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

by Siddharth Kara

As scrutiny over the conditions under which cobalt is mined has increased, stakeholders have formulated international coalitions to help ensure that their supply chains are clean. The two leading coalitions are the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) and the Global Battery Alliance (GBA). The RMI promotes the responsible sourcing of minerals in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. Part of the RMI’s platform includes a Responsible Minerals Assurance Process that purports to support independent, third-party assessments of cobalt supply chains and to monitor cobalt mining sites in the DRC for child labor. The GBA promotes safe working conditions in the mining of raw materials for rechargeable batteries. The GBA has developed a Cobalt Action Partnership to “immediately and urgently eliminate child and forced labour from the cobalt value chain”2 through on-ground monitoring and third-party assessments. In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.

Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

Throughout much of history, mining operations relied on the exploitation of slaves and poor laborers to excavate ore from dirt. The downtrodden were forced to dig in hazardous conditions with little regard to their safety and for little to no compensation. Today, these laborers are assigned the quaint term artisanal miners, and they toil in a shadowy substrate of the global mining industry called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Do not be fooled by the word artisanal into thinking that ASM involves pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans. Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools and work in hazardous conditions to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions. There are usually no avenues to seek assistance for injuries or redress for abuse. Artisanal miners are almost always paid paltry wages on a piece-rate basis and must assume all risks of injury, illness, or death.

Africa, as well as a means by which to transport valuable resources from the interior back to the Atlantic coast. No one knew at the outset that the Congo would prove to be home to some of the largest supplies of almost every resource the world desired, often at the time of new inventions or industrial developments—ivory for piano keys, crucifixes, false teeth, and carvings (1880s), rubber for car and bicycle tires (1890s), palm oil for soap (1900s+), copper, tin, zinc, silver, and nickel for industrialization (1910+), diamonds and gold for riches (always), uranium for nuclear bombs (1945), tantalum and tungsten for microprocessors (2000s+), and cobalt for rechargeable batteries (2012+). The developments that sparked demand for each resource attracted a new wave of treasure seekers. At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefited in any meaningful way from the monetization of their country’s resources. Rather, they have often served as a slave labor force for the extraction of those resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering.

As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm. Although

In the studies we conducted, the artisanal miners have more than forty times the amount of cobalt in their urine as the control groups. They also have five times the level of lead and four times the level of uranium. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.

Contamination by heavy metals of the local population and the food supply was causing a range of negative health consequences across the Copper Belt. For instance, Germain had recently documented a high rate of birth defects in mining communities, such as holoprosencephaly, agnathia otocephaly, stillbirth, miscarriages, and low birth weight.10 Germain said that in most cases, the child’s father had been working as an artisanal miner at the time of conception and that samples of cord blood taken at birth revealed high levels of cobalt, arsenic, and uranium. Respiratory ailments were also common—“Inhalation of cobalt dust causes ‘hard metal lung disease’ which can be fatal,” Germain said. “Also, prolonged contact with

cobalt by the artisanal miners can cause them to suffer acute dermatitis.”

If you really want to understand what is happening in the Congo’s mining sector, you must first understand our history. After independence, the mines were managed by the Belgians. They took all the money, and there was no benefit for the people. After the Belgians, we had “Africanization” with Mobutu. He nationalized the mines, but again, they only benefited the government, not the people. With [Joseph] Kabila, we created the Mining Code in 2002, and this brought foreign investment into the mining sector. They said the Mining Code would improve the lives of the Congolese people, but today, their lives are much worse. Now you can see—never have the people of Congo benefited from the mines of Congo. We only become poorer.

They tell the international community about their programs in Congo and how the cobalt is clean, and this allows their constituents to say everything is okay. Actually, this makes the situation worse because the companies will say—“GBA assures us the situation is good. RMI says the cobalt is clean.” Because of this, no one tries to improve the conditions.

Consider the first sentence, because this is the important one. If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector. How much of the Congo’s cobalt was “touched” by the hundreds of thousands of Congolese people suffering the consequences of toxic exposure to cobalt, uranium, lead, nickel, mercury, and other heavy metals? How much was touched by the infants who inhaled hazardous mining dust every day at artisanal mines? What about the noxious gas clouds and toxic dumping that contaminated the air, land, crops, animals, and fish stocks of the Copper Belt, and what about the millions of trees chopped down to make way for enormous open-pit mines? Let us not forget the unknown number of people who were injured or worse in mining accidents. By the time one tallied such a list, how much cobalt would be left in the world that was untouched by catastrophe in the Congo?

