This narrative is based on interviews conducted by Lobito Corridor field researchers. Names and identifying details have been changed. The account is preserved on our source evidence archive.
I am a community leader in a neighbourhood of Kolwezi where 340 families face potential displacement. Our neighbourhood sits on what the mining companies call a "concession extension zone." What we call it is home.
Five years ago, a mining company — I will not say which one because I fear retaliation — began approaching families individually, offering small amounts of money for their land. They did not come through official channels. They did not present an environmental impact assessment. They did not hold community consultations as the Mining Code requires. They sent agents who offered cash and asked for thumbprints on documents that most families could not read.
When I understood what was happening, I organised the neighbourhood. We formed a committee. We went to a lawyer in Lubumbashi — a two-day journey by bus — who explained our rights under Congolese law and under the international standards that apply because the mine receives financing from development banks. We learned that we had rights to consultation, to fair compensation, to free, prior, and informed consent. Rights that the agents had not mentioned.
We sent letters to the mining company, to the provincial governor, to the development bank that finances the project. The mining company stopped sending agents. But they have not withdrawn their expansion plans. They are waiting. We are waiting. The land remains ours for now, but the threat has not disappeared.
The corridor adds another dimension to our struggle. If the railway and associated infrastructure require our land, we face displacement from a different direction. We have heard about the community benefit agreements that organisations like Lobito Corridor promote. We want one. We want a legally binding document that says what our community receives in exchange for what it gives. Not a promise. A contract. Registered on the evidence archive where it cannot be changed or denied.
Fighting for land in the DRC is dangerous. Community leaders who resist mining companies have been threatened, arrested, and worse. I continue because 340 families depend on someone speaking for them. But I would feel safer if the international observers, the development banks, and the accountability organisations were watching closely. When powerful people are watching, the threats are quieter.
The Organising
When they first told us the railway would take our land, we were alone. Each family facing the same threat separately, each trying to negotiate individually with a company that had lawyers, money, and government support. We were farmers and miners with nothing but our presence on the land. That is when I decided: alone, we lose. Together, we might win something.
I went house to house in the neighbourhood. I talked to every family on the railway alignment. I wrote down their stories — how long they had lived there, what their land produced, how many children they had, what compensation they had been offered. The stories were similar: families who had lived on their land for generations, offered compensation that would not buy a plot half the size in any other part of Kolwezi. The company calculated the value of our houses but not our lives.
We formed a committee. We elected officers. We pooled money for a lawyer — not a Kinshasa lawyer who would take our money and disappear, but a local lawyer who knew the mining code and the land law and who had represented communities before. We documented everything: photographs of our homes, records of our crops, testimonies from elders about our land's history. When the Lobito Corridor monitors came, we gave them copies of everything. They put it on their evidence archive, they said. Now no one can deny what we had.
We have not won yet. The negotiations continue. The company has offered more than the original amount but still less than we deserve. The government says the railway must go through — national interest, they say. But we have learned something valuable: organised communities get better outcomes than isolated families. Not perfect outcomes, but better. And the documentation — the photographs, the testimonies, the evidence archive records — means that whatever happens, our story is preserved. They cannot pretend we agreed happily. They cannot pretend we were not here.
More Voices
A Life Along the Corridor
The corridor passes through my world but it does not stop to ask how I am. Every day I watch the changes — the surveyors with their equipment, the construction workers arriving in trucks, the officials in their vehicles with tinted windows who come and go without speaking to us. They are building something enormous, something that will change everything, and we are spectators at a transformation that will determine our future.
My community has seen change before. We have survived changes we did not choose — the colonial period, independence, the decline of the mines, the privatisation that emptied our hospitals and schools. Each change came with promises. Each change left us with less than we had before. So when the corridor people come with their presentations and their projections and their promises of jobs and development, we listen politely and believe cautiously.
What we want is simple. We want to be asked, not told. We want to be consulted before decisions are made, not informed after they are finalised. We want the wealth that flows through our community to leave some trace of its passage — a school that functions, a clinic with medicine, roads that don't become rivers when it rains. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for the minimum that justice requires when billions of dollars flow through the land where our grandparents are buried.
I tell my story not because it is unique but because it is common. Every community along the corridor has stories like mine — stories of hope and disappointment, of promises made and broken, of wealth extracted and poverty left behind. If the corridor is truly different from what came before, let it begin by listening to these stories. Not because listening is polite, but because listening is how you learn what communities actually need rather than what outsiders assume they want.
Names changed for protection. Interview preserved with source verification.