Lubumbashi.

Since last Thursday I am in Lubumbashi; located around 1,030 kilometers to the south of Bukavu and the capital of the province of Haut Katanga (HK). Just to give you an idea of size: the province of HK is around 500,000 km2, while the country of the Netherlands is around 41,500 km2. Lubumbashi – formerly known as Élisabethville or Elisabethstad – is the country’s second largest city with over a million people. The Belgians founded the city in 1910 and it grew quickly mainly because of Haut Katanga’s rich resources of copper, gold and uranium. HK is now the country’s richest province and contributes most to the national budget. For your information the capital Kinshasa is over 1,500 km away from Lubumbashi; partly explaining the secessionist current that has been present throughout the province’s recent history:

1960s

Shortly after Congo was granted independence on June 1960, Moise Tshombe proclaimed Katangan independence from the new Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba. His declaration of independence was made with the support of Belgian business interests and over 6,000 Belgian troops; Tshombe was known to be close to the Belgian industrial companies that mined in HK. In September 1960, Prime Minister Lumumba was replaced in a coup d'état by Mobutu Sese Seko. In January 1961, Lumumba was sent to Lubumbashi, where he was tortured and executed shortly after arrival; most likely with the help of the Belgium and US government. It was only after a decisive attack by UN forces on Katanga in December 1962 and the fall of Lubumbashi in January 1963, that Tshombe surrendered. Many lives were lost; including that of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld who died in uncertain circumstances in a plane crash.

1990s

More recently Lubumbashi was again in the spotlight. This was when rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila was in the process of overthrowing the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. (Yep, the first is the father of Joseph Kabila the current Congolese president who took over after his father’s assassination in January 2001). Laurent-Désiré Kabila, after Mobutu had fled in May 1997, spoke from Lubumbashi to declare himself president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pictures and statues of Laurent-Désiré Kabila are present throughout the city.

Now

At the moment Lubumbashi is very safe and quiet; almost to being boring. I do not need a radio here, I do not have a call sign, and the IRC even allows one to walk around the city. Let's see whether this stays the same in the next election (this year? Who knows?) when the governor of Katanga - Moïse Katumbi Chapwe – is is likely to run for the presidency.

So, what am I doing here in Lubumbashi?

Well, actually nothing very interesting. I am not going into the field and I am not training any people. I mainly talk and sit behind my laptop. That is, I have five main things that I am doing here:

• Talking to Mark; the boss of TUUNGANE for Haut Katanga. The evaluation is getting closer, we are planning to add a behavioral measure, and there are several other things that have to be talked about but that doesn’t go well over the phone;
• Talking to UN OCHA regarding maps of the Haut Katanga region;
• Talking with Professor Gabriel Kalaba from OCU at the University of Lubumbashi. He was responsible for the baseline survey in 2007 and I talked with him about his experiences and about his ideas for the next survey. Trivia: The Belgians established the University of Élisabethville (now the University of Lubumbashi) in 1954;
• Much time is spend behind a laptop to clean data. The IRC works with entities that are called CDCs and CDVs. A CDV consist out of several villages and a CDC consists out of several CDVs. In 2007 we had a nice document that said which villages were in which CDV and CDC. Over the last few years some CDVs were split up, merged, etc. and because nobody kept track, I am now trying to figure out in which CDC and CDV each of the villages is. FYI: We’re talking over 5,000 villages spread over four provinces. Yes, oh joy!
• We are about to start a big exercise to collect all the geo-locations of those aforementioned villages. I am now preparing the data for this, creating forms that can be filled out, have contact with different agencies to increase the number of GPS devices that we have, etc.

The IRC has a new office, which used to belong to the ICRC. It is much bigger than the one I worked in last summer: