industry? Throughout DRC’s Katanga region—the center of global copper and cobalt production—many continue to lament the disappearance of the Gecamines-Union Minière corporate giants of the past. And yet, a robust, Congolese-centric explanation for this widespread nostalgia has been lost amidst the ideological critiques of corporate capital, which focus more on the aftermath of 1990s/2000s re-privatization schemes rather than their history. Drawing on community bulletins in Swahili and French, conversations with Katangese workers and engineers, and company archives, I trace the social and political interests that shaped Congolese expectations towards private capital.In the late 19th century, Katanga—with its deep political tradition of the mikuba, or “copper eaters”—became a region of intense financial and geological speculation among trans-imperial mining companies. As investment flowed in, well-established indigenous miners, smelters, and traders carved out space within these companies. They offered important mapping and geological knowledge, yet over time, these intermediaries—alongside a growing population of migrant labor— placed new material demands on the nascent companies. These demands pushed companies to take on the responsibilities of the state, including border regulation, electricity distribution, and health services. Through these services and in the vacuum of state presence, company authority over land and residents’ sociability gradually accumulated during the colonial period. Following independence in 1960, this corporate-state model endured as successive Congolese governments attached themselves to these private interests, molding the material benefits that companies and their investors could offer to advance their own regionalist, nationalist, and internationalist aspirations. It was ultimately around these corporate institutions that, paradoxically, Congolese miners and officials developed postcolonial arguments for “economic independence” and solidified national sovereignty claims. Congolese affinity for corporate institutions was, thus, the product of a longer transnational process that re-imagined foreign capital from an agent of financial accumulation into one of state-making and civil society formation.
Linking the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial mining regimes opens up the entangled histories of capitalism and sovereignty in Central Africa. First, focusing on how Central Africans theorized, discussed, and re-imagined the global resource economy, this project inverts the conventional power relationship between international investor and Africa—a relationship that, even among critical underdevelopment scholars and world-systems theorists, understands Africa as largely a vessel for external finance and a story of totalizing immiseration. Second, in contrast to the labor histories of all-encompassing scientific management and corporate paternalism, this popular history of daily life under resource capitalism reveals a workforce with a much wider set of cultural experiences. Third, this study reframes state-centric notions of sovereignty, showing how local Katangese institutions and transnational finance developed their own governing logics that operated outside the purview of colonial and postcolonial administrations. With the rise of copper and cobalt as key commodities in global electrification and technology infrastructures, these social and political questions concerning Central Africans’ relationship to capital are essential for work in the 21st century global economy.
