Yon the high desert plains of eastern Washington in the United States, there is a great blue bend in the vast and winding Columbia River that encircles a site known as the Hanford Reservation.
Spaced along the banks of the river at regular intervals are huge windowless concrete structures: decommissioned nuclear reactors built in the early 1940s to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for the US nuclear weapons program.
The reactors surround one of the most polluted landscapes on the planet, with vast fields of underground tanks and acres of contaminated soil containing the radioactive legacy of the rush to build the first nuclear bombs.
But that contamination is not unique.
It shares a certain quality with several other sites found in the US, where America’s atomic weapons program, the Manhattan Project, processed the uranium ore its scientists and military authorities needed to design those bombs, build them, and use them in two cities in Japan. — and then build thousands more.
These sites, from Hanford to the poisoned suburbs of St Louis and Cincinnati, to dilapidated industrial structures in Buffalo and Middlesex, New York, show the residue of K-65 contamination.
This is the name given to the waste left over from the processing of a specific body of highly concentrated uranium ore; the most highly concentrated uranium found on the planet.
The source of that uranium was the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
First developed under Belgian colonial administration in the 1920s, the mine’s potent uranium ore (some of it at 65% concentration, when most mines struggle to produce 0.03% ore) it was initially ignored in favor of radium mining to satisfy the radiation craze. priests sweeping Europe.
European scientists were just beginning to imagine the explosive power found in the nucleus of the uranium atom when World War II broke out, and the special rocks of Shinkolobwe became the subject of an international struggle for control of a power that was likely to change. the world.
Wartime US military authorities worked hard to ensure that the Shinkolobwe ore powerhouse was kept away from its enemies. Ultimately, this mineral helped win the war: nuclear bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, forcing Japan to surrender, and it was subsequently used to develop the US’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Wartime spy networks that had denied the use of Shinkolobwe ore to the Nazis turned their attention towards concealing the location of the mine, and even its name, with the word “Shinkolobwe” removed from maps for decades.
When Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba rose to prominence in the late 1950s, promising to liberate the Congo nation from long years of colonial and post-colonial exploitation, the US and Belgian intelligence machines were at work. frantically to prevent his victorious nationalist movement from seizing control of the southeastern territories of the nation.
This is where most of the mines in the country and Shinkolobwe were located.
Just months after taking power in June 1960, Lumumba was overthrown with the connivance of US intelligence. He was transferred to Katanga province, where he was later assassinated just 80 km from Shinkolobwe under the supervision of agents of the Union Minière Belgian mining consortium.
In 1960 the mine was closed and the entrance was filled with concrete.
The story of a secret mine that holds minerals of immense power inspired American comic book artists Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1977 to invent the character of Black Panther, an African king who rules a technologically advanced secret kingdom powered by magical metal, who jealously guards him against a rapacious outside world that would exploit him.
Today the mine is abandoned, after the extraction of all usable uranium and the following six decades of artisanal and informal mining of cobalt and other minerals.
There has been speculation that Russian companies have expressed interest in reopening the mine, despite the fact that the uranium is long gone.
The mineral wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to drive much of the world’s rapid technological development, though little of that wealth returns to improve the lives of the people, including children, who work the mineral.
The rare metals that power our smartphones (using technologies developed in the service of the US defense industry) are excavated by miners working under conditions worse than those of Shinkolobwe’s uranium miners in the 1940s.
The legacy of the mine is still felt by the descendants of expatriate Congolese miners in South Africa, where the Congolese Civil Society of South Africa has, for the past six years, organized an annual conference called The Missing Link.
This event is intended to bring the story of Shinkolobwe to a global audience and link the stories of people around the world affected by what was done to Shinkolobwe’s ore.
Isaiah Mombilo and Yves Salankang Sa Ngol, directors of the group, talk about the effects that decades of working in the Shinkolobwe mine had on people who are now older, as well as their descendants.
Cancers, deformities in the womb and other health consequences are reminders of a history of manual labor carried out to unearth some of the rarest and most potent minerals on the planet.
The stories of the people who did this work and who survived the history of the Shinkolobwe mine are only just beginning to be told.
This article was first published on The Continentthe pan-African weekly produced in collaboration with the mail and guardian. It is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.
Hidden: The Shinkolobwe mine provided the uranium ore for the nuclear bomb.