Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

They had accrued a large debt to Banza and toiled under the menace of a penalty that soldiers would extort their families unless they complied with his directives, amounting to a textbook definition of forced labor under international law.6 To make matters worse, the children said that Chief Banza never offered any sort of accounting of the value of the heterogenite he sold to CMKK, which should have been credited against the debts they owed him. Even though heterogenite deposits deeper underground can have more than five times a higher grade of cobalt as deposits at the surface, Kosongo’s income did not change from the time he was a surface digger to the time he was a tunnel digger, presumably because he was repaying the debt he accrued across two months. In addition to forced labor in hazardous conditions, the children were also being exploited in a system of debt bondage—an economic advance was being used to extract forced labor from them, and the debt was not being discharged based on a fair market value of the output of their labor. Threats of violence, eviction from the work site, and the lack of any reasonable alternative kept the children ensnared in the system of bondage. In essence, they were child slaves.