The elements of power, p.5
The Elements of Power, page 5
Nobody could have known it at the time, but the decision of the young Englishman to relocate in search of warmer weather would trigger a chain of events that ultimately led to ubiquitous smartphone-computers tucked into billions of pockets and noiseless electric vehicles gliding down city streets. It would also kindle a potential energy revolution; offer one solution to climate change; and spark a competition for resources unseen since the days of the Cold War, with states pitted against one another in a mad rush to mass-produce batteries and thus eliminate carbon fuel. Whittingham’s work eventually garnered him the highest scientific recognition: In 2019, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—along with two other scientists, John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino—for his contribution to creating the first lithium-ion battery.
For his master’s degree at Oxford, Whittingham had studied alloys made out of tungsten metal. “We were looking at how fast the ions moved inside them,” Whittingham said when we spoke on a winter’s day in early 2020. Ions are atoms or clusters of atoms that hold an electric charge; when they move, they create an electrical current. The Cold War loomed large. “Part of that was tied to what was then the beginning of the space race,” he told me, “and part of my research at Oxford was in fact paid for by the U.S. Air Force.”
After completing his master’s, Whittingham continued to study the tungsten bronzes, undertaking a PhD with a fellowship from Britain’s Gas Council. “One month before I started, Britain hit natural gas in the North Sea,” he said. “So I was told, ‘You can work on anything you like. You’ve got your money. Don’t bother us with reports or anything else.’ ”
The freedom the Gas Council gave Whittingham facilitated his work on the tungsten bronzes. He showed that some ions moved rapidly within them. “That was it,” he said. “The beginning of a change, because at that point, I was going to be working on catalysis to turn coal gas into the equivalent of natural gas. Lucky changes, if you like.” The transport of ions would be his occupational focus for much of the next decade and beyond—their movement would be key to the creation of lithium-ion batteries. After his Gas Council fellowship, Whittingham decided to move to the U.S. for a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford.
Whittingham quickly fell in love with America, conducting his research during the week and hiking in California and Oregon’s national parks on the weekends. On a trip to the San Francisco Opera, in August 1968, he met his wife, Georgina, who was at that time studying for her master’s, with a concentration on Latin American literature and poetry in Spanish. Within seven months, they were married. Their four grandchildren are all native Californians.
The U.S. was intellectually stimulating for Whittingham. At Stanford, he continued to work on fast-ion transport, focusing on a compound called beta-alumina that Ford had been developing since 1967 for use in its own research into electric cars. He began to grasp the implications of his work—how it might be used to create a new, powerful battery—and the need for such a battery to power vehicles. Ford’s battery, however, was impractical, as it needed to be kept at three hundred degrees Celsius—far too hot for the inside of a car.
The next year, 1972, Whittingham traveled to northern Italy to attend a conference at Belgirate, a shrine-studded village clung to the shores of Lake Maggiore. The meeting was sponsored by NATO. Among Belgirate’s faded waterfront villas, Whittingham presented a paper on tungsten bronzes. The Belgirate Conference, as it came to be known, had a seismic impact on the new study of ion transport, and it was crucial to the discovery of lithium-ion batteries. “The original Belgirate Meeting made for the first time visible the technological potential related to the phenomenon of the fast ionic transport in solids,” Bruno Scrosati, an Italian electrochemist, later wrote.
The stage had been set for a new scientific field, known thereafter as “solid state ionics.” Studies in this field have led to a plethora of innovations we rely on today, such as electrochromic windows and mirrors, chemotronics (the development of optical and chemical sensors), fuel cells, nanotechnology, and water electrolysis. At Belgirate, another idea had come into sharper focus, and the outline for a new kind of battery had implanted itself in Whittingham’s head. The conference would end up having its greatest impact on a technology that would make its way into billions of pockets around the world—batteries.
