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Concept
Katanga Province
Summary
Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914.
It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015, when it was split into the Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, and Haut-Katanga provinces. Between 1971 and 1997 (during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko when Congo was known as Zaire), its official name was Shaba Province.
Katanga's area encompassed . Farming and ranching are carried out on the Katanga Plateau. The eastern part of the province is considered to be a rich mining region, which supplies cobalt, copper, tin, radium, uranium, and diamonds. The region's former capital, Lubumbashi, is the second-largest city in the Congo.
History of Katanga
Copper mining in Katanga dates back over 1,000 years, and mines in the region were producing standard-sized ingots of copper for international transport by the end of the 10th century CE.
In the 1890s, the province was beleaguered from the south by Cecil Rhodes' Northern Rhodesia, and from the north by the Belgian Congo, the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Msiri, the King of Katanga, held out against both, but eventually Katanga was subsumed by the Belgian Congo.
After 1900, the Societe Generale de Belgique practically controlled all of the mining in the province through Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK). This included uranium, radium, copper, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, germanium, manganese, silver, gold, and tin.
In 1915, a deposit of pitchblende and other uranium minerals of a higher grade than had ever been found before anywhere in the world and higher than any found since were discovered at Shinkolobwe. The discovery was kept secret by UMHK. After World War I ended a factory was built at Olen; the secrecy was lifted at the end of 1922 with the announcement of the production of the first gram of radium from the pitchblende. By the start of World War II, the mining companies "constituted a state within the Belgian Congo". The Shinkolobwe mine near Jadotville (now Likasi) was at the centre of the Manhattan Project.
Official source
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