Aug 21, 2023
Coming from the
Congo, I knew where an essential ingredient for atomic bombs was mined, even if
everyone else seemed to ignore it.
Papà, my dad, told
me a story long ago about the uranium that powered the first nuclear bomb. The
one dropped on Hiroshima; one of the bombs you saw being built in this summer’s
dramatic film, Oppenheimer. Papà, you see, was born in the Belgian Congo.
Earlier this summer,
I was invited to a screening of the blockbuster. The film’s director,
Christopher Nolan, was there too. In a recurring scene, meant to symbolize the
inching along of the scientists’ efforts, Oppenheimer fills an empty glass bowl
with marbles—first one at a time, then in handfuls. The marbles represent the
amount of uranium that has been successfully mined and refined to power the
nuclear reaction. The outcome of World War II, and the future of humanity,
hinges on who can create that monster first—the Axis or the Allies. The closer
we get to the bomb’s completion, the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s
no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24
stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.
As the marbles
steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners
hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.
Papà was born in
1946 at Mission Ngi, a tiny Belgian missionary outpost. He told us how, growing
up, the Belgians taught the Congolese to worship God; how the Belgians
addressed Congolese adults with the informal French tu, not the formal vous;
how the Belgians said eating with your hands, as Papà did at home, was
uncivilized. The Congolese were backward and ancillary to modern life, Papà
learned in school. So did I. And yet, Papà said, the Congolese were the
essential ingredient, the sine qua non, of arguably the most consequential
creation in modern history.
In 1885, when King
Leopold II of Belgium first claimed ownership of this massive stretch of land
sitting on the world’s deepest river, smack in the center of Africa, he called
it Congo Free State. Of course, life for the roughly 10 to 20 million inhabitants
meant surviving violence and a terror state run by the king. Throughout the
territory, which was converted into a series of cotton and rubber plantations,
the king’s soldiers amputated the forearms of Congolese people who didn’t meet
harvesting quotas. King Leopold’s policies drove famine and disease. Millions
didn’t make it.
In 1908, when the
Belgian government snatched the territory from the king, “Congo Free State”
became the “Belgian Congo.” At that point, writes historian Susan Williams,
author of Spies in the Congo, the private sector replaced the king as the
extractor of Congo’s natural resources. The violence remained. What’s more,
while the Belgian officials let Christian missionaries begin formally educating
kids, they were worried that literate Congolese would overturn the colony. Papà
told me how schooling beyond the fifth grade was illegal for most Congolese
kids. Papà, to the delight of his own father, would chance into one of the
colony’s exceptions—education for those who would become priests—an opportunity
even some of Papà’s elder siblings wouldn’t have.
The colonial system
built workers—or borderline enslaved people—not scholars. An American officer
who traveled to the Belgian Congo described a scene he saw on his first day: A
Congolese man in ragged shorts knelt on the ground, a Belgian officer towering
over him with a chicote, a leather whip tipped with metal ends. “The whip
whistled … Every lash was followed by a scream of agony … The black’s skin from
neck to waist was a mass of blood with ribs shining through.” This, the
American reported, was punishment for stealing a pack of cigarettes from a
Belgian. “Welcome to the Congo,” the American was told.
The largest company
in the Belgian Congo was the mining company Union-Minière du Haut-Katanga. The
colonial government had granted it the rights to an area spanning nearly 8,000
square miles, over half the size of Belgium. One of the mines there, Shinkolobwe,
was rich with uranium. In fact, it was filled with uranium that the Congolese
had already excavated and placed aboveground. Initially, uranium was just a
waste byproduct of digging for the more valuable radium, which Nobel-prize
winner Marie Curie had helped discover could treat cancer. In 1938, using
uranium, the physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out the
calculations that defined nuclear fission. If enough nuclei were split,
scientists realized, massive amounts of energy could be emitted. Uranium was
now coveted.
In 1939, just before
the start of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin
D. Roosevelt with a muted warning: “The element uranium may be turned into a
new and important source of energy in the immediate future … It is conceivable
… that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed.”