According to a mid-level manager at Congo DongFang Mining (CDM) who goes by the name of Hu, the people of the Congo, and Africa more generally, suffer exploitation because they are lazy. “If the Africans worked harder, they would not be so poor. Chinese people have discipline. African people do not. They drink and gamble. They allow their leaders to exploit them. This is why they are poor.” I met Hu at the Royal Casino, one of the private Chinese clubs in Lubumbashi. We sat poolside in the open air. Chinese men drank and smoked as heavy-beat club music thumped through the speakers. Congolese people were not allowed inside the club, except when the strippers arrived around 9:00 p.m. As he drank his beers, Hu from Chengdu let his opinions fly. “The Africans will always be poor because they do not want to learn. In China, we have the best education in the world. Chinese people study very hard, and look how quickly our country has become a world power.” Hu lit a cigarette and waved his hands in scattershot motions as he continued. “Also, the Africans lack management ability. They do not take interest in details. This is why they can only be laborers. Even as laborers, they do not perform well. They only want to have fun.” Hu continued by offering his thoughts on poverty in Africa. “I think they like being poor because they receive foreign aid and do not have to work. If they did not like being poor, why do they spend all day on Sunday in church instead of working?”

I can only assume that Hu felt comfortable sharing his perspectives on Africans because he assumed that like so many of the Indians in Africa, I too was a bigot. Indians have a long history on the continent dating back to the 1840s, when the British began shipping them to Africa to work as debt bondage slaves on railroads and plantations. The debts were manufactured through the imposition of exorbitant land taxes. If a peasant could not afford the taxes, he was told he could work it off by laying railroad in East Africa. Illiterate peasants were made to sign contracts they could not read, agreeing to discharge their debts as indentured workers. They often toiled for lifetimes, receiving little pay. In Africa, a hierarchy was soon established—Africans at the bottom, Indians and Arabs above them, and Europeans at the top. Skin tone dictated the hierarchy back then, and it still does today—simply swap out the Europeans with the Chinese.

Manono had a grim reputation as being the northern corner of Le Triangle de la Mort. The other two towns that form the “Triangle of Death” are Mitwaba and Pweto, so called because the Mai-Mai militias operating in the region were known to utilize particularly harsh methods to force the local population to dig for coltan and gold. Reports from the area describe torture, murder, and chopping off hands and feet—techniques passed down the generations from Leopold’s terror squads.

Throughout the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans remained largely restricted to the coasts of Africa and had virtually no knowledge of the interior. The one person most responsible for opening pathways into the interior of Africa was David Livingstone. Born in Scotland in 1813, Livingstone traveled to Cape Town in 1841 to preach Christianity to the natives. Hungry for adventure, he endeavored to cross the Kalahari Desert in 1849. In 1851, he became the first European to see the Zambezi River, at which point a new dream was born—was there a navigable river from the coast of Africa into the heart of the continent? The existence of such a river could facilitate Livingstone’s dream of bringing “commerce and Christianity” to Africa, which he felt would assist in the final extirpation of slavery.

Livingstone survived twenty-seven bouts of malaria thanks to his discovery of the ameliorative properties of quinine. For centuries, malaria had prevented European exploration of the African interior.

The bloodbath of World War II showed Africans that their European owners were not as enlightened as they portrayed themselves to be, leading to a wave of anti-colonial sentiment across the continent.

“The independence of the Congo constitutes the culmination of the work conceived by the genius of King Léopold II, undertaken by him with tenacious courage and continued with perseverance with Belgium.” An agitated Lumumba delivered an unscheduled response that pulsed with the anger of millions of Africans who were enslaved by the “genius” of their colonial overlords. He decried the “humiliating slavery” forced on the Congolese by the Belgians and lauded the Congolese struggle for freedom “amid tears, fire, and blood.” He warned that the people of the Congo would never forget the “grueling labor, demanded from us in return for wages that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger … or to raise our children as creatures very dear to us” and that the Congolese people had “seen our raw materials stolen” under the guise of laws that were “cruel and inhuman.” Lumumba ended his incendiary speech with a declaration to the Belgian king: “Nous ne sommes plus vos singes”—“We are no longer your monkeys.”4

Eleven days after independence, the Belgians executed a brazen plan to keep control of what mattered most in the Congo—the minerals of Katanga. They backed Moise Tshombe in announcing that Katanga Province had seceded from the Congo. UMHK provided crucial financial support to Tshombe’s administration, and Belgian troops expelled the Congolese army from Katanga. With surgical precision, the Belgians had severed Katanga Province like a hand from the body of the nation, and with it, 70 percent of the government’s income. The country was crippled before it ever had a chance.

