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

by Siddharth Kara

This rare, silvery metal is an essential component to almost every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today. It is also used in a wide array of emerging low-carbon innovations that are critical to the achievement of climate sustainability goals.

The Katanga region in the southeastern corner of the Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.

Foreign powers have penetrated every inch of this nation to extract its rich supplies of ivory, palm oil, diamonds, timber, rubber … and to make slaves of its people. Few nations are blessed with a more diverse abundance of resource riches than the Congo. No country in the world has been more severely exploited.

To be sure, the loss of life during Leopold’s control of the Congo is estimated to be as high as thirteen million people, a sum equal to half the population of the colony at the time.

The harsh realities of cobalt mining in the Congo are an inconvenience to every stakeholder in the chain. No company wants to concede that the rechargeable batteries used to power smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles contain cobalt mined by peasants and children in hazardous conditions.

In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.

Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

Although today’s trillion-dollar global mining industry is dominated by coal, iron, bauxite, phosphate, gypsum, and copper, the so-called strategic and rare earth elements used in modern technology devices and renewable forms of energy are rapidly growing in economic and geopolitical importance. Many of these strategic minerals can be found in central Africa, chief among them cobalt.

Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools and work in hazardous conditions to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south.

There are roughly forty-five million people around the world directly involved in ASM, which represents an astonishing 90 percent of the world’s total mining workforce.

There are many episodes in the history of the Congo that are bloodier than what is happening in the mining sector today, but none of these episodes ever involved so much suffering for so much profit linked so indispensably to the lives of billions of people around the world.

Few people sitting for breakfast in England in the 1700s knew that their tea was sweetened by sugar harvested under brutal conditions by African slaves toiling in the West Indies. The slaves remained far removed from the British breakfast table until a band of abolitionists placed the true picture of slavery directly in front of the English people.

The truth, however, is this—but for their demand for cobalt and the immense profits they accrue through the sale of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles, the entire blood-for-cobalt economy would not exist.

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.

In 2021, a total of 111,750 tons of cobalt representing 72 percent of the global supply was mined in the DRC, a contribution that is expected to increase as demand from consumer-facing technology companies and electric vehicle manufacturers grows each year.

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—ivory for piano keys, crucifixes, false teeth, and carvings (1880s), rubber for car and bicycle tires (1890s), palm oil for soap (1900s+), copper, tin, zinc, silver, and nickel for industrialization (1910+), diamonds and gold for riches (always), uranium for nuclear bombs (1945), tantalum and tungsten for microprocessors (2000s+), and cobalt for rechargeable batteries (2012+).

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.

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.

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.

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. More than three-fourths of the population live below the poverty line, one-third suffer from food insecurity, life expectancy is only 60.7 years, child mortality ranks eleventh worst in the world, access to clean drinking water is only 26 percent, and electrification is only 9 percent.

The global cobalt supply chain is the mechanism that transforms the dollar-a-day wages of the Congo’s artisanal miners into multibillion-dollar quarterly profits at the top of the chain.

Although Congolese law stipulates that mineral depots should be registered and operated only by Congolese nationals, almost all depots in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces are operated by Chinese buyers.

As of my last ground count in November 2021, there were nineteen major industrial copper-cobalt mining complexes operating in Haut-Katanga and Lualaba Provinces, fifteen of which were owned or financed by Chinese mining companies.

The vertical integration of Chinese companies across the cobalt supply chain has accelerated in recent years, solidifying the country’s dominance over the rechargeable battery industry.

Given its wide range of uses, the European Union has designated cobalt to be one of twenty “critical” metals and minerals, and the United States has designated cobalt to be a “strategic mineral.” Initiatives to secure reliable supplies of refined cobalt that bypass China’s current monopoly have become matters of considerable geopolitical importance to the U.S. and the EU.

In 2010, there were only 17,000 electric vehicles on the road in the entire world. By 2021, that number had skyrocketed to 16 million. Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement would require at least 100 million total electric vehicles in use by 2030.

Measured in price per kilowatt-hour, the production cost of lithium-ion battery packs has fallen 89 percent from $1,200/kWh in 2010 to $132/kWh in 2021.

When the Congo Free State passed in ownership from King Leopold II to the Belgian government, the colony was renamed the Belgian Congo.

Farrell stated in his report to King Leopold: It will be utterly impossible to exhaust your bodies of oxidized ores during this 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.4 Almost all that copper had cobalt attached to it, although it would take another 110 years before the rechargeable battery revolution would make the cobalt ten times more valuable than the copper.

