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

by Siddharth Kara

but hope in the Congo is like a hot coal—take hold, and it will scald you to the bone.

Sixty-three men and boys were buried alive in a tunnel collapse at Kamilombe on September 21, 2019. Only four of the sixty-three bodies were recovered. The others would remain forever interred in their final poses of horror. No one has ever accepted responsibility for these deaths. The accident has never even been acknowledged. This was the final truth of cobalt mining in the Congo: the life of a child buried alive while digging for cobalt counted for nothing. All the dead here counted for nothing. The loot is all.

The same nun who sent me the video from the COMMUS mine in Kolwezi showing Congolese workers being whipped like old-world African slaves while their Chinese bosses looked on, estimated that post-COVID, more than two-thirds of the children across the Copper Belt were not in school. According to her, almost all these children were digging in cobalt mines and becoming increasingly “sick, wounded, and orphaned.” Considering the worsening catastrophe, she asked a simple and clarifying question: How can a sustainable future be built through sacrificing the very bearers of that future, through depriving children’s well-being, and worse even, through depriving children the right to be?

One final voice calls to us from the Congo. The nation’s greatest freedom fighter and first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, described his dreams for the future of the country in his final missive to his wife, Pauline, just before he was assassinated. One can imagine the letter being addressed equally to the Congo itself. Lumumba’s dream was tragically snuffed out by those who would let nothing stand between them and their scramble to loot the country’s resources. Such has been the Congo’s nightmare for centuries.