Nations asking for assistance in expelling the Belgians and reunifying the country. The UN responded with the largest ground operation since its creation to help stabilize the nation, but the forces were not authorized to expel Belgian troops. Lumumba turned instead to the Soviet Union for help. The possibility that the Congo, and especially Katanga, might come under Soviet influence put the United States, the United Nations, and Belgium into overdrive to dispatch Lumumba. On August 18, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower met with his national security council to discuss the situation in the Congo and proclaimed that the U.S. had to “get rid of this guy.”5 The CIA hatched a plot to assassinate Lumumba using toothpaste poisoned with cobra venom; they settled instead on a plan to recruit Lumumba’s friend and the head of the army, Joseph Mobutu, to overthrow him. On September 14, 1960, Joseph Mobutu announced that he had seized control of the government. Mobutu had the army behind him, as well as the logistical and financial backing of the United States, United Nations, and Belgium. Mobutu expelled all Soviet troops and placed Lumumba under house arrest. On November 27, 1960, Lumumba...

Mobutu ran the Congo for thirty-two years, just as Leopold did—a personal wealth machine. He nationalized UMHK under Gécamines on December 31, 1966, and he took direct ownership of several mining concessions. He siphoned billions of dollars from the country’s mineral exports into personal bank accounts, becoming one of the ten richest people in the world during the 1980s.

Mobutu remained in power for decades, despite overt corruption, by embracing the U.S. cause against communism, which brought him the unwavering support of Presidents Nixon, Bush, Reagan, and Clinton. Katanga’s minerals flowed to the West, and the proceeds flowed into Mobutu’s bank accounts.

Tshisekedi continues to apply pressure to Chinese mining companies to improve transparency, labor standards, and sustainability practices. Displeased with Tshisekedi’s actions, Kabila is said to be scheming with Chinese backers to run again in the 2023 elections to retake control of the country, or to ensure the victory of someone else who will support their agenda.

The stage is set for the next contest to control Katanga’s riches. Will the Western-leaning Tshisekedi consolidate power, or will Kabila reclaim the nation and push it further toward China? The flow of cobalt is at stake, and with it, control of our rechargeable future. Who is to say that, either way, anything would improve in the lives of the Congolese people? From the moment Diego Cão introduced Europeans to the Kongo in 1482, the heart of Africa was made colony to the world. Patrice Lumumba offered a fleeting chance at a different fate, but the neocolonial machinery of the West chopped him down and replaced him with someone who would keep their riches flowing. Cobalt is but the latest treasure they have come to loot.

“You can determine the state of the global economy just by sitting along the road halfway between Likasi and Kolwezi and watching how many trucks filled with copper cathode and cobalt concentrate go by,” said Asad Khan, CEO of a Congolese construction company called Big Boss Congo.

“Gaddafis,” the term for hustlers that stockpile gasoline in plastic containers when supplies are plentiful, then resell it at a hefty premium when they dwindle. I found myself on the hunt for a Gaddafi more than once during my field research in the Congo.

They bought batteries to power their flashlight and radio. The price of the batteries was more expensive than I would have imagined—two dollars (roughly one day’s income) for a pack of four AA batteries. The price seemed particularly exorbitant since they were living right next to one of the largest battery-component metal-making mines in the world.

Ever since the pit wall collapse, Gloire had been suffering extreme pain and sharp fevers. He was unable to walk, change his clothes, or go to the toilet on his own. His mother and father were powerless to alleviate his pain or seek treatment for his injury. As best as I could determine, Gloire required surgery, a cast, and extensive rehabilitation, which he could only secure at a proper hospital in Kolwezi or Lubumbashi. Following Gloire’s injury, the family came under financial hardship and had to find a way to replace the lost income. “I take another son to dig with me now,” Franck said. “Are you worried you or he might get injured like Gloire?” I asked. “Yes, of course, but if we do not dig, we do not eat.”

