This morning, the ceremony at the Peace Memorial Park began at eight o'clock. At 8:15 am, the exact moment of the 1945 explosion, the bell tolled for a minute of silence. The program included the presentation of the register of the dead, the offering of flowers, and the 2026 Peace Declaration, read by the Mayor of Hiroshima before survivors and families.

The Declaration stated that military invasions continue to use nuclear weapons as instruments of intimidation. It also held accountable leaders who justify their own conduct by blaming other countries and noted the third consecutive failure of the Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in, once again, being unable to adopt a common final document.

The warning is directed at states with nuclear arsenals, but also at societies that have learned to live with the possibility of extermination. The danger increases when the bomb ceases to be a moral rupture and enters into security discourses, electoral calculations, diplomatic threats, and military doctrines presented as protection for citizens excluded from decisions of death.

The Hiroshima ceremony preserves the testimony of the Japanese victims, but the nuclear memory remains incomplete when the story begins in the laboratory, moves to the airplane, and ends in the devastated city. Before Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, there were geological maps, colonial contracts, and African workers extracting material from the earth whose fate was deliberately concealed from them.

This void resulted from war secrets, archives focused on leaders, and the corporate protection of a strategic business. Then, museums, films, and textbooks repeated the same protagonists. The African silence became a narrative routine, even though the weapon depended on a chain that originated thousands of kilometers from Japan, under Belgian colonial authority.

Shinkolobwe was located in southeastern Belgian Congo, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Union Minière du Haut Katanga, linked to Belgian capital and the colonial apparatus, exploited a deposit of exceptional wealth. The average ore grade exceeded two percent, far above the deposits available in the United States of America (USA) during the military atomic arms race.

The mine had lost importance when the company accumulated enough radium and uranium reserves to meet projected demand for decades. In 1937, mining ceased. Three years later, Edgar Sengier ordered approximately 1.200 tons of high-grade ore to be transported to New York, fearing that German expansion would place the African reserve in the hands of the Nazi regime.

The barrels arrived in Staten Island before the US entered the war and were stored in a warehouse near New York. In September 1942, the newly created Manhattan Engineering District purchased approximately 1.250 tons. The availability of that ore saved months of extraction and offered an industrial advantage in a race where time was of military value.

The uranium for the Manhattan Project came from three main sources: the Belgian Congo, Canada, and mines or waste from the USA. Shinkolobwe supplied approximately two-thirds of the material acquired by the program. This proportion doesn't allow us to track every atom of Little Boy, but it establishes the Congolese importance in supplying the facilities designed to separate uranium-235.

In Oak Ridge, the processed ore underwent processes that concentrated uranium-235, the fraction capable of sustaining the weapon's chain reaction. The route between Shinkolobwe and Hiroshima passed through refineries, factories, ports, and military structures. The mine was the first material station of a destructive technology, although much of the reserve was above ground.

The purchase of the ore was treated as a matter of military security. The cargo stored on Staten Island and the African reserves were negotiated in secret, while the shipments traversed heavily guarded routes. The secrecy protected the project from Nazi Germany, but it also deprived the Congolese of any knowledge about the destination of the ore mined under colonial authority.

The supply chain followed an imperial geography. The ore left Katanga, crossed railways and ports in Africa, and entered a North American industry financed with gigantic public resources. At each stage, the value increased, and the decision-making process moved further away from the origin. The territory supplied the rock, but did not control the science, the processing, or the military purpose of the finished product.

Inequality was evident in the distribution of power. The Congo held the depository, Belgium exercised colonial authority, the Union Minière signed the contracts, and the USA defined its use. Sovereignty could not be consulted because it did not exist as an independent power. Wealth remained within the territory, while decision-making, pricing, and knowledge remained outside of it.

The victors presented the operation as a military triumph. This interpretation acknowledged the laboratories, engineering, and industrial mobilization, but reduced Africa to a passive reserve. The archives identified the generals, physicists, and administrators, rarely the miners, porters, machinists, and communities that lived under colonial discipline and military secrecy.

The secrecy explains the initial silence, but it doesn't justify decades of omission. The documents were opened, the contracts revealed, and official US histories confirmed the origin of the ore. Excluding Africa from the Hiroshima narrative ceased to serve a military need and began to reveal how colonialism organizes archives and what societies choose to remember.

Congolese miners worked under an order that separated rights, wages, housing, and authority based on race. The Katanga industry recruited and disciplined African workers to serve European companies. In Shinkolobwe, much of the ore used in the war had already been extracted, but it was the result of years of colonial labor subjected to the interests of the Belgian company.

