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

by Siddharth Kara

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.