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

by Siddharth Kara

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