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

by Siddharth Kara

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.

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

“If I can describe the conditions accurately, I hope it may inspire people to help improve things here.” Lubuya looked at me as if I were a fool. “Every day people are dying because of the cobalt. Describing this will not change anything.”

The global economy presses like a dead weight on the artisanal miners, crushing them into the very earth upon which they scrounge.

The consumers of these devices, were they to stand next to Elodie, would appear like aliens from another dimension. Nothing in form or circumstance would bind them to the same planet, aside from the cobalt that flowed from one to the other.

The fact that families across the DRC are faced with the non-choice of putting a child in school or putting them to work so that the family can survive means that those families have been abandoned by the Congolese state just as much as they have been abandoned by the global economy.

Fate spared him the tragic truth—his efforts to open the interior of Africa to commerce and Christianity led to immeasurable suffering of the people he so loved.

The neighborhood is the inconvenient rumor that they hope will remain forever buried alongside the people who live here.

If the worst did happen, his sons would one day face the same devil’s bargain their father did—risk their lives in the underworld, just to survive.

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.

There is grief, and then there is soul-wrenching misery. There is loss, and then there is life-destroying calamity.

The land is filled with monsters, and the beast that dwells beneath Kasulo is a thousand-headed hydra, mouths agape at the surface, waiting for its prey to enter.

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.