The fight for the "trillion dollar maps" - The Saturday Story
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hidden in a quiet Belgian archive, century-old colonial maps of the Democratic Republic of Congo may hold the key to an estimated $24 trillion in untapped minerals. Now the United States, backed by Trump, together with the likes of Jeff Bezos, want them. The curators, however, are in no hurry to hand them over.
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Written by: Madeleine Spence, deputy editor for News Review, The Sunday Times.
Read by: Olivia Case.
Host: Luke Jones.
Producer: Dave Creasey.
We want to hear from you - email: thestory@thetimes.com
Read more: The $24trn question: who owns these 100-year-old mining maps?
Clips: DW, BBC.
Photo: Getty Images, The Sunday Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Luke Jones. |
| 0:12.0 | Hidden in a quiet Belgian archive, a century-old set of colonial maps of the Democratic Republic of Congo |
| 0:19.6 | might hold the key to $24 trillion in |
| 0:23.8 | untapped minerals. As you can imagine, lots of people are very interested in these maps. |
| 0:31.0 | And in the paper this week, Deputy Editor for the News Review section at the Sunday Times, |
| 0:35.0 | Maddie Spence, has published a really intriguing piece about the high-stakes battle underway between governments and billionaires to try and get their |
| 0:43.5 | hands on these maps. But the curators at the archive are in no hurry to help at all. And it |
| 0:51.2 | throws up some big questions. Who really owns the past? Who gets to profit from it? |
| 0:56.8 | We asked our producer, Olivia Case, to read Maddie's piece. |
| 1:10.4 | Far beneath the extravagant topiary, rolling lawns and vast lake surrounding a former |
| 1:17.3 | royal palace on the outskirts of Brussels, a handful of academics go about their daily business. |
| 1:28.8 | Tucked away in an archive where only slivers of daylight reach them, the researchers of |
| 1:36.2 | the Africa Museum leaf through brittle bundles of browned paper tied together with string. |
| 1:49.6 | Music of browned paper, tied together with string. Unperturbed by the row raging over the documents in their hands. |
| 1:54.6 | The archives, and in particular, the maps they contain, have recently become the centre of a geopolitical tussle, |
| 2:03.6 | involving the Congolese government and an American mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates. |
| 2:16.3 | These are the most comprehensive geological records of possibly the most resource-rich country in the world, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. |
| 2:29.3 | Deep in its earth, it's coltan, colbert, copper, lithium, uranium and much more. |
| 2:37.4 | These are building blocks for modern defence, infrastructure and technology. |
| 2:43.1 | Crucial to manufacturing fighter jets, phones, electric vehicle batteries, wind farms and nuclear power plants. |
| 2:51.8 | And the Central African country has untapped deposits worth an estimated $24 trillion. |
| 3:19.9 | America. American mining companies, with the support of the Trump administration, are vying to beat China in the race for these rare earth minerals. |
... |
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