AfricaMuseum refuses to yield Congo geological archives despite US pressure

mikkupikku

Yield to a US mining corp. Title buried the lead. > The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren (Flemish Brabant) is refusing to hand over geological archive material on Congo to an American mining company that wants to use the data to map valuable raw materials. ‘We want to digitalise the archives ourselves and not leave it to a private company,’ the museum says. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is increasing pressure through diplomatic channels. Yeah I'm with Africa Museum on this one. This said, there is a broad problem of getting old records digitized in African libraries. Very often these library and archive building are very old, don't have working climate control, and the records are often irreplaceable cultural artifacts that are rotting on the shelves for lack of funding to rescue them.

alephnerd

We've been working on this since the Biden administration as part of the Lobito Corridor [0] between Angola, DRC, and Zambia [1]. People really overestimate how much of an impact Trump has had on our grand strategy - it's the same people who worked under Obama, Biden, and Trump. We shifted to a more muscular resources policy during the 2010s due to the US-China rivalry. We're not that different from the French in that regard [2]. [0] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/biden-goes-angola-beyond-lobit... [1] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/africasource/what-to-k... [2] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-a-crisis-over...

josefritzishere

A large US mining company should be able to motivate the museum on their own, through sponsorship and donations. The US government has no business intervening to apply political pressure on behalf of a company who can’t figure that out. This is so inappropriate.