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

by Siddharth Kara

“many children themselves do not wish to be in the school. There is too much pressure for them to work, even if they can afford the fees. In the last year, I started with thirty-six children. After two months, I had only seventeen. Even those children worked every morning before they came to school. They were always tired and hungry. How can they learn in this condition?”

The dividends of an education were too theoretical and too far into the future for those who survived day-to-day, especially when the schools lacked the support they needed to provide an adequate education. It was no wonder that impoverished families across the Congo’s mining provinces relied on child labor to survive.

It may never be known just how much money Joseph Kabila extracted from Chinese mining contracts and construction deals. His apparent ransacking of mining assets and public funds would put even Leopold to shame.

I turned to Chance and tried to ask a few more questions of her, but she said she had to return to digging. She gently placed her sleeping son into a cardboard box next to the trench and climbed down in labored movements into the muck.

The eldest, Peter, wore blue jeans, plastic slippers, and a red shirt with the letters AIG stitched on the front. Imagine that on a remote hill deep in the Congo’s mining provinces, a child can be found digging for cobalt, wearing a muddy shirt with the logo of the behemoth American financial services company that had to be bailed out for $180 billion during the 2008 financial crisis. Imagine what even 1 percent of that money could do in a place like this, if it were spent on the people who needed it, not stolen by those who exploited them.

Why are the Congolese people still using their Zaire national ID cards from 1997? Because new national ID cards require that the government conduct a new national census, and the last one was conducted in 1984.

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.

“They kicked us from our homes!” an elderly man with patchy skin, Samy, exclaimed. “We lived on that land for three generations before the mining companies came. We grew vegetables and caught fish. They threw us out, and now we cannot find enough food to feed our families … We have no jobs in this area. How do they expect us to live?”

Imagine if a mining company came to the place where you live and they kick you out. They destroy all your belongings except whatever you can carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers. What can you do if there is no one to help you? Maybe you would feel it is your right to go back to that place where you lived and dig some of the minerals for yourself. That is how the people in Fungurume feel.

The price of the batteries was more expensive than I would have imagined—two dollars (roughly one day’s income) for a pack of four AA batteries. The price seemed particularly exorbitant since they were living right next to one of the largest battery-component metal-making mines in the world.

The deeper I ventured into the mining provinces, the murkier the bottom of the cobalt supply chain proved to be, and the more resistant to claims that the flow of cobalt was adequately monitored for child labor or other abuses.

The diggers at Tilwezembe described hazardous conditions and harsh reprisals if they did not obey their bosses. Some were locked inside a shipping container called a cachot (“dungeon”) without food or water for up to two days.

“The Republican Guard watches everything in Lualaba Province,” I was told by a colleague in Kolwezi. “They monitor the villages, and they intimidate anyone who tries to speak. When I say that, what I mean to tell you is if someone who works at Tilwezembe or Lac Malo or Kasulo speaks to someone like you, they will be shot in the night, and their body will be left on the street to instruct anyone else on the consequences of opening their mouths.”

“Boss Chu paid us based on the purity of the ore. Some days, if the purity was not good, he did not pay us anything.” “Who decided the purity was not good?” “Boss Chu.”

“Now I know what that dog felt like,” Muteba said. “I wish I had been brave enough to kill it.”

Chief Banza told the children that if they tried to work anywhere else, he would send soldiers to their homes and take the money they owed to him from their families. Kosongo said that Chief Banza was known to be a dangerous man, so he felt he had no choice but to work for him under this new arrangement.

In addition to forced labor in hazardous conditions, the children were also being exploited in a system of debt bondage—an economic advance was being used to extract forced labor from them, and the debt was not being discharged based on a fair market value of the output of their labor. Threats of violence, eviction from the work site, and the lack of any reasonable alternative kept the children ensnared in the system of bondage. In essence, they were child slaves.

The tunnel was only tall enough for them to shimmy through on their stomachs. The only source of light was from a small battery-powered flashlight fastened to their heads with a headband.

The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.

As we parted ways, Augustin had this to say, “Please tell the people in your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones.”

Although no one will ever know how many children are buried at Tilwezembe, this much is certain—as of November 1, 2021, Tilwezembe is a fully functioning mine, and hundreds of children can be seen entering it each and every day.

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.

Time-lapse satellite images of Kolwezi from 2012 to 2022 show that the “brown” around the city spread like a tsunami, devouring everything in its path. Kolwezi is the mangled face of progress in Africa. The hunt for cobalt is all.

Kolwezi is by far the most heavily polluted city in the southeastern provinces. Breathing hurts. Looking burns.