I learned from a few négociants at the village that they typically made three or four runs each night from Fungurume, for which they earned around ten to fifteen dollars per run. It was a substantial income for one night of work that might take an artisanal miner weeks to earn. I also confirmed that the Chinese buyers paid some of the villagers to use their huts as depots. Based on the volume of transactions I witnessed, it seemed plausible that hundreds of tons of copper-cobalt ore were being purchased through this marketplace each year. The informal and all but untraceable nature of the marketplace made it impossible to discriminate the source of cobalt once it was thrown into the same batch of acids for processing industrially mined ore. What else could the purpose of this kind of remote night marketplace be, other than to launder artisanally mined cobalt into the formal supply chain completely out of view, and certainly beyond the scope of any tracing or auditing of cobalt supply chains that were purportedly taking place? Can any company at the top of the chain legitimately suggest that the cobalt in their devices or cars did not pass through a village marketplace like this?

I was unable to ask questions of the COMAKAT official inside the pit amid the thunderous clanking of metal on stone. I could only observe as this sea of humanity matched brute force against the unforgiving rock. Dust and grit rose from the earth like smoke from a wildfire. It was impossible to fathom how a spectacle such as this could exist in the twenty-first century. One might imagine such a scene millennia ago, perhaps as tens of thousands of oppressed laborers in Egypt excavated thousands of tons of stone to build the great pyramids … but at the bottom of trillion-dollar supply chains during the modern era?

took samples from the river water near Mupanja and found particularly high levels of lead, chromium, cobalt, and industrial acids. When I inspected the water, it had an unnaturally dark color and was topped with slicks and sludge. There were a few areas of bubbly foam collected along the riverbank, in addition to scatterings of dead fish.

Several artisanal miners I interviewed confirmed Phelix’s statement that many of the diggers at Tilwezembe were not registered with either CMKK or COMIKU even though they worked at the mine, and that their bosses sold the ore they excavated to the cooperatives. They also confirmed the presence of SAEMAPE officials, and they stated that there were between one and two thousand children digging at Tilwezembe on any given day. They reported that children were typically paid roughly two dollars a day regardless of production and that they received little to no assistance when they suffered injuries. The diggers at Tilwezembe described hazardous conditions and harsh reprisals if they did not obey their bosses. Some were locked inside a shipping container called a cachot (“dungeon”) without food or water for up to two days.

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.

It is tempting to point the finger at local actors as the agents of the carnage—be it corrupt politicians, exploitative cooperatives, unhinged soldiers, or extortionist bosses. They all played their roles, but they were also symptoms of a more malevolent disease: the global economy run amok in Africa. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.

“Please tell the people in your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones.”

There are also a few Chinese-operated sites near the KCC complex, including the SICOMINES mines of Mashamba West and Dikuluwe, and the place where we will end our journey—Kamilombe.

Unwilling to relinquish his dream of an independent Katanga, Tshombe directed two major military campaigns to regain control of the province, known as the Shaba wars. The first Shaba war began on March 8, 1977, when Tshombe led two thousand soldiers to take control of major mining sites across the province. Hundreds of civilians were killed, and tens of thousands fled. The feeble Zairian military offered little resistance. A desperate Joseph Mobutu portrayed the invaders as communists backed by the Soviet Union to draw Western support. Once again fearing a communist takeover of the Congo’s crucial mineral assets, the U.S., Belgium, and France sent military aid to retake control of the province.

We have a saying, “Mtoto wa nyoka ni nyoka”—the child of a snake is a snake. Laurent Kabila was the first snake. He invaded Congo with the Rwandans and called himself a liberator … His son is also a snake. He sold our country to the Chinese and kept the money to himself. Let me tell you, people say things were better under Mobutu. They say Mobutu was strong and at that time Congo was proud. Mobutu made himself rich while the people suffered. Our leaders only care for themselves. After graciously answering

Aristote argued that the Mining Code in 2002 was forced on the DRC by the World Bank in exchange for much-needed loans. The country was reeling from years of war and violence dating back to the Rwandan genocide and was in desperate need of financial support. Aristote contended that the World Bank offered its support primarily with the ambition of opening the DRC’s mining concessions to its stakeholders so that they could get rich. Once the foreign mining companies got a foothold in the country, Aristote suggested that they used questionable practices to cheat the Congolese government on tax payments. As an example, he said that mining companies claimed higher capital expenditures and operating expenses than they originally projected in their feasibility studies. Based on these elevated expenses, the mining companies then asserted that they had not made any profit and therefore did not need to pay taxes or dividends to Gécamines.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I mean, do you try to determine if the ore came from child labor like Arran uses or some other kind of abuse?” He laughed and lit a cigarette in the candle at our dining table. “One does not ask such questions here,” he said. “Why not?” “There would be no cobalt left to buy.”

