Goat-Water: Congo’s diamond city once called Bakwanga
Mbuji-Mayi, capital of Kasai-Oriental in the south-central DRC, is often ranked the country’s second-largest city after Kinshasa—ahead of Lubumbashi and Kisangani. Known as Bakwanga until end-1962, its Tshiluba name means “Goat-Water” for the region’s herds along the Mbuji-Mayi River.
Five communes—Bipemba, Dibindi, Diulu, Kanshi, and Muya—each under a burgomaster date from a 4 March 1968 interior ministry order. Despite huge population, remoteness and thin infrastructure keep it feeling cut off from national circuits.
The site was once a cluster of villages on land held by the Bakwanga clan. Diamonds turned up as early as 1907, though their worth was not grasped until 1913, and a mining camp followed. The diamond company MIBA laid out the young town as labour camps, mines and living quarters, discouraged building, and required every resident to hold a permit and register at a command post, fearing theft.
In the 1950s the area was judged to hold the world's most important industrial diamond deposits, at least 300 million carats, and the city stands on top of them. Stones could be picked from local streams, and as of 1963 MIBA supplied four-fifths of global industrial diamonds and 57 percent of diamonds of every kind. After independence in 1960 Luba migrants poured in, and on 8 August 1960 the Luba chief Albert Kalonji made Bakwanga capital of his breakaway Mining State of South Kasai, crowning himself emperor in April 1961 before national troops arrested him that December.
Through the 1980s and 1990s Mobutu's government neglected the city, so MIBA repaired roads, paid soldiers, supplied power from its own station and set aside $5 million to $6 million annually for social spending. Its chief, Jonas Mukamba Kadiata Nzemba, appointed in 1986, became the de facto governor and backed the University of Kasai, while reportedly skimming $1.5 to $2 million a month for Mobutu. Kabila's rebels took the city on 4 April 1997 amid looting, and in October 1998 Zimbabwean and Chadian troops arrived to support him.
Source: Mbuji-Mayi
