Qualla: Luishia Mine

Luishia Mine: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In October 1928, 1,466 men worked at Luishia. That month, two of them died. Nearly one in six fell ill. The ledger-book precision of those numbers - 16.37 percent sick, exact to two decimal places - tells you something about what kind of enterprise the mine was: a colonial operation that counted its workers carefully, but cared for them less. In the decades that followed, those same workers would make themselves counted in a different way - through arson, sabotage, and eventually a general strike that spread across the Katanga copperbelt.

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Luishia Mine: The Ore and the Company

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Luishia mine sits in what was then Katanga Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo - one of dozens of copper and cobalt operations in a region the mining world knew simply as the Copperbelt. The original open pit was mined from 1913 to 1949 by Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, th...

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Luishia Mine: The Strike

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mining work in colonial Katanga was brutal. The pay was poor, the housing was worse, and industrial injury was constant. In 1938, workers at Luishia answered those conditions with arson and sabotage - a language that needed no translation. In December 1941, miners at Luishia join...

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Luishia Mine: After Belgium

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The original pit closed in 1949, but Luishia was not done. A 2007 assessment of the main Luishia mining permit described a property of about 1,729 square kilometers containing a defined resource of 26.1 million tonnes of ore, with average grades of 2.95 percent copper and 0.68 pe...

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Luishia Mine: Luishia South

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

About 75 km northwest of Lubumbashi, the Luishia South project covers 16.2 square kilometers to the south of the main orebody. A small historical pit was worked there between 1923 and 1928 through shafts and tunnels; about 350,000 tonnes of ore at 8.6 percent copper were identifi...

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Luishia Mine: The Permit and the Politics

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In March 2006 the Congolese government issued a permit to exploit the Luishia South project. Chevalier Resources acquired 57 percent of it. In November 2009, African Metals Corporation announced a binding letter of intent to buy Chevalier. By August 2011 the company estimated an ...

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