It would not be a stretch to suggest that much of the EV revolution rests on the weary shoulders of some of the poorest inhabitants of Kolwezi, yet few of them have the benefit of even the most basic amenities of modern life, such as reliable electricity, clean water and sanitation, medical clinics, and schools for children.

“If I can describe the conditions accurately, I hope it may inspire people to help improve things here.” Lubuya looked at me as if I were a fool. “Every day people are dying because of the cobalt. Describing this will not change anything.”

“The mama says the lake is poison,” he reported. “She said, ‘It kills the babies inside us. Mosquitoes do not drink the blood of the people who work here.’”

“The Chinese companies bring their workers from China because they do not trust African people,” Gilbert explained. “They think we will cheat them, yet they are in our country making money for themselves.”

She said that prostitution and digging for cobalt were the same—“Muango yangu njoo soko.” My body is my marketplace.

Elodie said she typically earned about CF 1,000 (about $0.55) a day at Lake Malo, which was not enough to meet even the most rudimentary needs. She was forced to let soldiers do “unnatural things” to her in order to survive.

The consumers of these devices, were they to stand next to Elodie, would appear like aliens from another dimension. Nothing in form or circumstance would bind them to the same planet, aside from the cobalt that flowed from one to the other.

He suggested that Arran was one of the leaders of Lebanese criminal activity in the Congo and that he was involved in laundering money for “criminal groups.” “What do you mean by criminal groups?” I asked. “Hezbollah,” he replied. Hani listed other groups as well, including Nigerian organized crime and Somali pirates. “Congo is the easiest place for these groups to clean their money.”

The U.S. Treasury Department put Congo Futur under targeted sanctions in 2010, alleging that the firm was part of a network of businesses in the DRC that was laundering millions of dollars for Hezbollah using accounts in the BGFIBank, the same bank used by Joseph Kabila to facilitate crooked transactions with Chinese mining companies.

I spoke with numerous residents of Kanina, and they all complained of persistent and troublesome pollution from the COMMUS concession. “There are explosions at the mine,” one resident complained. “Dirt falls over our homes. Everything is dirty. Our houses shake in the night, and we cannot sleep.” “Clouds of yellow gas float over our homes and fall in our food and water,” another resident said.

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. COMMUS appeared to have figured out a third option—dump tons of indiscriminate stone and dirt outside their concession and let children handpick the valuable ore.

the two boys, ages thirteen and fourteen, started walking with their sacks of cobalt stones in the opposite direction of the COMMUS depots to try to earn more than the pittance they were being paid by the depot agents. The COMMUS security guards promptly gunned them down.

“China is too competitive. Someone like me cannot advance in China. Africa is a big place. It is not so competitive. We can find opportunities here,” Chen said. Chen lived in a flat in a walled Chinese enclave in Kolwezi, where many of the Chinese expatriates in the area resided. The enclave included a Chinese grocery store and private restaurant. They also had a private Chinese medical clinic nearby. “It is less crowded here than China. It is less polluted. I will try to bring my family here. We can have a better life,” Chen said.

CHEN: Here anyone can do business if they pay the correct price. ME: You mean a bribe? CHEN: Yes. It is a good system. ME: You are saying bribery is good? CHEN: In China, not even a bribe can work unless you are in the elite circles. Here, money makes you elite. That is why so many Chinese come to Africa. ME: I see.

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.

Whether in villages like Kamatanda, towns like Fungurume, or cities like Kolwezi, the consequences of displacement due to mining operations were always the same—exacerbated poverty, increased hardship, and growing desperation.

I asked Ikolo what it felt like when he was underground hacking at the heterogenite vein. “All the men must stay calm. We know the tunnel might collapse. We are not stupid. We pray before we go down. We focus on our work. It is in God’s hands if we live.”

“There is no other work here. Cobalt is the only possibility. We go down the tunnel. If we make it back with enough cobalt, our worries are finished for one day.”

“We climb down, we dig, we climb up. We wash the dust away. This is our life. We can only move forward,” Mutombo said.

There is grief, and then there is soul-wrenching misery. There is loss, and then there is life-destroying calamity. One encounters the limits of what human hearts can endure all too often in the Congo.

Before I left, Josué grabbed my arm and looked at me with the face of a man on fire. “Now you understand how people like us work?” “I believe so.” “Tell me.” “You work in horrible conditions and—” “No! We work in our graves.”

Two men lifted a child out of the dirt and laid him gently on the ocher gravel. His bloodied face was locked in a macabre expression of terror. His slender frame was stained with a paste of dirt and blood, the color of burnt umber or rusted metal. The boy looked no older than fifteen, a brief life aborted in the most wretched manner imaginable.

This was the final truth of cobalt mining in the Congo: the life of a child buried alive while digging for cobalt counted for nothing. All the dead here counted for nothing. The loot is all.

If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal miners would be done.