Qualla: Mutoshi mine

Mutoshi mine: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every lithium-ion battery in every electric vehicle depends on cobalt, and much of the world's cobalt depends on a stretch of ground in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo called the Copperbelt. Mutoshi sits inside that belt, a mine and a tailings dump and a series of deposits tucked into the red earth near Kolwezi. Between January 2018 and December 2020, roughly 5,000 men, women, and sometimes children worked the Mutoshi site with picks and shovels, filling plastic sacks with ore to sell to traders at the gate. They were paid by the bag. They breathed the dust. They were not employees of any mine in the formal sense. They were artisanal miners, and their labor is woven into the aluminum, cobalt, and copper of products used around the world.

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Mutoshi mine: A Mine With Many Owners

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mutoshi's corporate history reads like a deal sheet. It was, until 2005, owned by Gecamines, the Congolese state mining company, together with a private DRC firm called EMIKO. That year the Australian-Canadian firm Anvil Mining paid US$12.5 million for a 70 percent stake. In Octo...

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Mutoshi mine: The People Who Worked the Ground

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between 2018 and 2020, Chemaf and Trafigura ran what industry analysts called a formalization pilot at Mutoshi. Thousands of artisanal miners, locally called creuseurs or diggers, were registered, issued helmets and identification, and concentrated into a fenced area where they c...

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Mutoshi mine: COVID, Closure, and the Industrial Pivot

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In March 2020, as the pandemic spread, Trafigura suspended the artisanal operation at Mutoshi. Families who had relied on daily pay lost it. Some kept digging anyway, elsewhere, in less organized sites where no one was counting bags or checking for children. In December 2020, Tra...

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Mutoshi mine: What the Tailings Told Us

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between 1960 and 1987, the original Mutoshi plant washed ore and discharged mineralized waste into the Kulumaziba watercourse. Decades later, when Anvil Mining arrived, those tailings were themselves economic: 102,000 tonnes of copper were estimated to remain in the first 7.5 kil...

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