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

by Siddharth Kara

Throughout much of history, mining operations relied on the exploitation of slaves and poor laborers to excavate ore from dirt. The downtrodden were forced to dig in hazardous conditions with little regard to their safety and for little to no compensation. Today, these laborers are assigned the quaint term artisanal miners, and they toil in a shadowy substrate of the global mining industry called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM).

There are roughly forty-five million people around the world directly involved in ASM, which represents an astonishing 90 percent of the world’s total mining workforce.

Most people do not know what is happening in the cobalt mines of the Congo, because the realities are hidden behind numerous layers of multinational supply chains that serve to erode accountability. By the time one traces the chain from the child slogging in the cobalt mine to the rechargeable gadgets and cars sold to consumers around the world, the links have been misdirected beyond recognition, like a con man running a shell game.

Today’s tech barons will tell you a similar tale about cobalt. They will tell you that they uphold international human rights norms and that their particular supply chains are clean. They will assure you that conditions are not as bad as they seem and that they are bringing commerce, wages, education, and development to the poorest people of Africa (“saving” them). They will also assure you that they have implemented changes to remedy the problems on the ground, at least at the mines from which they say they buy cobalt. After all, who is going to go all the way to the Congo and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them? The truth, however, is this—but for their demand for cobalt and the immense profits they accrue through the sale of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles, the entire blood-for-cobalt economy would not exist. Furthermore, the inevitable outcome of a lawless scramble for cobalt in an impoverished and war-torn country can only be the complete dehumanization of the people exploited at the bottom of the chain.

At no point in their history have the Congolese people benefited in any meaningful way from the monetization of their country’s resources. Rather, they have often served as a slave labor force for the extraction of those resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering.

The battery packs in electric vehicles require up to ten kilograms of refined cobalt each, more than one thousand times the amount required for a smartphone battery. As a result, demand for cobalt is expected to grow by almost 500 percent from 2018 to 2050,3 and there is no known place on earth to find that amount of cobalt other than the DRC.

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.

The great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about; that Europe began to “propagate” at a time when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry; that it was our misfortune to encounter that particular Europe on our path, and that Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history. —Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

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.

People ask, why are the children working in the mines? My grandchildren are there now. Would you rather they starve? Many of the children lost their parents. Sometimes a woman will marry again and the man chases the children out of the house. What are those children supposed to do? They can only survive by digging.

The Chinese companies have a negative impact on the Congo through tax evasion and revenue evasion. How did we discover this? We discovered that most Chinese mining companies have two accounts: one account that they prepare for us that understates production, and another account that they show to the Chinese government and state-run banks that is higher than what they declare to us. This is because once they start production, they have to repay their loans. The second issue is the separation of minerals. Copper always comes with a percentage of cobalt. After they separate the metals, a Chinese company will declare the cobalt to us, but not the copper. They know we do not have the capacity to monitor this, so it is another way they evade their payments to us.

Child labor, subhuman working conditions, toxic and potentially radioactive exposure, wages that rarely exceeded two dollars per day, and an untold rash of injuries were the norm. Astonishingly, the appalling conditions at the mines remained almost entirely invisible to the outside world. Mining accidents were rarely reported, and families were forced to face the consequences of injured loved ones on their own. Across all the interviews I conducted, I received testimonies of seven tunnel collapses at KCC and Mashamba East that took place between June 2018 and November 2021, but only one of these catastrophes was ever reported in the media—the collapse of a tunnel inside the KCC mine on June 27, 2019, that killed forty-one people. In response to the tragedy, Glencore issued a public statement that more than two thousand artisanal miners illegally entered its mining sites each day and that “KCC urges all illegal miners to cease from putting their lives at risk by trespassing on a major industrial site.”4

When a tunnel collapses in Kasulo, most bodies are never recovered. The family members are unable to give their loved ones a proper funeral. They are compelled instead to walk each day upon their dead. That is the reality that no one up the chain wants us to see. That is the truth that is meant to be forever buried here. The cruel design of a tunnel collapse makes sure of it, and everyone knows it. Perhaps they count on it—the impenetrable silence that obscures the vast tally of severed lives upon which great fortunes are built.

It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result. —Mahatma Gandhi

The biggest problem faced by the Congo’s artisanal miners is not the gun-toting soldiers, unscrupulous Chinese buyers, exploitative mining cooperatives, or collapsing tunnels. These and other antagonists are but symptoms of a greater menace. The biggest problem faced by the Congo’s artisanal miners is that stakeholders up the chain refuse to accept responsibility for them, even though they all profit in one way or another from their work.

They have corrupted some of our countrymen; they have bought others; they have done their part to distort the truth and defile our independence. What else can I say? That whether dead or alive, free or in prison by order of the colonialists, it is not my person that is important. What is important is the Congo, our poor people whose independence has been turned into a cage, with people looking at us from outside the bars, sometimes with charitable compassion, sometimes with glee and delight. But my faith will remain unshakable. I know and feel in my very heart of hearts that sooner or later my people will rid themselves of all their enemies, foreign and domestic, that they will rise up as one to say no to the shame and degradation of colonialism and regain their dignity in the pure light of day.