M. Stanley Whittingham in his Exxon lab
Chapter 4
The Land of the Three Kings
Growing up in 1990s Congo, Odilon Kajumba Kilanga did not look to copper and cobalt miners as his role models. He and his family, who lived on the outskirts of the city of Lubumbashi, were poor, but they had a sense that there was a larger world beyond the suburb they called home. After all, his father, Joseph, a tire salesman, could claim official connections. Joseph’s uncle Joseph Kufi Kilanga was a government minister, and when he had a child Odilon’s father gave his son the postname Kilanga.
Kufi exemplified success to Kajumba and to his extended family, even if they barely knew him. He was born in 1935, in Mbulula, a small town not far from a tributary of the Congo River in the northernmost reaches of Katanga. At that time, Congo still belonged to Belgium, and the Belgians had warped the concept of ethnicity there through conquest and games of colonial favoritism—divide-and-conquer strategies with far-reaching consequences for the way profits from battery minerals are distributed in the twenty-first century.
“My family are Hemba,” Kajumba told me. The Hemba have a reputation among other Congolese, deserved or not, for being quick of temper. “The Hemba are a disciplined people. In Katanga, we are known as an excessively brutal people, a bit like the cowboys of Texas—you know, a warrior has lots of discipline,” Gaylord Kilanga, Kufi’s son and Kajumba’s cousin, told me. “We raise our children in a very disciplined way, as if we were in the army.” Kilanga told me that many Hemba, including himself, think of themselves as descendants of a “Nilotic” people from Ethiopia, though scholars also trace their roots to a nineteenth-century migration from Tanzania and to a northward progression of Lunda groups from the Copperbelt. Many Congolese consider them to be originally from Katanga, distant cousins and neighbors of the far more populous Baluba-Katanga, or Luba, people, who can trace their origins to the fight between the Red and Black Kings.
The Hemba are perhaps most famous internationally for their art and sculptural figures, the most well-known of which are known as singitis. These sculptures, which occasionally have two faces, emphasize different attributes of kingship. Singitis were held inside special huts at the centers of their towns, only meant to be accessed by designated caretakers. During Belgian rule, however, the sculptures were looted by colonialists, who prized them for their careful craft; in the 1970s, many were sold to unscrupulous dealers. The catalog entry for one Hemba statuette at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art explains how such a large-eyed, big-bellied sculpture emphasized two important factors in Hemba society: the eyes, for education and experience, and “the umbilicus,” which signified an ancestral link, or “the point of connection with one’s extended lineage.”
Kufi, Kajumba’s great uncle, was born, according to his son, “into a family of very weak fortune.” By the age of five, he had lost both his mother and his father, and he was entrusted to a Belgian Catholic priest for his upbringing. A bright boy, he was sent to study at a seminary in the nearby town of Kongolo. In the mid-1950s, when he was in his early twenties, the priest who had cared for Kufi sponsored his study in Katanga’s capital, more than six hundred miles to the south. The education of Black Africans in Congo was a novelty: The colony did not open its first university until 1954. “Pas d’élite, pas d’ennuis,” the Belgians would say. “No elite, no trouble.”
If things were getting a little better for Congolese, they were getting much better for the colonialists, especially those who were involved in the mining sector. The companies were some of the most profitable global stocks: the Apples or Nvidias of their time. This is a fact that is barely acknowleged these days: More than sixty years after independence, some Belgian journalists still cite a study from 1957 that claims that Belgium put more into Congo than it took from it over the fifty-two years of colonization. The money that Belgium supposedly “lost” in Congo stands at more than $1.5 billion in 2025 U.S. dollars. But this ignores the specific nature of Belgium’s colonial project, which was for the state to support private enterprise through investment and cloak private gain in corporate structures, a practice that was passed down to the rulers of an independent Congo and their foreign backers. And, incidentally, a practice that is still alive and well today.
