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

by Siddharth Kara

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.

The equator transects the top third of the Congo, and when it is the rainy season on one side of the equator, it is the dry season on the other. As a result, it is always raining somewhere in the Congo, and the country has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world.

The first rechargeable electric vehicle was invented in 1880s, but it was not until the early 1900s that electric vehicles were being produced on a commercial scale. By 1910, around 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were propelled by electric engines. Had the trend continued, we would all be living on a cleaner, cooler planet.

As we rounded a broad ridge and the main pit revealed itself, the scene hit like a thunderclap. In all my time in the Congo, I never saw anything like it. An explosion of human beings was crammed inside the enormous digging pit, which was at least 150 meters deep and 400 meters across. More than fifteen thousand men and teenage boys were hammering, shoveling, and shouting inside the crater, with scarcely room to move or breathe. None of the workers wore an inch of protective gear—just shorts, trousers, flip-flops, and maybe some shirts. It was a storm of colors—red, blue, green, yellow, and orange melded inside the pink-stone pit. At least five thousand raffia sacks filled with ore were stacked at the edge of the excavation area, a growing tally from that morning’s production alone. The pit was not dirt and stone—it was a solid mountain of rock and heterogenite being chiseled and hammered into pebbles by raw human force.

Kolwezi is a Wild West frontier, home to roughly one-fourth of the world’s cobalt reserves. The city’s extraordinary mineral endowment has resulted in considerable environmental destruction due to the rapid expansion of mining operations. Look up Kolwezi on Google Earth and zoom in. See the colossal craters, the behemoth open-pit mines, and the immense swaths of dirt. Small artificial lakes provide water to the mining operations, not to the city’s inhabitants. Villages have been flattened. Forests have been razed. The earth has been gouged and gashed. Mines swallow all.