This narrative is based on interviews conducted in Bel Air neighbourhood, Kolwezi. Names have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
The Notice
We had been living in our house for seventeen years when the notice came. The house was not fancy — three rooms, cement block walls my father-in-law built when he worked for Gécamines in the 1990s. But it was ours. My children were born there. My mother-in-law died there. The mango tree in the yard, she planted it.
The notice said the railway right-of-way required clearance. Our house was within the zone. We had to relocate. There would be compensation. We did not understand at first — the railway had not run through Bel Air for as long as anyone could remember. The tracks were buried under years of settlement. Children played on the old rail bed. People had built homes, planted gardens, opened small shops along what used to be the corridor.
Then the surveyors came with their equipment. They painted marks on walls. They measured distances. They told us that the railway was being rehabilitated and the corridor needed to be cleared. They said it was a big project — billions of dollars. They said it would bring jobs and development. They said we would be compensated.
The Compensation
The compensation offer came three months later. For our house — three rooms, cement blocks, iron roof, seventeen years of life — they offered 2.8 million Congolese francs. About $1,000 US dollars. I asked the assessment team: where in Kolwezi can I buy land and build a house for $1,000? They said the rate was set by the provincial government. They said it was standard.
My husband went to the mairie to contest. He waited four hours. They told him to come back. He went back. They told him the rate was fixed, but he could submit an appeal. We submitted an appeal. Months passed. No response. Meanwhile, the construction crews moved closer.
Some neighbours accepted the compensation and left. They had no choice — their houses were marked for immediate clearance. One family moved to a plot on the edge of town, twenty minutes' walk from the market where the wife sold vegetables. Her business collapsed because her customers could not find her. Another family moved to Katanga neighbourhood, further from the artisanal mining sites where the husband worked. His earnings dropped because of transport costs to the sites.
The international standards — the IFC Performance Standards, the Resettlement Action Plans that the development banks require — say that displaced families must be "at least as well off" after resettlement. I do not know how to measure that. But I know that the families who have left are not as well off. They are further from their work, their markets, their social networks. The compensation did not cover the true cost of rebuilding.
Waiting
We are still in our house. The appeal is still pending. The construction has not reached our section yet, but we can see the machines working two blocks away. Some nights we hear the drilling. The children ask if we will have to leave. I tell them I do not know.
What hurts most is not the threat of displacement itself. It is the feeling of powerlessness. Decisions about our home, our neighbourhood, our life — these are being made in offices far away by people who have never walked through Bel Air. They see a map with a red line for the railway corridor. We see the house where our children grew up.
I understand that the railway matters. I understand that the corridor can bring development. But development that destroys the homes of poor families without fair compensation is not development. It is extraction with a different name. The colonial companies took our minerals. Now they take our land for the railway to carry the minerals. And they tell us it is for our benefit.
What Must Change
I want the people making these decisions to know: we are not against the railway. We are against being treated as if we do not matter. Fair compensation means enough to rebuild our life, not a government rate that has not been updated in years. It means a community benefit agreement that gives Bel Air something in return for what it sacrifices. It means consultation that happens before decisions, not after.
After Displacement
Six months after we moved to the resettlement site, the reality of displacement has settled into our daily lives like dust into our lungs. The new house has four walls and a roof — that is what the compensation report will say. What it will not say is that the walls are thinner than our old house, that the roof leaks in the corners, that there is no kitchen because the design assumed we would cook outside but the wind at this exposed hilltop site makes outdoor cooking impossible for half the year.
The children walk seven kilometres to school. In Bel Air, the school was two blocks away. My daughter, who is nine, leaves the house at five in the morning to arrive before the bell. She comes home at two in the afternoon, too tired to study, too hungry because we cannot afford to give her a lunch packet for the walk. Her grades have dropped. The teacher says she falls asleep in class. This is what displacement does to children: it does not just move them, it diminishes them.
The livelihood restoration programme promised by the project has not materialised. In Bel Air, I sold vegetables at the market. The market was a five-minute walk. Here, the nearest market is in Kolwezi, a forty-minute bus ride that costs money I don't have. My husband worked as a motorcycle taxi driver in Bel Air; here, there are no customers because there are no destinations. We are surviving on the compensation money, which shrinks every month. When it runs out, I don't know what we will do.
The Day They Came
They gave us two weeks' notice. Two weeks to leave the house where I was born, where my parents were born, where my children took their first steps. Two weeks to dismantle a life and carry it somewhere else. The notice was a piece of paper in French, which my mother cannot read, handed by a man in a suit who did not give his name, accompanied by two policemen who did not need to say anything because their presence said everything.
The compensation they offered was calculated by someone who has never lived in Bel Air. They counted rooms but not memories. They measured walls but not the mango tree my grandmother planted that gives fruit every December. They valued the structure at what it would cost to build with their materials, not what it would cost to replace with ours. And the "resettlement site" they showed us — twenty kilometres from Kolwezi, on land where nothing grows, with no school, no clinic, no market — is not replacement; it is exile.
My neighbours fought. Some refused to leave. The police came again, this time without the man in the suit. The houses were marked with paint — red X for demolition. Some families left quietly, taking what they could carry. Others were still negotiating when the bulldozers came. I heard my neighbour Marie screaming as they pushed the walls of her house while she was still gathering her children's school uniforms from inside.
They call it "development." They say the railway needs this land. But the railway existed before, when I was young, and it went around Bel Air, not through it. Someone chose this route. Someone decided that our homes were worth less than a straighter track. Someone calculated that displacing three hundred families would cost less than engineering a curve. I want to know who that someone is. I want to look them in the face and ask: if it were your home, your mango tree, your children's school — would you have drawn the same line on the map?
Related Intelligence
Bel Air · Kolwezi · Displacement Law · IFC Performance Standards · RAP