The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has intensified its diplomatic push to recover millions of colonial-era geological maps and data archives currently held in Belgium.
Kinshasa seeks full control over the historical records to identify new deposits of copper, cobalt, and lithium.
Louis Watum Kabamba, the Congolese minister of mines, met with Belgian and European Union (EU) officials in Brussels to discuss the restitution.
The documents are currently housed at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren.
The collection includes field reports, aerial photographs, rock samples, and exploration documents gathered under Belgian rule between 1885 and 1960.
Congolese officials agreed with Brussels to establish a joint roadmap and a monitoring task force for the digitization and return of the archives.
The mining ministry stated that the initiative is an essential step toward achieving geoscientific sovereignty for the central African nation.
A dispute erupted recently, when the museum refused to grant a foreign private company exclusive access to the documents.
The United States minerals and artificial intelligence (AI) startup KoBold Metals had struck a deal with Kinshasa to digitize the files.
Belgian authorities countered that a public scientific collection cannot provide exclusive data rights to an overseas private firm.
Instead, the museum plans to manage the digitization internally and transfer copies to Congolese authorities in gradual batches.
A Belgian government spokesperson confirmed that the ongoing project receives financial backing through EU funding streams.
The dispute has revived historical tensions regarding Belgium's colonial exploitation of the region's vast natural resource wealth.
Kinshasa plans to distribute the digital records to local scientists and international investors to accelerate mineral exploration.
The mining ministry noted that state-owned entities like China Railway Group have previously utilized similar museum records for copper exploration in Kasaï.
The push for data recovery coincides with stricter state regulation over domestic mineral exports.
Kinshasa suspended cobalt exports in February 2025 due to a market oversupply that depressed national revenues
The government replaced that ban with an export quota system in October 2025.
The current framework caps domestic cobalt exports at 96,600 tonnes annually for 2026 and 2027 to stabilize global market pricing.
The DRC currently supplies approximately three-quarters of the global output of cobalt, which serves as a critical component for electric vehicle batteries.
Other African nations are similarly modernizing historical records, including South Africa's Council for Geoscience, which partnered with mining group BHP.
Kinshasa also joined the EU-backed PanAfGeo+ INVEST initiative in March 2026 to enhance technical expertise in critical-mineral mapping.
The recovery of these historical geological profiles is seen as vital, because a very large part of the nation remains completely unexplored.
The technical archive represents decades of geological surveying that would cost billions of dollars to replicate under modern field conditions.
Access to these datasets will allow the state to delineate formal critical mineral reserves, and separate them from conflict-affected zones.
The historical documents detail specific exploration campaigns that covered gold, coltan, manganese, tin, tungsten, and uranium deposits across multiple provinces.
By securing these files, the mining ministry intends to make the domestic exploration sector far more competitive and attractive to foreign capital.
Western nations are also watching the dispute closely, as they seek to diversify supply chains and reduce global reliance on Chinese refining.
The current cooperation between Brussels and Kinshasa aims to resolve the longstanding gridlock over the ownership of colonial material wealth.
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