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

by Siddharth Kara

no one up the chain considers themselves responsible for the artisanal miners, even though they all profit from them.

“IDAK has the correct goals, but there is no chance to realize their goals so long as the government is corrupt and the Chinese rule Katanga. The Chinese pay billions to the government, and the politicians close their eyes. Organizations like IDAK and other civil society organizations are allowed to exist only to show they exist.”

If you really want to understand what is happening in the Congo’s mining sector, you must first understand our history. After independence, the mines were managed by the Belgians. They took all the money, and there was no benefit for the people. After the Belgians, we had “Africanization” with Mobutu. He nationalized the mines, but again, they only benefited the government, not the people. With [Joseph] Kabila, we created the Mining Code in 2002, and this brought foreign investment into the mining sector. They said the Mining Code would improve the lives of the Congolese people, but today, their lives are much worse. Now you can see—never have the people of Congo benefited from the mines of Congo. We only become poorer.

“There is an agenda to promote a false picture of the conditions here. The mining companies claim there are not any problems here. They say they maintain international standards. Everyone believes them, so nothing changes.”

The Global Battery Alliance and Responsible Minerals Initiative were supposed to be assisting with adherence to these norms via on-ground assessments of cobalt supply chains and monitoring of artisanal mining sites for child labor. I asked Philippe if he had ever seen or heard of these initiatives. Here is what he said:

They tell the international community about their programs in Congo and how the cobalt is clean, and this allows their constituents to say everything is okay. Actually, this makes the situation worse because the companies will say—“GBA assures us the situation is good. RMI says the cobalt is clean.” Because of this, no one tries to improve the conditions.

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.

“According to the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], up to seventy percent of the cobalt from the DR Congo has some touch with child labor. There are large gaps of information on the supply chain, so we have to fix the information flow in a trusted way,”

flow?” Fixing it for the artisanal miners would suggest a genuinely independent and objective assessment of the realities on the ground. Fixing it for everyone else would suggest the opposite. And trusted by whom? Same problem. Consumer tech and EV giants, mining companies, and the Congolese government would be unlikely to trust the same flow of information that the artisanal miners would trust.

The prevailing information flow depicted a false reality that conditions were not so bad and that they were being monitored to root out problems. A more accurate information flow would depict the opposite—conditions on the ground for the artisanal miners were hazardous and subhuman, and there were tens of thousands of children who mined for cobalt under these conditions every day.

If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector.

What about the noxious gas clouds and toxic dumping that contaminated the air, land, crops, animals, and fish stocks of the Copper Belt, and what about the millions of trees chopped down to make way for enormous open-pit mines?

By the time one tallied such a list, how much cobalt would be left in the world that was untouched by catastrophe in the Congo?

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay … He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. —Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Neatly arranged mountains of vegetables at grocery stores seem vulgar. Bright lights and flushing toilets seem like sorcery. Clean air and water feel like a crime.

Imagine for a moment what it was like for an African person to be ripped from her home; separated from husband and children; chained, branded, beaten, raped, and incarcerated—all before being forced into the putrid cargo hold of a slave ship, crammed next to hundreds of agonized men, women, children, and babies. Or what it was like to spend six weeks in this cargo hold without room to sit upright, locked down by flesh-ripping shackles day and night. Or to have to use a bucket for a toilet in front of hundreds of people as the ship crashed through waves. Or to try to comfort an inconsolable child who was frightened, feverish, and seasick. Or to be one of the gravely ill, but still living, who was thrown into the ocean like so much refuse. Or to survive this hell only to arrive in the Americas and be sold into slavery, where the real torture began. Imagine for

Perhaps that is the most enduring contrast of all between our world and theirs—our generally safe and satisfied nations can scarcely function without forcing great violence upon the people of Africa.

“If the Africans worked harder, they would not be so poor. Chinese people have discipline. African people do not. They drink and gamble. They allow their leaders to exploit them. This is why they are poor.”

“Also, the Africans lack management ability. They do not take interest in details. This is why they can only be laborers. Even as laborers, they do not perform well. They only want to have fun.” Hu continued by offering his thoughts on poverty in Africa. “I think they like being poor because they receive foreign aid and do not have to work. If they did not like being poor, why do they spend all day on Sunday in church instead of working?”

Indians have a long history on the continent dating back to the 1840s, when the British began shipping them to Africa to work as debt bondage slaves on railroads and plantations. The debts were manufactured through the imposition of exorbitant land taxes. If a peasant could not afford the taxes, he was told he could work it off by laying railroad in East Africa. Illiterate peasants were made to sign contracts they could not read, agreeing to discharge their debts as indentured workers. They often toiled for lifetimes, receiving little pay. In Africa, a hierarchy was soon established—Africans at the bottom, Indians and Arabs above them, and Europeans at the top.