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

by Siddharth Kara

The Katanga region in the southeastern corner of the Congo holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.

The harsh realities of cobalt mining in the Congo are an inconvenience to every stakeholder in the chain. No company wants to concede that the rechargeable batteries used to power smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles contain cobalt mined by peasants and children in hazardous conditions.

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.

Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.

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.

But why fix a problem if no one thinks it exists?

There is no known deposit of cobalt-containing ore anywhere in the world that is larger, more accessible, and higher grade than the cobalt under Kolwezi.

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.

As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.

Despite being home to trillions of dollars in untapped mineral deposits, the DRC’s entire national budget in 2021 was a scant $7.2 billion, similar to the state of Idaho, which has one-fiftieth the population. The DRC ranks 175 out of 189 on the United Nations Human Development Index. More than three-fourths of the population live below the poverty line, one-third suffer from food insecurity, life expectancy is only 60.7 years, child mortality ranks eleventh worst in the world, access to clean drinking water is only 26 percent, and electrification is only 9 percent.

“Congo is only a bank account for the president,” Gloria added.

“What I can tell you is there is no other work for most people who live here,” Faustin said. “Yet anyone can dig cobalt and earn money.”

“I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”

Therein lies the great tragedy of the Congo’s mining provinces—no one up the chain considers themselves responsible for the artisanal miners, even though they all profit from them.

Consider the first sentence, because this is the important one. If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector. How much of the Congo’s cobalt was “touched” by the hundreds of thousands of Congolese people suffering the consequences of toxic exposure to cobalt, uranium, lead, nickel, mercury, and other heavy metals? How much was touched by the infants who inhaled hazardous mining dust every day at artisanal mines? What about the noxious gas clouds and toxic dumping that contaminated the air, land, crops, animals, and fish stocks of the Copper Belt, and what about the millions of trees chopped down to make way for enormous open-pit mines? Let us not forget the unknown number of people who were injured or worse in mining accidents. By the time one tallied such a list, how much cobalt would be left in the world that was untouched by catastrophe in the Congo?

The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent. Most of it was built, after all, on violence, neatly tucked away in history books that tend to sanitize the truth.

Imagine for a moment what it was like for an African person to be ripped from her home; separated from husband and children; chained, branded, beaten, raped, and incarcerated—all before being forced into the putrid cargo hold of a slave ship, crammed next to hundreds of agonized men, women, children, and babies. Or what it was like to spend six weeks in this cargo hold without room to sit upright, locked down by flesh-ripping shackles day and night. Or to have to use a bucket for a toilet in front of hundreds of people as the ship crashed through waves. Or to try to comfort an inconsolable child who was frightened, feverish, and seasick. Or to be one of the gravely ill, but still living, who was thrown into the ocean like so much refuse. Or to survive this hell only to arrive in the Americas and be sold into slavery, where the real torture began. Imagine for a moment the toll taken on a person, a family, a people, a continent across centuries of the slave trade, followed by a century of colonization. Empires were built and generations of wealth were amassed across the Western world in this manner. Perhaps that is the most enduring contrast of all between our world and theirs—our generally safe and satisfied nations can scarcely function without forcing great violence upon the people of Africa. The catastrophe in the mining provinces of the Congo is the latest chapter in this unholy tale.

Congolese people were not allowed inside the club, except when the strippers arrived around 9:00 p.m.

This land that is home to the world’s largest reserves of an element crucial to the manufacture of the most dominant form of rechargeable energy in the world still awaits the arrival of electricity.

Morel published a book, Affairs of West Africa, in 1902, which included a blistering indictment of the Congo Free State. He assigned responsibility for the exploitative system to Leopold, who had “invented a form of slavery more degrading and more atrocious than any slavery which has existed previously.”4 Morel’s book led the UK House of Commons to debate the issue on May 20, 1903. Roger Casement, British consul to the Congo Free State, was ordered to conduct a formal inquiry. Casement published The Casement Report in early 1904 based on his investigations in the Congo rain forest and the testimonies of the natives he met, all of which confirmed everything the missionaries had been saying and that Morel had deduced from import-export data.

worked at Tocotens for Gécamines. The company gave us a good wage. They provided a home to each family. They provided school for our children. When we had another child, they gave us one more sack of flour each month. After Gécamines left, we had no wage. We tried to dig in the mines. I had to go to Lubumbashi to sell the ore, but I could only earn ten percent of what I earned before.

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.

Arthur took a long sip of his beer and stared morosely. “What did that child die for?” he asked. “For one sack of cobalt? Is that what Congolese children are worth?”

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

The age of invasion completed its tragic reconnaissance of the global south when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, and Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India in 1498.

During his journeys, Livingstone survived twenty-seven bouts of malaria thanks to his discovery of the ameliorative properties of quinine.

According to his apocryphal account, he uttered the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley spent four months with Livingstone and came to see him as the father he never had.

Stanley’s escapades negotiating treaties for the AIC involved the first time that batteries played a role in the exploitation of the Congolese people. George Washington Williams, an African American minister traveling in the Congo, uncovered Stanley’s ruse as a way of intimidating tribal leaders into signing his treaties. He wrote about it in An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II: A number of electric batteries had been purchased in London, and when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother’s hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong, that he nearly knocked him off his feet in giving him the hand of fellowship. When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength.

