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

by Siddharth Kara

“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,” Reine said. “Congo is only a bank account for the president,” Gloria added.

resources, and the artisanal miners suffer because of this. He takes bribes and closes his eyes while the creuseurs are made like animals,” Joseph explained.

Let me tell you the most important thing that no one is discussing. The mineral reserves in Congo will last another forty years, maybe fifty? During that time, the population of Congo will double. If our resources are sold to foreigners for the benefit of the political elite, instead of investing in education and development for our people, in two generations, we will have two hundred million people who are poor, uneducated, and have nothing left of value. This is what is happening, and if it does not stop, it will be a disaster.

power. Elections were scheduled for December 30, 2018, after more than two years of delays. Kabila was termed out of running again, which meant that there was bound to be a head of state not named Kabila for the first time in twenty-two years. I asked the students whether they thought conditions might improve after the elections. “Kabila has already arranged for [Félix] Tshisekedi to win,” Joseph responded. “He will be Kabila’s puppet. Everyone knows this.”

he began to wage an anti-corruption campaign that included scrutiny of some of Kabila’s dealings in the mining sector.

“Under President Tshisekedi, there is a changing mentality on corruption. We can talk about it now. It is recognized as a serious problem and as a priority.”

Tshisekedi is perceived as trying to align the country closer to the U.S., whereas Kabila is fighting to maintain links to China.

“Tshisekedi is looking for American investment because it brings better jobs, delivers for local communities, and respects the environment.” Tshisekedi expanded his efforts to challenge Chinese hegemony over the country’s mining sector with the bold announcement in May 2021 that he would renegotiate contracts with Chinese mining companies that were signed under Joseph Kabila.

Let’s say in eighty-five percent of the major mining contracts you will always find a Chinese company behind the deal. Most of these deals lacked transparency. Their modus operandi was to ensure that nothing would be published in terms of these contracts. There were a lot of bribes going around in the last regime to make this happen. We want to publish the details of these agreements so we can hold the Chinese companies accountable.

Whether this decision will lead to any improvements in the lives of the nation’s artisanal miners remains to be seen.

I visited an abandoned Gécamines mining site near the outskirts of the city called Gécamines Sud (“Gécamines South”). The mine was once the pride of Lubumbashi and a symbol of its economic strength. At its peak, Gécamines Sud employed thousands of citizens and produced tens of thousands of tons of copper annually. Operations at the mine ceased in the early 1990s, and the site has been dormant ever since.

Kipushi is located about forty kilometers southwest of Lubumbashi right at the Zambian border.

It is home to the immense Kipushi Mine, which was originally called the Prince Leopold Mine when the Belgians established it in 1924. At that time, the mine had the largest known deposits of copper and zinc in the world. UMHK exploited the mine until it was nationalized by Mobutu under Gécamines. Gécamines operated the mine for almost three decades, after which operations ceased around the same time as they did at Gécamines Sud.

Canada-based Ivanhoe Mines resuscitated the mine in 2011 through a 68–32 joint venture with Gécamines cal...

Ivanhoe also shares rights with China-based Zijin Mining to ...

located at the opposite end of the Copper Belt—the giant Kamoa-Kakula copper mine west of Kolwezi. The site contains the largest undeveloped ...

Lubumbashi to Kipushi is the primary route of export for cobalt and other...

good condition until 1997 when Laurent Kabila and his Rwanda-Uganda-backed army, the AFDL, invaded the country. The AFDL shelled the road to cut off reinforcements fro...

2010, a Chinese consortium called SICOMINES repaved the road as part of an agreement brokered by Joseph Kabila, through which China managed to corner most of the global ...

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.

There was considerable controversy with the SICOMINES agreement the moment the ink dried. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, both major creditors to the DRC, were not pleased with the new debt load on the Congo and the “other means” clause in the agreement, particularly if it led to the loss of collateralized mining assets on their loans. The IMF and World Bank pressured Kabila to renegotiate terms. In December 2009, the “other means” clause of the agreement was removed, and the total loan amount was reduced

SICOMINES agreed to pave 6,600 kilometers of road and to build two hospitals and two universities in Katanga, in exchange for mining rights to two concessions near Kolwezi: Dikuluwe and Mashamba West.

Kabila established a private firm called Strategic Projects and Investments (SPI), which received money from a range of Chinese projects, including the tolls paid by trucks that crossed the border at Kipushi after the new road was built.

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.

the SICOMINES deal is exempt from taxes until infrastructure and mining loans are fully repaid, which means that the DRC will not receive meaningful income from the deal for many years to come.

“The termites are drawn to copper in the dirt. They build the hills at that location. Creuseurs sometimes dig under them because they know there will be copper and cobalt there.”

