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At Djoko Punda you enter the domain of the Forminiere, the corporation founded by a monarch and which has a kingdom for a partner. Woven into its story is the romance of a one-time barefoot Virginia boy who became the commercial associate of a king. What is the Forminiere and what does it do? The name is a contraction of Société Internationale Forestiere & Miniere du Congo.

I lunched in comfortable brick houses and dined at night in a club where every man wore evening clothes. I kept saying to myself, "Is this really the Congo?" Everywhere I heard English spoken. This was due to the large British interest in the Union Miniere and the presence of so many American engineers.

Williams now organized the company known as the Tanganyika Concessions, which became the instigator of Congo copper mining. Subsequently the Union Miniere du Haut Kantanga was formed by leading Belgian colonial capitalists and the Tanganyika Concessions acquired more than forty per cent of its capital. The Union Miniere took over all the concessions and discoveries of the British corporation.

The ores are of a very high grade and since the Union Miniere owns more than one hundred mines, of which only six or seven are partially developed, the future seems safe. Copper is only one phase of the Katanga mineral treasure. Coal, iron, and tin have not only been discovered in quantity but are being mined commercially.

The Katanga is, with the exception of certain palm fruit areas, the bulwark of British interests in the Congo. The American domain is the Upper Kasai district. Conspicuous among the Americans at Elizabethville was Preston K. Horner, who constructed the smelter plant and who was made General Manager of the Union Miniere in 1913.

Clearly to understand the scope and purpose of the Forminiere you must know that it is one of the three companies that have helped to shape the destiny of the Congo. I encountered the first the Union Miniere the moment I entered the Katanga. The second is the Huileries du Congo Belge, the palm-oil producers whose bailiwick abuts upon the Congo and Kwilu Rivers.

The Union Miniere is now the leading industrial institution in the Katanga and its story is really the narrative of a considerable phase of Congo development. Within ten years it has grown from a small prospecting outfit in the wilderness, two hundred and fifty miles from a railway, to an industry employing at the time of my visit more than 1,000 white men and 15,000 blacks.

Jadot was instrumental in organizing the Union Miniere and was also the compelling force behind the building of the Katanga Railway. In 1912 he became Vice Governor of the Société and the following year assumed the Governorship. In addition to being President of the Forminiere he is also head of the Union Miniere and of the new railroad which is to connect the Katanga with the Lower Congo.

Now we come to the third and the most important agency, so far as American interest is affected, in the Forminiere, whose empire is the immense section watered by the Kasai River and which extends across the border into Angola. In the Union Miniere you got the initial hint of America's part in the development of the Congo. That part, however, was entirely technical.

For some years A. E. Wheeler, a widely-known American engineer, has been Consulting Engineer of the Union Miniere, with Frederick Snow as assistant. Since my return from Africa Horner has retired as General Manager and Wheeler has become the ranking American. Practically all the Yankee experts in the Katanga are graduates of the Anaconda or Utah Mines.