The records do not identify the men who excavated, separated, and transported the rock. This documentary inequality produces a consequence in the memory of Hiroshima: without names, medical records, and family histories, the worker disappears, and the ore seems to move on its own. The absence of faces facilitates a narrative that removes colonial suffering from the responsibility linked to nuclear history.

It is prudent to distinguish what is proven from what the archives do not allow us to measure. The Congolese origin of the ore is documented, as is the ownership by Union Minière and the American purchase. However, the number of workers exposed, the individual radiation levels, and the health impact remain difficult to reconstruct with the certainty required by a historical investigation.

Uncertainty should not erase risk. Uranium requires protection, technical information, and medical supervision. In the Belgian empire, workers received orders without participating in the decision-making process or demanding transparency about the fate of the ore. Ignorance was part of the structure that concentrated knowledge outside the Congo and left the risk with the workers.

Recovering this information doesn't mean inventing biographies that the documents have lost. It means acknowledging its presence, searching local archives, listening to families, studying the health of communities, and demanding cooperation from institutions that retained contracts and profits. Memory begins when it declares the gaps and works to reduce them, instead of transforming silence into a definitive absence.

Little Boy exploded over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. Estimates acknowledged by the city put approximately 140 dead by the end of that year, including those from the explosion, burns, injuries, and radiation. The number remains approximate because entire families perished and the destruction eliminated records essential for a complete and reliable count.

The hibakusha transformed the experience of devastation into a warning against any use of nuclear weapons. Their testimonies describe burned bodies, thirst, late-onset illnesses, fear, and losses that no doctrine can reduce to a mere military calculation. The memory of Hiroshima restores humanity to the victims and rejects the sanitized language of states regarding technological violence.

Adding Shinkolobwe to this memory does not shift the moral center of the bombed city. It shows that the weapon had a history made of conquest, extraction, and inequality. The Japanese victim and the Congolese worker occupied distinct positions, but were linked by a power structure that transformed African wealth into a capacity for destruction administered far from its origin.

The separation persists because experiences belong to national archives, academic disciplines, and distinct memories. Hiroshima appears in the history of war; Shinkolobwe, in that of colonial exploitation. Journalism can bring the fragments together and show that the nuclear age was born from a chain where science, capital, military power, and empire acted under the secrecy of war.

When Africa enters the memory of nuclear power, the question of responsibility becomes more pressing. Belgium needs to confront the role of colonial and corporate structures. The US needs to acknowledge the project's origins. The DRC needs access to archives, promote research, and inscribe Shinkolobwe in national history, museums, and education.

Africa responded to the nuclear threat with a political choice that is significant in this story. The Treaty of Pelindaba, adopted in 1996 and in force since 2009, created a nuclear-weapon-free zone in Africa.

The agreement prohibits nuclear explosive devices and links the peaceful use of the atom to international safeguards, the security of facilities, and the responsibility of participating states. Pelindaba does not erase the past nor guarantee peace, but it expresses sovereignty.

The continent that supplied fissile material for the uranium bomb used against Hiroshima has decided to reject the installation, manufacture, possession, and testing of nuclear weapons on its territory. This position gives Africa authority in debates on disarmament and nuclear justice.

Mineral sovereignty begins before contracts. It requires archives, labor oversight, scientific capacity, negotiation, transformation, and knowledge of the military uses of resources. A state that is unaware of the mineral route may receive revenue without gaining power. Shinkolobwe shows that possession is not enough when technical decision-making and the destination belong to others.

The question returns with cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and resources sought by the energy transition and the military industry. History doesn't repeat itself identically, but it retains a similar structure: urgency increases, contracts accelerate, and communities receive little information about the value, risks, buyers, and purpose of what they are letting go of.

Inscribing the Congo in the memory of Hiroshima is an act of sovereignty over the past and a warning for the future. The continent must tell the story of its resources before they are converted into foreign power. Without archives, science, negotiation, and decision-making, wealth will remain visible in products but absent from the narratives that explain its origin.

The 81st anniversary of Hiroshima, commemorated today, compels us to look at the flash and the excavated earth before it. The bomb killed in a Japanese city, but its material chain crossed colonial Congo, where wealth was extracted under foreign authority, secretly purchased, and transformed far from any African decision about its destiny.

Remembering Shinkolobwe does not divide the memory of the victims. It reconstructs responsibility by including the erased workers, the company that negotiated, the power that dominated, and the state that manufactured the weapon. Peace loses strength when it chooses comfortable chapters of history and leaves colonialism out of the core memory, even though it organized the material origin of the project.

Sovereignty begins with the right to know where wealth goes and into what power it will be converted. When the bell tolls, Hiroshima and Shinkolobwe should be heard in the same story.