Belgian museum to make colonial-era Congo mining maps public

From century-old maps to meticulous field notes, Belgium is sitting on a trove of geological records on colonial-era Congo, a coveted archive it is working to open up amid a global scramble for critical minerals.

Teeming documents charting the rich subsoil of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo fill nearly 500 metres of shelving at the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, outside the Belgian capital.

The museum has pledged to digitise the contents and make them public within five years and, as the race for so-called rare earths heats up, it has grappled with how far to share the data with the mining sector.

Last year, the institution - formerly the Royal Museum for Central Africa - turned down an offer from the US company KoBold Metals to handle the archive's digitisation.

Belgian officials said they could not give exclusive access to millions of documents about the Congo’s geology to an overseas private company.

Instead, with significant EU funding, it intends to appoint a European contractor for the mammoth project, currently in its preparatory phase.

The aim is ultimately to make the data available to DRC authorities, both to support scientific research and to help unlock economic opportunities.

“Starting in the 1960s and afterwards, private Belgian companies went bankrupt, ceased their operations in Congo, and deposited archives here,” said museum director, Bart Ouvry.

“These are important from a scientific point of view, but also from an economic one. And so for some time now, there has been a great deal of interest in them, not only from scientists, but also from the private sector."

Francois Kervyn, the museum geologist leading the project, said “the content of the documents is absolutely incredible", describing decades of fieldwork carried out in largely unmapped regions.

The archive brings together surveys conducted by Belgian geologists as well as files from mining companies that operated in the vast African country before independence in 1960.

While the original focus was on copper and gold, some records also point to deposits of cobalt and lithium - minerals that have become strategically vital in recent years.

For Kinshasa, the historical data could help identify new deposits and attract investment as demand surges for materials used in weapons, mobile phones, and electric cars.

“The Congolese have identified several priority exploration zones - they are not starting from scratch. We are providing archives to confirm or refine their knowledge," said Kervyn.

One of the 15 least-developed countries in the world, the DRC has some of the richest land on the planet, notably in copper, cobalt, coltan, and lithium.

In a sector largely dominated by China, other major powers are increasingly eyeing the Congolese subsoil in an effort to compete - with the United States in particular seeking to expand its foothold.