Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · Belgian Colony · Katanga Copper

Belgian Congo - September 1, 1939

The Belgian Congo in 1939 is the extractive colony in its purest form - a territory roughly eighty times the area of Belgium, governed for the account of Brussels by a few thousand European administrators over some ten million Africans who have no political rights and no share in the wealth their labour produces. The colony is a mineral machine. Union Minière du Haut-Katanga pulls copper and cobalt from the Katanga plateau; the mines of Shinkolobwe hold the richest uranium ore then known on earth; industrial diamonds, tin, gold, palm oil and cotton flow out through the railway to Matadi and, southward, to the Rhodesian and Angolan lines. Governor-General Pierre Ryckmans administers a system built on the colonial trinity of state, Catholic mission and mining company. The strategic identity is the colony as balance sheet: no army of its own beyond the Force Publique, no voice of its own, and a value to the outside world measured entirely in what can be dug out of its ground - a value that the war opening in Europe is about to make enormous.

Starting position

The starting board is a productive, quiescent, entirely subordinate colony on the eve of a European war it does not control. Order rests on the Force Publique, a colonial army of roughly eighteen thousand African soldiers under Belgian officers, which doubles as gendarmerie across a territory with almost no roads. The economy is export-mineral: copper and cobalt from Katanga, diamonds from Kasai, gold from the east, and the strategically singular uranium of Shinkolobwe, whose ore Union Minière has already been stockpiling above ground. African labour is coerced through recruitment quotas and cultivation requirements; education is left to the missions; political expression does not exist. The metropole is small and, within months of the war's opening, will be overrun - Belgium falls in May 1940 - which leaves the colony's governor and its mining directorate to decide, largely on their own, whether the Congo throws its output and its soldiers behind the Allied cause. The pieces are copper, cobalt, uranium, rubber and the Force Publique, and every one of them is about to become a war asset.

What turns the campaign

What Brussels wants is what it has always wanted: an uninterrupted flow of minerals and revenue, order maintained cheaply by a thin European administration and the Force Publique, and no disturbance to a system that pays. What the war forces on the colony is a set of choices its structure never anticipated. With the metropole occupied, the Congo becomes the richest asset of the Free Belgian cause and a critical Allied supplier - its copper going into shell casings, its cobalt into alloys, its rubber replacing lost Asian sources, and, most consequentially, its uranium becoming the feedstock the American bomb programme will buy in secret. The Force Publique, meanwhile, will campaign against the Italians in Abyssinia. The campaign turns on whether the colony holds firm in the Allied camp, whether its output can be raised and moved through the long southern rail routes under wartime demand, and whether ten million subjects can be kept producing without the coercion tipping into revolt. It is a colony asked to fight a war it has no say in - and to win it with rocks.

Signature challenge