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

by Siddharth Kara

“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.”

“When my son died, I died.”

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.

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?

The biggest problem faced by the Congo’s artisanal miners is that stakeholders up the chain refuse to accept responsibility for them, even though they all profit in one way or another from their work.

If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal miners would be done.

The dead here still don’t count.

We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and the free and liberated peoples in every corner of the globe will ever remain at the side of the millions of Congolese who will not abandon the struggle until the day when there will be no more colonizers and no more of their mercenaries in our country.

Africa will write its own history and both north and south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity.