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April 15 - April 22, 2025
Just as the DRC is blessed with the world’s largest cobalt reserves needed to meet demand for today’s electric vehicle revolution, so too was Leopold’s Congo blessed with millions of square kilometers of rubber trees needed to meet demand for the first automobile revolution.
Leopold was forced to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government on November 15, 1908, netting him a tidy sum of several hundred million dollars on top of what he had already profited. The Belgians took control of the “Belgian Congo” and regretfully continued the system of forced labor for rubber extraction that Leopold began.
Eleven days after independence, the Belgians executed a brazen plan to keep control of what mattered most in the Congo—the minerals of Katanga. They backed Moise Tshombe in announcing that Katanga Province had seceded from the Congo. UMHK provided crucial financial support to Tshombe’s administration, and Belgian troops expelled the Congolese army from Katanga. With surgical precision, the Belgians had severed Katanga Province like a hand from the body of the nation, and with it, 70 percent of the government’s income. The country was crippled before it ever had a chance.
Lumumba wrote to the United Nations asking for assistance in expelling the Belgians and reunifying the country. The UN responded with the largest ground operation since its creation to help stabilize the nation, but the forces were not authorized to expel Belgian troops. Lumumba turned instead to the Soviet Union for help. The possibility that the Congo, and especially Katanga, might come under Soviet influence put the United States, the United Nations, and Belgium into overdrive to dispatch Lumumba. On August 18, 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower met with his national security council to
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Mobutu ran the Congo for thirty-two years, just as Leopold did—a personal wealth machine. He nationalized UMHK under Gécamines on December 31, 1966, and he took direct ownership of several mining concessions. He siphoned billions of dollars from the country’s mineral exports into personal bank accounts, becoming one of the ten richest people in the world during the 1980s.
Mobutu remained in power for decades, despite overt corruption, by embracing the U.S. cause against communism, which brought him the unwavering support of Presidents Nixon, Bush, Reagan, and Clinton. Katanga’s minerals flowed to the West, and the proceeds flowed into Mobutu’s bank accounts.
Despite questions about the credibility of the results, Tshisekedi’s inauguration on January 25, 2019, marked the first peaceful transfer of power in the Congo since the country’s independence in 1960.
From the moment Diego Cão introduced Europeans to the Kongo in 1482, the heart of Africa was made colony to the world. Patrice Lumumba offered a fleeting chance at a different fate, but the neocolonial machinery of the West chopped him down and replaced him with someone who would keep their riches flowing.
Corporations atop the cobalt chain stake their reputations on the impervious wall that is supposed to exist between industrial and artisanal production. Such assertions are as meaningless as trying to claim that one can discriminate the water from different tributaries while standing at the mouth of the Congo River.
In 2016, Freeport sold its stake in TFM to China Molybdenum (CMOC) for $2.65 billion. The sale ended the presence of any U.S.-based mining companies in the DRC and cleared the way for the Chinese takeover of the Congo’s copper-cobalt mines.
At its peak in 2018, Mutanda produced 27,300 tons of cobalt,3 which accounted for almost 30 percent of global production and positioned Glencore as the largest cobalt mining company in the world.
Considering that it was just one of the many industrial mining sites in which artisanal mining was the dominant mode of production, two facts seemed indisputable: 1) the artisanal contribution of total cobalt production in the Congo could easily exceed even the highest estimates of 30 percent, and 2) the massive amount of artisanal production from the Congo had to flow into the formal supply chains of big tech and EV companies.
For those from whom everything has already been taken, even the harshest penalty means little compared to the power of speaking … or for speaking on behalf of those who can no longer speak.
There is more misery-for-profit in Kolwezi than perhaps any other city in the world.
The Chinese companies have an unfair advantage over every other company operating in the Congo, including my own. First, although they claim they are private companies, they all receive funding from the government of China. Basically, this means they receive free money and have almost no cost of capital. You cannot compete on this basis. It is an extremely difficult environment to succeed … The Chinese mining contracts signed by the Kabila government are lopsided and benefit the DRC state and the population very little.
She said that prostitution and digging for cobalt were the same—“Muango yangu njoo soko.” My body is my marketplace.
Industrial mining is like doing surgery with a shovel artisanal mining is like doing it with a scalpel. During industrial excavation, tons of dirt, stone, and ore are gathered indiscriminately with large machinery, crushed down to pebbles, and processed to extract minerals of value. It is by design a blunt-force, low-yield, high-volume business. Artisanal miners, on the other hand, can use more precise tools to dig or tunnel for high-grade deposits of ore, extract only the ore, and leave the valueless dirt and stones behind.
Artisanal mining techniques can yield up to ten or fifteen times a higher grade of cobalt per ton than industrial mining can. This is the primary reason that many industrial copper-cobalt mines in the DRC informally allow artisanal mining to take place on their concessions, and it is also why they tend to supplement industrial production by purchasing high-grade artisanal ore from depots.
From Musompo forward, there was no way to determine the source of the cobalt—all the sacks were dumped together in the same transport trucks and dropped off for processing at the same facilities. Musompo’s function seemed to be little more than a massive, centralized laundering mechanism for artisanally mined cobalt into the formal supply chain.
the conditions at the CHEMAF model site did not match what I had been told by some of the Pact staff in Kolwezi. Specifically, there appeared to be child-mined cobalt entering Mutoshi through the spaghetti-wire fence. Teenagers worked at the site with fake voter registration cards. The radiation officer was not regularly checking radiation levels. Bags of cobalt were not tagged, and cobalt from unknown origins was purchased from external depots and mixed at CHEMAF’s refining facility in Lubumbashi. Crucially, reduced or delayed wage payments appeared to be a major disincentive for many
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The norms of wealthy countries could not simply be imposed upon the poor. What makes eighteen the magic number for adulthood? A strong, thoughtful, fifteen-year-old male in the Congo who wants to provide for his family may be every bit an adult as an eighteen-year-old high schooler in the West. The problem, however, is that if lines are not drawn somewhere, vulnerable children will invariably be exploited, and it is impossible to go case by case for every teenager in poor nations to determine who is adequately mature to make “adult” decisions and perform “adult” work.
Livingstone dreamed that commerce and Christianity would eradicate “the desolating slave trade” that ravaged eastern Africa. 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. In no place has that suffering been greater than in the Congo.
The most fortunate tunnel diggers in Kasulo earn around $3,000 per year. By way of comparison, the CEOs of the technology and car companies that buy the cobalt mined from Kasulo earn $3,000 in an hour, and they do so without having to put their lives at risk each day that they go to work.
Money and death were served together in Kasulo; the diggers could not have one without the other.
When a tunnel collapses in Kasulo, most bodies are never recovered. The family members are unable to give their loved ones a proper funeral. They are compelled instead to walk each day upon their dead. That is the reality that no one up the chain wants us to see. That is the truth that is meant to be forever buried here. The cruel design of a tunnel collapse makes sure of it, and everyone knows it. Perhaps they count on it—the impenetrable silence that obscures the vast tally of severed lives upon which great fortunes are built.
It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
Meaningful solutions cannot be devised if they are devoid of direct input from those the solutions are meant to assist.
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.
Rather than issue vacant statements on zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR, corporations should do the one simple thing that would truly help: treat the artisanal miners as equal employees to the people who work at corporate headquarters.