In fact, the levers of business and commerce had made Congo into one of the most purely extractive colonies in world history. Huge fortunes were made in the private sector, especially by way of mining. Shareholders, including the Belgian state and Belgian and international investors, were raking it in. Through the mining of copper and cobalt, the Union Minière, a single company, produced net profits of over thirty-one billion Belgian francs (more than $6.8 billion in 2025 U.S. dollars) in the years between 1950 and 1959 alone. During the 1950s, the company was one of the largest suppliers of copper to a swiftly electrifying world. “The colonial economy was a goldmine for Belgian investors and the yields of Congolese mining companies were especially impressive,” the political scientist Emizet François Kisangani wrote in a 2023 reassessment of Congo’s colonial economics. “They ranked among the world’s best financial performers.”
Congo did not exist in a vacuum. Its corporatist structure meant that global market trends determined the colony’s economic fate. In the mid-1950s, after Kufi arrived in Elisabethville, the world economy slipped into a recession, and with its outsize reliance on exports, Congo suffered.
In 1958, the head of a Belgian tin-mining concern’s economic studies unit summed up the situation: “Unemployment has appeared in the Congo, whereas previously the country had always had a shortage of labor.” Elisabethville found itself in the middle of a political foment aggravated by a lack of jobs for Congolese, who had increasingly begun traveling to cities to find work. Long mistreated by their colonial masters, the Congolese found a voice in the calls for liberation that were starting to be heard across the African continent. People began to agitate for a Congo run by the Congolese, not by the Belgians.
* * *
As Kufi continued his studies in Elisabethville during the second half of the 1950s, a new category of ethnic identity was becoming central to the politics of the era: Which people a Congolese belonged to, what language they spoke, and what region they came from suddenly became dividing lines. Katanga was hurtling toward decolonization, but a new class of politicians was asking: Decolonization for whom?
By the late 1950s, an unsuccessful Katangese trader named Moïse Kapend Tshombe was one of those politicians. He was local royalty by virtue of his marriage to the daughter of the Mwaant Yav, a traditional king of the Lunda people whose title meant “lord of the vipers.” Since colonizing Congo, the Belgians had used so-called chefs coutumiers, or customary chiefs, often the relatives of kings and lords they had vanquished, to reinforce their control. Under European rule, the privileges of these chiefs were mainly symbolic, but as the move toward decolonization gained momentum, they became rallying posts for political factions.
Tshombe used his royal connections to become one of the most important political voices in Katanga. The Lunda were especially worried that a postcolonial Congolese government headquartered outside Katanga might strip the South of its mineral wealth. This, they pointed out, would simply mean replacing their rulers in Brussels with another faraway elite who had little to do with them. This dynamic continues to be key to the politics of Katanga during the current era. Katangese point out that the province does not receive its fair share of the wealth generated by its copper-and-cobalt mines. As the sociologist Claude Iguma Wakenge has noted, when a politician who was considered “not a Katangese” was appointed to a ministerial position overseeing mining for the Haut-Katanga provincial government in 2017, controversy erupted, and the politician was shifted out of the mining role.
The seeds of an ethnic dilemma that continues to plague southern Congo were planted in the 1920s, when the Belgian colonial government embarked upon a policy of “labor stabilization.” At the time, scores of African workers were dying in their mines. The heads of the Union Minière and the colonial administration decided to create workers’ compounds with health care and schools for workers who had transferred to Katanga. Foremost among them were a people called the Luba-Kasai, who quickly rose in the Belgians’ estimation. In 1951, a Belgian scholar described the Luba-Kasai as “intelligent, robust, hard-working and entrepreneurial; they have a decided willingness to cooperate with the occupying whites to adapt and elevate themselves in the new state of things which has come to throw their primitive situation into disarray.” By 1956, the Union Minière employed a staff that was 53 percent Luba-Kasai.
The Lunda—along with the Yeke, Sanga, and Luba—called themselves “autochthonous.” They saw themselves as the true inheritors of the wealthy land that the Belgians were about to leave. To them, the Luba-Kasai were “foreigners” who were interested in stealing minerals.
