page_title: Katanga Province
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Katanga Province / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Shinkolobwe mine was exploited by the Belgian Union Minière du Haut Katanga. The majority of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project came from that mine, thanks to the intuiton of Edgar Sengier, the CEO of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, who had suspected that uranium would be important in war times and imported 1,000 tons of uranium ore in the United States in 1939. Contacted by the Manhattan Project people in 1942, he sold them the total stock and after refurbishment of the Shinkolobwe mine, sold them 30,000 ton between 1942 and 1944.
context_page_description: Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914.
  It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015, when it was split into the Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba and Haut-Katanga provinces. Between 1971 and 1997, its official name was Shaba Province.
  Katanga's area encompassed 497,000 square kilometres. Farming and ranching are carried out on the Katanga Plateau. The eastern part of the province is considered to be a rich mining region, which supplies cobalt, copper, tin, radium, uranium, and diamonds. The region's former capital, Lubumbashi, is the second-largest city in the Congo.
context_section_description: Copper mining in Katanga dates back over 1,000 years, and mines in the region were producing standard-sized ingots of copper for international transport by the end of the 10th century CE.
  In the 1890s, the province was beleaguered from the south by Cecil Rhodes' Northern Rhodesia, and from the north by the Belgian Congo, the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Msiri, the King of Katanga, held out against both, but eventually Katanga was subsumed by the Belgian Congo.
  After 1900, the Societe Generale de Belgique practically controlled all of the mining in the province through Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK). This included uranium, radium, copper, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, germanium, manganese, silver, gold, and tin.
  In 1915, a deposit of pitchblende and other uranium minerals of a higher grade than had ever been found before anywhere in the world and higher than any found since were discovered at Shinkolobwe. The discovery was kept secret by UMHK. After World War I ended a factory was built at Olen; the secrecy was lifted at the end of 1922 with the announcement of the production of the first gram of radium from the pitchblende. By the start of World War II, the mining companies "constituted a state within the Belgian Congo". The Shinkolobwe mine near Jadotville (now Likasi) was at the centre of the Manhattan Project.
  In 1960, after the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Republic of the Congo) gained independence from Belgium, the UMHK, Moise Tshombe and Godefroid Munongo supported the secession of Katanga province from the Congo. This was supported by Belgium but opposed by the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. This led to the assassination of Lumumba and the Katanga Crisis (or "Congo Crisis"), which lasted from 1960 to 1965. The breakaway State of Katanga existed from 1960 to 1963.
  In 2005, the new constitution specified that Katanga was to be split up into separately administered provinces.
  Militias such as Mai Mai Kata Katanga led by Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga fought for Katanga to secede, and his group briefly took over the provincial capital Lubumbashi in 2013.
  In 2015, Katanga Province was split into the constitutional provinces of Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, and Haut-Katanga.
caption: Mine de Shinkolobwe. The uranium for the Manhattan Project and the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Shinkolobwe mine.
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