Einstein’s letter mentioned four known uranium sources: the United States,
which “has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities”; Canada and
the former Czechoslovakia, where “there is some good ore”; and Congo—“the most
important source of uranium.” According to Jean Bele, a Congolese nuclear
physicist at MIT, 100 kilograms of Congolese uranium ore could yield about 1
kilogram of refined uranium. The same amount of ore from the other locations
would yield only 2 or 3 grams of the refined uranium necessary for such a
weapon.
The mining company
typically built fenced-in compounds that resembled prison camps for the workers
and their families; the company initially gave each family about 43 square
feet—the size of a small garage—and weekly food rations. At work, miners sorted
uranium ore by hand. One person described a piece of Shinkolobwe uranium as a
block “as big as a pig.” It was “black and gold and looked as if it were
covered with a green scum or moss.” He called them “flamboyant stones.”
The director of
Union-Minière du Haut-Katanga was Edgar Sengier, a pale Belgian man with a
sharply cut mustache. Having seen Germany invade Belgium in World War I,
Sengier was unsure about what Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939
foretold. Would Belgium—or even the African colonies—be next? So in October, he
fled Belgium for New York City and transferred the mining company’s business
operations there. However, before he had set up shop, a British chemist and the
Nobel Prize–winning scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, son-in-law of Marie Curie,
tipped off Sengier that the uranium in Congo might become essential in the war.
The next fall, Sengier ordered that it be shipped to New York.
So Congolese workers
carried and loaded the ore. It was sent by train to Port Francqui (now Ilebo),
then by boat down the Kasai and Congo Rivers to the capital, Leopoldville (now
Kinshasa). At the port of Matadi, the uranium began its trek across the Atlantic
Ocean, past German U-boats, to a warehouse on Staten Island. Sengier stored
more than 2.6 million pounds of ore in the States. About 6.6 million pounds
remained in Shinkolobwe.
In May 1940, Hitler
invaded France and Belgium. The Belgian government fled to London, and the
Third Reich installed a pro-Nazi government in Belgium. The governor-general of
the Belgian Congo, however, declared that the colony would support the Allies. He
drafted troops, offered up Congolese laborers, and created production quotas to
supply the Allies with necessary war materials. And so, during the war, many
Congolese returned to the very forests where their parents and grandparents had
had their hands amputated, ordered to cull rubber again, this time for hundreds
of thousands of military tires. As the war ramped up, Congolese miners also dug
for minerals like copper in around-the-clock shifts.
In Sengier’s mining
towns, as elsewhere, the Congolese were unable to move freely without permits.
Or to vote. Workers had to be home by 9 pm, lest they suffer harsh
consequences. Pay was terrible. But by 1941, though “natives” were excluded
from unions, Black workers at several of Sengier’s mines began organizing for
higher wages and better labor conditions.
December 7, 1941,
Pearl Harbor Day, was not only a pivotal day in the course of the war, but also
in the lives of the Congolese mine workers. That day, Sengier’s Black employees
organized a massive mining strike across Katanga. In Elisabethville, 500 workers
refused to start their shifts. Soon, freshly off-duty miners joined them and
assembled in front of management’s offices, demanding a raise. They won an
agreement that they could come bargain the next day.
The next morning,
the mine workers showed up to the local soccer stadium to negotiate with
Sengier’s company and the colonial governor of Katanga. According to
conflicting reports, between 800 and 2,000 strikers attended. The company
offered a verbal agreement to raise wages. One historian describes it as the
“first open expression of open protest in the social history of the Congo.” But
when a Congolese worker named Léonard Mpoyi demanded written confirmation of
the wage raise, the colonial governor insisted the crowd go home.
“I refuse,” Mpoyi
said. “You must give us some proof that the company has agreed to raise our
salaries.”
“I have already
demanded that you go to the office to check,” replied the governor, Amour
Marron. He then pulled a gun from his pocket and shot Mpoyi, point blank.
Soldiers opened fire “from all directions.” The mine workers poured out of the
stadium. Roughly 70 people died. About 100 were injured.
The next morning, a
company loudspeaker summoned everyone back to work.
