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March 29 - March 31, 2024
Until this moment, I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon
That is the lasting image I take from the Congo—the heart of Africa reduced to the bloodstained corpse of a child, who died solely because he was digging for cobalt.
There is no known deposit of cobalt-containing ore anywhere in the world that is larger, more accessible, and higher grade than the cobalt under Kolwezi.
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
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.
Accountability vanishes like morning mist in the Katangan hills as it travels through the opaque supply chains that connect stone to phone and car.
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.
a khaki-colored Uluru.
Katangan copper first made its way to Europe via Portuguese slave traders as early as the sixteenth century.
The quantity of copper you can thus produce is entirely a question of demand—the mines can supply any amount. You can make more copper and make it much cheaper than any mines now working. I believe your mines will be the source of the world’s future supply of copper.
Yehudi Menuhin.
Wow
Displacement of the native population due to mine expansion is a major crisis in the mining provinces.
“In Congo, the government is weak. Our state institutions are impotent. They are kept this way so they can be manipulated by the president to suit his ambitions,”
the rechargeable battery revolution has unleashed a malevolent force upon the Congo that tramples all in its path in a merciless hunt for cobalt.
The money was to be repaid through the value of copper-cobalt deposits excavated by SICOMINES. If the deposits proved insufficient, the DRC agreed to repay the loans through “other means.”
The nation, however, has seen little profit from the SICOMINES agreement. Infrastructure projects have been delayed, road quality has been poor, and there has been little by way of environmental or social impact considerations in the construction and mining operations of SICOMINES.
I know its very different but drawin so mng paralleles with India
“Mbazi,” he said. Heterogenite. I studied the stone closely. It was dense with a rugged texture, adorned with an alluring mix of teal and azure, speckles of silver, and patches of orange and red—cobalt, nickel, copper. This was it. The beating heart of the rechargeable economy.
Being cut off from the marketplace forced them to accept submarket prices from négociants for their hard labor, further reinforcing the state of poverty that pushed them into artisanal mining to begin with.
From pit, to pool, to sack of stones—the family had subdivided the steps involved in getting cobalt out of the ground and packed for transport by négociants. The négociants then sold the cobalt into the formal supply chain via nondescript depots along the highway.
Laundering minerals from child to battery was just that simple.
:-(
A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.
There was nothing to stop mining companies from going to the artisanal sites themselves and directly paying the women, men, and children who dug their cobalt—aside from the negative optics associated with having direct links to hazardous, penny-wage artisanal mining areas teeming with children.
“Even if children do not work in the mines, indirect exposure to heavy metals from their parents is worse for them than direct exposure for the adults.
Let’s say for a moment that paying a decent wage to adult artisanal miners would help keep children in school instead of working in mines and that it would also help families afford medical care when they were ill or injured, save money to help withstand income shocks or other misfortunes, and alleviate strain and violence in the community. Let’s say a decent wage for adults might accomplish all of this and more—who should pay it?
Therein lies the great tragedy of the Congo’s mining provinces—no one up the chain considers themselves responsible for the artisanal miners, even though they all profit from them.
Now you can see—never have the people of Congo benefited from the mines of Congo. We only become poorer.
“There is an agenda to promote a false picture of the conditions here. The mining companies claim there are not any problems here. They say they maintain international standards. Everyone believes them, so nothing changes.”
sentence. What exactly does it mean to “fix the information flow?”
The prevailing information flow depicted a false reality that conditions were not so bad and that they were being monitored to root out problems.
The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay … He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
Words keep coming back
The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent. Most of it was built, after all, on violence, neatly tucked away in history books that tend to sanitize the truth.
They allow their leaders to exploit them. This is why they are poor.”
“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?”
Skin tone dictated the hierarchy back then, and it still does today—simply swap out the Europeans with the Chinese.
This land that is home to the world’s largest reserves of an element crucial to the manufacture of the most dominant form of rechargeable energy in the world still awaits the arrival of electricity.
It seemed that on any given day, a poor family in the Congo almost always needed income first and education second or not at all. Food,
At times, it felt like cobalt stakeholders up the chain counted on it. Why help build schools or fund proper education for Congolese children living in mining communities, when the children could just dig up cobalt for pennies instead?
During Mbese’s time, Gécamines provided jobs with fixed wages to tens of thousands of citizens in the mining provinces. The company built schools and hospitals, provided insurance schemes, and cultivated pride in its employees. It also trained hundreds of mining engineers who had prestigious jobs with competitive salaries. Some even went on to work for major mining companies abroad. Unfortunately, the entire system was erected on a shaky foundation. The company fell into ruin in large part due to the apparent theft of funds by executive management, mining officials, and elite government
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Hearing about child trafficking in Milele a second time from children around Likasi and Kambove seemed more than coincidence.
To this day, the official national identification cards used by every citizen in the DRC to prove their citizenship have not been updated since 1997, when the country was called Zaire.
One senior parliamentarian in Kinshasa once told me that the international community was mistaken about the issue of child labor at artisanal mines in the Congo. According to him, they were actually Pygmies.
but I saw enough to conclude that there was a secret world of artisanal mining hidden in these hills that operated in an even more oppressive manner than the more visible sites like Kipushi and Tocotens.
Arthur took a long sip of his beer and stared morosely. “What did that child die for?” he asked. “For one sack of cobalt? Is that what Congolese children are worth?”
Quinine proved to be the first of two crucial developments that facilitated European colonization of Africa. The second development involved boiling water.
Livingstone’s dream was achieved, but it became a nightmare for the people of the Congo.
Following Leopold’s model, the Lever brothers used forced labor in the extraction of palm oil under a quota system. The riches they generated helped build the multinational powerhouse Unilever.
Laurent Kabila ran the Congo as a kleptocratic system of personal enrichment.
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?
Cobalt is but the latest treasure they have come to loot.
I tried to imagine how their parents must feel, watching their children being contaminated each day and feeling powerless to protect them.