His new patch of personal property in Africa was seventy-six times the size of Belgium.

Leopold’s Force Publique coerced the native population to extract rubber sap from the vines of rubber trees deep in the Congolese rain forest. They whipped natives into submission using the chicotte, a flesh-shredding whip fashioned from twisted hippopotamus hide. They kidnapped the wives and children of village men and ordered them to meet a quota of three to four kilos of rubber sap per fortnight. If they returned from the forest without meeting their quotas, the hands, noses, or ears of their loved ones were chopped off.

Farther north, the Belgians sold a seventy-five-thousand-square-kilometer concession of rain forest filled with palm oil trees to the Lever brothers, whose new soap recipe required palm oil. Following Leopold’s model, the Lever brothers used forced labor in the extraction of palm oil under a quota system. The riches they generated helped build the multinational powerhouse Unilever.

Eleven days after independence, the Belgians executed a brazen plan to keep control of what mattered most in the Congo—the minerals of Katanga. They backed Moise Tshombe in announcing that Katanga Province had seceded from the Congo. UMHK provided crucial financial support to Tshombe’s administration, and Belgian troops expelled the Congolese army from Katanga. With surgical precision, the Belgians had severed Katanga Province like a hand from the body of the nation, and with it, 70 percent of the government’s income. The country was crippled before it ever had a chance.

In an ironic twist of history, Munongo was the grandson of King Msiri. In 1891, Belgian mercenaries dispatched by Leopold had assassinated Msiri to take control of Katanga, and exactly seventy years later, Msiri’s grandson joined with the Belgians to assassinate Lumumba and hand Katanga back to the Belgians. After torturing Lumumba for hours, Tshombe and the Belgians shot him dead. They chopped up the body and threw the parts into barrels of sulfuric acid. Lumumba’s skull, bones, and teeth were ground to dust and scattered on the drive back, save just one tooth, taken as a souvenir by the Belgian commissioner of the Katangan police.

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. However, that which Katanga gives, it can also take away. Copper prices peaked at $1.33 per pound in April 1974 and plunged to $0.59 per pound in June 1982 as low-cost producing nations increased output. Copper production by Gécamines peaked in 1988 at nearly 480,000 tons, and five years later, it plummeted to 30,000 tons. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mobutu’s value to the West collapsed with it. A genocide in neighboring Rwanda proved to be the catalyst for his final downfall.

From the moment Diego Cão introduced Europeans to the Kongo in 1482, the heart of Africa was made colony to the world. Patrice Lumumba offered a fleeting chance at a different fate, but the neocolonial machinery of the West chopped him down and replaced him with someone who would keep their riches flowing. Cobalt is but the latest treasure they have come to loot.

Corporations atop the cobalt chain stake their reputations on the impervious wall that is supposed to exist between industrial and artisanal production. Such assertions are as meaningless as trying to claim that one can discriminate the water from different tributaries while standing at the mouth of the Congo River.

Toxic solvents and acids used in the processing are supposed to be disposed of responsibly. My visit to Tenke proved otherwise.

“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?”

One of my translators, Olivier, described the situation best: 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.

I looked at the two boys playing in the dirt, wrapped in a blanket of poison. I tried to imagine how their parents must feel, watching their children being contaminated each day and feeling powerless to protect them. Although violence was never an acceptable response, I could understand why the people of Fungurume might feel desperate enough to set fire to a few trucks.

I recalled the words of Reine, the student in Lubumbashi, who said that my heart would cry when I saw what the mining companies had done to the forests and rivers. I felt both sadness and outrage as I watched children splashing innocently in the toxic waters. Men fished for dinner from the bridge above the river, and women washed clothes along the riverbank as white-breasted cormorants floated by. The people of Mupanja were being contaminated in every possible way.

The BBC ran an episode of its documentary series Panorama on April 15, 2012, that focused on Glencore’s role in child labor at Tilwezembe.5 Both Glencore and the Congolese government dismissed the story as an exaggeration. The truth, however, is that the system of artisanal mining at the site has evolved into a sophisticated economy that appears to include two of the largest artisanal mining cooperatives in Lualaba Province, as well as officials working for SAEMAPE.

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 translator for my interviews, Augustin, was distraught after several days of trying to find the words in English that captured the grief being described in Swahili. He would at times drop his head and sob before attempting to translate what was said. 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.”

The thirst for money transforms men into assassins … All means are good to obtain money or humiliate the human being. —Archbishop Eugène Kabanga Songasonga of Lubumbashi, 1976

A desperate Joseph Mobutu portrayed the invaders as communists backed by the Soviet Union to draw Western support. Once again fearing a communist takeover of the Congo’s crucial mineral assets, the U.S., Belgium, and France sent military aid to retake control of the province.

Tshombe initiated the second Shaba war the following year. This time, his forces swiftly took control of Kolwezi. Western powers were reluctant to enter the fray a second time. Some say that a frantic Mobutu ordered his troops to kill Europeans in Kolwezi to spark Western intervention. After hundreds of Europeans were killed, French and Belgian paratroopers, with air support from the United States, dropped on Kolwezi. The ensuing battle resulted in the destruction of much of the city and hundreds of civilian casualties before control was finally wrested from the rebels.

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.”