economic annals of the country it is worth more than
passing attention. Like so many parts of Africa, its exploitation is
recent. For years after Livingstone planted the gospel there, it
continued to be the haunt of warlike tribes. The earliest white visitors
observed that the natives wore copper ornaments and trafficked in a rude
St. Andrew's cross--it was the coin of the country--fashioned out of
metal. When prospectors came through in the eighties and nineties they
found scores of old copper mines which had been worked by the aborigines
many decades ago. Before the advent of civilization the Katanga blacks
dealt mainly in slaves and in copper.

The real pioneer of development in the Katanga is an Englishman, Robert
Williams, a friend and colleague of Cecil Rhodes, and who constructed,
as you may possibly recall, the link in the Cape-to-Cairo Railway from
Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia to the Congo border. He has done for
Congo copper what Lord Leverhulme has accomplished for palm fruit and
Thomas F. Ryan for diamonds. Congo progress is almost entirely due to
alien capital.

Williams, who was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, went out to Africa in 1881
to take charge of some mining machinery at one of the Kimberley diamond
mines. Here he met Rhodes and an association began which continued until
the death of the empire builder. On his death-bed Rhodes asked Williams
to continue the Cape-to-Cairo project. In the acquiescence to this
request the Katanga indirectly owes much of its advance. Thus the
constructive influence of the Colossus of South Africa extends beyond
the British dominions.

In building the Broken Hill Railway Williams was prompted by two
reasons. One was to carry on the Rhodes project; the other was to link
up what he believed to be a whole new mineral world to the needs of
man. Nor was he working in the dark. Late in the nineties he had sent
George Grey, a brother of Sir Edward, now Viscount Grey, through the
present Katanga region on a prospecting expedition. Grey discovered
large deposits of copper and also tin, lead, iron, coal, platinum, and
diamonds. Williams now organized the company known as the Tanganyika
Concessions, which became the instigator of Congo copper mining.
Subsequently the Union Miniere du Haut Kantanga was formed by leading
Belgian colonial capitalists and the Tanganyika Concessions acquired
more than forty per cent of its capital. The Union Miniere took over all
the concessions an