The second, or informal, economy developed later in Lubumbashi (DRC) than it had in Kinshasa. The Katanga metropolis, long protected from the process of informalization thanks to its large industrial complexes, suffered seriously from the crisis of the 1990s which led to the collapse of the mining industry and, more generally, of the whole salaried sector. After a brief history of the city and of the state of play of the informal economy, this article attempts a detailed analysis of this economy's lexicon. Expressions newly created from Swahili, French and other languages provide an excellent point of entry into the concrete practices of this sector, as well as the representations and morality on which such practices are based. Strongly associated with expressions of energy, cunning and conspiracy, the vocabulary emerging from the second economy bears witness to the appreciation of the ‘anti-hero’ and demonstrates the inception of a new moral economy in which the state and the powerful have become targets of legitimate predation based on the principle of redistribution.