According to the British newspaper The Financial Times, the Congolese government last year signed an agreement with the American company Kobold Metals to digitalise old archive material on the Congolese subsoil.

The mining company, which is partly owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and tech billionaire Bill Gates, wants to analyse this data using AI to identify new, suitable mining locations. The Congolese soil is rich in critical raw materials such as cobalt, copper and coltan.

The archive in question is located in the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, which refuses to transfer the material to the company. ‘We want to carry out the digitisation ourselves, in a scientific manner, and not leave it to a private company,’ museum director Bart Ouvry explained.

‘These are public archives, not company archives that can simply be handed over. The project is being carried out with the support of the European Union and in collaboration with the Geological services in Congo, which are closely involved as scientific partners.’

What exactly is in these archives?

‘They contain documents from Belgian mining companies that ceased operations in the late 1960s,’ explains Ouvry. ‘These archives contain information about Congo, but also about Rwanda, Burundi and other African countries.’

Because it is a public federal archive, the material in the archive is already publicly accessible to researchers. This also applies to private companies if they obtain permission from the Congolese government for a specific part of the archive.

Pressure from the Trump administration

According to Flemish daily De Standaard, the Trump administration is exerting political pressure on the museum to transfer the archive to Kobold Metals for digitisation. The American president has long had his sights set on the mineral wealth of Congo.

‘There were technical contacts with the Congolese government a few months ago,’ confirms a spokesperson for Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prévot (Francophone centrist). ‘The American embassy also had a meeting about this with our Africa desk. This took place mainly at diplomatic and technical level, not at ministerial level’.

Prévot's office supports the position of the AfricaMuseum. ‘A digitisation process is already underway between the museum and the Congolese government, and it is not the intention that a private company should simply be given privileged or exclusive access,’ it says.