About a year after
Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt assigned General Leslie Groves to head the
Manhattan Project. On his first day, in September 1942, Groves and his deputy,
Colonel Kenneth Nichols, talked about how to procure the necessary uranium for the
massive project. Nichols told Groves about Sengier, and his uranium. The next
morning, Nichols met Sengier in his New York office, and by the end of the
meeting they struck a deal on a yellow legal pad. “I want to start hauling the
uranium away tomorrow,” Nichols declared. Less than a month later, Groves hired
J. Robert Oppenheimer to build the bomb.
Over the next couple
years, the Congo became a hotbed for American spies—under the cover of
“consulate officer,” “Texaco employee,” a “buyer of silks,” and “live gorilla
collector”—there to secure the flow of uranium. General Groves insisted that
the US gain complete control of Shinkolobwe and recommended to President
Roosevelt that the mine be reopened. The Army Corps of Engineers was sent to
the Congo to start up mining operations anew. The mine’s location was scrubbed
from maps. Spies were told to eliminate the word “uranium” from their
conversations; rather, advisers added, use words like “diamonds.” The company’s
miners also began mining for other war-necessary minerals, toiling in sweat by
day, and with immense furnaces by night, swarmed by the sound of trains or
planes from America. By then, thanks to the mining strike, worker salaries had
risen by 30 to 50 percent. Still, some men were forcibly required to mine. From
1938 to 1944, fatal accidents at the company’s plants almost doubled. To avoid
rubber quotas, people fled the rural areas for cities like Elisabethville,
whose African population swelled from 26,000 in 1940 to 65,000 in 1945.
The US government
was also worried about Nazi spies. One American spy was tasked with figuring
out if Nazis were smuggling Shinkolobwe uranium. Among Sengier’s many shipments
of ore, one was intercepted and sunk by the Nazis.
When they arrived in
the US, the flamboyant stones were refined in places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
and then shipped to Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It took nearly three
years for Oppenheimer and his team to develop the bombs. Even though the Germans
surrendered in May 1945 (and it became clear they were not close to completing
a nuclear bomb), the war in the Pacific still raged. Ultimately, in August
1945, the US dropped two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first of which
was filled with—like Papà said—Congolese uranium.
Jean Bele, the
Congolese nuclear physicist, tells me radioactive isotopes are still in the
ground near Shinkolobwe today. “Radioactive solids enter the water, the crops,
the trees, the soil, the animals, and they get to the humans,” he said. We
don’t know the extent of the radiation. We do know that in Oak Ridge there is
increased cancer mortality. And near St. Louis, Missouri, where remains of the
Congolese ore were dumped, contamination poses risks to workers for the next
1,000 years.
After the screening
of Oppenheimer, like a fanboy, I approached Nolan in the lobby. I was able to
ask him about the marbles, about why he chose them and what creative issue they
solved. He acquiesced with a courtly nod: “I needed a way to demonstrate how
long it would have taken to refine all that ore.” Then he added, “The number of
marbles was actually mathematically accurate to represent the amount that they
needed.”
Of course, without
Congo, obtaining all that ore would have been impossible. In a race to build
the bomb, both sides wanted the Congolese ore. The Shinkolobwe mine was “a
freak occurrence in nature,” according to Colonel Nichols. “Nothing like it has
ever again been found.” And that, of course, means that without Congo’s Black
workers—terrorized and chicote-d into submission, digging essential war
minerals 24 hours a day—the outcome of arguably the most consequential project
in human history would have been very different.
In 1946, Sengier
became the first non-American to receive the president’s Medal for Merit—“for
the performance of an exceptionally meritorious or courageous act” that sealed
the Allies’ victory. In a photo from the ceremony, you might see something
else: a man with something to hide. Intelligence during the war revealed that
Sengier’s company also sold about 1.5 million pounds of Congolese uranium to
the Nazis. In 1948, a radioactive mineral was named in Sengier’s honor:
sengierite.
At the same time,
the Congolese, the people I come from, set about tearing down the colonial
systems meant to eclipse their power; they finally won their independence in
1960. Papà was 13 years old then, and though it would take years for him to
learn about the uranium miners, he always knew that Congolese people matter to
history.
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