When encountering the “Dig Up the Sun” map created by Roger Peet in 2022, it became obvious that it would have to be featured on the cover of this issue. A few years before us, Roger mapped the interconnection of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Euro-American colonialism, and the extracted colonized land, in particular in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this text, he provides us with the context in which this cartographic research was done, following the path of his father, Terry Peet, who worked for the CIA in Congo in the 1960s.
On September 29, 1965, my father, Terry Peet, awoke before dawn. He left his wife and two young daughters sleeping and drove to the Welsh coast, where he inflated a raft he’d checked out from the Royal Air Force base where he was a military helicopter instructor. He loaded scuba equipment into the raft, left a note in his car about going on one last dive even though it was getting dark, and then pushed the raft out into the cold dark swells of the Welsh channel. He watched until the tide caught it and then walked up to the road and hitched into town.
He caught a train across the country to London where a connection in the Belgian Embassy gave him a ferry ticket. He took another train to the ferry and boarded it. During the crossing he struck up a conversation with a young Canadian medical student and, when the ferry arrived in Ostend, they went to the same hotel. They spent the following week together, before he received orders to board a flight to Congo.
That woman was Joan Milner, and she would eventually become my mother. She had the same first name as my father’s first wife; the one he left asleep in the dark before dawn. They spent a week together in Brussels, a whirlwind romance in the company of gangsters and post-colonial adventurists, before he was seconded on to Congo. She returned to Canada and began the correspondence that kept them connected for the next three years.
My father went to Congo to fly military helicopters for the CIA. The agency’s project to maintain political control of the country faced immense pressure during the chaotic post-independence period, after the assassination of Lumumba by Belgian agents with US approval. He had been recruited somehow; the details are lost. The Americans needed helicopter pilots to navigate Congo’s thickly forested terrain, and my father was looking to escape an unhappy marriage and serve some kind of destiny.
Five years earlier, the United States and Belgium had engineered the murder of the country’s first independent Prime Minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba, after he made it clear that he intended to use the country’s immense mineral wealth for the benefit of its citizens. They killed him for wanting to claim rights of refusal over resources they had long considered their own. For the next five years, the country burned.
One of the most important resources that Congo possessed was a mine in the province of Katanga called Shinkolobwe, which was the source of the most powerful uranium ore on the planet; a single enormous egg-shaped geological anomaly composed of highly concentrated radioactive material, that had been used two decades previous to design, develop, and detonate the first atomic bombs. The idea of Shinkolobwe passing out of US and Belgian control and into the hands of Africans was unacceptable to Western authorities, and they had closed it when Lumumba took power. Prior to Lumumba’s assassination in January 1961, the intelligence services of those two countries had engineered the secession of Katanga. It was to Katanga that they sent Lumumba after they deposed him, and he was murdered, dismembered, and dissolved in acid by Belgian agents, less than 150 kilometers from the Shinkolobwe mine.
Five years later, the country was in uproar as a nationwide guerrilla struggle to reclaim Lumumba’s legacy raged against the forces the US and Belgium were trying to install in its place. Into this maelstrom came a young British helicopter pilot in search of a new self. He wanted to matter to the world and to history, and he imagined that he might achieve that by coming to the aid of Congo’s Belgian settlers. My father thought he could fashion an identity for himself by rescuing them from the fury of the people they had parasitized for so long.
The CIA had facilitated the installation of an ambitious army colonel named Joseph-Desiré Mobutu as President in 1965, just after my father’s arrival, and Mobutu ruled the country for the next 32 years. For a brief period in the first few years of Mobutu’s regime, my father was his personal helicopter pilot, installed at the behest of US intelligence to report on conversations had on board the President’s helicopter, during flights to and from his luxurious yacht.
After my father’s death, I received a box of documents which showed his attempts to find some proof of the fact that he had worked for the CIA, mostly unsuccessful—except for one letter from his former superior in Congo that acknowledged that he had indeed been a contract pilot for the Agency’s Congo effort. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to articulate to himself, and to others, that he had done what was necessary and good in the service of an effort that history would show to be honorable. It wasn’t, though, and he knew it. But he never knew anything of Shinkolobwe.
