In building the Broken Hill Railway Williams was prompted by two reasons. One was to carry on the Rhodes project; the other was to link up what he believed to be a whole new mineral world to the needs of man. Nor was he working in the dark. Late in the nineties he had sent George Grey, a brother of Sir Edward, now Viscount Grey, through the present Katanga region on a prospecting expedition. Grey discovered large deposits of copper and also tin, lead, iron, coal, platinum, and diamonds. Williams now organized the company known as the Tanganyika Concessions, which became the instigator of Congo copper mining. Subsequently the Union Miniere du Haut Kantanga was formed by leading Belgian colonial capitalists and the Tanganyika Concessions acquired more than forty per cent of its capital. The Union Miniere took over all the concessions and discoveries of the British corporation. The Union Miniere is now the leading industrial institution in the Katanga and its story is really the narrative of a considerable phase of Congo development.
Within ten years it has grown from a small prospecting outfit in the wilderness, two hundred and fifty miles from a railway, to an industry employing at the time of my visit more than 1,000 white men and 15,000 blacks. It operates four completely equipped mines which produced nearly 30,000 tons of copper in 1917, and a smelter with an annual capacity of 40,000 tons of copper. A concentrator capable of handling 4,000 tons of ore per day is nearing completion. This bustling industrial community was the second surprise that the Congo disclosed.
Equally remarkable is the mushroom growth of Elizabethville, the one wonder town of the Congo. In 1910, when the railway arrived, it was a geographical expression,—a spot in the jungle dominated by the huge ant-hills that you find throughout Central Africa, some of them forty feet high. The white population numbered thirty. I found it a thriving place with over 2,000 whites and 12,000 blacks. There are one third as many white people in the Katanga Province as in all the rest of the Congo combined, and its area is scarcely a fourth of that of the colony.
The father of Elizabethville is General Emile Wangermee, one of the picturesque figures in Congo history. He came out in the early days of the Free State, fought natives, and played a big part in the settlement of the country. He has been Governor-General of the Colony, Vice-Governor-General of the Katanga and is now Honorary Vice-Governor. In the primitive period he went about, after the Congo fashion, on a bicycle, in flannel shirt and leggins and he continued this rough-and-ready attire when he became a high-placed civil servant.
Upon one occasion it was announced that the Vice-Governor of the Katanga would visit Kambove. The station agent made elaborate preparations for his reception. Shortly before the time set for his arrival a man appeared on the platform looking like one of the many prospectors who frequented the country. The station agent approached him and said, "You will have to move on. We are expecting the Vice-Governor of the Katanga." The supposed prospector refused to move and the agent threatened to use force. He was horrified a few minutes later to find his rough customer being received by all the functionaries of the district. Wangermee had arrived ahead of time and had not bothered to change his clothes.
When I rode in a motor car down Elizabethville's broad, electric-lighted avenues and saw smartly-dressed women on the sidewalks, beheld Belgians playing tennis on well-laid-out courts on one side, and Englishmen at golf on the other, it was difficult to believe that ten years ago this was the bush. I lunched in comfortable brick houses and dined at night in a club where every man wore evening clothes. I kept saying to myself, "Is this really the Congo?" Everywhere I heard English spoken. This was due to the large British interest in the Union Miniere and the presence of so many American engineers. The Katanga is, with the exception of certain palm fruit areas, the bulwark of British interests in the Congo. The American domain is the Upper Kasai district.
Conspicuous among the Americans at Elizabethville was Preston K. Horner, who constructed the smelter plant and who was made General Manager of the Union Miniere in 1913. He spans the whole period of Katanga development for he first arrived in 1909. Associated with him were various Americans including Frank Kehew, Superintendent of the smelter, Thomas Carnahan, General Superintendent of Mines, Daniel Butner, Superintendent of the Kambove Mine, the largest of the Katanga group, Thomas Yale, who is in charge of the construction of the immense concentration plant at Likasi, and A. Brooks, Manager of the Western Mine. For some years A. E. Wheeler, a widely-known American engineer, has been Consulting Engineer of the Union Miniere, with Frederick Snow as assistant. Since my return from Africa Horner has retired as General Manager and Wheeler has become the ranking American. Practically all the Yankee experts in the Katanga are graduates of the Anaconda or Utah Mines.
With Horner I travelled by motor through the whole Katanga copper belt. I visited, first of all, the famous Star of the Congo Mine, eight miles from Elizabethville, and which was the cornerstone of the entire metal development. Next came the immense excavation at Kambove where I watched American steam shovels in charge of Americans, gouging the copper ore out of the sides of the hills. I saw the huge concentrating plant rising almost like magic out of the jungle at Likasi. Here again an American was in control. At Fungurume I spent the night in a native house in the heart of one of the loveliest of valleys whose verdant walls will soon be gashed by shovels and discoloured with ore oxide. Over all the area the Anglo-Saxon has laid his galvanizing hand. One reason is that there are few Belgian engineers of large mining experience. Another is that the American, by common consent, is the one executive who gets things done in the primitive places.
I cannot leave the Congo copper empire without referring to another Robert Williams achievement which is not without international significance. Like other practical men of affairs with colonial experience, he realized long before the outbreak of the Great War something of the extent and menace of the German ambition in Africa. As I have previously related, the Kaiser blocked his scheme to run the Cape-to-Cairo Railway between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Kivu, after King Leopold had granted him the concession. Williams wanted to help Rhodes and he wanted to help himself. His chief problem was to get the copper from the Katanga to Europe in the shortest possible time. Most of it is refined in England and Belgium. At present it goes out by way of Bulawayo and is shipped from the port of Beira in Portuguese East Africa. This involves a journey of 9,514 miles from Kambove to London. How was this haul to be shortened through an agency that would be proof against the German intrigue and ingenuity?
