Few relationships are as fraught with complexity and moral ambiguity as those between the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Recently, former US President Joe Biden visited Angola to push the Lobito Corridor infrastructure project, which will ship minerals from the DRC out to the world. It’s a slick, modern initiative. Yet it is also a reminder of a much darker history of exploitation that stretches back more than a century.

The Lobito Corridor is all about minerals like cobalt and copper—essential for electric cars and smartphones, but at a cost. The idea is to make it easier for the DRC’s resources to reach global markets, with the US backing the project to counter China’s growing influence in Africa. Yet dig a little deeper, and it’s hard not to see shades of the same old story. Despite being framed as a development initiative, the Lobito Corridor risks perpetuating Congo’s resource curse, where its wealth serves foreign powers rather than its own people.

To comprehend these contemporary issues, one must journey back to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, European powers and the US legitimized Leopold’s International Association of the Congo as government of the newly created Congo Free State.

Under Leopold’s brutal regime, the Congolese endured mutilation, rape, and murder for profit from ivory and rubber—an estimated 10 million Congolese died. The notorious Force Publique enforced rubber quotas with brutal punishments—floggings, mutilations, execution. Women were taken as hostages, children kidnapped, and the unproductive had their hands severed, which became a macabre currency to prove punishment. 

American missionaries and activists, notably George Washington Williams, were among the first to decry these atrocities. Williams’s Open Letter to Leopold in 1890 was a scathing indictment, detailing the abuses and calling for intervention. 

Yet his appeal was met with silence until the rise of a transatlantic reform movement. Through the formation of the American and British Congo Reform Associations in 1904, activists such as author Mark Twain, British journalist E. D. Morel, and Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, galvanized public opinion and pressured the US and British governments to act. Morel, in horror, declared, “I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers, with a King for a croniman.” In 1908, the Congo Free State was annexed by the Belgian government, though still under colonial rule.

To combat this activism, Henry Wellington Wack, one of Leopold’s American operatives, attempted to co-opt American capital to neutralize opposition. Financier J.P. Morgan met with Leopold, while industry magnates Thomas Fortune Ryan and John D. Rockefeller Jr. gathered in Brussels. By 1906, Ryan and Daniel Guggenheim’s American Congo Company secured a 99-year lease to exploit rubber over 4,000 square miles, with an option for 2,000 more. Not content with merely exploiting the surface, American financiers orchestrated the creation of the Société internationale forestière et minière du Congo, or Forminière, securing a monopoly on mining activities across a district encompassing half the Congo Free State. In true kleptocratic fashion, Leopold and his Belgian cronies ensured they received substantial cuts from every concession and option. 

These business dealings were exposed in William Randolph Hearst’s New York American in 1906, revealing a cabal of American financiers: Ryan, James D. Stillman, Edward B. Aldrich, the Guggenheims, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. They had transformed into de facto overseers of Leopold’s empire, masking raw greed under the guise of civilization and commerce.

Today, Congo’s natural wealth continues to attract morally dubious figures. Enter Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire whose “opaque” mining deals siphoned over $1.36 billion from Congo’s coffers, according to the US Treasury. Though sanctioned, his case reflects a deeper pattern—one where foreign powers sanitize corruption without addressing structural exploitation.

Which brings us to the Lobito Corridor, a project promising regional prosperity while conveniently redirecting Africa’s resources into global supply chains. On paper, it’s a practical rail and port network linking the DRC and Zambia to Angola’s coast. In reality, it echoes the past—another chapter in the long tradition of Congo’s riches benefiting foreign powers.

The role of the US is framed as a counter to China’s influence in Africa, and will likely create jobs and boost trade. However, it is also a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—a century on, the story of Congo’s exploitation is still the same. 

Biden’s visit marked the first by a US president to Africa since 2015, yet uncertainty looms over Donald Trump’s second term. Would flagship projects like the Lobito Corridor survive, or would an America First agenda deprioritize Africa?

Without listening to Congolese voices and addressing entrenched inequalities, the Lobito Corridor risks becoming just another gilded pipeline of exploitation, tracing its origins back to the blood-soaked jungles of the Congo Free State—and the ambitions of a Belgian king and American business interests.