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Sir Robert Williams was a Scottish mining engineer, pioneering explorer of Africa, entrepreneur, and railroad developer who was chiefly responsible for the discovery of the vast copper deposits in Katanga Province (now incorporated in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Williams was closely associated, variously as an employee of, advisor to, and partner with Cecil Rhodes in his many enterprises from the time of their first meeting in 1885 at the de Beers diamond mine in Kimberley until Rhodes’s death in 1902. Williams planned and executed the creation of the Benguela railway through then Portuguese West Africa (now Angola). [1] In 1902, Williams took over the construction and completed the connection to Lua at the border to the Congo in 1929.
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