A disagreement has arisen between U.S. mineral exploration company KoBold Metals and Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa over a proposal to digitize the museum’s extensive colonial-era geological archive from the Democratic Republic of Congo. KoBold Metals offered to fund the digitization in exchange for exclusive access to the data, a proposal the museum has so far declined, citing concerns over privatizing public heritage.
KoBold Metals, a California-based company backed by investors including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, uses artificial intelligence to search for deposits of cobalt, copper, and other minerals critical for electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies. The company approached the museum, also known as the AfricaMuseum, with an offer to digitize its vast and largely uncatalogued archive.
The collection contains thousands of maps, geological surveys, and reports compiled by Belgian geologists during the country’s colonial rule of the Congo, which ended in 1960. The materials are stored in the museum’s basement in Tervuren, outside Brussels.
In its proposal, KoBold offered to finance the entire digitization process, a project the museum estimates would cost millions of euros. In return, the company requested a period of exclusive access to the digitized data to aid its search for mineral deposits in the DRC.
Museum officials have publicly expressed reservations about the terms. Guido Gryseels, the director of the AfricaMuseum, stated that while the museum is seeking partners for the digitization, it cannot agree to an exclusive arrangement with a private, for-profit entity. In comments to reporters, Gryseels emphasized the museum’s responsibility to make the archive accessible to the scientific community and the Congolese people. He described the proposal as a potential “privatization of public heritage.”
The museum is instead seeking public funding to undertake the project independently, with the goal of making the entire archive available online without restriction.
KoBold Metals has presented its offer as a way to preserve a decaying historical record while advancing the global transition to clean energy. Josh Goldman, the company’s president, told news agencies that the archive contains valuable information that is currently inaccessible and at risk of deteriorating. He argued that KoBold’s work would preserve the data for future generations while accelerating the discovery of materials necessary to address climate change. According to the company, the data would be made public after its period of exclusive use.
The dispute highlights the complexities surrounding historical archives collected during colonial periods, particularly when the information they contain has significant modern commercial value. Officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo have also expressed interest in accessing the archive’s data to better understand their nation’s geological resources.
As of now, negotiations between KoBold Metals and the AfricaMuseum are at an impasse, and the future of the archive’s digitization remains unresolved.