The governor-general of the Belgian Congo, Pierre Ryckmans, declared in June 1940: “The Belgian Congo, in the present war, is the most important asset of Belgium. It is entirely at the service of the Allies, and through them of the motherland. If she needs men, it will give them; if she needs work, it will work for her.”6 Tens of thousands of Congolese people were worked to the bone in copper mines and sent to the war to die for the benefit of Belgium and its European allies.

The foundation for China’s dominance in Africa was established in 2000 when President Jiang Zemin proposed the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to facilitate Chinese investments in African countries. The relationship was billed as a win-win: the Chinese would build much-needed roads, dams, airports, bridges, mobile networks, and power plants across Africa, and in exchange, China would secure access to vital resources to support its growing economy.

The ore transportation fees seemed to be little more than a money grab by the government. Why else charge people for driving rocks from one place to another? The fees also made it impossible for most artisanal miners to access markets directly due to their inability to pay the tax. 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.

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.

Philippe was describing a smoke screen set up by powerful stakeholders that served to obscure the harsh realities under which cobalt was mined. The more time I spent in the Congo, the more his words rang true. To this day, I never met anyone associated with the GBA or the RMI in the Congo, nor did I ever hear about any inspections of artisanal mining areas from any colleagues in the DRC being conducted under their banners.

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.

Copper is not the only thing the Belgians found near Likasi. They also discovered uranium on April 11, 1915. The deposits had an average concentration of 65 percent U308 (triuranium octoxide), making it the highest-grade source of uranium in the world at the time.

Shinkolobwe provided roughly 75 percent of the uranium that was used for the bombs dropped from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

It seemed unimaginable that the difference between receiving an education and having to engage in hazardous child labor was a handful of dollars.

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.

It was no wonder that impoverished families across the Congo’s mining provinces relied on child labor to survive. 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?

Morel recalled the reports of atrocities submitted by missionaries and concluded that the Congo Free State was operating by virtue of “the reduction of millions of men to a condition of absolute slavery, by a system of legalized robbery enforced by violence.”2

Morel and Casement met in England and formed the Congo Reform Association (CRA) in March 1904 to bring down Leopold’s colonial regime. The CRA became the first international human rights organization of the twentieth century, driven by the power of data (Morel) and survivor testimonies (Casement). Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington were among the many supporters of the CRA. By 1908, Leopold was forced to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, bringing an end to one of the most brazen systems of slavery in the history of Africa. Or so it seemed.

Leopold showed the world that the Congo was teeming with riches. The minerals in Katanga had only recently been prospected when the Belgian government took over. The scramble was on.

The leak occurred in the summer of 2021 and revealed that a shell company called the Congo Construction Company (CCC), whose accounts were held at the Kinshasa branch of BGFIBank, acted as a financial intermediary between Chinese mining companies and Kabila’s family. One of Kabila’s sisters owned a 40 percent stake in the bank branch, for which she never paid a dollar, and the branch was operated by one of Kabila’s brothers. An investigation conducted by Bloomberg revealed that “in total, about $65 million flowed through CCC’s accounts between January 2013 and July 2018, of which $41 million was withdrawn in cash, making it impossible to track the beneficiaries of all the funds.

Why are the Congolese people still using their Zaire national ID cards from 1997? Because new national ID cards require that the government conduct a new national census, and the last one was conducted in 1984.

The great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about; that Europe began to “propagate” at a time when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry; that it was our misfortune to encounter that particular Europe on our path, and that Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history.

Throughout the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans remained largely restricted to the coasts of Africa and had virtually no knowledge of the interior.

Quinine proved to be the first of two crucial developments that facilitated European colonization of Africa. The second development involved boiling water. Beginning in the 1850s, the steam engine revolutionized transport. Steamboats carried goods quickly and less expensively across rough seas. They could also forge upstream to allow exploration of rivers into the African continent.

Stanley’s journey opened the Congo to the eyes of Europe, and King Leopold II of Belgium made his move. Leopold formed a holding company called the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) with himself as the sole shareholder. The stated purpose of the AIC was to fulfill Livingstone’s dream of bringing Christianity and commerce to the heart of Africa. Leopold offered Stanley a job—return to the Congo and secure treaties from local tribes on behalf of the AIC.

On November 15, 1884, the major colonial powers of Europe convened in Berlin to discuss how they might carve up Africa. Leopold’s emissaries presented the territories of the AIC as a free-trade zone and stipulated that the Congo River would remain open for shipping without tariffs. The conference ended with the General Act of Berlin, which set out the terms of the European dissection of Africa. Leopold dissolved the AIC, and on May 29, 1885, he declared himself to be the personal owner and king sovereign of the Congo-Vrijstaat—the Congo Free State. His new patch of personal property in Africa was seventy-six times the size of Belgium.