AfricaMuseum refuses to yield Congo geological archives despite US pressure(www.vrt.be)

13 pointsby hezag4 hours ago3 comments

mikkupikku4 hours ago
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.
- sam_lowry_3 hours ago
  Africa Museum is a few km from where I live, I know a cople geologists that worked there and I followed reconstruction works at the museum and all the controversies around them.
  I feel like money is not an issue for the museum. Conscientous use of money is another problem.
  Wasteful mismanagement of public funds is a plague of Belgian public service.
  They could have striken a deal, e.g. let the U.S. company digitize the records on premise and make them public.
  - alephnerd3 hours ago
    > They could have striken a deal, e.g. let the U.S. company digitize the records on premise and make them public
    They won't - it's a US-EU competition.
    The US+UAE is backing the DRC and the EU is backing Rwanda [0][1][2] in order to access critical minerals in Central Africa, most of which are in M23 controlled or adjacent territory [3] whose control is contested between the DRC and Rwanda.
    The US under Biden and Trump has backed the DRC but the EU is backing Rwanda and M23.
    We're in the midst of a new Scramble for Africa and all countries and blocs are acting unilaterally.
    [0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/le-monde-africa/article/2024/02/29...
    [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/10/drc-calls-eu-m...
    [2] - https://www.habtoorresearch.com/programmes/drc-minerals-us-e...
    [3] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42461-022-00551-x
  - wiz21c3 hours ago
    > Wasteful mismanagement of public funds is a plague of Belgian public service.
    Please don't propagate rightwing ideology. There are plenty of public services and servants who do their job very well. I worked in several administrations with them as an IT manager.
    Sure there is "corruption" and other things but in my experience, not that much.
    sam_lowry_4 minutes ago
    It's a bit off topic, bit my favourite corruption story that I tell non-Belgians is the titres-services/dienstencheques scam.
    It's a kind of money that could be used only for household tasks. Think cleaning lady. At the introduction, they costed ~4.80€/hour to the public while designated organisations cashed in from state 27€/hour.
    The difference came from public money, the stated reason was to draw household workers from black market, the second reason was to achieve the goal of +100,000 jobs that the then Prime Minister set, the real reason was to enrich the few insiders, my memory does not serve me well, but IIRC the party affiliated with public service workers profited the most.
- doctorpangloss3 hours ago
  i'm with the museum too, but: the default HN critic is unsympathetic to people seeking to exploit some data. except when the default HN critic stands to make a lot of money exploiting some other data. what is the line? like i could easily flip this on the museum: what right does this museum have, it is a public institution, criminals are welcome to visit it and learn whatever the hell they want, for any exploitative reason, why draw the line at miners? why do they have an exclusive right to systematic data use? why is it even theirs, exclusively, to begin with? there is no simple, objective framework for this stuff. that said, i think we would all be better off if non-entertainment information were free and easily scrapable.
  - ivan_gammel3 hours ago
    If understand this correctly, the museum is currently digitalizing the archive, which is then expected to be publicly available. United Oligarchs of America want to get the papers for „digitalization“ in their own hands, which will be de facto exclusive access to the information contained in them. It smells like neocolonialism and corruption.
josefritzisherean hour ago
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.
alephnerd3 hours ago
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...