Why would children be handpicking stones outside a giant, Chinese-owned copper-cobalt concession? The best way to understand the situation is to examine the difference between industrial and artisanal mining. Industrial mining is like doing surgery with a shovel artisanal mining is like doing it with a scalpel. During industrial excavation, tons of dirt, stone, and ore are gathered indiscriminately with large machinery, crushed down to pebbles, and processed to extract minerals of value. It is by design a blunt-force, low-yield, high-volume business. Artisanal miners, on the other hand, can use more precise tools to dig or tunnel for high-grade deposits of ore, extract only the ore, and leave the valueless dirt and stones behind. Or, like the children sorting through rubble outside COMMUS, they can simply handpick the stones of value and discard the rest. Artisanal mining techniques can yield up to ten or fifteen times a higher grade of cobalt per ton than industrial mining can. This is the primary reason that many industrial copper-cobalt mines in the DRC informally allow artisanal mining to take place on their concessions, and it is also why they tend to supplement industrial production by purchasing high-grade artisanal ore from depots. COMMUS appeared to have figured out a third option—dump tons of indiscriminate stone and dirt outside their concession and let children handpick the valuable ore.

The colleague who sent the video told me that the two boys, ages thirteen and fourteen, started walking with their sacks of cobalt stones in the opposite direction of the COMMUS depots to try to earn more than the pittance they were being paid by the depot agents. The COMMUS security guards promptly gunned them down.

It bears repeating that removing the layers of intermediaries and allowing artisanal miners to sell production at standardized prices directly to mining companies would be much more advantageous for them—either that, or paying them fixed, livable wages. But even with that reform, there still would be no accountability for mining companies and their upstream customers for the conditions under which the cobalt was being mined. The system was opaque and untraceable by design.

When I asked him if he knew how CDM set up a depot, we had the following exchange: CHEN: Here anyone can do business if they pay the correct price. ME: You mean a bribe? CHEN: Yes. It is a good system. ME: You are saying bribery is good? CHEN: In China, not even a bribe can work unless you are in the elite circles. Here, money makes you elite. That is why so many Chinese come to Africa. ME: I see.

I asked whether CHEMAF had considered offering the artisanal miners fixed wages as opposed to piece-rate wages. I suggested that doing so might provide workers with greater stability and a sense of security and that it might also prevent the artisanal miners from selling cobalt to external depots where they could be paid more, or more quickly. Sylvain responded that a fixed wage was not possible because of the fluctuations in the price of cobalt, a reasoning that I did not accept. Employees of industrial mines were paid fixed salaries that did not fluctuate based on the price of the underlying commodity, so why should artisanal miners be any different? Piece-rate wage systems by nature shifted market risks from mining companies to workers. Doing so placed substantial pressure on artisanal miners to dig themselves to the bone, take more risks, and bring their children into the mines to boost incomes.

This price disparity meant that the artisanal miners who worked inside the CDM model site were repaying their up-front wage advances and equipment expenses at submarket rates, which amounted to a system of debt bondage, just like the system Kosongo worked under at Tilwezembe.

artisanal miners I interviewed described cooperatives as the central agents of their exploitation. Perhaps some cooperatives operated as these three officials described, but from everything I had learned, CMKK, COMIKU, and COMIAKOL seemed to serve little function other than to enrich their powerful owners while allowing everyone up the chain to claim that the cobalt from their operations was produced without child labor or hazardous working conditions. I pushed the officials on the issue of child labor, and as expected, they assured me that there were no children working at the sites they managed, which did not match with my investigations. They also asserted that most people working at artisanal mining ZEAs were registered with mining cooperatives, which again did not match with my investigations. On the contrary, I had

The lack of government support of public education in the DRC is an inexplicable failure that severely exacerbates levels of poverty and child labor in the country. At just five or six dollars a month, the fees per child required to keep schools functional are so small that even a modest amount of funding could help solve the problem. Put another way, the monthly fees per child required to keep Congolese children in school and out of mines was equal to two Primus beers at Taverne La Bavière. As I left, the officials ordered a third round.

The people whose ancestors were once forced to measure their lives in kilos of rubber were now forced to measure their lives in kilos of cobalt.

Josué remained silent throughout the interview. I understood why he was reluctant for his son to relive this tragedy. Before I left, Josué grabbed my arm and looked at me with the face of a man on fire. “Now you understand how people like us work?” “I believe so.” “Tell me.” “You work in horrible conditions and—” “No! We work in our graves.”