The Shinkolobwe mine is the reason for the US postwar obsession with Congo, and as such it is the reason that my father and mother met. It’s the wound at the heart of the world where the stones were dug to bring the sun to earth, to bring into this world the thing of power that would allow those who controlled it to deny the future to anyone who stood against them. That place is forbidden now, a lost wasteland of rock and scrub that has been dug through a thousand times by the successive generations of Congolese people who do the work of hauling forth from the Earth the things that Capital has demanded, digging up the sun.
Those workers are not present in popular accounts of this history. For a long time the mine was absent too; stricken from maps, kept wrapped in a formal secrecy whose gravity persists today in both Congo and the United States. The radioactivity from waste products derived from Shinkolobwe ore contaminates sites across the United States, from suburban St. Louis to upstate New York, to the sprawling Hanford reservation, often referred to as the single most contaminated site in the western hemisphere. Images of the radioactive plume from the first nuclear test at the Trinity site in New Mexico show a cloud of radionuclides spreading across the entire North American continent. That is all Shinkolobwe.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to research the exact route that the ore from Shinkolobwe had taken through the hastily-assembled industrial infrastructure of the Manhattan Project. As I read, the idea of a map came to mind as a way of depicting Shinkolobwe’s diasporic presence. I identified the major sites of ongoing radioactive contamination from the processing of Shinkolobwe ore in the USA and dug, so to speak, into them, looking for the details of a story that had become most of my waking world.
When I felt like I had the details of the radioactive legacy of Shinkolobwe in hand, and in order, I began to structure a visual representation of them. The imagery in the map depicts the usage of Shinkolobwe ore during the three year period in which the Manhattan project was actively developing the bomb, from the project’s dawn in 1943 through the first usage of the weapons over Japan in 1945. The story continues on after 1945, as the Manhattan Project became the Atomic Energy Commission and nuclear weapons production pivoted from hot war to Cold War contexts; and in fact Shinkolobwe produced the majority of nuclear material for all US atomic weapons production through the mid 1950s, but in order to keep the map as clear as possible I limited it to a strict wartime timeframe. That allowed me to include the 1,000 tons of Shinkolobwe ore that the Germans seized from the docks in Antwerp when they invaded Belgium, ore which was later found and seized by the Manhattan Project’s agents in secret stockpiles in France and Germany, still in barrels marked “Produit du Congo.”
The rest of the ore, purchased by the US from the Belgian mineral corporation Union Minière, was processed through facilities in Middlesex NJ, Tonawanda, NY, St Louis, MO, Oak Ridge, TN, and Hanford WA, among others. As the bomb project was of the utmost urgency, disposal of the waste it produced was pursued carelessly, if at all, and since the Belgians had stipulated that they were only selling to the US Army the uranium found in the Shinkolobwe ore, the US found itself contractually obliged to store the highly-radioactive byproducts of the industrial processes they were inventing, on the understanding that the Belgians were eventually going to demand their return. That demand never came, however, and even if it had, the contamination was already far out of anyone’s control.
The uranium deposit at Shinkolobwe, when taken up and transmuted by the US Army’s corps of scientists and engineers, became the source of a power that had never before existed on Earth: the power to end everything, and to deny the future to every comer, every agent that might have ever thought to offer an alternative to the way the United States wanted the world to be. The map I made shows the mark left on the planet by that process of discovery, and points specifically to the debt that the US owes to the nameless Congolese mineworkers who raised those stones into the light.
The work of science and war has taken the world so far apart, and ourselves so far apart from it, that we can no longer remember what it means to be inside it. We orbit it now, like electrons; weightless, barely even there. These are the first microseconds of the long nuclear future, and the only thing that remains of us is our need to matter.
That’s what happened to my father, fleeing one world in search of another where he could be someone essential. But he was always essential. He betrayed everything in the service of empires that left him faceless in the dust, but his birthday is on June 30, the same day as the Congolese Independence Day. Like him, all of us who live in the shadow of the mine will never find what we are looking for in the waste left behind by our investigations; we can only find it in the things we do as ensemble. Not taken apart, but taken together, forever. Into the future. ■