Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...members of the British House of Commons made an astounding insinuation last week-that the private Belgian concern, Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, which manufactures 90% of the world's radium under Belgian Government control, was restricting that valuable metal's production. The Belgian pitchblende mines, whence the related radium, polonium and lead are refined, are at Katanga, Belgian Congo. Those mines have far outdistanced the Jackinov mines in Czechoslovakia where Becquerel and the Curies got their first pitchblende supplies. Other, but at present little used, sources of radium are autunite deposits in Portugal, betafite deposits in Madagascar...
...Belgian Congo, just where it touches Great Britain's colony of Northern Rhodesia (so named after its exploiter, Cecil John Rhodes). Between Elizabethville and Port Franc-qui (named after the rehabilitator of Belgium's currency, former Finance Minister Emile Francqui) lie the Katanga Mountains, rich in copper, and over them runs a 660 mile long railway which King & Queen proceeded to inaugurate. Local copper executives dolefully informed His Majesty that their Blackamoor miners have tribally combined to enforce a ruinous wage of 12? per day - the standard pay for such labor elsewhere in the Congo being...
Transportation facilities are rapidly being created in the "Dark Continent." The Cape-to-Cairo route of about 5,000 miles by rail and water lacks only 300 miles of railway line. Also, the Benguella railway line from the Katanga copper fields to the African west coast is largely completed, and the unfinished portion is being steadily lessened. Altogether there are 23,000 miles of existing railway mileage in Africa, which provide freight as well as passenger facilities. More and more African railways are used for commerce; in the beginning they were patronized mainly by travelers...
Already there are large amounts of U. S. capital invested in Africa, principally in the Katanga copper mines and the new Congo diamond fields. Yet for several years the shares of the Rand gold mines and the De Beers diamond mines have been listed in the New York Stock Exchange...
...chief drawbacks to the rapid development of the Katanga properties consist in transportation and labor. A labor shortage in Central Africa is slowing up the completion of the Benguella R. R., the future outlet for the mines to the seacoast...