> The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren (Flemish Brabant) is refusing to hand over geological archive material on Congo to an American mining company that wants to use the data to map valuable raw materials. ‘We want to digitalise the archives ourselves and not leave it to a private company,’ the museum says. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is increasing pressure through diplomatic channels.
Yeah I'm with Africa Museum on this one. This said, there is a broad problem of getting old records digitized in African libraries. Very often these library and archive building are very old, don't have working climate control, and the records are often irreplaceable cultural artifacts that are rotting on the shelves for lack of funding to rescue them.
I feel like money is not an issue for the museum. Conscientous use of money is another problem.
Wasteful mismanagement of public funds is a plague of Belgian public service.
They could have striken a deal, e.g. let the U.S. company digitize the records on premise and make them public.
They won't - it's a US-EU competition.
The US+UAE is backing the DRC and the EU is backing Rwanda [0][1][2] in order to access critical minerals in Central Africa, most of which are in M23 controlled or adjacent territory [3] whose control is contested between the DRC and Rwanda.
The US under Biden and Trump has backed the DRC but the EU is backing Rwanda and M23.
We're in the midst of a new Scramble for Africa and all countries and blocs are acting unilaterally.
[0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/le-monde-africa/article/2024/02/29...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/10/drc-calls-eu-m...
[2] - https://www.habtoorresearch.com/programmes/drc-minerals-us-e...
[3] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42461-022-00551-x
Please don't propagate rightwing ideology. There are plenty of public services and servants who do their job very well. I worked in several administrations with them as an IT manager.
Sure there is "corruption" and other things but in my experience, not that much.
People really overestimate how much of an impact Trump has had on our grand strategy - it's the same people who worked under Obama, Biden, and Trump. We shifted to a more muscular resources policy during the 2010s due to the US-China rivalry.
We're not that different from the French in that regard [2].
[0] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/biden-goes-angola-beyond-lobit...
[1] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/africasource/what-to-k...
[2] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-a-crisis-over...