“Each truck is weighed at the border, and because most of them are overweight, they are charged for excess cargo.”

“The trucks can wait three or four days to cross the border,” Philippe explained. “They are filled with ore from across Katanga—copper, cobalt, nickel, and zinc from Lualaba and Haut-Katanga, and also gold, coltan, cassiterite, and wolframite from Tanganyika.”

Tanganyika Province is part of the old Katanga region, located immediately north of Haut-Katanga Province. It is a very dangerous area overrun by numerous Mai-Mai militias.

the Mai-Mai militias are not as active in the Copper Belt part of Katanga, as it is more h...

Mai-Mai means “water-water,” based on the belief that they have magical powers that can turn enemy bullets into water. The militias originally took up arms to support Joseph Mobutu against Laurent Kabila’s invasion in 1997. Soon after, the Mai-Mai degenerated into roving bands of hoodl...

Tanganyika Province happens to contain substantial coltan reserves, along with significant deposits of tin, tungsten, and gold. Each of these metals is requ...

Most of the minerals are smuggled out of the country into formal supply chains via Rwanda and Uganda, or across the Kipushi border point with Zambia.9

asked if there were children digging in the forest. “Yes, of course,” Philippe replied. “What else will they do? There are no schools in the villages. Each member of the family must earn for the collective to survive.”

We were still a few hundred meters away from the KICO mine when I heard a loud droning that drowned out all other noise in the area. “That is the main ventilation fan at KICO that blows air down the primary shaft so workers can breathe,” Philippe explained. I asked how deep the shaft was. “More than one kilometer.”

I could barely make out a few dozen people scraping at the bottom of the crater in various trenches. Philippe explained that Gécamines had already excavated most of the copper, cobalt, and zinc from the open pit years ago, but artisanal miners still scavenged the site for whatever scraps they could find, like birds picking at bones after the big cats have finished gorging.

I could discern an immense craterous landscape with a few thousand bodies moving over it. “That is the primary artisanal mining area,” Philippe said. “It goes all the way into Zambia.”

KICO had a dedicated power supply and included comfortable residential facilities for Ivanhoe employees from abroad, as well as a gym and a recreation area.

The Kipushi artisanal mining area was located in an open swath of earth just south of the abandoned Gécamines pit. It was a vast lunar wasteland spanning several square kilometers—a bizarre juxtaposition to the advanced KICO mining compound sitting right next to it. KICO had first-world mining equipment, excavation techniques, and safety measures. The artisanal site seemed to be time-warped from centuries before, populated by peasants using rudimentary tools to hack at the earth.

“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.

Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe, but that is not the biggest worry that the artisanal miners have. The ore often contains traces of radioactive uranium.

There was no formal border crossing in this part of Kipushi, just an invisible line somewhere beyond the artisanal mining area that the local population crossed each day.

pit. They broke down larger stones into pebbles using a metal mallet so that they could fit more into each sack. Once the sacks were full, they carried them to nearby pools of water to sift the contents through a kaningio (metal sieve). The sieved heterogenite stones were then loaded back into the sacks. It took several such cycles each day to obtain enough heterogenite pebbles to fill one large raffia sack.

“Why don’t you take the cobalt to the depots yourself?” “I don’t have a motorbike. Some other creuseurs can do the transportation to the comptoirs themselves, but this is a risk, because you must have a permit to transport ore in Congo. If the police find us when we are transporting the ore without the permits, we will be arrested,” Faustin explained.

it was too expensive for most artisanal miners.

“There are three different permits required for transporting ore. The price depends on how much ore is being transported and the distance it is transported. Négociants must pay something like eighty or one hundred dollars per year to transport one ton of ore no more than ten kilometers. A comptoir will have to transport many tons of ore, and maybe the distances could be up to fifty kilometers. The mining companies must transport thousands of tons, and it could be more than three hundred kilometers if they are traveling from Kolwezi to Kipushi, so the fee in this case can be thousands of dollars each year.”

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.

The heterogenite in Kipushi had a cobalt grade of 1 percent or less, which was much lower than the heterogenite closer to Kolwezi, where cobalt grades could exceed 10 percent. The low grade of cobalt in Kipushi had a direct bearing on the meager incomes earned by the artisanal miners who worked in the area.

Boys like André and Kisangi who sieved and washed stones were called laveurs, and women and girls were called laveuses.

The boys tipped the sack over and emptied the contents by hand into a large pile next to the washing pool. André stepped bare-skinned into the noxious water and picked up the sieve by two handles at one end. He lodged the other end of the sieve into the dirt at the edge of the pool. Kisangi used the small shovel to scoop the contents of the sack onto the sieve. André then vigorously yanked the sieve up and down through the surface of the water, separating dirt from stone.