In October 1958, Tshombe founded the Confederation of Tribal Associations of Katanga, better known by its French acronym as the Conakat. Kufi did not agree with its policies, which he thought of as “tribalist,” but many Southerners began to side with Tshombe as he promoted a Katangese ethnostate.
In many ways, Tshombe’s ideology rested on a foundation that the Belgians had laid. The party’s leaders cherry-picked among colonial-era studies by European anthropologists to create a vision of a Katangese ethnic group. Godefroid Munongo Mwenda M’Siri, another of the Conakat’s cofounders and a direct descendant of King Msiri, adeptly baked these into an ideology. “When the first white explorers discovered the part of Africa called Katanga,” he wrote, “they found three monarchies which were not only bound by family, economic and social links but—and this is by far the most important—their historic destiny had been linked for centuries.”
* * *
Not all Congolese thought a postcolonial state should be split along ethnic lines. People who saw a future for a united Congo drew inspiration from around Africa. The late 1950s were heady years across the continent. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, a teacher and organizer who was inspired by the Indian independence movement of Mahatma Gandhi, used nonviolent protest, or “positive action,” to eject the British in 1957. The Congolese, and especially a young post office clerk named Patrice Émery Lumumba, looked up to Nkrumah and other African nationalists. Lumumba was ten years Kufi’s senior, but his education had taken a similar form: He had studied at seminaries and worked his way through the colonial hierarchy. In October 1958, the same month Conakat was founded, he created the Congolese National Movement (MNC).
The MNC was a party that espoused nationalism and stood in opposition to other Congolese parties that had been founded along ethnic or tribal lines. That year, Nkrumah, who had become Ghana’s prime minister, invited Lumumba and African activists from twenty-seven other African countries and territories to Accra for an All-African Peoples’ Conference. “Hands off Africa!” the event’s slogan shouted. “The wind of freedom currently blowing across all of Africa has not left the Congolese people indifferent,” Lumumba declaimed during a speech that would launch him into the world’s consciousness. He inveighed against “colonialism, imperialism, tribalism, and religious separatism, all of which constitute a serious obstacle to the blooming of a harmonious and fraternal African society.”
Patrice Émery Lumumba visits Brussels in 1960.
For Kufi, the Unitarian politics of Lumumba were more to his liking. “He was a student but Lumumbist in his way of being,” Kilanga told me of his father. By 1959, many Luba, too, despite their position as “autochthonous Katangese” in the ethnic hierarchy that the Conakat had drawn up, began to support the ideas of Lumumba. The Association of the Luba People of Katanga (Balubakat) allied itself with the MNC. Kufi looked up to the Balubakat, particularly its charismatic leader, Jason Sendwe, and during breaks in his studies, he began to organize for the movement to keep Congo whole.
After years of repression under the Belgians, Congo was now barreling toward independence, but the country had been barely developed by its colonizers. Roads led to mines and coffee plantations, but away from the axes of profitability, and many Congolese were completely cut off from the world. There were, among them, few of the functionaries, lawyers, and doctors who would be needed to staff a modern state. And there were no senior soldiers to run the country’s army and prevent mutinies. When the competing Congolese political parties met in Brussels at the beginning of 1960, Tshombe and the Conakat wanted to retain control of the province’s mineral wealth and maintain an oversight role for the Belgian king. The other political groups, led by Lumumba, overruled Tshombe. The stage had been set for a rupture that would tear Congo to shreds.
Chapter 5
The Prime Minister’s Tooth
About thirty miles into the drive eastward from Lubumbashi, the road forks. Take a left and you will eventually end up in Kolwezi, the mining city where Kajumba lived, and where most of Congo’s copper and cobalt is mined. On the right, near the little village of Shilatembo, stands a painted concrete gateway topped by a cheery greeting: Bienvenue Au Site Touristique Lumumba.
