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Joseph Conrad immortalized the evil of Leopold’s Congo Free State in Heart of Darkness (1899) with four words—“The horror! The horror!” He subsequently described the Congo Free State as the “vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience” and a land in which “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks is the basis of administration.”
Stakeholders fought to maintain the system. They told the British public not to trust what they were told. They espoused the great humanity of the slave trade—Africans were not suffering, they were being “saved” from the savagery of the dark continent.
The battery packs in electric vehicles require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than one thousand times the amount required for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050,3 and there is no known place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC.
Despite being home to trillions of dollars in untapped mineral deposits, the DRC’s entire national budget in 2021 was a scant $7.2 billion, similar to the state of Idaho, which has one-fiftieth the population. The DRC ranks 175 out of 189 on the United Nations Human Development Index.
They tried to have children, but she miscarried twice. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”
“They said they would build schools and make jobs, but we are still waiting,” a Fungurume resident named Eric said. “They care only about the cobalt. The people of Fungurume are like pests to them.”
An explosion of human beings was crammed inside the enormous digging pit, which was at least 150 meters deep and 400 meters across. More than fifteen thousand men and teenage boys were hammering, shoveling, and shouting inside the crater, with scarcely room to move or breathe. None of the workers wore an inch of protective gear—just shorts, trousers, flip-flops, and maybe some shirts. It was a storm of colors—red, blue, green, yellow, and orange melded inside the pink-stone pit.
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? This could not be what adherence to international human rights norms or 100 percent participation in third-party audits with cobalt suppliers was supposed to look like.
That is why she said, “Our children are dying like dogs.”
Ambassador Balumuene made it clear that he did not think a foreigner should be the one to make such a case on behalf of his people. He felt instead that the people of the Congo needed to speak for themselves about what was happening in their country, and he suggested that if I really wanted to help, I should go back and assist local researchers in doing so.
