As the world’s major powers scramble to secure access to so-called ‘critical minerals’, British mining companies sense an opportunity. Giants such as Anglo American are presenting themselves as leaders in delivering the green transition, branding their massive expansions of mining activities as necessary for global decarbonisation. As it sells off the coal and diamond assets that helped make it a company worth tens of billions, Anglo isrushing to expand copper and iron ore production under the guise of the energy transition.
Yet behind the green facade lies a long legacy of colonial dispossession and racialised violence. Such dynamics remain a core part of Anglo American’s business model, as the company resists calls for reparative justice and continues to force its extractivist activities onto working-class communities worldwide.
Growth through violence
Founded in 1917, Anglo American rapidly expanded to take control of South Africa’s mining sector, and within 12 years had bought out the mining empire De Beers, founded by English colonist Cecil Rhodes. The company forged deep ties with the white supremacist, settler government, and was a driving force in industrialising the region at the cost of starvation wages, racial discrimination and segregation and the violent, sometimes deadly, suppression of labour organising.
After the formal legislation of apartheid in 1948, the company multiplied into an empire of over 150 companies. By the fall of apartheid in 1994, its subsidiaries controlled more than half of all private industry in South Africa.
Anglo American’s operating tactics are exemplified in their treatment of Kabwe, Zambia. From 1925 to 1974, it played a key role in controlling one of the world’s biggest lead mines, generating extreme levels of pollution and toxicity in Kabwe. Lead is a heavy metal that is toxic for humans to consume, particularly for children and pregnant women. In Kabwe, several generations have experienced lead poisoning through the ingestion of contaminated soil and dust.
For solidarity movements in the global north resisting militarisation, racist policing and imperialism, the struggle against the ‘critical mineral’ boom is inseparable
Despite the mine’s closure in 1994, the continued failure to clean up the mine’s waste has left Kabwe known to this day as ‘the world’s most toxic town’. In the worst affected towns over half of children under six have blood lead levels 18 times higher than the recognised threshold for humans, which can result in life-long, irreversible damage.
The community of Kabwe have fought back with a historic class action lawsuit on behalf of 140,000 Zambian children and women of childbearing age. The claimants are demanding compensation for decades of lead poisoning, comprehensive blood level screening for the community, and the clean-up of the contaminated land. Anglo American have refused to engage with the demands, claiming they are not responsible and pinning the blame on the state-owned operator that took over after it left the mine in 1974.
Lydia Moyo, a community advocate living in Kabwe who came to London in April 2025 to challenge Anglo, told the Decolonial Centre that ‘every day we are faced with this health risk’, sharing that one of her younger children has ‘been constantly affected by lead’. She added ‘we understand as a people of these hotspot areas of Kabwe that Anglo American is responsible,’ but that corporate bosses ‘want to bully their way out of this situation in Kabwe’.
Greenwashing mega-mining
As it sidesteps liability for making Kabwe one of the world’s worst sacrifice zones, Anglo American is also positioning itself as a climate leader in the global transition away from fossil fuels. This new PR move hides the fact that coal – the most carbon intensive fossil fuel – has been an ‘integral’ part of Anglo American operations for the past 80 years.
Although it is the third biggest exporter of steelmaking coal worldwide – and therefore a key driver of the climate crisis – the company in 2024 announced plans to divest coal assets as part of a wider restructure. The shift from thermal coal operations towards expanding copper and iron ore mining has been framed by the mining giant as playing ‘its role responsibly in forging a more sustainable world’. Yet, these ‘transition minerals’ rely on the same extractive, ecologically violent model as lead or coal mining; weaponising the same colonial legacies that have allowed Anglo to dodge responsibility for the poisoning of Kabwe’s soil and water.
In April 2025, Lydia visited London as part of a delegation of land defenders resisting Anglo American mining projects, convened by London Mining Network, to share their struggles at the corporation’s AGM. There, Claudio Rojas, a member of Movimiento No+ Anglo in Chile, highlighted that Anglo American’s open-pit copper Los Broncos mine is driving irreversible destruction of glaciers and jeopardizing water security for Santiago’s six million residents.
Lucio Flores, president of the Regional Farmers Federation of Moquegua and Bladimir Martinez, from the Red Muqui national network, also visited London from Peru. They told us how Anglo’s rapid expansion of copper mining is compounding existing water scarcity problems, jeopardising local health, agriculture and indigenous ways of life. The ‘future-smart’ Quellaveco mine has, for example, led to heavy metals pollution in local rivers, with studies confirming the presence of heavy metals in the blood of local children, echoing the harms of Anglo’s Kabwe mine. If the reality of Anglo’s ‘sustainable’ mining teaches us one thing, it is that a transition led by extractive, colonial mining giants will be neither just nor green.
An anti-imperialist movement rising
The struggle against ‘big mining’ has implications for people far beyond sites of extraction. For solidarity movements in the global north resisting militarisation, racist policing and imperialism, the struggle against the ‘critical mineral’ boom is inseparable. Aluminium and titanium, for example, form the structural backbone of drones used to gather information on protesters in ICE resistance in LA.
Phosphate rock is used for phosphate chemical production, causing unprecedented cancer rates in Gabes, Southern Tunisia, where a new green ammonia plant has just been approved in the face of growing resistance. Rare earth elements are of ‘vital importance’ in the construction of F-35 planes, used to commit genocide in Gaza.
The UK government’s critical minerals strategy projects that by 2040, four times the amount of ‘critical minerals’ currently extracted globally will be required for clean energy technologies. This is fuel to mining company lobbyists’ tactics, which include farcical claims that as much copper needs to be extracted in the next 20 years as has been produced in the history of humanity. It is not the demands of decarbonisation and tackling fuel poverty driving these wild projections, but demand for electric SUVs and energy intensive AI from the world’s wealthiest.
Huge mining expansions threaten to simply electrify a colonial and extractivist status quo. They will preserve the unsustainable consumption rates and ballooning military budgets of the wealthiest countries, while rendering more and more areas of the planet uninhabitable. Movements against imperialism, especially in the global north, must take the greenwashing of mineral mining seriously. As communities across the world unite to resist the escalating ‘critical minerals’ rush, our task is clear: dismantle the myth of ‘green’ mining and build powerful coalitions of solidarity against the mining giants fuelling planetary destruction.
