# Kilo-Moto The colonial gold parastatal of the Ituri and Haut-Uélé, and the clearest documented case in this vault of **colonial labour policy producing an ethnic war eighty years later**. Gold was found in the Ituri River in **1903** by prospectors working for [[Leopold II]]; the Kilo mine opened in 1905 and Moto in 1911. The colonial state created a *régie* in **1919** and converted it into a commercial company in **1926**. By 1930 the two fields produced around 5,000 kg of gold a year; Belgian charter companies took over three million ounces of a recorded eleven million lifetime. ## The labour policy and its consequence Kilo-Moto had a permanent labour problem, and the way the administration solved it reshaped Ituri. Agents bribed or coerced local chiefs into supplying workers. Between **1917 and 1918** the Belgian authorities reorganised the **Lendu into autonomous chiefdoms** while favouring the **Hema** in education and administration, and granted settler landholdings through the 1910s and 1920s. The Rift Valley Institute traces the **Hema–Lendu wars of 1999–2007** — among the most vicious episodes of the Congo wars, and the conflict that produced [[Bosco Ntaganda]] — directly to that administrative engineering. It is the sharpest available answer to the question of what colonial extraction actually left behind: not only a hole in the ground, but a political geography built to serve a mine. ## Afterwards Nationalised without compensation in **1967** as OKIMO, and restructured as **SOKIMO**. It now holds minority stakes in joint ventures with international miners, including 10% of the Kibali mine, among the largest gold operations in Africa. Ituri gold today is the least governable commodity in the region. Congolese official artisanal gold exports were under $2 million in 2021, while Uganda exported $2.25 billion of gold in 2020–21 and Rwanda $654 million in 2022, neither from meaningful domestic deposits. Gold is portable, fungible and effectively outside every conflict-minerals regime — the consistent finding of the empirical literature on [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]], where 3T supply chains improved and **gold got worse**. ## See also [[Belgian Congo]] · [[Forminière]] · [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] · [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]] · [[Congolese History Hub]]